The US Defense Department publishes its new long-term blueprint for the future, entitled “Joint Vision 2020.” As a Defense Department press release points out, “‘Full-spectrum dominance’ is the key term” in the plan. “Full-spectrum dominance means the ability of US forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations.” [American Forces Press Service, 6/2/2000] The term comes from US Space Command’s “Vision for 2020” in 1998, which spoke of “dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investment.” Author Peter Dale Scott will later note this represents an important shift from a policy of containing or rolling back the Soviet Union to “full-spectrum dominance of the globe” in order to achieve “global economic integration on American terms, [including] the opening of foreign markets to US investment.” [Scott, 2007, pp. 19-20] Scott will also note that the similarity between this blueprint and a report published by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) think tank several months later “was not coincidental,” since it was built on a 1992 draft report written by some of the same people involved in the PNAC report, such as Paul Wolfowitz and I. Lewis Libby. The PNAC report calls itself a “blueprint” for the “creation of a ‘global Pax Americana’” (see September 2000). [Scott, 2007, pp. 24]
January 7, 2001: Rumsfeld Report Echoes ‘New Pearl Harbor’ Language
Donald Rumsfeld publishes a report as chairperson of the Rumsfeld Commission that makes proposals for the US Space Command. Rumsfeld is in the process of becoming defense secretary for the incoming Bush administration. His commission’s report says with respect to attacks in space: “The question is whether the US will be wise enough to act responsibly and soon enough to reduce US space vulnerabilities. Or whether, as in the past, a disabling attack against the country and its people—a ‘Space Pearl Harbor’—will be the only event able to galvanize the nation and cause the US government to act.” Author Peter Dale Scott will later note the similarity between this language and that of a Project for the New American Century (PNAC) think tank report published several months before, signed by Rumsfeld and others, that warned of impediments to overhauling the US military “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor” (see September 2000). Scott will comment that such quotes indicate that the US oil industry and military had achieved a quiet consensus by this time that “America would need full-spectrum dominance to guarantee access to oil and other resources in the rest of the world. This program would require massive expenditures, perhaps as much as a trillion dollars, and this could not be expected from Congress—except in response to an attack as massive and frightening as Pearl Harbor.” [Scott, 2007, pp. 24]
