Bad News For Bush

Business as usual in Iraq. Surge or not.

Iraq has failed to meet all but three of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks for political and military progress, according to a draft of a Government Accountability Office report.

"While the Baghdad security plan was intended to reduce sectarian violence, U.S. agencies differ on whether such violence has been reduced," it states. While there have been fewer attacks against U.S. forces, it notes, the number of attacks against Iraqi civilians remains unchanged. It also finds that "the capabilities of Iraqi security forces have not improved." "Overall," the report concludes, "key legislation has not been passed, violence remains high, and it is unclear whether the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion in reconstruction funds," as promised.

Iraq needs $100-150 bln for reconstruction: Finance minister

AMMAN (Reuters) - Iraq needs at least $100 billion to rebuild its shattered infrastructure after four years of violence and lawlessness following the U.S.-led invasion of 2003, Finance Minister Bayan Jabor said on Monday.

"The country is devastated and we are in need of at least $100 billion to $150 billion to restore infrastructure -- from sewerage to water to electricity to bridges and basic needs of the country," he told Reuters in Amman.

He said about $4 billion had been spent on infrastructure projects so far this year, more than in all of 2006, when internal violence and the limited capacity of the Iraqi private sector meant only about 40 percent of $6 billion allocated in the budget was used.

"What happened last year was ... a failure in the government's ability to execute," Jabor said.

Health and humanitarian crisis in Iraq

The billions of dollars planned for reconstruction are going unspent as the situation on the ground has spelled suspension for reconstruction efforts. While the coalition forces had not predicted the downward spiral that ensued - predicting a peaceful transition from one regime to another - investments have been mainly made in reconstruction efforts and in comparison, next to nothing, has been set aside for humanitarian assistance.

Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction

July 30, 2007 Quarterly and Semiannual Report to Congress (Highlights, All Sections and Appendices)

Asset Transfer
SIGIR produced another audit on the asset-transfer process,
looking at how completed projects are transferred to
Iraqi control. During the course of the audit, SIGIR found
that the Government of Iraq (GOI) has failed to accept a
single U.S.-constructed project since July 2006. Although
local Iraqi officials have accepted projects, the national
government has not. Moreover, SIGIR learned that the U.S.
government is unilaterally transferring projects to Iraq. The
failure of the asset-transfer program raises concerns about
the continuing operation and maintenance of U.S.-constructed
projects.

First Focused Financial Review
This quarter, SIGIR completed the first in a series of
focused financial reviews of large contracts funded by
the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund (IRRF). These
reviews will meet the “forensic audit” requirement
that the Congress imposed upon SIGIR last December
through the Iraq Reconstruction Accountability Act of
2006.

This initial review examined the work performed
by Bechtel under its Phase II IRRF contract. SIGIR’s
findings from the Bechtel audit are emblematic of
the many challenges faced by contractors in the Iraq
reconstruction program, including insufficient oversight,
descoping, project cancellations, cost overruns,
and significant delays in completing projects. SIGIR has
announced the next round of focused financial reviews,
which will audit the largest contracts in the Iraq reconstruction
program over the next year.

Anti corruption
The Embassy made progress on several fronts to address the endemic corruption in Iraq, which SIGIR views as a “second insurgency.” This quarter saw the inception of the Iraqi-created Joint Anti-Corruption Council (JACC), comprising the three main anticorruption organizations in Iraq, as well as other governmental representatives. A SIGIR audit this quarter identified continuing challenges to the implementation of a coherent anticorruption effort, including the absence of a program manager with the authority to coordinate the overall anticorruption effort and the lack of a comprehensive plan that ties anti corruption programs to the U.S. Embassy’s Iraq strategy.

Officer overseeing Iraq reconstruction projects urges patience

Brig. Gen. Michael J. Walsh, commander of the Corps of Engineers' Gulf Region Division in Baghdad since Oct. 14, 2006, is responsible for overseeing the bulk of U.S.-funded reconstruction projects in Iraq. Earlier this summer, Government Executive senior correspondent Katherine McIntire Peters interviewed Walsh when he was in Washington during a brief leave from Iraq. The following is an edited transcript:

Q: You've been in Iraq more than eight months now. How have things gone with reconstruction during that time?

A: The security issue had an impact on about 12 percent of our projects when I got there, and now it's up to about 19 percent. Certainly part of the requirements in building, whether in the United States or Iraq, is to make sure you get the skilled labor, the equipment and the materials you need. In Iraq, you also need to make sure the security piece is taken care of, and then make sure the politics are OK with the local tribes and the provincial leadership. If any one of those four or five things is not in alignment, then you have to slow down or stop a project.

About 60 percent of our contracts are now with Iraqi firms. If an Iraqi principal or an Iraqi senior worker receives a cell phone call threatening him or his wife, he may not come to work. That's what we call an impact to the construction schedule. There also have been some attacks on particular project sites. Some small percentage have been damaged beyond repair. So far, we've completed 3,200 projects. I would say probably less than 1 percent of those have been destroyed. It's a very small percentage.

Troops Confront Waste In Iraq Reconstruction

Maj. Craig Whiteside's anger grew as he walked through the sprawling school where U.S. military commanders had invested money and hope. Portions of the workshop's ceiling were cracked or curved. The cafeteria floor had a gaping hole and concrete chunks. The auditorium was unfinished, with cracked floors and poorly painted walls peppered with holes.

Whiteside blamed the school director for not monitoring the renovation. The director retorted that the military should have had better oversight. The contract shows the Iraqi contractor was paid $679,000.

Americans who report Iraq corruption pay a price

Corruption has long plagued Iraq's reconstruction. Congress approved more than $30 billion to rebuild Iraq, and at least $8.8 billion of it has disappeared, according to a government reconstruction audit.

Yet there are no noble outcomes for those who have blown the whistle, according to a review of such cases by The Associated Press.

William Weaver, a professor of political science at the University of Texas-El Paso and a senior adviser to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, said, "If you do it, you will be destroyed."

Investigating an Outsourced War

The United States government detained Donald Vance just outside Baghdad for 97 days. They hooded him, interrogated him ruthlessly, and blasted his cell with heavy metal music. He was accused of selling weapons to terrorists. His real crime appears to be telling the FBI about corrupt contracting practices in Iraq. Vance is among a select group of state enemies: whistleblowers.

We know this because of an Associated Press story that uncovered Vance’s ordeal. Vance, suspicious that the contractor he worked for was supplying weapons to insurgents, started supplying information to the FBI back in the States. But he was soon detained by Army Special Forces and brought to Camp Cropper for his 97-day stay.

The story also reported the fate of other whistleblowers who have tried to halt the massive boondoggles still ongoing in Iraq: they have been “vilified, fired, and demoted.”

Bunnatine Greenhouse, a high-ranking civilian in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who testified about the corrupt practices of a Halliburton subsidiary now “sits in a tiny cubicle in a different department with very little to do and no decision-making authority, at the end of an otherwise exemplary 20-year career.” Julie McBride testified about the same Halliburton company’s cost exaggerations and skimming. What happened? “Halliburton placed me under guard and kept me in seclusion. My property was searched, and I was specifically told that I was not allowed to speak to any member of the U.S. military. I remained under guard until I was flown out of the country.”

Pentagon auditors investigating alleged Iraq contract fraud
Mike Rosen-Molina at 7:13 PM ET

[JURIST] The US Department of Defense will send an investigative team headed by Pentagon Inspector General Claude M. Kicklighter to Iraq to probe allegations of fraud and corruption related to military contracts, a DOD spokesman said Tuesday. The team will concentrate on incongruities concerning weapons and supplies bought by the US and intended for the use of Iraqi forces. As of last week, 73 criminal investigations were underway into contracts valued at more than $5 billion, Army spokesman Col. Dan Baggio said Monday; 20 military and civilian figures, including an officer who worked closely with Gen. David Petraeus , have already been indicted. The New York Times reported Tuesday that multiple federal agencies, including the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, are conducting their own investigations into the matter.

The Rip-off in Iraq: You Will Not Believe How Low the War Profiteers Have Gone

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

Humanitarian disillusions

On August 28th, Al-Jazeera English broadcast a report that the Salvadorian contingent of the MNF-I will be renewed in Iraq, highlighting their “reconstruction and humanitarian assignment”. It’s not the first misuse of the humanitarian concept. Everyone is aware of the existence of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps fewer people know that some Private Security Companies (PSCs), that are often compared to mercenary companies, justify their presence through “humanitarian” reasons.

For example, the British Aegis, well known in Iraq for the video broadcast by its personnel showing them firing at civilian vehicles with Elvis Presley as accompanying background music. As one of the largest PSC worldwide they have created the “Aegis Foundation”, which has been active across Iraq since 2004 and “has completed a wide range of projects assisting communities in urgent need, from providing clean drinking water for schools and inoculations against water-borne diseases to supplying hospitals and medical clinics with generators and essential equipment.” The International Peace Operation Association (IPOA), which, at the exact opposite of what its name suggest is a trade association of some of the most prominent PSC and has rules of engagement in its Code of Conduct, doesn’t hesitate to talk about the “benefits of military in humanitarian role” in its newsletter.

SEE:

Military Industrial Complex

The Cost of War

U.S. Supplies Iraqi Insurgents With Weapons

Surge Blackout

What He Didn't Say

Iraq; The War For Oil

Look In Your Own Backyard

Iraq Inspector General

Another Privatization Failure

Conservative Nanny State

Another Privatization Myth Busted

Halliburton

Privatization of War

Privatization


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Why Do the Washington Post and George Will Love the F-35?

Melvin Goodman

June 1, 2026

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F-35 in flight. Photo: Master Sgt. Donald R. Allen, US Air Force.

“Whenever a fight occurs, airpower will be presupposed for projecting unmatched combat power, from the long-range strike capability of strategic bombing, to support for ground combat.  If the necessity of a substantial support infrastructure is an argument against the F-35, what of an aircraft carrier’s large enveloping group of support vessels?”

– George F. Will, “Why the F-35 is a vital U.S. asset in this menacing era.”Washington Post, May 28, 2026.

Thirteen years ago, I made the case against the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism.  My argument was based on overall cost (“the most expensive program in our military inventory”), the large number of aircraft proposed for the U.S. Navy (“absence of any other navy with a global presence or a power projection capability”), and the obsolescence of manned aircraft (“the next generation of pilotless armed drones as well as hypersonic cruise missiles have more uses than several thousand sophisticated fighter aircraft”).

If I choose to update National Insecurity, I would emphasize that exorbitant spending on defense limits the funding needed for a prosperous economy and a healthy society.  I would also add that Russia and China now field complex, multilayered air-defense systems that stitch together a variety of advanced sensors and surface-to-air missiles.

George Will bases his defense of the F-35’s substantial support structure on the aircraft carrier’s “large enveloping group of support vessels.”  What Will doesn’t acknowledge is the fact that the aircraft carrier like the battleship has become obsolete.  Second to the worst-case costs of the F-35 nightmare is the worst-case cost for the next generation of aircraft carriers.  The USS Gerald R. Ford, the Navy’s most expensive warship, ran billions of dollars in cost overruns under a contract that obligated the U.S. Navy to pay 90 percent of the cost of overruns.  In view of the limited strategic utility of aircraft carriers and the Chinese success in developing anti-ship missiles, the debate should be about the desirability of maintaining these floating arsenals and not whether it justifies the arguments for the F-35.

But Will and the mainstream media in general are taken in by the advertising campaigns of the military-industrial community, particularly Lockheed Martin, the manufacturer of the F-35 and the greatest beneficiary of the Pentagon’s largesse.  Moreover, Congress didn’t want to let go of the F-35 because Lockheed Martin relied on 47 states for spare parts and construction.  Members of Congress look at these exorbitant programs as job programs for their constituents and not as defense necessities.  No federal agency does a better job of public relations for its programs than the Pentagon.

The mainstream media also ignores the culprits who are responsible for these decisions regarding defense spending and legacy weapons systems.  Last  week, for example, the New York Times credited Robert Gates, our 22nd secretary of defense, with “railing against weapons that did too much and cost too much throughout his time in two presidential administrations.”  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Again, 13 years ago I wrote that Gates “claimed to want a debate on defense spending…but consistently dodged the issue, especially when appearing before Congress.”  There were no savings during Gates’s tenure, and the stock values of all major defense companies soared during his stewardship.

The military is much too big and the defense budget is now out-of-sight.  Too much of the federal budget is allocated to defense and not to domestic requirements.  International agreements to limit military requirements such as a series of arms control and disarmament measures and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty have been rejected by Presidents George W. Bush and Trump.  And now we are in a war with Iran that the Joint Comprehensive Agreement of 2015 would have prevented, if it had not been thrown away by Donald Trump in his first term.

The decades of war with Iraq and Afghanistan made no sense and we have nothing to show for it in terms of U.S. national security.  We spent more for reconstruction in Iraq, for example, than we did on the Marshall Plan for Europe after World War II.  Finally, what has air superiority done for the United States, Russia, and Israel—the world’s most militarist nations—in Iran, Ukraine, and Gaza, respectively?

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.

Business As Usual

US Senator Elizabeth Dole likes to say in defense of the US invasion of Iraq that it is bringing the poor oppressed people there "Free Market Democracy". Truly American enteprize and business have taken over Iraq;

Judge Radi Hamza Radi, head of the Iraqi Commission on Public Integrity set up in 2004, says corruption has “exploded" since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003.

US auditor lists failures in rebuilding of Iraq

The top auditor of the US reconstruction effort in Iraq yesterday detailed a series of failures, including a $218.5 million emergency radio network that doesn't work, a hospital that is turning out to be twice as expensive as planned, an oil pipeline that is spewing lakes of crude oil onto the ground, and a prison that was meant to hold 4,400 inmates but can house only about 800.

Stuart Bowen Jr. , the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, cited multiple causes for the failures at a Senate hearing yesterday, among them the growth of the Iraqi insurgency, poor planning by the US government, and corruption in the Iraqi government.

But he also took aim at the ``cost-plus" contracts given to American construction firms -- including Bechtel, part of the consortium that oversaw Boston's Big Dig -- which guaranteed profits on top of the cost of the project, even with huge overruns.

Thats Iraq now ask yourselves what is happening in Afghanistan? Same thing.

"Everybody complains about corruption in government administration, especially with the judiciary," Hazami told The Associated Press.

Mission Impossible?

NATO faces a culmination of challenges aside from the Taliban military threat. The poppy culture of the south runs the local economy and serves the interests of the Taliban. It is run by tribes that live on both sides of the border with Pakistan, forging stronger ties amongst themselves and pushing any allegiance with Kabul further away. The area is dominated by a Pakistani sphere of influence; politically, economically and socially. Many businesses trade the Pakistani rupee as a means of legitimate currency and cross border trading and businesses are only second to opium production as the most profitable commercial activity in the area. This is a tough challenge for international troops to overcome as they try to prop up a central government’s control where it is already widely mistrusted and unwanted.

NEWS ANALYSIS: Rogue States Within States Pose Growing Threat

Although the United States largely destroyed al Qaeda's haven in Afghanistan, the terrorist network remains the world's most feared -- and probably the hardest to contain -- transnational group.

"The only thing that we found works is if we can convert (groups like al Qaeda) ... isolate them in a state, so that it looks more or less like a state threat," said Chet Richards, a former U.S. Air Force Reserve air attache to Saudi Arabia, who has written extensively about nontraditional enemies the United States is likely to face in the 21st century.

"We did it in Afghanistan. But once ... you've taken down their main state basis, they become basically organized crime."

Although it lost control of Afghanistan in 2001, the Taliban has returned -- this time, as a nonstate actor, which in recent months appears to have gone from strength to strength, launching incursions into Afghanistan out of the tribal provinces of western Pakistan, where the Pakistani government has been unable -- or, some experts say, unwilling -- to rein it in.

Also See:

Iraq

Afghanistan


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Americans Are Paying a Massive Price To Maintain the Empire

by Matthew Hoh Posted onJanuary 25, 2024

Two press reports stood out to me this morning: the release of the names of two US Navy SEALs who drowned two weeks ago in the Arabian Sea and the Air Force’s production authorization for the B21 Raider bomber. Both stories symbolize an imperial inertia that defines American national security policies, an inertia that is damaging our democracy and jeopardizing futures.

The SEALs died taking part in a blockade mission against Yemen, a mission that dates back nearly a decade and is part of a two-decade-long history of US military action against Yemen (the US first launched a drone strike in Yemen in 2002). US policy towards Yemen is part of the larger, failed and counterproductive Global War on Terror, which itself is part of a larger, failed and counterproductive US Middle East policy. US Middle East policy, in its current form, goes back to the 1970s and is part of a larger, failed and counterproductive US militarized foreign policy. Can anyone go to the families of those two SEALs killed carrying out those policies and explain what their deaths were for without resorting to grotesque and false tropes of freedom and security, the same aspirational and patriotic fairy tales that have been used to justify 250-plus military operations by the US since 1991?

The other story relates to the authorization of production of the B21 Raider, which is set to replace the B1 and B2 bombers but not the 70-year-old B52s. That the youngest B52 was produced in 1962 and won’t be replaced, but the bombers built in modern times must be replaced, tells you a great deal about the strategy of the American weapons industry. This fleecing of the American taxpayers by the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) is nothing new. Both political parties have hollowed out the American economy to the benefit of weapons makers. If any citizen has the gall to ask their members of Congress why our living standards are so far below those of the world’s other wealthy nations, the answers come back as some variation of “we can’t afford those things.”

What’s new about the B21 is that the cost for years was classified, even to members of Congress. Budget figures, as well as contract details, production schedules and test results, are still being kept hidden. Reports say Northrup Grumman will produce 100 of the planes, and, with an estimated total program cost of more than $200 billion, keeping quiet about the price tag of $2 billion airplanes is a politically savvy move if not a democratic one.

Alongside the story of the B21 was a reference to the nation’s new intercontinental ballistic missile, the LGM-35 Sentinel, exploding in cost and years behind schedule. Both the Raider and the Sentinel are part of the $2 trillion modernization of American nuclear weapons begun during the Obama Administration. Cynically it is understandable why both the Pentagon and the weapons makers want to keep the B21 program hidden. MIC officials often speak of the lessons learned from the gross cost overruns, lengthy delays and failed testing of weapons systems like the F35, the Littoral Combat Ship and the Future Combat System, among many, many others, and those lessons seem to be: don’t let anyone know what’s going on. The roster of weapons that don’t work and have cost us trillions is seemingly infinite and, in a sanely functioning and non-corrupt democracy, Pentagon budgets would be decreasing, generals would be fired and defense industry share prices would be labeled as SELL. It would be far easier to write about the weapons the US taxpayers have funded that have performed as advertised and stayed within budget, but that would probably only amount to a tweet or two.

The only thing more likely than more American families continuing to lose loved ones to failed and counterproductive overseas wars will be a lack of any effective congressional resistance to US Middle East policy, most urgently Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. Likewise, the only thing more likely than the B21 being another poorly performing MIC cash cow will be the lack of meaningful political opposition to the overall MIC gravy train. The inertia of both a militarized foreign policy that, through its actions, creates a circular reality that justifies continued military action and a military-industrial complex that now says the American people don’t have the right to know how much our weapons cost demonstrate a dangerous reality of American democracy and a terrible path ahead.

Reprinted with permission from Matt’s Thoughts on War and Peace.

Matthew Hoh is the Associate Director of the Eisenhower Media Network. Matt is a former Marine Corps captain, Afghanistan State Department officer, a disabled Iraq War veteran and is a Senior Fellow Emeritus with the Center for International Policy. He writes at Substack.

The Incompetence of Masters of War

Western defense giants tout cutting-edge tech, but their “state-of-the-art” systems often fall short in asymmetrical warfare. From faulty missile defense systems to overpriced carriers, the only thing that consistently works is the profit machine.

By Samuel Geddes

August 12, 2024

Source: Jacobin


USS Dwight D. Eisenhower



The ineffectiveness of “cutting-edge” military technology shown in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the spillover conflicts undermines the notion that the military-industrial complex aims to win wars. Instead, it reveals its true objective: profiting from ongoing conflicts.

Since its crushing victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, one of Israel’s primary functions as a US-European client state has been that of a weapons laboratory. Throughout eight decades of repressing, invading, and annexing the territory of regional countries, it has served as a proving ground for arms manufacturers.

This continuous opportunity for such demonstration has enabled Israel, starting in the 1980s, to develop its own highly globalized military-industrial complex. From tanks to drones, “Israel” became a byword for the technical superiority and unbeatable effectiveness of western hard power over those on its receiving end.

Since the turn of the millennium, however, and especially since the Hamas-led Palestinian offensive against Israel on October 7, the region has become a weapons lab of a very different kind. It now showcases the armaments of its enemies and their ability, for a fraction of the cost and technical complexity, to render its space-age technology uneconomical and, by extension, obsolete.

The spread of cheap, cost-effective arms among asymmetric opponents of the West has significantly blunted the power of conventional weapons systems. The rational thing to do is accept this and redirect these hundreds of billions of wasted dollars to social programs and infrastructure. Almost anything would be more defensible than the status quo.

Costly Defense, Cheap Defeat

By no means is this the first time the efficacy of Western armaments has been called into question. A near-identical situation unfolded more than three decades ago during the US-led war on Iraq over its occupation of Kuwait. Official outlets gloried in the technical prowess of the weaponry brought to bear against the Ba’athist armed forces, with the media marveling at the proclaimed effectiveness of the Patriot missile defense system. Its success rate at shooting down Iraqi ballistic missiles was almost immediately challenged. A subsequent US government study into the Patriot system’s performance revised the initial claims of an 80 and 50 percent interception rate in Saudi Arabia and Israel respectively to 70 and 40 percent. The report further notes that, according to the “strongest evidence,” the overall success rate of the Patriot system during Desert Storm dwindled to 9 percent.

In the intervening three decades, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor emeritus Theodore Postol has been one of the most consistent critics of missile defense systems, compellingly arguing they routinely fail to intercept their targets and are regularly known to misfire. A stark example of this occurred on April 13 of this year, when, after bombing the Iranian consulate in Damascus and killing several senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders, Israel faced the largest combined drone and missile barrage in history as Iran and its regional allies responded.

Although Israel claimed to have intercepted “99 percent” of the ordnance, the Iron Dome system relied heavily on the support of US, French, British, Saudi, and Jordanian militaries to prevent Iranian munitions reaching their targets. Despite this, and despite Tehran’s warnings that a strike was imminent, some missiles evaded the combined Israeli air defenses and struck critical military targets such as the Nevatim air base in the Negev desert. The total cumulative cost of this seemingly impressive feat of missile defense (assuming we take Israel at its word) has been estimated at more than $1 billion for all of the interceptor munitions fired, whereas the cost of the Iranian operation was at most $80 to $100 million — one-tenth of the price.

In a related theater of the conflict, the Yemeni political and military movement Ansar Allah began launching drones and missiles at commercial ships in the Bab al-Mandeb channel, in solidarity with Gaza. Instead of addressing the Houthis’ stated objectives, the West responded with armed force. Anticipating a US-led blitzkrieg against Yemen, one of the poorest Arab countries, online hawks warned Yemenis that they were “about to find out” why Americans “don’t have universal healthcare.” After eight months of the fiercest naval combat experienced since World War II, the unintended truth of that hollow bluster is more apparent than its authors could ever have intended.

Billion-Dollar Blunders

In June, the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, a supreme example of American hard power, was withdrawn from the Red Sea waters bordering Yemen. Conflicting reports emerged as to whether Ansar Allah had in fact successfully struck and damaged the vessel or whether it had simply exhausted its interceptors against the relentless barrage of disposable Shahed drones launched by the Yemeni movement. Regardless of the exact reason, the situation demonstrated that fielding the most powerful navy in history — and potentially losing its most powerful vessel — was prohibitively more expensive, in pure monetary terms, than the cost to its opponents of attacking it.

A relatively “low-tech” drone with a sufficient payload needs only to evade a carrier’s defenses and hit its target once, whereas these dollar defense systems must be successful every time. Comparing the cost of an interceptor missile (ranging from a minimum of $2 million apiece to as much as $28 million) to that of a Shahed drone ($20,000 to $50,000), this is a losing proposition in the long run. On top of this, the presence of this overwhelming firepower has done nothing to prevent Ansar Allah from strangling maritime traffic through the Red Sea and imposing yet another supply chain crisis on the global economy.

It may even be that the current spike in tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, possibly presaging a full-scale war, was brought on by exactly the kind of technical malfunction that Professor Postol has warned of. Israel’s July 30 assassination of the lead Hezbollah commander Fu’ad Shukr, which is expected to prompt imminent retaliation from Hezbollah, was claimed by Tel Aviv to have been in response for a missile strike on July 27 that killed twelve children in Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights.

This claim overlooks the fact that the area is Israeli-occupied Syrian territory and its residents have refused Israeli citizenship along with the “sympathy” of the Benjamin Netanyahu regime. Furthermore, the narrative surrounding this “attack” quickly buried suspicions that the missile involved was an Iron Dome interceptor that veered wildly off course, striking the very territory it was supposed to be shielding. If this hypothesis proves true, then the potentially calamitous war that may result will have been triggered by an errant missile fired by a prohibitively expensive and dangerously unreliable missile defense system.

Squandering Public Supports

If all this technical wizardry isn’t meant to win wars, one wonders about its purpose. It’s reminiscent of Boeing’s plea deal with the US government to avoid legal consequences for substandard manufacturing, which at its worst, killed more than three hundred passengers in two separate crashes. The priority is to sell planes, not to make sure they stay in the air.

One of the few sectors seemingly impervious to the stock market crash at the start of this August has been the defense industry. Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics have all been in a sustained uptrend over the past year, spiking very conspicuously around October 7. Clearly the large-scale and repeated demonstration of their products’ ineffectiveness is no obstacle to long-term profitability.

The most notorious example of wastefulness in military spending is undoubtedly the Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet. From the program’s inception in 2006 to the present, the F-35 was projected to cost over $1.7 trillion over its lifetime. Persistent cost overruns and development woes have angered even the Pentagon itself, which opened the program up to competitive bidding in 2012. More than a decade later, the rapid spread of drone technology has made it possible for unmanned craft, sometimes referred to as “loitering munitions,” to perform many of the tasks traditionally handled by fighter jets — with little overengineering and none of the risk to an actual pilot. That the total budget of this program could eradicate all American student loan debt or cover half the cost of a national health system only adds to the obscenity of it all.

It is well-known that the military-industrial economy is dependent on public subsidy. The technology in mobile phones, computers, and the internet — essential to modern life —was not “invented” by figures like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, but was instead developed by public investment. The initial funding came from decades of American taxpayer dollars.

Capitalism is not designed to be ethically consistent, but if it were, companies whose business model depends on state supports would be paying out dividends to every single American as a return on their initial investment.

In 2024, the US military budget reached an incredible $841 billion. If even a fraction of these funds were to be spent on restoring the education system to a level befitting the richest country on earth, canceling university tuition debt, or creating a national health system, it would achieve far greater benefits. While $1 trillion might not result in effective missile shields, it is very likely capable of creating a functioning health or educational system.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY 

$778 Billion and Counting: Who's Paying for All This Pentagon Waste? (Hint: It's You)

It can't be emphasized enough just how many taxpayer dollars are now being showered on the Pentagon.


Antiwar protesters gathered in front of City Hall in downtown Philadelphia for an emergency rally demanding America not further entrench itself in the Syrian conflict and that American forces be pulled out of all middle east countries on April 14, 2018. (Photo: Cory Clark/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

WILLIAM HARTUNG

February 3, 2022

2021 was another banner year for the military-industrial complex, as Congress signed off on a near-record $778 billion in spending for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy. That was $25 billion more than the Pentagon had even asked for.

It can't be emphasized enough just how many taxpayer dollars are now being showered on the Pentagon. That department's astronomical budget adds up, for instance, to more than four times the cost of the most recent version of President Biden's Build Back Better plan, which sparked such horrified opposition from Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) and other alleged fiscal conservatives. Naturally, they didn't blink when it came to lavishing ever more taxpayer dollars on the military-industrial complex.

Without a significant change of course, 2022 will once again be a banner year for Lockheed Martin and other top weapons makers at the expense of investing in programs necessary to combat urgent challenges from pandemics to climate change to global inequality.

Opposing Build Back Better while throwing so much more money at the Pentagon marks the ultimate in budgetary and national-security hypocrisy. The Congressional Budget Office has determined that, if current trends continue, the Pentagon could receive a monumental $7.3 trillion-plus over the next decade, more than was spent during the peak decade of the Afghan and Iraq wars, when there were up to 190,000 American troops in those two countries alone. Sadly, but all too predictably, President Biden's decision to withdraw U.S. troops and contractors from Afghanistan hasn't generated even the slightest peace dividend. Instead, any savings from that war are already being plowed into programs to counter China, official Washington's budget-justifying threat of choice (even if outshone for the moment by the possibility of a Russian invasion of Ukraine). And all of this despite the fact that the United States already spends three times as much as China on its military.

The Pentagon budget is not only gargantuan, but replete with waste—from vast overcharges for spare parts to weapons that don't work at unaffordable prices to forever wars with immense human and economic consequences. Simply put, the current level of Pentagon spending is both unnecessary and irrational.

Price Gouging on Spare Parts

Overcharging the Pentagon for spare parts has a long and inglorious history, reaching its previous peak of public visibility during the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Then, blanket media coverage of $640 toilet seats and $7,600 coffee makers sparked public outrage and a series of hearings on Capitol hill, strengthening the backbone of members of Congress. In those years, they did indeed curb at least the worst excesses of the Reagan military buildup.

Such pricing horror stories didn't emerge from thin air. They came from the work of people like legendary Pentagon whistleblower Ernest Fitzgerald. He initially made his mark by exposing the Air Force's efforts to hide billions in cost overruns on Lockheed's massive C-5A transport plane. At the time, he was described by former Air Force Secretary Verne Orr as "the most hated man in the Air Force." Fitzgerald and other Pentagon insiders became sources for Dina Rasor, a young journalist who began drawing the attention of the media and congressional representatives to spare-parts overcharges and other military horrors. In the end, she formed an organization, the Project on Military Procurement, to investigate and expose waste, fraud, and abuse. It would later evolve into the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), the most effective current watchdog when it comes to Pentagon spending.

A recent POGO analysis, for instance, documented the malfeasance of TransDigm, a military parts supplier that the Department of Defense's Inspector General caught overcharging the Pentagon by as much as 3,800%—yes, you read that figure right!—on routine items. The company was able to do so only because, bizarrely enough, Pentagon buying rules prevent contract officers from getting accurate information on what any given item should cost or might cost the supplying company to produce it.

In other words, thanks to Pentagon regulations, those oversight officials are quite literally flying blind when it comes to cost control. The companies supplying the military take full advantage of that. The Pentagon Inspector General's office has, in fact, uncovered more than 100 overcharges by TransDigm alone, to the tune of $20.8 million. A comprehensive audit of all spare-parts suppliers would undoubtedly find billions of wasted dollars. And this, of course, spills over into ever more staggering costs for finished weapons systems. As Ernest Fitzgerald once said, a military aircraft is just a collection of "overpriced spare parts flying in formation."

Weapons This Country Doesn't Need at Prices We Can't Afford

The next level of Pentagon waste involves weapons we don't need at prices we can't afford, systems that, for staggering sums, fail to deliver on promises to enhance our safety and security. The poster child for such costly, dysfunctional systems is the F-35 combat aircraft, a plane tasked with multiple missions, none of which it does well. The Pentagon is slated to buy more than 2,400 F-35s for the Air Force, Marines, and Navy. The estimated lifetime cost for procuring and operating those planes, a mere $1.7 trillion, would make it the Pentagon's most expensive weapons project ever.

Once upon a time (as in some fairy tale), the idea behind the creation of the F-35 was to build a plane that, in several variations, would be able to carry out many different tasks relatively cheaply, with potential savings generated by economies of scale. Theoretically, that meant the bulk of the parts for the thousands of planes to be built would be the same for all of them. This approach has proven a dismal failure so far, so much so that the researchers at POGO are convinced the F-35 may never be fully ready for combat.

Its failures are too numerous to recount here, but a few examples should suffice to suggest why the program minimally needs to be scaled back in a major way, if not canceled completely. For a start, though meant to provide air support for troops on the ground, it's proved anything but well-designed to do so. In fact, that job is already handled far better and more cheaply by the existing A-10 "Warthog" attack aircraft. A 2021 Pentagon assessment of the F-35—and keep in mind that this is the Department of Defense, not some outside expert—found 800 unresolved defects in the plane. Typical of its never-ending problems: a wildly expensive and not particularly functional high-tech helmet which, at the cost of $400,000 each, is meant to give its pilot special awareness of what's happening around and below the plane as well as to the horizon. And don't forget that the F-35 will be staggeringly expensive to maintain and already costs an impressive $38,000 an hour to fly.

In December 2020, House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith finally claimed he was "tired of pouring money down the F-35 rathole." Even former Air Force Chief of Staff General Charles Brown acknowledged that it couldn't meet its original goal—to be a low-cost fighter—and would have to be supplemented with a less costly plane. He compared it to a Ferrari, adding, "You don't drive your Ferrari to work every day, you only drive it on Sundays." It was a stunning admission, given the original claims that the F-35 would be the Air Force's affordable, lightweight fighter and the ultimate workhorse for future air operations.

It's no longer clear what the rationale even is for building more F-35s at a time when the Pentagon has grown obsessed with preparing for a potential war with China. After all, if that country is the concern (an exaggerated one, to be sure), it's hard to imagine a scenario in which fighter planes would go into combat against Chinese aircraft, or be engaged in protecting American troops on the ground—not at a moment when the Pentagon is increasingly focused on long-range missiles, hypersonic weapons, and unpiloted vehicles as its China-focused weapons of choice.

When all else fails, the Pentagon's fallback argument for the F-35 is the number of jobs it will create in states or districts of key members of Congress. As it happens, virtually any other investment of public funds would build back better with more jobs than F-35s would. Treating weapons systems as jobs programs, however, has long helped pump up Pentagon spending way beyond what's needed to provide an adequate defense of the United States and its allies.

And that plane is hardly alone in the ongoing history of Pentagon overspending. There are many other systems that similarly deserve to be thrown on the scrap heap of history, chief among them the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), essentially an F-35 of the sea. Similarly designed for multiple roles, it, too, has fallen far short in every imaginable respect. The Navy is now trying to gin up a new mission for the LCS, with little success.

This comes on top of buying outmoded aircraft carriers for up to $13 billion a pop and planning to spend more than a quarter of a trillion dollars on a new nuclear-armed missile, known as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, or GBSD. Such land-based missiles are, according to former Secretary of Defense William Perry, "among the most dangerous weapons in the world," because a president would have only minutes to decide whether to launch them on being warned of an enemy nuclear attack. In other words, a false alarm (of which there have been numerous examples during the nuclear age) could lead to a planetary nuclear conflagration.

The organization Global Zero has demonstrated convincingly that eliminating land-based missiles altogether, rather than building new ones, would make the United States and the rest of the world safer, with a small force of nuclear-armed submarines and bombers left to dissuade any nation from launching a nuclear war. Eliminating ICBMs would be a salutary and cost-saving first step towards nuclear sanity, as former Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg and other experts have made all too clear.

America's Cover-the-Globe Defense Strategy

And yet, unbelievably enough, I haven't even mentioned the greatest waste of all: this country's "cover the globe" military strategy, including a planet-wide "footprint" of more than 750 military bases, more than 200,000 troops stationed overseas, huge and costly aircraft-carrier task forces eternally floating the seven seas, and a massive nuclear arsenal that could destroy life as we know it (with thousands of warheads to spare).

You only need to look at the human and economic costs of America's post-9/11 wars to grasp the utter folly of such a strategy. According to Brown University's Costs of War Project, the conflicts waged by the United States in this century have cost $8 trillion and counting, with hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, thousands of U.S. troops killed, and hundreds of thousands more suffering from traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. And for what? In Iraq, the U.S. cleared the way for a sectarian regime that then helped create the conditions for ISIS to sweep in and conquer significant parts of the country, only to be repelled (but not thoroughly defeated) at great cost in lives and treasure. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, after a conflict doomed as soon as it morphed into an exercise in nation-building and large-scale counterinsurgency, the Taliban is now in power. It's hard to imagine a more ringing indictment of the policy of endless war.

Despite the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, for which the Biden administration deserves considerable credit, spending on global counterterror operations remains at high levels, thanks to ongoing missions by Special Operations forces, repeated air strikes, ongoing military aid and training, and other kinds of involvement short of full-scale war. Given the opportunity to rethink strategy as part of a "global force posture" review released late last year, the Biden administration opted for a remarkably status quo approach, insisting on maintaining substantial bases in the Middle East, while modestly boosting the U.S. troop presence in East Asia.

As anyone who's followed the news knows, despite the immediate headlines about sending troops and planes to Eastern Europe and weapons to Ukraine in response to Russia's massing of its forces on that country's borders, the dominant narrative for keeping the Pentagon budget at its current size remains China, China, China. It matters little that the greatest challenges posed by Beijing are political and economic, not military. "Threat inflation" with respect to that country continues to be the Pentagon's surest route to acquiring yet more resources and has been endlessly hyped in recent years by, among others, analysts and organizations with close ties to the arms industry and the Department of Defense.

For example, the National Defense Strategy Commission, a congressionally mandated body charged with critiquing the Pentagon's official strategy document, drew more than half its members from individuals on the boards of arms-making corporations, working as consultants for the arms industry, or from think tanks heavily funded by just such contractors. Not surprisingly, the commission called for a 3% to 5% annual increase in the Pentagon budget into the foreseeable future. Follow that blueprint and you're talking $1 trillion annually by the middle of this decade, according to an analysis by Taxpayers for Common Sense. Such an increase, in other words, would prove unsustainable in a country where so much else is needed, but that won't stop Pentagon budget hawks from using it as their North Star.

In March of this year, the Pentagon is expected to release both its new national defense strategy and its budget for 2023. There are a few small glimmers of hope, like reports that the administration may abandon certain dangerous (and unnecessary) nuclear-weapons programs instituted by the Trump administration.

However, the true challenge, crafting a budget that addresses genuine security problems like public health and the climate crisis, would require fresh thinking and persistent public pressure to slash the Pentagon budget, while reducing the size of the military-industrial complex. Without a significant change of course, 2022 will once again be a banner year for Lockheed Martin and other top weapons makers at the expense of investing in programs necessary to combat urgent challenges from pandemics to climate change to global inequality.

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WILLIAM HARTUNG

William D. Hartung 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" (2012) and "How Much Are You Making on the War Daddy?: A Quick and Dirty Guide to War Profiteering in the Bush Administration" (2003). He is the co-editor of "Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War "(2008).

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