Our near term future as a country involves weighty decisions regarding our fiscal and national security. There will be trade offs during the next federal government incremental funding authorization.
We are approaching a National Debt of $35 Trillion with a downgraded fiscal credit rating while carrying the financial burden of ongoing support for NATO and the Ukraine war, investments in the Israel – Hamas conflict, as well as domestic program needs.
A look over our shoulder at two driving factorsin recent warfare is useful as we consider history when viewing our future while making prudent decisions on the principal contributors to our national debt and security.
The motives of the U.S. Military Industrial Complex (MIC) and The US Agency for International Development (USAID) contractors fostered continuing wars. Continued war nets billions in sales of weapons and massive construction and redevelopment dollars for international companies. They often operated fraudulently, fostering waste, fraud and abuse.
It is common knowledge that many of these corporations spent more each year in lobbying costs than they paid in taxes and passed exorbitant overhead and executive pay costs on to the tax payer, thus financing the riches of their operating personnel while remaining marginally profitable to stockholders.
I watched this from the inside of many of these companies for 36 years. You can read my dissertation on the subject at:
There was a complete lack of cultural understanding between U.S. and Western decision makers and the middle east culture they were trying to “Assist” by nation building.
The only real cultural understanding that existed during the period was in the person of General Schwarzkopf who spent much of his youth in the Middle East with his father, an ambassador to Saudi Arabia. He was fascinated by the Arab culture, commanded their respect and, like Eisenhower, led a successful coalition during the first Gulf War to free Kuwait.
He astutely recommended no occupation of Iraq, went home and stayed out of government. Norman, like General Eisenhower, knew the power of the MIC.
U.S Tax payers funded billions in USAID and construction projects in Iraq. The money was wasted due to a lack of cultural understanding, waste, fraud and abuse. The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) has documented that aspect of the Iraq war history, as well as similar motives and abuses in Afghanistan.
CONCLUSION AND A HOPE FOR OUR FORTHCOMING DECISIONS:
There is history repeating itself here – much like Vietnam and Iraq, the above two factors are deeply at play again, with a lack of astute learning in our government as we look back over our shoulder.
We must come to the understanding, like a highly respected war veteran and West Point Instructor recently stated, “Victory’s been defeated; it’s time we recognized that and moved on to what we actually can accomplish.”
Frank Spinney is an expert on the MIC. He spent the same time I did on the inside of the Pentagon while I worked Industry. You may find his interviews informative.
I have hope these historical factors are useful in considering our future financial and defense security and that every U.S. citizen from the individual voter to the politician will consider them in their decision-making.
“TOM DISPATCH” – By Ben Freeman and William D. Hartung
“The military-industrial complex (MIC) that President Eisenhower warned Americans about more than 60 years ago is consuming more tax dollars and feeding far larger weapons producers than when Ike raised the alarm about the “unwarranted influence” 1961 ”
“The statistics are stunning. This year’s proposed budget for the Pentagon and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy is $886 billion — more than twice as much, adjusted for inflation, as at the time of Eisenhower’s speech. The Pentagon now consumes more than half the federal discretionary budget, leaving priorities like public health, environmental protection, job training, and education to compete for what remains. In 2020, Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in Pentagon contracts, more than the entire budget of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined.
This year’s spending just for that company’s overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft equals the full budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And as a new report from the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies revealed recently, the average taxpayer spends $1,087 per year on weapons contractors compared to $270 for K-12 education and just $6 for renewable energy.
The list goes on — and on and on. President Eisenhower characterized such tradeoffs in a lesser known speech, “The Chance for Peace,” delivered in April 1953, early in his first term, this way: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…”
How sadly of this moment that is.
New Rationales, New Weaponry
Now, don’t be fooled. The current war machine isn’t your grandfather’s MIC, not by a country mile. It receives far more money and offers far different rationales. It has far more sophisticated tools of influence and significantly different technological aspirations.
Perhaps the first and foremost difference between Eisenhower’s era and ours is the sheer size of the major weapons firms. Before the post-Cold War merger boom of the 1990s, there were dozens of significant defense contractors. Now, there are just five big (no, enormous!) players — Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. With so few companies to produce aircraft, armored vehicles, missile systems, and nuclear weapons, the Pentagon has ever more limited leverage in keeping them from overcharging for products that don’t perform as advertised. The Big Five alone routinely split more than $150 billion in Pentagon contracts annually, or nearly 20% of the total Pentagon budget. Altogether, more than half of the department’s annual spending goes to contractors large and small.
In Eisenhower’s day, the Soviet Union, then this country’s major adversary, was used to justify an ever larger, ever more permanent arms establishment. Today’s “pacing threat,” as the Pentagon calls it, is China, a country with a far larger population, a far more robust economy, and a far more developed technical sector than the Soviet Union ever had. But unlike the USSR, China’s primary challenge to the United States is economic, not military.
Yet, as Dan Grazier noted in a December 2022 report for the Project on Government Oversight, Washington’s ever more intense focus on China has been accompanied by significant military threat inflation. While China hawks in Washington wring their hands about that country having more naval vessels than America, Grazier points out that our Navy has far more firepower. Similarly, the active American nuclear weapons stockpile is roughly nine times as large as China’s and the Pentagon budget three times what Beijing spends on its military, according to the latest figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
But for Pentagon contractors, Washington’s ever more intense focus on the prospect of war with China has one overriding benefit: it’s fabulous for business. The threat of China’s military, real or imagined, continues to be used to justify significant increases in military spending, especially on the next generation of high-tech systems ranging from hypersonic missiles to robotic weapons and artificial intelligence. The history of such potentially dysfunctional high-tech systems, from President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense system to the F-35, does not bode well, however, for the cost or performance of emerging military technologies.
No matter, count on one thing: tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars will undoubtedly go into developing them anyway. And remember that they are dangerous and not just to any enemy. As Michael Klare pointed out in an Arms Control Association report: “AI-enabled systems may fail in unpredictable ways, causing unintended human slaughter or an uncontrolled escalation crisis.”
Arsenal of Influence
Despite a seemingly never–endinglist of overpriced, underperforming weapons systems developed for a Pentagon that’s the only federal agency never to pass an audit, the MIC has an arsenal of influence propelling it ever closer to a trillion-dollar annual budget. In short, it’s bilking more money from taxpayers than ever before and just about everyone — from lobbyists galore to countless political campaigns, think tanks beyond number to Hollywood — is in on it.
And keep in mind that the dominance of a handful of mega-firms in weapons production means that each of the top players has more money to spread around in lobbying and campaign contributions. They also have more facilities and employees to point to, often in politically key states, when persuading members of Congress to vote for — Yes!– even more money for their weaponry of choice.
The arms industry as a whole has donated more than $83 million to political candidates in the past two election cycles, with Lockheed Martin leading the pack with $9.1 million in contributions, followed by Raytheon at $8 million, and Northrop Grumman at $7.7 million. Those funds, you won’t be surprised to learn, are heavily concentrated among members of the House and Senate armed services committees and defense appropriations subcommittees. For example, as Taylor Giorno of OpenSecrets, a group that tracks campaign and lobbying expenditures, has found, “The 58 members of the House Armed Services Committee reported receiving an average of $79,588 from the defense sector during the 2022 election cycle, three times the average $26,213 other representatives reported through the same period.”
Lobbying expenditures by all the denizens of the MIC are even higher — more than $247 million in the last two election cycles. Such funds are used to employ 820 lobbyists, or more than one for every member of Congress. And mind you, more than two-thirds of those lobbyists had swirled through Washington’s infamous revolving door from jobs at the Pentagon or in Congress to lobby for the arms industry. Their contacts in government and knowledge of arcane acquisition procedures help ensure that the money keeps flowing for more guns, tanks, ships and missiles. Just last month, the office of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) reported that nearly 700 former high-ranking government officials, including former generals and admirals, now work for defense contractors. While a few of them are corporate board members or highly paid executives, 91% of them became Pentagon lobbyists, according to the report.
And that feverishly spinning revolving door provides current members of Congress, their staff, and Pentagon personnel with a powerful incentive to play nice with those giant contractors while still in their government roles. After all, a lucrative lobbying career awaits once they leave government service.
Nor is it just K Street lobbying jobs those weapons-making corporations are offering. They’re also spreading jobs to nearly every Main Street in America. The poster child for such jobs as a selling point for an otherwise questionable weapons system is Lockheed Martin’s F-35. It may never be fully ready for combat thanks to countless design flaws, including more than 800 unresolved defects detected by the Pentagon’s independent testing office. But the company insists that its program produces no less than 298,000 jobs in 48 states, even if the actual total is less than half of that.
In reality — though you’d never know this in today’s Washington — the weapons sector is a declining industry when it comes to job creation, even if it does absorb near-record levels of government funding. According to statistics gathered by the National Defense Industrial Association, there are currently one million direct jobs in arms manufacturing compared to 3.2 million in the 1980s.
Outsourcing, automation, and the production of fewer units of more complex systems have skewed the workforce toward better-paying engineering jobs and away from production work, a shift that has come at a high price. The vacuuming up of engineering and scientific talent by weapons makers means fewer skilled people are available to address urgent problems like public health and the climate crisis. Meanwhile, it’s estimated that spending on education, green energy, health care, or infrastructure could produce 40% to 100% more jobs than Pentagon spending does.
Shaping the Elite Narrative: The Military-Industrial Complex and Think Tanks
One of the MIC’s most powerful tools is its ability to shape elite discussions on national security issues by funding foreign policy think tanks, along with affiliated analysts who are all too often the experts of choice when it comes to media coverage on issues of war and peace. A forthcoming Quincy Institute brief reveals that more than 75% of the top foreign-policy think tanks in the United States are at least partially funded by defense contractors. Some, like the Center for a New American Security and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, receive millions of dollars every year from such contractors and then publish articles and reports that are largely supportive of defense-industry funding.
Some such think tanks even offer support for weapons made by their funders without disclosing those glaring conflicts of interest. For example, an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholar’s critique of this year’s near-historically high Pentagon budget request, which, she claimed, was “well below inflation,” also included support for increased funding for a number of weapons systems like the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, the B-21 bomber, and the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile.
What’s not mentioned in the piece? The companies that build those weapons, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, have been AEI funders. Although that institute is a “dark money” think tank that doesn’t publicly disclose its funders, at an event last year, a staffer let slip that the organization receives money from both of those contractors.
Unfortunately, mainstream media outlets disproportionately rely on commentary from experts at just such think tanks. That forthcoming Quincy Institute report, for example, found that they were more than four times as likely as those without MIC funding to be cited in New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal articles about the Ukraine War. In short, when you see a think-tank expert quoted on questions of war and peace, odds are his or her employer receives money from the war machine.
What’s more, such think tanks have their own version of a feverishly spinning revolving door, earning them the moniker “holding tanks” for future government officials. The Center for a New American Security, for example, receives millions of dollars from defense contractors and the Pentagon every year and has boasted that a number of its experts and alumni joined the Biden administration, including high-ranking political appointees at the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Shaping the Public Narrative: The Military-Entertainment Complex
Top Gun: Maverick was a certified blockbuster, wowing audiences that ultimately gave that action film an astounding 99% score on Rotten Tomatoes — and such popular acclaim helped earn the movie a Best Picture Oscar nomination. It was also a resounding success for the Pentagon, which worked closely with the filmmakers and provided, “equipment — including jets and aircraft carriers — personnel and technical expertise,” and even had the opportunity to make script revisions, according to the Washington Post. Defense contractors were similarly a pivotal part of that movie’s success. In fact, the CEO of Lockheed Martin boasted that his firm “partnered with Top Gun’s producers to bring cutting-edge, future forward technology to the big screen.”
While Top Gun: Maverick might have been the most successful recent product of the military-entertainment complex, it’s just the latest installment in a long history of Hollywood spreading military propaganda. “The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have exercised direct editorial control over more than 2,500 films and television shows,” according to Professor Roger Stahl, who researches propaganda and state violence at the University of Georgia.
“The result is an entertainment culture rigged to produce relatively few antiwar movies and dozens of blockbusters that glorify the military,” explained journalist David Sirota, who has repeatedlycalled attention to the perils of the military-entertainment complex. “And save for filmmakers’ obligatory thank you to the Pentagon in the credits,” argued Sirota, “audiences are rarely aware that they may be watching government-subsidized propaganda.”
What Next for the MIC?
More than 60 years after Eisenhower identified the problem and gave it a name, the military-industrial complex continues to use its unprecedented influence to corrupt budget and policy processes, starve funding for non-military solutions to security problems, and ensure that war is the ever more likely “solution” to this country’s problems. The question is: What can be done to reduce its power over our lives, our livelihoods, and ultimately, the future of the planet?
Countering the modern-day military-industrial complex would mean dislodging each of the major pillars undergirding its power and influence. That would involve campaign-finance reform; curbing the revolving door between the weapons industry and government; shedding more light on its funding of political campaigns, think tanks, and Hollywood; and prioritizing investments in the jobs of the future in green technology and public health instead of piling up ever more weapons systems. Most important of all, perhaps, a broad-based public education campaign is needed to promote more realistic views of the challenge posed by China and to counter the current climate of fear that serves the interests of the Pentagon and the giant weapons contractors at the expense of the safety and security of the rest of us.
That, of course, would be no small undertaking, but the alternative — an ever-spiraling arms race that could spark a world-ending conflict or prevent us from addressing existential threats like climate change and pandemics — is simply unacceptable.”
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Ben Freeman, a TomDispatch regular, is a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of a forthcoming report on Pentagon contractor funding of think tanks.
All wars eventually result in negotiated settlements. Avoiding them by learning and negotiation in the first place is the most effective war weapon and by far the least costly in materials, debt and lives.
Vietnam was not a declared war. It was an “Intervention”, developed by the U.S. Military Industrial Complex (MIC) and the “Best and the Brightest” in the Pentagon. It became the defacto model for military actions, not only by the U.S. but also other major world powers. Intervention has a long history.
A similar intervention occurred in Iraq, driven by the same MIC forces.
The Vietnam “Intervention” legacy continued after 911 in Afganistan, with mammoth costs in money, treasure and lives; then on to the Middle East and to Ukraine and the Gaza support program, while making billions for defense industries and delivering death and destruction to civilians. What must be learned and what price are we willing to pay to learn it?
Our near term future as a country involves weighty decisions regarding our fiscal and national security. There will be trade offs during the next federal government incremental funding authorization this Fall.
We are approaching a National Debt of $34 Trillion with a downgraded fiscal credit rating while carrying the financial burden of ongoing support for NATO and the Ukraine war, the Middle East Gaza conflict, as well as domestic program needs.
A look over our shoulder at two driving factors of our recent warfare is useful as we consider history when viewing our future while making prudent decisions on the principal contributors to our national debt and security.
I was in Vietnam for two tours as a combatant; working in US Army Base Development. I observed Philco Ford CAGV, Pacific Architects and Engineers, Leo Daley and other huge corporations working throughout the country supplying American occupation and making billions.
“David Halberstam’s book offers a great deal of detail on how the decisions were made in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations that led to the war, focusing on a period from 1960 to 1965 but also covering earlier and later years up to the publication year of the book. Many influential factors are examined in the book:
A quote many years ago from Major-General Smedley D. Butler: Common Sense (November 1935)
” I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service as a member of our country’s most agile military force—the Marine Corps. I have served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to major-general. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers, In short I was a racketeer for capitalism
Thus, I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place to live for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in…. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American Sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded honors, medals, promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents. War Is A Racket”
THE VIETNAM WAR – THE COSTLIEST TO DATE
It’s been 5 decades since the U.S. ended its involvement in the Vietnam War, and yet payments for the conflict are still rising.
Now above $22 billion annually, Vietnam compensation costs are roughly twice the size of the FBI’s annual budget. And while many disabled Vietnam vets have been compensated for post-traumatic stress disorder, hearing loss or general wounds, other ailments are positioning the war to have large costs even after veterans die.
Based on an uncertain link to the defoliant Agent Orange that was used in Vietnam, federal officials approved diabetes a decade ago as an ailment that qualifies for cash compensation — and it is now the most compensated ailment for Vietnam vets.
The VA also recently included heart disease among the Vietnam medical problems that qualify, and the agency is seeing thousands of new claims for that condition.
THE RECENTLY CONCLUDED MAJOR CONFLICTS
If history is any judge, the U.S. government will be paying for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the next century as service members and their families grapple with the sacrifices of combat.
An Associated Press analysis of federal payment records found that the government is still making monthly payments to relatives of Civil War veterans — 148 years after the conflict ended.
At the anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, more than $40 billion a year was going to compensate veterans and survivors from the Spanish-American War from 1898, World War I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the two Iraq campaigns and the Afghanistan conflict. And those costs are rising rapidly.
U.S. Sen. Patty Murray said such expenses should remind the nation about war’s long-lasting financial toll.
“When we decide to go to war, we have to consciously be also thinking about the cost,” said Murray, D-Wash., adding that her WWII veteran father’s disability benefits helped feed their family.
With greater numbers of troops surviving combat injuries because of improvements in battlefield medicine and technology, the costs of disability payments are set to rise much higher.
So far, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the first Persian Gulf conflict in the early 1990’s have cost about $12 billion a year to compensate those who have left military service or family members of those who have died.
Those post-service compensation costs have totaled more than $50 billion since 2003, not including expenses of medical care and other benefits provided to veterans, and are poised to grow for many years to come.
The new veterans are filing for disabilities at historic rates, with about 45 percent of those from Iraq and Afghanistan seeking compensation for injuries. Many are seeking compensation for a variety of ailments at once.
Experts see a variety of factors driving that surge, including a bad economy that’s led more jobless veterans to seek the financial benefits they’ve earned, troops who survive wounds of war, and more awareness about head trauma and mental health.
THE FUTURE
Recent events involving US war “Interventions” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and the Gaza Conflict demonstrate the incredibly out of control nature of the Military Industrial Complexes in the major advanced countries. We are receiving daily demonstrations of their danger, their folly and their contribution to the largest national debt ever to grace the face of the earth.
Alternatives to war in terms of negotiation, scientific advancement and cooperation among world governments not only are required but are the only feasible solution to the present state of our global affairs. The war makers are going broke, subjecting the planet to tremendous risk and operating on world credit subject to world approval.
“Just days after the Department of Defense failed its fifth consecutive financial audit, the Pentagon submitted its second unfunded priorities list to Congress, requesting an additional $25 billion on top of the over $24 billion wish list submitted to Congress earlier this year.
The United States Congress should not be the Pentagon’s Santa Claus. But even if it were, who writes a second letter to ask for more when they’re already on the naughty list?”
“Beyond the stated budget, it’s become routine that the Pentagon also hands Congress a list of programs it would like to fund but does not explicitly have money for: the unfunded priorities. While the “optional” wish list could seem like a good way to offer lawmakers and the military some flexibility, in the op-ed below, POGO’s Julia Gledhill argues it’s actually become another barrier to DoD transparency when it comes to taxpayer dollars.
Congress requires military services and commands to produce these wish lists, which outline items that don’t make it into the Pentagon’s official budget request. And while the Department of Defense has submitted these wish lists for decades, publicly available records suggest this is first time the department has sent Congress two in one year.
There are no public indications this list came from an additional request by lawmakers, either. Arriving so late in the congressional budget process, it directly appeals to a select group of decision makers finalizing the annual defense policy bill, rather than to Congress as a whole.
It’s increasingly clear that if you give the Pentagon an inch, it will take a mile. Lawmakers show the Pentagon special treatment by requiring these lists; while government-wide wish lists would of course be wasteful, it’s telling that no other department has the same requirement.
Unfunded wish lists circumvent the White House’s strategic guidance for the department and potentially harms non-defense spending; lawmakers with equities on, say, labor or agriculture committees should be against them on that basis alone. A second wish list, targeting only the top eight defense authorizers and appropriators? That should be the kind of thing that pushes other members of Congress to finally level the playing field and eliminate wish lists for good.
Being strong on defense can’t just mean throwing money at the Pentagon — it should mean prioritizing military readiness and holding the Department of Defense accountable for wasteful spending. The Pentagon has proven that it is not a good steward of Americans’ tax dollars. It hasn’t just failed its fifth consecutive audit, it was actually unable to give [PDF] auditors enough information to issue a clean opinion for the second year in a row. If the Department of Defense isn’t managing its money well now, it’s hard to believe throwing them another $25 billion will make Americans significantly safer, especially given the department’s infamous struggles with acquisition programs.
But Congress should rid itself of the Pentagon’s dreadful wish lists for an even more fundamental reason: These lists bypass the actual budgetary process. The Pentagon has developed the largest defense budget on the planet every year since at least 1949, supposedly ensuring that critical needs and priorities are properly supported in its formal budget — crying poor seems laughable.
Unfunded priority lists always circumvent and undermine the budget process, and sending Congress a second wish list during the lame duck session is outrageous because debate is essentially impossible. Committees have already held all their open discussions on the staggering $830-plus billion Pentagon budget. Now, congressional leaders have retreated behind closed doors to hash out the differences between a House version of the budget and a presumptive Senate version that itself was never actually debated or voted on by the full Senate. The Pentagon’s wish list could be a Hail Mary attempt to influence negotiations on the defense topline at the final stage in the policymaking process.
With Congress’s packed schedule, it will be up to a handful of congressional leaders to decide if and how to fund programs the Pentagon didn’t consider important enough for its formal budget request. In other words, a few individuals will likely decide whether or not they should approve an additional $25 billion on top of at least $839 billion in military spending already approved by the House.
Wish lists aren’t typically publicly accessible, either. Media outlets and organizations often gain access to parts of them, but by and large, only lawmakers see them. Bloomberg News appears to be the only outlet to gain access to the Pentagon’s latest list, making it extremely difficult for the public to evaluate the Pentagon’s request.
Lawmakers should be offended by the Pentagon’s audacious move to submit a second wish list because it encourages some of the most powerful members of Congress to make significant additions to the defense budget without substantive feedback from their colleagues. Plus, it’s impossible for a department already struggling with financial mismanagement to develop fiscal discipline when Congress funds its wish list requests outside the formal budget process. By repealing statutory requirements for the military to produce these unfunded priorities lists, Congress could encourage military branches and commands to critically analyze and reshape their budgets. In so doing, the military would begin to make the tradeoffs necessary to improve financial management and military readiness.
After all, neither Congress nor the Pentagon can address the security threats of tomorrow without accountability and oversight today. Increasing the amount of money the Pentagon handles, much less the weapon systems it develops, only exacerbates its management challenges.
The United States Congress should not be the Pentagon’s Santa Claus. But even if it were, who writes a second letter to ask for more when they’re already on the naughty list?”
Julia Gledhill is an analyst in the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight.
“Five of the nation’s biggest defense contractors — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Technologies and General Dynamics — spent a combined $60 million in 2020 to influence policy, according to a new report from the Center for Responsive Politics.”
“The paper, “Capitalizing on conflict: How defense contractors and foreign nations lobby for arms sales,” details how a network of lobbyists and donors steered $285 million in campaign contributions and $2.5 billion in lobbying spending over the last two decades, as well as hiring more than 200 lobbyists who previously worked in government.
The amount of money at stake is immense, both at home and abroad, the center states on its website, OpenSecrets.org. Not only is a significant portion of the Pentagon’s $740 billion annual budget spent on weapons, the report explains, but American defense firms agreed to sell $175 billion in weapons to other countries over the last year. That includes deals to sell $23 billion in F-35 Joint Strike Fighters and drones to the United Arab Emirates, and billions more in sales to Taiwan and Saudi Arabia, it adds.
The practice appears unlikely to change significantly under the Biden administration. The report notes that while President Joe Biden issued an order restricting officials who leave the White House from quickly lobbying the executive branch or registering as foreign agents, several of his appointees have ties to the defense industry. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, for example, sat on Raytheon’s board before joining the administration.
And since Biden’s inauguration, the report states, the State Department has approved the sale of $85 million in missiles from Raytheon to Chile, and a $60 million deal between Lockheed Martin and Jordan to provide F-16 Fighting Falcons and services.
Foreign nations that are among the arms industry’s biggest customers also spend heavily to influence U.S. policy, often to the tune of tens of millions of dollars in spending covered by the Foreign Agents Registration Act. However, the report notes that some nations that spend the most, such as South Korea and Japan, focus more on trade and commercial issues than military spending.
Australia, the United Arab Emirates, Taiwan and Saudi Arabia are some of the other major buyers of American weapons.
Defense lobbyists are also among the best-connected in Washington, D.C., the report states. Of the 663 lobbyists working for defense contractors, nearly three-quarters used to work for the federal government — the highest percentage of any industry, according to the report.
“These connections make for cozy relationships and highly useful contact lists,” the report says. “Overworked and underpaid congressional staffers can also hope that lucrative lobbying jobs await them at the same companies who come to them pushing their own agendas.”
The so-called “revolving door” also exists on Capitol Hill, the report adds. Over the last 30 years, nearly 530 staffers have both worked for a member of the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees of both houses of Congress or the Defense Appropriations subcommittees, and then as a lobbyist for defense companies.
The report highlights former Defense Secretary Mark Esper as an example of the revolving door in action. Esper worked for the Senate Foreign Relations and House Armed Services committees in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as well as an assistant deputy secretary of defense, before moving to Raytheon’s government relations office. After seven years in that job, President Donald Trump made him secretary of the Army and then head of the Defense Department.”
“Mergers and geographic groupthink have helped wring innovation out of the defense business. “As the defense industry has shrunk, all of the contractors began to look more and more alike.”
“It was a striking passage in a Christmas Eve Washington Poststory about a company that helps small businesses get contracts from nearby big corporations. “These small suppliers have been heavily reliant on the health of big companies in their regions,” it read. “If you are in Houston, your business lives and dies with oil and gas. In the Midwest, it’s automotive. Boston caters to medical device companies. Washington is well known for its aerospace and defense.”
Well, it may be well known now, but that’s a relatively recent phenomenon. Defense-contractor headquarters tended to be where the factories were, far away from the decision-makers in D.C. Lockheed and Northrop were in California, for example, and General Dynamics was in St. Louis.
But General Dynamics moved to D.C.’s Virginia suburbs in 1991. “Winning contracts is not just a function of providing the necessary aircraft or submarine,” a St. Louis-based defense industry analyst said when the move was announced. “There also, sorry to say, are politics that get involved in a lot of these decisions. It’s something that’s difficult to quantify, but you know it does have a place in these decisions.”
Lockheed shuttered its California headquarters in 1995 after it merged with Martin Marietta. The deal reflected “Southern California’s dwindling role as a mainstay of the U.S. aerospace industrial complex,” the Los Angeles Times reported at the time. “Lockheed Martin chose Martin Marietta’s home of Bethesda, Md., for its headquarters, formally ending Lockheed’s long domicile in the San Fernando Valley.”
Northrop moved to Falls Church, Va., in 2010. “We think we’ll be able to do a better job for our customers and our company by having our corporate office there,” Northrop chief Wes Bush said back then. “
“The bottom line, so far: According to the Costs of War Project, we’re staring at a $5.4 trillion tab for the post-9/11 wars, through September 30, 2020, the final day of the current fiscal year.
That’s an average of $23.7 billion monthly for the past 228 months.“
That’s really not a surprise. The surprise is how much more they cost than we’ve been told.
It might help to think of the nation’s post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq like a pair of icebergs. The Pentagon has a web page that tells us how much we’ve each paid for the wars. But that only tells us how much of those icebergs we can see above the waves. While it includes totals for war fighting, it doesn’t track the Pentagon’s bigger war budget, interest paid on money we’ve borrowed to fight the wars, veterans’ care, and other ancillary costs. There’s a whole lot more hidden beneath the waves. The real issue isn’t whether the cost of war is high; the issue is why the U.S. government keeps under-estimating it, and why U.S. citizens and taxpayers keep tolerating it.
The cost versus benefit of the nation’s post-9/11 wars was highlighted December 9 when the Washington Post began publishing a blockbuster series detailing how poorly the war in Afghanistan is going. The series is based on more than 400 internal government interviews that the Post largely pried from the congressionally created and independent Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction under the Freedom of Information Act. The stories show how U.S. government officials have misled the American public over the past 18 years by publicly declaring how well the war was going while privately acknowledging the opposite.
It echoes much of the analysis on Afghanistan we’ve done regularly here at the Military Industrial Circus (May 2017’s “What kind of military willingly walks onto a perpetual treadmill when the chance of prevailing is next to nil?”) about the rampant truth-fudging (August 2017’s “One can only take the constant spinning for so long before becoming dizzy and cynical over can-do officers who can’t-do.”), the hiding of key indicators about the war’s progress from the American people who are paying and dying for it (November 2017’s “When things are going well, there’s no shutting up the Pentagon.”), and the blindness of our national leaders through three administrations (last March’s “American hubris is always amazing to see, especially in hindsight.”).
For those too young to remember, the nation’s seemingly never-ending post-9/11 wars began as an invasion of Afghanistan. It was designed to crush its Taliban-run government for offering sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda prior to the 9/11 attacks. But it quickly morphed into a “Global War on Terrorism” that has involved U.S. military action in about 80 nations. In 2003, the U.S. also invaded Iraq, arguing—wrongly as it turned out—that Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction and played a role in the 9/11 attacks.
The global war on terrorism has killed 7,028 Pentagon personnel, both military and civilian, since 9/11 (at least 7,800 others, employed by private U.S. contractors, have also died in Afghanistan and Iraq.) But its mission creep has also created a non-nuclear chain reaction: The U.S. repeatedly decided it needed more troops, which has led to more veterans. Many of those heroes thankfully have survived wounds that would have killed them in prior wars. But that will boost the cost of their care for decades to come. The Department of Homeland Security, which the government cobbled together from existing agencies in 2003, was padded out with its own bureaucracy. The State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development got their own off-budget accounts too. And the federal government began borrowing money to pay for all this.
You might think, as a taxpayer, that you could just wander over to defense.gov and look up the cost of those two wars. After all, they’ve been the Pentagon’s focus, fiscally and otherwise, for nearly 20 years. But you’d be wrong. The Pentagon, whether reporting on wars or weapons, is remarkably opaque when it comes to spelling out how much they cost. So outsiders have had to step in to make cents of how much our recent wars have cost.
Even more amazingly after nearly 20 years of war, keeping track of how much the U.S. is spending on the wars may be getting tougher. “In some instances, DOD, State Department and Department of Homeland Security Budgets are opaque,” notes a recent report by the Costs Of War Project, which consists of a team of about 50 experts. “Indeed, because of recent changes in budgetary labels and accounting at DOD, DHS, and the State Department, understanding the costs of the post-9/11 wars is potentially even more difficult than in the past.”
The U.S. has spent an estimated $5.4 trillion on its post-9/11 war on terror, with an additional $1 trillion due for veterans’ care in the future. (Table: United States Budgetary Costs and Obligations of Post-9/11 Wars through FY2020: $6.4 Trillion, page 3, by Neta C. Crawford for the Cost of War Project at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University)
Those interested in minimizing war’s costs will limit their ledger to what the Pentagon actually is spending on combat. A more complete accounting will add in additional military spending routinely ladled into Pentagon coffers during wartime. A still-fuller accounting will add veterans’ care, homeland security, and interest on the money we’ve borrowed to fight the war.
There’s a lot of wishful thinking involved when the U.S. is thinking of going to war. If the government were simply sloppy and slipshod, its estimates would be both low and high. But invariably, they are low, which suggests there’s a motive to the math: Low-balling the cost of war makes it more likely war will happen.
The bureaucratic imperative of how the Pentagon buys its wars and weapons is the “buy-in,” a rosy projection designed to show that the conflict or hardware is a relative bargain. Yet once the war or hardware has achieved escape velocity, its price begins escalating.
The Pentagon argues the nation’s investment in any particular piece of shiny new weapon has grown so massive that abandoning the effort would send those sunk costs spinning down the drain. Likewise, war costs soar because of mission creep—rebuilding Afghanistan instead of simply ousting the Taliban following the attacks of September 11, 2001, for example—and concern that pulling out before achieving victory would mean the lives of those Americans already killed in the effort would have been wasted.
Of course, no one can predict the final cost of a war before it has begun. Yet before it begins the government tends to speak of a war’s monthly cost. In Iraq, for example, that led to an early claim that the war would cost $2 billion a month, totaling perhaps $50 billion. Those relatively low numbers, in Pentagon terms anyway, grease the skids to war.
But watch how they grow.
The litany of minimized post-9/11 war-cost estimates is long. It got off to an ignoble start when one White House official suggested the Iraq war might cost more than his finger-crossing political masters wanted to admit. In September 2002, White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey played the skunk at the Garden of Eden party (Iraq has several sites vying to be the biblical paradise) when he suggestedthe Iraq war’s cost to the U.S. could range between $100 billion and $200 billion. He tried to gussy up his then-exorbitant estimate: “The successful prosecution of the war,” he argued in the Wall Street Journal, “would be good for the economy.”
Nonetheless, Lindsey was unceremoniously combat-booted from the White House three months later. Mitch Daniels, the director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget at the time, said the war’s cost couldn’t be estimated. But he declaredLindsey’s estimate was “likely very, very high.”
By January 2003, two months before the invasion of Iraq, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld uncharacteristically deferred to Daniels’ bean counters when it came to projecting the war’s cost. “Well, the Office of Management and Budget has come up with a number that’s something under $50 billion for the cost,” saidRumsfeld, who seemingly rarely embraced others’ views when he believed strongly in his own.
In April 2003, just after the U.S. invaded Iraq, the Pentagon saidthe Iraq war would cost about $2 billion a month. But three months later, Rumsfeld raised lawmakers’ eyebrows when he doubledits estimated monthly cost to $3.9 billion (along with nearly $1 billion a month for Afghanistan).
By July 2006, nearly five years after the 9/11 attacks, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) saidCongress “has appropriated about $430 billion to DOD and other government agencies for military and diplomatic efforts in support of GWOT [the Global War on Terrorism].” (You know you’ve reached the Big Time in Washington when your pet project rates its own acronym.) That translated into about $7.4 billion a month.
But the numbers were squishy. “GAO’s prior work found numerous problems with DOD’s processes for recording and reporting GWOT costs, including long-standing deficiencies in DOD’s financial management systems and business processes, the use of estimates instead of actual cost data, and the lack of adequate supporting documentation,” top U.S. Bean Counter David Walker (officially known as the Comptroller General of the United States, the position that runs the GAO), told a congressional panel. “As a result, neither DOD nor the Congress reliably know how much the war is costing.”
“[N]either DOD nor the Congress reliably know how much the war is costing.”
DAVID WALKER, COMPTROLLER GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES
That’s quite a statement coming from the congressional Bookkeeper-in-Chief.
By 2014, the Congressional Research Service said that the U.S. had spent $1.6 trillion “for military operations, base support, weapons maintenance, training of Afghan and Iraq security forces, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs, and veterans’ health care for the war operations initiated since the 9/11 attacks.” That worked out to about $10.3 billion a month.
But even that eye-watering sum misses the mark. The Costs of War Project has spent the past decade pawing through government documents to try to tote up the post-9/11 wars’ total cost. Its latest calculation, released in November, says the U.S. will have spent $5.4 trillion on the global war on terrorism by the end of the current 2020 fiscal year, along with an additional $1 trillion for veterans’ care beyond that. That’s about $20,000 per American.
“There are many hidden or unacknowledged costs of the United States’ decision to respond to the 9/11 attacks with military force,” the group, run out of Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, says on its website. “We aim to foster democratic discussion of these wars by providing the fullest possible account of their human, economic, and political costs, and to foster better informed public policies.” The group’s work is largely funded by the Carnegie Corporation, the Colombe Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, and Boston and Brown universities.
“We go to war with optimistic assumptions” of duration, cost, and casualties, says Neta Crawford, head of Boston University’s political science department and one of the Costs of War Project’s leaders and author of its latest study. “Most people believe that force is effective, but the history of war is that [winning] doesn’t happen at least half the time,” Crawford told POGO.
And it isn’t just fusty academics who feel that way. “No government-wide reporting consistently accounts for both DOD and non-DOD war costs,” advises an April reportfrom the Congressional Research Service. Not only hasn’t the government been able to win its post-9/11 wars; after nearly two decades it can’t tell us how much it has spent failing to do so.
Put that in your howitzer and light it.
Something to keep in mind the next time the Pentagon predicts a war is going to cost $2 billion a month.”
Made In in USA and Exported By U.S. Government to Turkey
“DEFENSE NEWS“
The U.S. sold $55.4 billion worth of weapons to allies and partners around the globe in fiscal year 2019.
Lt. Gen. Charles Hooper, the head of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency: “We’re gonna win this thing folks. Working together — industry, private sector, the implementing agencies, DoD, State — all of us. We’re gonna win this thing.”
“After essentially giving a green light to Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria to attack the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) forces, President Trump took a slight turn when he declared that there would be severe economic consequences for Turkey if the intervention was not carried out in a “humane” fashion.
If the president were to take action to try to stem a military incursion that he helped facilitate, he could start by cutting off support for Turkey’s military, which is heavily dependent on U.S.-supplied equipment.
The most effective thing the president or Congress could do to hamper Turkey’s military efforts is to cut off spare parts and sustainment of its U.S.-supplied weapons, both of which are crucial to the continued operation of the Turkish military machine.
Of 333 combat aircraft possessed by Turkey, 53 are older generation F-5 fighter planes, and 280 are fighter/ground attack planes that are all variants of the F-16, which is co-produced in Turkey. Turkey also has 31 U.S.-origin C-130 transport aircraft.
The United States has supplied the majority of Turkey’s more than 2,400 Main Battle Tanks, including over 900 variants of the M-1 and 850 older generation M-48s, which were purchased in the 1960s and 1970s and modernized in the mid-1980s. In addition, over two-thirds of Turkey’s more than 3,600 armored personnel carriers are U.S.-made M-113s.
U.S. arms sales are often justified on the grounds that they create “interoperability” with key allies so they can fight alongside the U.S. in a crisis. It is less often noted that arms sales also pose substantial risks that U.S.-supplied weapons may be used to abuse human rights, attack civilians, or otherwise act in a fashion contrary to U.S. interests. The most egregious recent example of this phenomenon has been Saudi Arabia’s use of U.S. arms to bomb civilians in Yemen and spark the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Turkey’s invasion of Syria is another example of U.S. arms being misused. The Turkish action should be a cautionary tale for Congress as it grapples with how best to monitor and control U.S. arms transfers.
Congress has already taken a large step forward in recent years in its attempts to cut off U.S. arms and military assistance to the brutal Saudi-led war in Yemen, from using the War Powers Resolution to voting down specific arms sales. Unfortunately, these unprecedented efforts have been vetoed by President Trump, in part under the false assumption that arms sales to Saudi Arabia are a major boon to the U.S. economy.
President Trump’s lack of knowledge of how arms sales work was on display once again when he cited Turkey’s role in producing components for the U.S. F-35 combat aircraft as a reason to maintain the alliance in the face of Turkey’s unacceptable and potentially devastating intervention in Syria. In fact, the United States has suspended Turkey’s involvement in the F-35 program in a dispute over Ankara’s decision to buy Russian S-400 air defense systems. Either someone forgot to tell the president, or he was just engaged in the sort of fact-free riffing that has become one of his hallmarks.
To add insult to injury, it ends up U.S. weapons are being used on both sides of the current battle in Syria. A fact sheet produced by the Center for International Policy’s Security Assistance Monitor has pointed out that the vetted Syrian opposition – including Syrian Kurdish forces – have received roughly $2 billion in U.S. “train and equip” assistance, including a $300 million request in Fiscal Year 2019. But it’s not a fair fight. The Kurdish forces have received mostly rifles, ammunition, and rocket launchers, while Turkey has U.S.-supplied fighter planes, tanks, and bombs.
In the 1970s, when U.S.-armed Greek and Turkish forces were fighting each other in Cyprus, it was a significant factor in prompting Congress to pass the Arms Export Control Act, which forced the Pentagon to inform Congress of major arms sales in advance and set up a mechanism for Congress to block sales that were not deemed to be in the national interest. Perhaps it’s time for an overhaul of that act that strengthens Congress’s leverage over arms sales decisions, perhaps by requiring positive Congressional approval before sensitive sales move forward. It’s time to highlight the risks of runaway arms trading, not just the alleged benefits.”
WilliamHartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. He is the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (Nation Books, 2011) and the co-editor, with Miriam Pemberton, of Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War (Paradigm Press, 2008). His previous books include And Weapons for All (HarperCollins, 1995), a critique of U.S. arms sales policies from the Nixon through Clinton administrations.
Chinese DF-15B Short-Ranged Ballistic Missile (SRBM) during PLA Rocket Force exercise.
“BREAKING DEFENSE“
“A whopping six Chinese companies have stormed into the top 15 global defense firms according to a new report by Defense News, which released its annual Top 100 list of the biggest defense companies in the world.
The burgeoning Chinese defense industry has blown past the majority of its US counterparts while leaving virtually all of Europe in the dust, according to a new study of the global defense market.”
“The top Chinese company on the list, Aviation Industry Corporation of China, boasts an estimated revenue from defense sales of $24 billion, pushing past traditional US defense giants General Dynamics and BAE Systems. The company has also inched within roughly a billion in revenue of fellow behemoths, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, both of which pulled in just over $25 billion in 2018.
Two other Chinese companies, China North Industries Group Corporation Limited, and the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, made the top 10.
Pentagon officials have long bemoaned the Chinese government’s ability to order industry to respond quickly — and completely — to its demands. The new report shines a spotlight on the gravity of those complaints while shining a spotlight on secretive Chinese defense industry.
During his recent nomination hearing to become the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley said when it comes to military technology and doctrine, “China went to school on us,” telling the Senate Armed Services Committee, “they watched us very closely in the First Gulf War, the Second Gulf War. They watched our capabilities. And in many many ways, they have mimicked those, and they have adopted many of the doctrines and organizations.”
Some of the huge technological strides Beijing has made recently come as the result of rules that require foreign companies to share their technological expertise in exchange for access to China’s vast market. Using those technologies, combined with a willingness to spend, has allowed Chinese defense companies to grow at an astounding rate.
A Defense Intelligence Agency report released in January said that this state of affairs isn’t likely to change any time soon: “China has the political will and fiscal strength to sustain a steady increase in defense spending during the next decade, which will help support PLA modernization, develop an integrated military-civilian defense industry, and explore new technologies with defense applications,” the report concludes.
Given the poor transparency rules governing Chinese companies and China’s poor record of disclosing defense spending these companies could well be much larger than estimated. “
EDITOR’S NOTE: We have often discussed the inefficient one year budget cycle of the US Government and recommend changes. The One Year Budget Cycle Must Go. Robert F. Hale was comptroller and chief financial officer at the Defense Department from 2009 until 2014. As you will see in his opinion below, he heartily agrees.
Robert Hale
“BREAKING DEFENSE”
“WHY DOD’s YEAR-END SPENDING NEEDS TO CHANGE”
“As the end of the fiscal year approaches at the Department of Defense (DoD), organizations are working hard to spend all the funds which are available for use only during the current fiscal year.
The pithy rationale for these actions: “Use it or lose it.”
We need to find practical ways to apply the brakes to year-end spending so that DoD funds only its highest-priority needs.
DoD spending spikes sharply during the final week of the fiscal year. (To be technically correct, by “spending” I am referring to entering into contracts or otherwise obligating funds.) In a 2010 report researchers from Harvard and Stanford Universities showed that, based on data for the years 2004 to 2009, final-week spending at DoD was more than four times higher than the average weekly spending during the rest of the year. Similar trends occurred at other federal agencies.
The spike doesn’t necessarily mean that year-end funds are wasted. Many year-end funds buy construction-related goods and services, office equipment, and IT equipment and services. These items are needed, but they do not directly support the most critical DoD mission needs, such as training and military readiness. Moreover, research on federal IT spending suggests that final-week purchases are of lower quality than those made during the rest of the year, and I suspect the same finding applies to other categories of spending. The surge in spending may also lead overworked contracting officers to push out lower-quality contracts.
Making operating funds available only for one year works against good resource allocation in another way. Resource managers must estimate forthcoming bills for services in the final month of the fiscal year (for example, final bills for electricity and water) and obligate the funds before year’s end. They have to estimate on the high side because, if their estimate is low, they risk violating the federal anti-deficiency laws. High estimates for routine services leave fewer funds available for mission-critical activities such as training and readiness.
Year-end spending worries federal employees, and it should worry taxpayers too. For several years the Obama Administration conducted a SAVE campaign (Securing Americans’ Value and Efficiency), which asked federal employees to suggest ways to make government more efficient. In my role as DoD comptroller, I reviewed suggestions related to DoD. I was struck by how many employees urged that year-end spending be reduced. A 2007 survey of DoD financial management and contracting professionals showed the same result. Almost all respondents expressed concerns about year-end spending.
The law already has some provisions designed to avoid year-end spending spikes. For example, only 20 percent of major operating budgets are supposed to be spent during the final two months of the fiscal year. But this provision still leaves room for final-week spikes.
Congress could help by passing DoD appropriations on time – that is, by October 1. Late appropriations push even more spending toward the end of the year and may exacerbate year-end spending. Unfortunately, Congress has not provided DoD with an on-time appropriation during any of the Obama years, and it will apparently not do so again this year.
But Congress can help by permitting DoD to carry over a small percentage of its operating budgets (perhaps 5 percent) into the next fiscal year. This flexibility would not increase the total funds available to DoD. However, for funds eligible for carry over, managers could decide whether to buy that office furniture for the headquarters at the end of the year or wait and let other needs compete for the funds next year. There is some evidence that carry-over authority helps. Our Harvard and Stanford researchers found that, at one federal agency that had such authority (the Department of Justice), final-week spending spikes were much smaller.
While serving as DoD’s comptroller, I tried to persuade Congress to permit the Department to carry over small amounts of its operating funding into the next fiscal year. I made a few converts, but not enough to make it happen.
The next administration should try again to secure carry-over authority.”
ROSE COVERED GLASSES 