Chalmers Johnson: Empire Falls: "The problem is that this president, or any president who replaces him, can’t stand up to the vested interests in the Pentagon, the secret intelligence agencies and the military industrial complex. I say this in part because of what happened in the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev truly tried to reform the Soviet system... Most people in this military do not expect to be shot at. That is proving to be a major limitation of our Roman pretensions and ambitions. We will be finding out within a very short period of time—a matter of months—whether we can raise the armed forces that we have in the past through incentives and getting people to volunteer. In a very short period of time, 40 percent of the troops in Iraq will be Reserves and National Guardsmen. They didn’t expect that duty when they joined the National Guard."

Chalmers Johnson: Empire Falls: "The problem is that this president, or any president who replaces him, can’t stand up to the vested interests in the Pentagon, the secret intelligence agencies and the military industrial complex. I say this in part because of what happened in the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev truly tried to reform the Soviet system... Most people in this military do not expect to be shot at. That is proving to be a major limitation of our Roman pretensions and ambitions. We will be finding out within a very short period of time—a matter of months—whether we can raise the armed forces that we have in the past through incentives and getting people to volunteer. In a very short period of time, 40 percent of the troops in Iraq will be Reserves and National Guardsmen. They didn’t expect that duty when they joined the National Guard."