It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Over the years, U.S. military expenditure has continuously hit record highs while the country's fiscal deficit worsened, behind which lies the strong influence of the country's military-industrial complex.
Throughout the U.S. history, its military-industrial complex, a mighty interest group, has repeatedly manipulated the country's political decision-making and seen wars as a shortcut to profits, prompting the U.S. government to cause one catastrophe after another in the world.
War is big business for the U.S., as Peter Kuznick, a history professor at the American University in the U.S., put it sharply.
To create inelastic demand for arms trade, the U.S. military-industrial complex has been bent on pushing U.S. foreign policy toward wars and conflicts.
“The U.S., driven by political-corporate greed, robbed Afghanistan of stability and tranquility for two decades,” said an article published on the website of Pakistan Observer.
In the Afghan war where loss is reckoned in lives, the only winner is the U.S. military-industrial complex, the article pointed out.
“The decisions to start and sustain wars are thus shaped by people with vested interests in extending the war as long as possible,” the article continued.
The five biggest U.S. defense contractors—Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman—acquired as much as $2.02 trillion from the U.S. government’s funding for the war in Afghanistan, according to the Security Policy Reform Institute, an independent think tank in the U.S.
The fact that U.S. top weapon companies grabbed huge profits from the war in Afghanistan mirrors the age-old special existence of the military-industrial complex in the U.S.
During World War II, a structural connection between the giant war machine of the U.S. and the country’s economic system was forged and a huge interest group composed of the U.S. military, military industrial enterprises, politicians, and scientific research institutions took shape.
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government,” warned former U.S. President Dwight David Eisenhower in his farewell speech delivered in 1961.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower added.
However, in the following decades, the influence of the military-industrial complex hasn’t been curbed, but penetrated deeply into the decision-making process of the U.S.
General Dynamics got off to a good start this year; although the world becomes more and more dangerous for mankind, the company has seen a good sign of stable demands, said Phebe Novakovic, chairman of General Dynamics, in April. Her remarks revealed that the U.S. military-industrial complex is actually composed of a bunch of vultures.
It is no secret that U.S. military industry companies spend large sums of money on lobbying U.S. politicians, donating money to their election campaigns and funding the so-called policy experts to ensure policies are in their favor.
Representatives from military industry companies have also frequently taken advantage of the “revolving door” to hold a position in key decision-making departments.
Statistics suggest that more than 4,000 military-industrial complex lobbies are active in today’s U.S. political arena.
The military-industrial complex can not only make sure that its own interests are not affected by changes of government, but can often prevent government from making decisions that may shrink its slice of the cake, even if these decisions are in line with the public interest.
The U.S. government has unrestrainedly provided resources for arms dealers, sacrificing investment in its public goods and increasing the risks of wars, which has done itself and others no good, commented Erica Fein, the Senior Washington Director of American anti-war coalition Win Without War.
To ensure strong demands for arms trade, the U.S. military-industrial complex has continuously incited the government to create imaginary enemies, never hesitating to arouse people’s fear and stirring up trouble.
The U.S. is searching for enemies around the world under the guise of safeguarding national security and promoting democracy and freedom, of which one of the drivers is the interests of the military-industrial complex, as American observers noted.
If it had not been the Russians, the U.S. would have devised some other rivals to replace them as a justification for its military aggression, George Kennan, who formulated the U.S. containment policy toward the Soviet Union, said in a speech in his later years.
Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has successively launched the Kosovo War, the War in Afghanistan, the Iraq War, and many other wars, in which American arms dealers have made a great fortune.
For a long time, the U.S. military-industrial complex has repeatedly packaged wars as a proper option for U.S. foreign policy in a bid to pursue its own benefit, which has caused endless pain for people in other countries and led to turmoil and unrest in the world.
Such consequences make people around the world couldn’t help but wonder: What the U.S. has done to shoulder the international responsibilities it has kept talking about? How has it safeguarded the human rights it always spouts off about? Where is the so-called democracy that it couldn’t stop boasting about?
(Zhong Sheng is a pen name often used by People’s Daily to express its views on foreign policy and international affairs.)
Crash of a Canadian Forces helicopter, which killed 3 and injured 4 off Nova Scotia, occurred while aircraft was under restrictions because of past mechanical troubles
Under the Trudeau government the Canadian state focused less on external military operational capacity and more on the use of the military for domestic problems.
One was the Trudeau fear of insurrection in Quebec post the FLQ crisis, the other was the idea that the military should also be used for domestic emergencies, like clearling snow from Toronto streets or clean up after storms.
The Trudeau government also looked at the military as an opportunity to offer jobs to Maritimers whose local fishing industry was in decline. Along with the policy of promoting the depopulation of the Maritimes by promoting fishers to take up work elsewhere in Canada, the military offered trades training to the unemployed.
Combined with the Liberals ideology that the military was for peace keeping, and their disdane for NATO (though unlike the NDP they never admitted to wanting to leave NATO, they merely provided the absolute minimum required to maintain membership) military equipment purchased was for domestic use.
After WWII the dismantling of the merchant marine directly impacted on Canada's ability to maintain its ship building ability.
Under the Mulroney government the final destruction of Canada's indigenous ship and aircraft building industry was sealed with the Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA. What the Liberals had wrecked with indifference, the Conservatives now finally killed with its sucking up to the U.S.
Under the Chretien Liberals, a new policy was introduced, one that bespoke the Liberals frugality with taxpayers money, post-Mulroney's spending spree, the government would only buy used military equipment at bargain basement prices, and would continue to maintain old outdated equipment past their expiry date.
There are no such thing as accidents. The failure of the Submarine fleet, the aging helicopter fleets, the dangerous outdated fleet of Tudor aircraft for Canada's Snowbirds, all this is the direct result not only of the Canadian Governments failure to fund the military but the result of the death of Canada's own homegrown ship and aircraft industries. The Liberals had no use for an indigenous Military Industrial complex, satisfied being a branch plant supplier to the US for its war operations.
The Liberals focused their policies on domestic peace keeping, increasing the capabilities of the military and police to monitor the Left, Labour, the Anti-War movement and Quebec nationalists.
Under the Conservatives, both Mulroney and now the Harpocrites, the military industrial complex that did exist in Canada was further reduced to hewers of wood and drawers of water for the benefit of the Americans.
Today the military is being funded to buy new equipment, from the U.S. And that includes secondary manufacturing and maintance, something Canada once was famous for, is now being contracted out.
The failure to subsidizde the Canadian Military Industrial complex was a political choice of the Liberals, they had little use for the Military, except to quell another Quebec crisis. For the Conservatives its a political choice as well, to integrate the Canadian Military Industrial complex into the American one. Meaning that our military will be supplied by the American Military Industrial complex.
War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Or so the song lyrics go anyway.
But in the case of this country, war, it turns out, has been good for plenty of high-class Americans, especially our weapons makers. As TomDispatch regular David Vine and Theresa Arriola report today, the military-industrial-congressional complex (MIC) has proven to be a cash cow of the first order (though I hate to insult cows that way). In this century, the money has simply poured into it and yet, somehow, it never seems to be enough. Only recently, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell typically “ripped” President Biden’s request for $850 billion for the 2025 Pentagon budget as “inadequate” and demanded even more money for it. So, it goes — so, in fact, it has long gone.
And in a country in which the Pentagon budget and the far vaster national security budget only continue to rise, the oddest thing of all, it seems to me, is this: since the U.S. emerged victorious from World War II, no matter how much money it’s poured into the MIC or how many bases its military has established globally, in no significant war — from Korea in the early 1950s to Vietnam in the 1960s to the Afghan and Iraq wars of this century and the Global War on Terror that went with them — has this country ever (that’s right ever) emerged genuinely victorious.
Yes, the nation whose “defense” budget equals that of the next nine countries combined can’t win a war or stop pouring money into its military and the vast industrial combine that goes with it. Today, backed by an extraordinary set of original images related to the MIC that have never been published before (and can be seen in their original form here), Vine and Arriola offer a look at just what a disaster it’s proven to be for this country. ~ Tom Engelhardt
The Military-Industrial Complex Is Killing Us All
by David Vine and Theresa (Isa) Arriola
We need to talk about what bombs do in war. Bombs shred flesh. Bombs shatter bones. Bombs dismember. Bombs cause brains, lungs, and other organs to shake so violently they bleed, rupture, and cease functioning. Bombs injure. Bombs kill. Bombs destroy.
Bombs also make people rich.
When a bomb explodes, someone profits. And when someone profits, bombs claim more unseen victims. Every dollar spent on a bomb is a dollar not spent saving a life from a preventable death, a dollar not spent curing cancer, a dollar not spent educating children. That’s why, so long ago, retired five-star general and President Dwight D. Eisenhower rightly called spending on bombs and all things military a “theft.”
The perpetrator of that theft is perhaps the world’s most overlooked destructive force. It looms unnoticed behind so many major problems in the United States and the world today. Eisenhower famously warned Americans about it in his 1961 farewell address, calling it for the first time “the military-industrial complex,” or the MIC.
Start with the fact that, thanks to the MIC’s ability to hijack the federal budget, total annual military spending is far larger than most people realize: around $1,500,000,000,000 ($1.5 trillion). Contrary to what the MIC scares us into believing, that incomprehensibly large figure is monstrously out of proportion to the few military threats facing the United States. One-and-a-half trillion dollars is about double what Congress spends annually on all non-military purposes combined.
Calling this massive transfer of wealth a “theft” is no exaggeration, since it’s taken from pressing needs like ending hunger and homelessness, offering free college and pre-K, providing universal health care, and building a green energy infrastructure to save ourselves from climate change. Virtually every major problem touched by federal resources could be ameliorated or solved with fractions of the cash claimed by the MIC. The money is there.
The bulk of our taxpayer dollars are seized by a relatively small group of corporate war profiteers led by the five biggest companies profiting off the war industry: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon (RTX), Boeing, and General Dynamics. As those companies have profited, the MIC has sowed incomprehensible destruction globally, keeping the United States locked in endless wars that, since 2001, have killed an estimated 4.5 million people, injured tens of millions more, and displaced at least 38 million, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
The MIC’s hidden domination of our lives must end, which means we must dismantle it. That may sound totally unrealistic, even fantastical. It is not. And by the way, we’re talking about dismantling the MIC, not the military itself. (Most members of the military are, in fact, among that the MIC’s victims.)
While profit has long been part of war, the MIC is a relatively new, post-World War II phenomenon that formed thanks to a series of choices made over time. Like other processes, like other choices, they can be reversed and the MIC can be dismantled.
The question, of course, is how?
The Emergence of a Monster
To face what it would take to dismantle the MIC, it’s first necessary to understand how it was born and what it looks like today. Given its startling size and intricacy, we and a team of colleagues created a series of graphics to help visualize the MIC and the harm it inflicts, which we’re sharing publicly for the first time.
The MIC was born after World War II from, as Eisenhower explained, the “conjunction of an immense military establishment” — the Pentagon, the armed forces, intelligence agencies, and others — “and a large arms industry.” Those two forces, the military and the industrial, united with Congress to form an unholy “Iron Triangle” or what some scholars believe Eisenhower initially and more accurately called the military-industrial–congressional complex. To this day those three have remained the heart of the MIC, locked in a self-perpetuating cycle of legalized corruption (that also features all too many illegalities).
The basic system works like this: First, Congress takes exorbitant sums of money from us taxpayers every year and gives it to the Pentagon. Second, the Pentagon, at Congress’s direction, turns huge chunks of that money over to weapons makers and other corporations via all too lucrative contracts, gifting them tens of billions of dollars in profits. Third, those contractors then use a portion of the profits to lobby Congress for yet more Pentagon contracts, which Congress is generally thrilled to provide, perpetuating a seemingly endless cycle.
But the MIC is more complicated and insidious than that. In what’s effectively a system of legalized bribery, campaign donations regularly help boost Pentagon budgets and ensure the awarding of yet more lucrative contracts, often benefiting a small number of contractors in a congressional district or state. Such contractors make their case with the help of a virtual army of more than 900 Washington-based lobbyists. Many of them are former Pentagon officials, or former members of Congress or congressional staffers, hired through a “revolving door” that takes advantage of their ability to lobby former colleagues. Such contractors also donate to think tanks and university centers willing to support increased Pentagon spending, weapons programs, and a hyper-militarized foreign policy. Ads are another way to push weapons programs on elected officials.
Such weapons makers also spread their manufacturing among as many Congressional districts as possible, allowing senators and representatives to claim credit for jobs created. MIC jobs, in turn, often create cycles of dependency in low-income communities that have few other economic drivers, effectively buying the support of locals.
For their part, contractors regularly engage in legalized price gouging, overcharging taxpayers for all manner of weapons and equipment. In other cases, contractor fraud literally steals taxpayer money. The Pentagon is the only government agency that has never passed an audit — meaning it literally can’t keep track of its money and assets — yet it still receives more from Congress than every other government agency combined.
As a system, the MIC ensures that Pentagon spending and military policy are driven by contractors’ search for ever-higher profits and the reelection desires of members of Congress, not by any assessment of how to best defend the country. The resulting military is unsurprisingly shoddy, especially given the money spent. Americans should pray it never actually has to defend the United States.
No other industry — not even Big Pharma or Big Oil — can match the power of the MIC in shaping national policy and dominating spending. Military spending is, in fact, now larger (adjusting for inflation) than at the height of the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq, or, in fact, at any time since World War II, despite the absence of a threat remotely justifying such spending. Many now realize that the primary beneficiary of more than 22 years of endless U.S. wars in this century has been the industrial part of the MIC, which has made hundreds of billions of dollars since 2001. “Who Won in Afghanistan? Private Contractors” was the Wall Street Journal‘s all too apt headline in 2021.
Endless Wars, Endless Death, Endless Destruction
“Afghanistan” in that headline could have been replaced by Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq, among other seemingly endless U.S. wars since World War II. That the MIC has profited off them is no coincidence. It has helped drive the country into conflicts in countries ranging from Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, to El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, and Grenada, to Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, and so many others.
Deaths and injuries from such wars have reached the tens of millions. The number of estimated deaths from the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen is eerily similar to that from the wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia: 4.5 million.
The numbers are so large that they can become numbing. The Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama helps us remember to focus on:
one life one life one life one life one life
because each time is the first time that that life has been taken.
The Environmental Toll
The MIC’s damage extends to often irreparable environmental harm, involving the poisoning of ecosystems, devastating biodiversity loss, and the U.S. military’s carbon footprint, which is larger than that of any other organization on earth. At war or in daily training, the MIC has literally fueled global heating and climate change through the burning of fuels to run bases, operate vehicles, and produce weaponry.
The MIC’s human and environmental costs are particularly invisible outside the continental United States. In U.S. territories and other political “grey zones,” investments in military infrastructure and technologies rely in part on the second-class citizenship of Indigenous communities, often dependent on the military for their livelihoods.
Endless Wars at Home
As the MIC has fueled wars abroad, so it has fueled militarization domestically. Why, for example, have domestic police forces become so militarized? At least part of the answer: since 1990, Congress has allowed the Pentagon to transfer its “excess” weaponry and equipment (including tanks and drones) to local law enforcement agencies. These transfers conveniently allow the Pentagon and its contractors to ask Congress for replacement purchases, further fueling the MIC.
Some will defend the military-industrial complex by insisting that we need its jobs; some by claiming it’s keeping Ukrainians alive and protecting the rest of Europe from Vladimir Putin’s Russia; some by warning about China. Each of those arguments is an example of the degree to which the MIC’s power relies on systematically manufacturing fear, threats, and crises that help enrich arms merchants and others in the MIC by driving ever more military spending and war (despite a nearly unbroken record of catastrophic failure when it comes to nearly every U.S. conflict since World War II).
The argument that current levels of military spending must be maintained for “the jobs” should be laughable. No military should be a jobs program. While the country needs job programs, military spending has proven to be a poor job creator or an engine of economic growth. Research shows it creates far fewer jobs than comparable investments in health care, education, or infrastructure.
U.S. weaponry has aided Ukrainian self-defense, though the weapons manufacturers are anything but altruists. If they truly cared about Ukrainians, they would have forgone any profits, leaving more money for humanitarian aid to that country. Instead, they’ve used that war, as they have Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and growing tensions in the Pacific, to cynically inflate their profits and stock prices dramatically.
Discard the fearmongering and it should be clear that the Russian military has demonstrated its weakness, its inability to decisively conquer territory near its own borders, let alone march into Europe. In fact, both the Russian and Chinese militaries pose no conventional military threat to the United States. The Russian military’s annual budget is one-tenth or less than the size of the U.S. one. China’s military budget is one-third to one-half its size. The disparities are far larger if you combine the U.S. military budget with those of its NATO and Asian allies.
Despite this, members of the MIC are increasingly encouraging direct confrontations with Russia and China, aided by Putin’s war and China’s own provocations. In the “Indo-Pacific” (as the military calls it), the MIC is continuing to cash in as the Pentagon builds up bases and forces surrounding China in Australia, Guam, the Federated States of Micronesia, Japan, the Marshall Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Papua New Guinea, and the Philippines.
Such steps and a similar buildup in Europe are only encouraging China and Russia to strengthen their own militaries. (Just imagine how American politicians would respond if China or Russia were to build a single military base anywhere close to this country’s borders.) While all of this is increasingly profitable for the MIC, it is heightening the risk of a military clash that could spiral into a potentially species-ending nuclear war between the United States and China, Russia, or both.
The Urgency of Dismantling
The urgency of dismantling the military-industrial complex should be clear. The future of the species and planet depends on it.
The most obvious way to weaken the MIC would be to starve it of its lifeblood, our tax dollars. Few noticed that, after leaving office, former Trump-era Pentagon chief Christopher Miller called for cutting the Pentagon’s budget in half. Yes, in half.
Even a 30% cut — as happened all too briefly after the Cold War ended in 1991 — would free hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Imagine how such sums could build safer, healthier, more secure lives in this country, including a just economic transition for any military personnel and contractors losing jobs. And mind you, that military budget would still be significantly larger than China’s, or Russia’s, Iran’s, and North Korea’s combined.
Of course, even thinking about cutting the Pentagon budget is difficult because the MIC has captured both political parties, virtually guaranteeing ever-rising military spending. Which brings us back to the puzzle of how to dismantle the MIC as a system.
In short, we’re working on the answers. With the diverse group of experts who helped produce this article’s graphics, we’re exploring, among other ideas, divestment campaigns and lawsuits; banning war profiteering; regulating or nationalizing weapons manufacturers; and converting parts of the military into an unarmed disaster relief, public health, and infrastructure force.
Though all too many of us will continue to believe that dismantling the MIC is unrealistic, given the threats facing us, it’s time to think as boldly as possible about how to roll back its power, resist the invented notion that war is inevitable, and build the world we want to see. Just as past movements reduced the power of Big Tobacco and the railroad barons, just as some are now taking on Big Pharma, Big Tech, and the prison-industrial complex, so we must take on the MIC to build a world focused on making human lives rich (in every sense) rather than one focused on bombs and other weaponry that brings wealth to a select few who benefit from death.
Theresa (Isa) Arriola is an assistant professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at Concordia University. She chairs Our Common Wealth 670 (OCW 670) on Saipan, a community advocacy group dedicated to research, education, and awareness about military planning in the Mariana Islands. She was born and raised on Saipan and is an Indigenous Chamorro woman. Her research interests center around militarism, indigeneity, sovereignty, and Oceania.
Copyright 2024 Theresa (Isa) Arriola and David Vine'
University Investments: Divesting from the Military-Industrial Complex
by Binoy Kampmark / April 30th, 2024
The rage and protest against Israel’s campaign in Gaza, ongoing since the October 7 attacks by Hamas, has stirred student activity across a number of US university campuses and beyond. Echoes of the Vietnam anti-war protests are being cited. The docile consumers of education are being prodded and found interested. University administrators and managers are, as they always tend to, doing the bidding of their donors and funders in trying to restore order, punish the protesting students where necessary and restrict various forms of protest. Finally, those in the classrooms have something to talk about.
A key aspect of the protest centres on university divestment from US military companies linked and supplying the Israeli industrial war machine. (The pattern is also repeating itself in other countries, including Canada and Australia.) The response from university officialdom has been to formulate a more vigorous antisemitism policy – whatever that means – buttressed, as was the case in Columbia University, by the muscular use of police to remove protesting students for trespassing and disruption. On April 18, in what she described as a necessary if “extraordinary step”, Columbia President Minouche Shafik summoned officers from the New York Police Department, outfitted in riot gear, to remove 108 demonstrators occupying Columbia’s South Lawn. Charges have been issued; suspensions levelled.
Students from other institutions are also falling in, with similar results. An encampment was made at New York University, with the now predictable police response. At Yale, 45 protestors were arrested and charged with misdemeanour trespassing. Much was made of the fact that tents had been set up on Beinecke Plaza. A tent encampment was also set up at MIT’s Cambridge campus.
The US House Committee on Education and the Workforce has also been pressuring university heads to put the boot in, well illustrating the fact that freedom of speech is a mighty fine thing till it aggrieves, offends and upsets various factional groups who wish to reserve it for themselves. Paradoxically enough, one can burn the US flag one owns as a form of protest, exercise free speech rights as a Nazi, yet not occupy the president’s office of a US university if not unequivocal in condemning protest slogans that might be seen as antisemitic. It would have been a far more honest proposition to simply make the legislators show their credentials as card carrying members of the MIC.
The focus by students on the Israeli-US military corporate nexus and its role in the destruction of Gaza has been sharp and vocal. Given the instinctive support of the US political and military establishment for Israel, this is far from surprising. But it should not be singular or peculiar to one state’s warring machine, or one relationship. The military-industrial complex is protean, spectacular in spread, with those in its service promiscuous to patrons. Fidelity is subordinated to the profit motive.
The salient warning that universities were at risk of being snared by government interests and, it followed, government objectives, was well noted by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his heralded 1961 farewell address, one which publicly outed the “military-industrial complex” as a sinister threat. Just as such a complex exercised “unwarranted influence” more broadly, “the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” The nation’s academics risked “domination … by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money”.
This has yielded what can only be seen as a ghastly result: the military-industrial-academic complex, heavy with what has been described as “social autism” and protected by almost impenetrable walls of secrecy.
The nature of this complex stretches into the extremities of the education process, including the grooming and encouragement of Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) students. Focusing on Lockheed Martin’s recruitment process on US college campuses in his 2022 study for In These Times, Indigo Olivier found a vast, aggressive effort involving “TED-style talks, flight simulations, technology demos and on-the-spot interviews.” Much is on offer: scholarships, well-paid internships and a generous student repayment loan program. A dozen or so universities, at the very least, “participate in Lockheed Martin Day, part of a sweeping national effort to establish defense industry recruitment pipelines in college STEM”.
Before the Israel-Gaza War, some movements were already showing signs of alertness to the need to disentangle US learning institutions from the warring establishment they so readily fund. Dissenters, for instance, is a national movement of student organisers focused on “reclaiming our resources from the war industry, reinvest in life-giving services, and repair collaborative relationships with the earth and people around the world.”
Such aspirations seem pollyannaish in scope and vague in operation, but they can hardly be faulted for their intent. The Dissenters, for instance, took to the activist road, being part of a weeklong effort in October 2021 comprising students at 16 campuses promoting three central objects: that universities divest all holdings and sever ties with “the top five US war profiteers: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics”; banish the police from campuses; and remove all recruiters from all campuses.
Demanding divestment from specific industries is a task complicated by the opacity of the university sector’s funding and investment arrangements. Money, far from talking, operates soundlessly, making its way into nominated accounts through the designated channels of research funding.
The university should, as part of its humane intellectual mission, divest from the military-industrial complex in totality. But it will help to see the books and investment returns, the unveiling, as it were, of the endowments of some of the richest universities on the planet. Follow the money; the picture is bound to be an ugly one.Facebook
By Azubuike Ishiekwene 19 May 2024 Azubuike Ishiekwene is the editor-in-chief at Leadership Media Group.
Although it accounted for only about 3% of the US GDP two years ago, the military-industrial complex has been linked with nearly every bad thing – from the overthrow and murder of radical Chilean president Salvador Allende Gossens to the Vietnam War, and from the Iran-Contra Affair to Gulf Wars 1 and 2.
I was chatting with a friend last week, who, mid-speech, redirected our conversation to the situation in the Middle East. She wanted to know what the mood in the US was. More than 9,000 kilometres away in Nigeria, from where she was calling, she didn’t quite trust the media accounts. Since I was visiting the US, she thought I might have a better reading of the pulse.
Her call coincided with the decision by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to launch a ground offensive in Rafah, in spite of warnings about compounding the current humanitarian disaster in Gaza where more than 32,000 Palestinians have been killed, not counting bodies still under the rubble.
No one is sure how many more dead would be counted before Netanyahu finds the last Hamas, but is there still a chance – just one chance – that the dog in this deadly hunt will hear the hunter’s restraining whistle? Is the US unable or unwilling or both unable and unwilling to call on Netanyahu to stop? Calling America
I told the caller that the honest answer was, I don’t know. The mood on US campuses is clear. Students from Columbia to Yale and from Harvard to New York and the University of Texas in Austin, pitched tents outside for days in running battles with the police to demand an end to the war. They wanted the Biden administration to call Netanyahu to order.
There were counter-protests, all right, but the overwhelming majority of students across US college campuses made their voices loud and clear: Israel had gone too far in avenging October 7.
That was the mood on the campuses.
It wasn’t very different on the streets, either. You could say that is to be expected. Two of three cab drivers I used were persons with Arab roots who wore their grief on their sleeves.
They were not all Hamas sympathisers, just ordinary folks who might still have remained in Palestine under better leadership, but in whose eyes the worst Palestine leaders now look like saints, thanks to Israel’s ruthless war in Gaza. But you don’t have to be an Arab or Jew or Greek to ask, who can stop Netanyahu? You just have to be human to see that if two wrongs don’t make a right, a third only compounds it.
So, who does the US listen to and why does it matter in the war in Gaza? In politico-speak, those who move the hand that moves the most powerful country in the world are called the “military-industrial complex”. What is the complex?
This is how Meta AI defines it: “The military-industrial complex (MIC) refers to the interconnected network of relationships between the military, defence contractors and the federal government. It involves the collaboration and cooperation between these entities to produce and profit from military weapons, equipment and services.
“The term was first used by President Dwight D Eisenhower in his farewell address in 1961, where he warned of the potential dangers of an unchecked alliance between the military, defence contractors and politicians.”
If there’s anyone who ought to know that a threesome involving the military, defence contractors and politicians can hardly end in any good, it was Eisenhower. He was on two of the three sides; and Dick Cheney who became vice-president decades later, was on the last two – defence contractor and politician.
Eisenhower led two of the most consequential military campaigns in World War 2, before he later became president.
This complex is not large. In number terms, it would be a tiny fraction of the number of college students who besieged dozens of campuses last week, calling for an end to the war in Gaza. Statistics in 2009 suggested that it includes around 1,100 lobbyists who represent about 400 clients from the defence sector, mostly companies that make losses from peace. Size matters not
But you would be mistaken to judge its influence by its size. Although it accounted for about 3% of the US GDP two years ago, these folks, famous mostly for their notorious exploits, have been linked with nearly every bad thing from the overthrow and murder of radical Chilean president Salvador Allende Gossens to the Vietnam War and from the Iran-Contra Affair to Gulf Wars 1 and 2.
As bad things go, the last one was the baddest. This complex instigated the US invasion of Iraq in spite of all evidence to the contrary. It made up its own convenient evidence, bomb after bomb, as hundreds of lives were destroyed and centuries of civilisation in Mesopotamia were pillaged and ruined.
After the war, one of the last surviving White House peaceniks, Barack Obama, said in a declassified document: “Isis [Islamic State], is a direct outgrowth of al-Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion, which is an example of unintended consequences – which is why we should generally aim before we shoot.”
Unfortunately, even Obama the Dove shot before aiming in Libya.
In the Middle East, the complex has President Biden by the balls. That was what I told the caller from Nigeria. It doesn’t matter what the students are saying on college campuses or what the cab drivers think – the complex has Biden by the balls. And what a hold they have on him and on anyone in the White House in an election year! The complex has got Israel’s back. Biden is damned if he calls out Netanyahu. Damned if he doesn’t. Owners of America
That’s what I told the caller. The Igbo of southeastern Nigeria have a profound way of saying it that is lacking in the English language: “Ana enwe obodo enwe! [A town is owned and the owners call the shots!]”
It’s a hard thing to say, even harder, perhaps, to accept. Because the logic of accepting that the complex owns America and has its ear is to deny the agency of actors within the system who may hold different, even stridently opposing views.
But think of it this way: Why would America, a beacon of the rule of law, conveniently hide under its non-signatory status to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to allow Israel to continue bombarding Gaza in spite of warnings by the court and the UN of an impending humanitarian catastrophe?
Why would Biden, who regretted voting for the war in Iraq, and who as president, has prioritised diplomacy, become so impotent over Gaza? It’s the complex, folks! They’ve got him by the balls in an election year!
And Netanyahu knows this, as do large sections of the Western media largely controlled by vested interests in the Middle East conflict. Netanyahu knows that Israel’s invincibility is an American yarn. The students said as much in their placards and graffiti last week, but who’s listening?
Certainly not Biden, who along with his British ally, Rishi Sunak, scrambled military assets to defend Israel on 15 April when Iran launched what might otherwise have been a devastating retaliatory attack on Israel. The yarn of Israel’s invincibility, largely overplayed in the Western media, continues to feed the war. For how long? How many more lives before enough is enough? What price peace?
On the whole, the world is in a far more peaceful place today than it was in the 20th century when millions of people died from senseless, bloody conflicts over ego and territory. Yet, it has taken bloody hard work to bring us here, where prosperity is not only measured by the complex’s profit from wars, but also by how many ordinary folks around the world have bread on their table and milk for their babies.
Now, it seems like from South Sudan to Yemen and from the meat grinder in Ukraine to Gaza, the world is adrift again, one war at a time, as America defies the voices of its own children.
Someone must stop, listen and act. If not Biden, then who?
DM
Sunday, July 25, 2021
Philosophical Soup: The glorification of the U.S. military-industrial complex in film
The following article contains spoilers for “Outside the Wire.”
Action movies are undeniably entertaining and captivating, and the genre is typically defined by big, strong military heroes. Take “Outside the Wire,” all of the “Captain America” movies or basically any Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero film for example.
In reality, however, superheroes such as Captain America and Captain Marvel are just figures who are glorifying the United States’ military-industrial complex. And Marvel movies aren’t the only films that do this.
In the recent Netflix movie “Outside the Wire,” Anthony Mackie plays a U.S. robot soldier fighting against Russia in a civil war in Ukraine. Captain Leo, Mackie’s character, is the latest in the line of supersoldiers in films. At the end of the movie, he goes rogue and tries to prevent future wars and the super-soldier program by launching nuclear missiles against the United States.
Ultimately, Thomas Harp, the hero of the movie, stops Leo from launching the missile. Framing Leo as the well-meaning villain only serves to glorify the United States’ endless wars. Netflix tries to make a complex point, yet it falls short once again by letting the U.S. hero win.
“Captain America: The Winter Soldier” is another example. While the action sequences in this film are excellent, it, too, glorifies the military-industrial complex.
“Avengers: Endgame,” another action movie, was the second highest-grossing film ever, raking in only around $46 million less than “Avatar.”
It raises the question: What does the United States love so much about action movies that are steeped in military themes?
I watch action movies simply because I enjoy watching them, not out of any sense of patriotism. However, I think this may be too simple of an explanation. If you think about it more, action movies — perhaps similar to all forms of media — help us escape the mundane nature of our lives.
I do not seek to take my mundane life for granted. I am incredibly lucky to be able to go to college and have a set routine. Places that are currently being destroyed by the U.S. military are not so lucky.
Just last week for my Introduction to International Relations class, I watched a video in which a Syrian mother described how a berry tree was able to protect her and her children from the shrapnel of a Russian bomb that dropped on their village.
The United States, and other countries, has been pulled into a humanitarian crisis in Syria. The lives of those who live in Syria have been affected by near-constant war for the last 10 years. This in turn has become a sort of proxy war between the United States and other countries.
I know the damage our military-industrial complex causes, yet I still unintentionally support it through watching action movies. Can I reconcile my enjoyment for movies such as “Lady Bird” with my enjoyment of “Captain America” and the violence it helps to normalize?
The depiction of U.S. exceptionalism in films have influenced cultural perceptions of enemies in these movies and real-life U.S. adversaries. In most films, these enemies are the Russians or Soviet Union — a remnant of the Cold War — North Koreans or Islamic extremists.
The United States has fought so many different countries around the globe that there is no shortage of enemies for action filmmakers to use. By using a biased narrative and blurring the line between real and fictional wars, the United States gains control of who is perceived as the enemy of the people. This can be dangerous if used to misguide or miseducate the public to garner support for wars.
To sum up, our perception of the United States cannot be separated from how action movies depict the country. One feeds the other.
The military thrives upon the media industry portraying the institution in a positive light. To understand the United States, all you need to do is watch an action movie to get a sense of what the country thinks of itself as: the shining beacon of light in a sea of chaos.
Yet the United States image as a world power has been tainted, which is why it is so necessary for action movies to show a U.S. perception of reality and why it is doubly more crucial for us to recognize and be aware of this propaganda the next time we indulge in the MCU and other films.
