https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/dictators_bent_on_building_military_empires_the_cost_of_the_nations_endless_wars
Dictators Bent on Building Military Empires: The Cost of the Nation’s Endless Wars
“Autocrats only understand one word: no, no, no. No you will not take my country, no you will not take my freedom, no you will not take my future… A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease the people’s love of liberty. Brutality will never grind down the will of the free.”—President Biden
Oh, the hypocrisy.
The United States has spent much of the past half-century policing the globe, occupying other countries, and waging endless wars.
What most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military industrial complex that has its sights set on world domination.
War has become a huge money-making venture, and the U.S. government, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.
America’s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine has already cost taxpayers more than $112 billion and shows no signs of abating.
Clearly, it’s time for the U.S. government to stop policing the globe.
The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world.
American troops are stationed in Somalia, Iraq and Syria. In Germany, South Korea and Japan. In Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. In Niger, Chad and Mali. In Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.
Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”
Incredibly, America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.
The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”
This is how a military empire occupies the globe.
After 20 years of propping up Afghanistan to the tune of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, the U.S. military may have finally been forced out, but those troops represent just a fraction of our military presence worldwide.
In an ongoing effort to police the globe, American military servicepeople continue to be deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere.
This is how the military industrial complex, aided and abetted by the likes of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and others, continues to get rich at taxpayer expense.
Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad aren’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.
War spending is bankrupting America.
Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world's population, America boasts almost 50% of the world's total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.
In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.
The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.
Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.
Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.
In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.
Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.
Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.
Unfortunately, even if we were to put an end to all of the government’s military meddling and bring all of the troops home today, it would take decades to pay down the price of these wars and get the government’s creditors off our backs.
As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”
War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors. Indeed, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”
Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.
A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:
$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.
That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.
Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.
Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.
That needs to change.
The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.
The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback.
The U.S. military’s ongoing drone strikes will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people.The war hawks’ militarization of America—bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield—is also blowback.
James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”
We are seeing this play out before our eyes.
The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.
Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.
At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:
The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.
This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.
We failed to heed his warning.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, war is the enemy of freedom.
As long as America’s politicians continue to involve us in wars that bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much closer to eventual collapse, “we the people” will find ourselves in a perpetual state of tyranny.
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/merger-mania-military-industrial-complex/5808693
Merger Mania in the Military-Industrial Complex
Tackling Pentagon Waste Means Battling the Big Weapons Makers and Asking More of Congress
It’s early in the new Congress, but lawmakers are already hotly debating spending and debt levels. As they do so, they risk losing track of an important issue hiding in plain sight: massive Pentagon waste. At least in theory, combating such excess could offer members of both parties common ground as they start the new budget cycle. But there are many obstacles to pursuing such a commonsense agenda.
Pentagon waste is a longstanding issue in desperate need of meaningful action. Last November, the Department of Defense once again failed to pass even a basic audit, as it had several times before. In fact, independent auditors weren’t even able to assess the Pentagon’s full financial picture because they couldn’t gather all the necessary information to complete an evaluation. In some ways, that should have been devastating, the equivalent of a child receiving an incomplete on an end-of-year report card. No less alarming, the Pentagon couldn’t even account for about 61% of its $3.5 trillion in assets. Yet the last Congress still approved $858 billion in defense programs for fiscal year 2023, a full $45 billion more than even the Biden administration requested.
Spending levels aside, poor financial management has a serious negative impact on both service members and taxpayers. Last month, for example, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) revealed that the Pentagon can’t account for at least $220 billion worth of its property, including such basics as ammunition, missiles, torpedoes, and their component parts. For its part, Congress (and so the average taxpayer) doesn’t have the faintest idea how much it’s spent on weapons or their components distributed to contractors for maintenance and upgrades. Worse, the GAO reports that the $220 billion in unaccounted-for equipment and parts is “likely significantly understated.”
Such irresponsible financial management also applies to Pentagon weapons purchases, creating another set of problems. The Department of Defense commits staggering numbers of taxpayer dollars to new weapons programs without doing its due diligence, all too often resulting in dysfunctional systems. The GAO has reported on this issue for 20 years and yet there’s been little discernible change in Pentagon behavior.
There is a better way, though. For example, in its most recent Annual Weapons Systems Assessment Report, the GAO notes that obtaining basic information at critical points in the weapons-buying process produces better cost and delivery outcomes. In defense-speak, this is called “knowledge-based acquisition.” Of course, requiring crucial information about a program before proceeding to its development stage should be a no-brainer. Yet the Pentagon has wasted untold billions of dollars on ill-functioning weaponry like the F-35 combat aircraft by proceeding to the development stage without faintly adequate information.
And the status quo guarantees future disasters like the F-35. According to the GAO, more than half of the major defense-acquisition programs it reviewed in fiscal year 2022 “did not demonstrate critical technologies in a realistic environment before beginning system development.” That’s like buying a house without checking whether the water pressure is adequate or the roof leaks — or, in the case of the F-35, a few thousand houses. An independent assessment of that fighter jet in fiscal year 2021 found more than 800 unresolved deficiencies, six of which are so serious that they may cause death or serious injury to those operating the plane, or critically restrict its capabilities in a combat setting. In the 20 years since the program began, the Pentagon has yet to approve that deeply deficient, wildly expensive plane for full production. Put another way, it has already spent nearly $200 billion on a system that may never actually be fully ready for combat.
Aside from the fact that the F-35’s engine doesn’t work, the main reason the Pentagon hasn’t gone full speed ahead on production is that even its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, can’t assess the aircraft’s performance. Why? Because the company hasn’t finished developing the simulator required to properly test it. Still, the money keeps flowing and, by current estimates, the program’s lifecycle cost will exceed $1.7 trillion, making it one of the most expensive weapon programs in Pentagon history.
Looking Down from the (Capitol) Hilltop
Pentagon waste is, of course, nothing new. Still, the need to trim the fat only grows more urgent as this country faces mounting security challenges ranging from the increasing devastation of climate change to strategic competition with other powers. The war in Ukraine is already straining the Pentagon’s buying system in striking new ways. As the need to get weapons out the door quickly becomes its number one priority, its penchant for wasting taxpayer dollars will undoubtedly only grow worse.
Still, there are reforms that could quickly improve the situation. There’s no need for Congress or the Pentagon to reinvent the wheel, since the steps toward making weapons-buying more accountable have been clear for years — as have the roadblocks along the way.
One of the biggest obstacles to reform is that so many lawmakers have vested interests in a hands-off approach to the Pentagon budget. As a start, striking numbers of them have instant conflicts of interest with respect to the defense industry, since they own stock in major weapons-making firms. Those companies make major campaign contributions to keep the lawmakers in their camp. Open Secrets.org, a group that tracks money in politics, reported, for instance, that, in the 2020 election cycle, the arms sector contributed $50 million to political candidates and their committees.
To mask such obvious conflicts of interest and their wasteful consequences, lawmakers generally prefer to change the subject. When the Pentagon budget is threatened with even modest reductions, they routinely trot out tired arguments about how such enormous sums create jobs, jobs, and more jobs. Forget that the data shows education spending produces more than twice as many jobs, while clean energy and healthcare generate 50% more. In short, taxpayers would be far better off if Congress repurposed significant amounts of Pentagon spending for more productive endeavors.
Beyond long-overdue campaign finance reform and a congressional stock-trading ban, lawmakers have a lot of ground to cover when it comes to making Pentagon spending more accountable. The GAO has clear recommendations for ways to mitigate the risks and challenges of prospective weapons programs before making investment decisions. It has also recommended developing significantly better ways of assessing “military readiness” (the fitness of units to engage in combat). Too often, an alleged lack of readiness is used as another excuse to further pump up the Pentagon budget. The Congressional Research Service has, however, pointed out that Congress doesn’t even have a standard definition of military readiness, so how can legislators begin to evaluate the real-world impact of the hundreds of billions of dollars they routinely authorize for the Department of Defense?
The bottom line is simple enough: Congress needs to cut the Pentagon budget dramatically. It’s not only outrageously oversized, but some parts of it are genuinely dangerous. Take, for instance, the newest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) now being prepared by Northrop Grumman for a prospective $264 billion over its lifetime. Such missiles will only increase the risk of an accidental nuclear war because a president will have just minutes to decide whether to launch them in a crisis (and once they’re launched, you can’t take them back).
Unfortunately, lawmakers have proven remarkably unwilling to address the issue of Pentagon waste. Take the chair of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, for example. The new incumbent Ken Calvert (R-CA) recently offered this boilerplate response on the subject:
“Despite various reports on budget numbers, while I support reforms that will yield cost savings in any government program, I do not support cuts to national security that would negatively impact readiness or slow our ability to deliver capability to the warfighter.”
Never mind that Congress can’t assess military readiness, his statement obscures the fact that he undoubtedly intends to press for even higher budgets, while threatening to make the search for “waste” a modest sideshow.
Such an approach, of course, directly benefits politicians like Calvert. After all, he was the second-highest recipient of defense-industry contributions in Congress between 2021 and 2022 at $415,850. Only current House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-AL) received more. So don’t expect either of them to go after the F-35, despite its cost overruns and dismal performance, or any other major weapons system.
In fact, last December, Rogers said all too bluntly that his priority this year would be “no cuts whatsoever to defense spending.” In January, he turned around and told a Defense News reporter, “We’re going to start meeting right away about what I see as threats and challenges that we’ve got to meet… because we intend to do some cutting. There’s some legacy systems and fat. There’s a lot that can be taken out.” Count on one thing, though, as with Calvert, Rogers’ idea of what can be “taken out” will not include spending on any of the Pentagon’s costliest weapons programs.
Still, these days even retiring some old weapons programs would count as a modest victory in Washington. Rogers and Adam Smith (D-WA), the ranking Democrat on the armed services committee, do appear to agree on the importance of dumping outmoded systems, so maybe they’ll actually trim a little fat.
Thankfully, there are a number of lawmakers across the ideological spectrum who are genuinely interested in broader Pentagon spending cuts. While some progressive Democrats press for a smaller Pentagon budget and refocusing “national security” on people, not corporations, a few on the Republican right argue for military cuts with the debt ceiling in mind. Unfortunately, supporters of such reductions are fighting an uphill battle.
Contractors First, Taxpayers Last
Members of Congress routinely favor major weapons makers over the needs of taxpayers and military personnel. As lawmakers fight for military contracts that will generate revenue in their districts or states, they have become remarkably complicit in the consolidation of the industrial part of the military-industrial complex, which threatens actual national security, in part by reducing corporate competition.
For decades, Congress stood by while weapons companies gobbled each other up through mergers and acquisitions. The result: the five largest contractors — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — have, in recent years, split a staggering $150 billion-plus in Pentagon funding annually, often in “sole-source contracts” that virtually guarantee overcharging and cost overruns.
In 2015, for instance, Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest weapons manufacturer, acquired Sikorsky aircraft for $9 billion. At the time, the Pentagon expressed some concern about the impact of corporate conglomeration, without actually opposing the deal because, as the Justice Department decided, Sikorsky wasn’t a direct competitor. It manufactured helicopters and Lockheed didn’t. The Justice Department later rebuked Frank Kendall, a Pentagon official who expressed concerns about the deal, while pushing back on his calls for a more formal Pentagon role in potentially blocking such mergers.
Three years later, Northrop Grumman acquired Orbital ATK, then the biggest manufacturer of rocket motors in the country. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) imposed guardrails on the deal because Northrop also made missiles and acquiring a company that produced motors for its missiles could give it an unfair advantage over other missile manufacturers. Still, the merger went through.
In 2019, L3 Technologies and the Harris Corporation combined in a “merger of equals” to create L3Harris, the sixth-largest defense contractor. Both companies were the sole suppliers of critical components for the military’s night-vision equipment. As a result, the Justice Department concluded that the merger would monopolize that technology and required Harris to sell its night-vision business. The company is now, however, trying to acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne, the last remaining independent supplier of missile propulsion systems in the United States. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) recently called on the FTC to block the deal, arguing that it would decrease competition in rocket motors.
In 2020, Raytheon and United Technologies combined in the biggest defense merger in decades, valued at about $121 billion. The resulting company, Raytheon Technologies, now an aerospace conglomerate, has established itself as a global supplier of everything from jet engines to missiles. As this country’s second-biggest weapons contractor, only Lockheed Martin outdoes it in annual defense revenues.
It is, of course, long past time for Congress to push back against such merger mania in the arms industry and the wild Pentagon overspending, waste, and poor weaponry that goes with it. Reducing the political clout of the major weapons makers would do more than just save billions of tax dollars. It just might prompt a broader debate about the purpose of a Pentagon budget now rising toward the trillion-dollar mark annually.
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