WASHINGTON — The Democratic Congress and us voters have a bigger “don’t ask-don’t tell” security problem than legitimizing the behavior of homosexuals in the uniformed armed forces.

It is the entire defense budget and the defense establishment. A couple of little- noticed dispatches six weeks ago from the mountains of Afghanistan signaled that the entire U. S. defense phalanx has spun entirely out of civilian control.

The stories told of the killing of seven Central Intelligence Agency soldiers, presumably by the Taliban. Two of them were private contractors. They were civilian employees of the notorious Blackwater firm, the outfit under investigation for gunning down 17 helpless Iraqi civilians.

What are we doing on the ground in Afghanistan? Why are we still hiring men trained by

Blackwater’s swaggering founder, Erik Prince? Blackwater last fall changed its name to Xe, and other handles, in a move to shed its bad name.

Getting back to basics, this is a republic where the military is supposed to be subject to civilian control. With Congress declining to ask questions, and executive agencies refusing to talk about why the CIA is now a paramilitary organization, this is not civilian control.

It is not healthy for the country, it is not a work of freedom to be creating a super-secret Army in the CIA, one that hires clandestine soldiers trained at secured, private reservations in North Carolina, Illinois and California. “Subversive” is not too strong a word for it.

President Obama’s 2011 defense budget contains a record $56 billion for such sub-rosa operations. The whole military budget is a 3.4 percent increase over this year — roughly double the rate of inflation. The $708 billion schedule continues to increase spending on speculative weapons systems— programs that lobbyists for defense firms like — much more than for support for our fighting forces and their families. Overall,

the defense budget is almost double what it was in 2003. Led around by industry lobbyists and connected generals, Obama exempted $200 billion for research from his softee freeze on discretionary spending.

No one except a tiny congressional clique knows what the CIA spends. There is a formal CIA budget, but all the money stuff is in a classified “amendment.” And the CIA gets additional cash nominally allocated for other programs like farm aid, which is shunted through the back door over to “the company.”

There is no one in Congress trying to put a brake on this craziness. There is even less interest in Congress in putting all our wars to a vote. All of the action is supposedly authorized by resolutions passed in 2001 and 2002 that bear no relation to what we are doing now.

The entire national intelligence budget is now classified, and additional agencies are now included under a growing cloak of secrecy, including portions of the Drug Enforcement Agency.

This looks a lot like what President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address in 1961: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Fifty years later, Congress is evading the awful reality of “the disastrous rise of misplaced power” in secret armies, swelling secret budgets and the launching of three pre-emptive wars in six years.

Commenting on the need for Congress to change the law controlling gay lifestyles in the military, the Pentagon said last week that for now it will call a moratorium on the discharge of those who fail to abide by the don’t ask-don’t tell code.

Clearly, the Defense Department and the intelligence community have become laws unto themselves, intimidating the president, deciding what codes of conduct they will enforce and “letting slip the dogs of war” almost at a whim.