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.
What constitutes national security and how is it best achieved? Does massive military spending really make a country more secure, and what perils to democracy and liberty are posed by vast military establishments? Questions like those are rarely addressed in honest ways these days in America. Instead, the Trump administration favors preparations for war and more war, fueled by potentially enormous increases in military spending that are dishonestly framed as “recapitalizations” of America’s security and safety.
Such framing makes Pete Hegseth, America’s self-styled “secretary of war,” seem almost refreshing in his embrace of a warrior ethos. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham is another “warrior” who cheers for conflict, whether with Venezuela, Iran, or even — yes! — Russia. Such macho men revel in what they believe is this country’s divine mission to dominate the world. Tragically, at the moment, unapologetic warmongers like Hegseth and Graham are winning the political and cultural battle here in America.
Of course, U.S. warmongering is anything but new, as is a belief in global dominance through high military spending. Way back in 1983, as a college student, I worked on a project that critiqued President Ronald Reagan’s “defense” buildup and his embrace of pie-in-the-sky concepts like the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), better known as “Star Wars.” Never did I imagine that, more than 40 years later, another Republican president would again come to embrace SDI (freshly rebranded as “Golden Dome”) and ever-more massive military spending, especially since the Soviet Union, America’s superpower rival in Reagan’s time, ceased to exist 35 years ago. Amazingly, Trump even wants to bring back naval battleships, as Reagan briefly did (though he didn’t have the temerity to call for a new class of ships to be named after himself). It’ll be a “golden fleet,” says Trump. What gives?
For much of my life, I’ve tried to answer that very question. Soon after retiring from the U.S. Air Force, I started writing for TomDispatch, penning my first article there in 2007, asking Americans to save the military from itself and especially from its “surge” illusions in the Iraq War. Tom Engelhardt and I, as well as Andrew Bacevich, Michael Klare, and Bill Hartung, among others, have spilled much ink (symbolically speaking in this online era) at TomDispatch urging that America’s military-industrial complex be reined in and reformed. Trump’s recent advocacy of a “dream military” with a proposed budget of $1.5 trillion in 2027 (half a trillion dollars larger than the present Pentagon budget) was backed by places like the editorial board of the Washington Post, which just shows how frustratingly ineffectual our efforts have been. How discouraging, and again, what gives?
Sometimes (probably too often), I seek sanctuary from the hell we’re living through in glib phrases that mask my despair. So, I’ll write something like: America isn’t a shining city on a hill, it’s a bristling fortress in a valley of death; or, At the Pentagon, nothing succeeds like failure, a reference to eight failed audits in a row (part of a 30-year pattern of financial finagling) that accompanied disastrous wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Such phrases, no matter how clever I thought they were, made absolutely no impression when it came to slowing the growth of militarism in America. In essence, I’ve been bringing the online equivalent of a fountain pen to a gun fight, which has proved to be anything but a recipe for success.
In America, nothing — and I mean nothing! — seems capable of reversing massive military spending and incessant warfare. President Ronald Reagan, readers of a certain (advanced) age may recall, was nicknamed the “Teflon president” because scandals just didn’t seem to stick to him (at least until the Iran-Contra affair proved tough to shed). Yet history’s best candidate for Teflon “no-stick” status was never Reagan or any other president. It was and remains the U.S. warfare state, headquartered on the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. And give the sclerotic bureaucracy of that warfare state full credit. Even as the Pentagon has moved from failure to failure in warfighting, its war budgets have continued to soar and then soar some more.
Forgive the repetition, but what gives? When is our long, national nightmare of embracing war and (wildly overpriced) weaponry going to end? Obviously, not anytime soon. Even the Democrats, supposedly the “resistance” to President Trump, boast openly of their support for what passes for military lethality (or at least overpriced weaponry), while Democratic members of Congress line up for their share of war-driven pork. To cite a cri de coeur from the 1950s, have they no sense of decency?
The Shameless Embrace of Forever War and Its Spoils
I’m just an aging, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel. Who cares what I think? But America should still care about the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower, also known as Ike, the victorious five-star general of D-Day in 1944 and beyond, and this country’s president from 1953 to 1961. Ike was famously the first significant figure to warn Americans about the then-developing military-industrial complex (MIC) in his farewell address to the nation. Yet, even then, his words were largely ignored. Recently, I reread Ike’s warning, perhaps for the 100th time and was struck yet again by the way he highlighted the spiritual dimension of the challenge that is, all too sadly, still facing us.
In case you’ve forgotten them (or never read them), here are Ike’s words from that televised address in January 1961, when he put the phrase “the military-industrial complex” in our language:
“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. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Those were the prescient words of the most senior military man of his era, a true citizen-soldier and president, and more than six decades later, we should and must act on them if we have any hope left of preserving “our liberties and democratic processes.”
Again, wise words, yet our leaders have seldom heeded them. Since 1961, the “disastrous rise of misplaced power” when it comes to the MIC has infected our culture, our economy, even — to steal a term from the era of the disastrous American war in Vietnam — our hearts and minds. Indeed, despite the way the MIC failed so spectacularly to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, the Afghans, the Iraqis, and other embattled peoples across the globe in various misbegotten and mendacious wars, it did succeed spectacularly over the years in winning the hearts and minds of those who make the final decisions in the U.S. government.
In an astonishing paradox, a spendthrift military establishment that almost never wins anything, while consistently evading accountability for its losses, has by now captured almost untrammeled authority within our land. It defies logic, but logic never was this country’s strong suit. In fact, only recently, we reached a point of almost ultimate illogic when America’s bully-boy commander-in-chief insisted that a Pentagon budget already bloated with cash needs an extra $500 billion. That, of course, would bring it to about $1.5 trillion annually. Apologies to my Navy friends but even drunken sailors would be challenged to spend that mountain of money.
In short, no matter what it does, the Pentagon, America’s prodigal son, never gets punished. It simply gets more.
More, More, More!
Not only is such colossal military spending bad for this country, but it’s also bad for the military itself, which, after all, didn’t ask for Trump’s proposed $500 billion raise. America’s prodigal son was relatively content with a trillion dollars in yearly spending. In fact, the president’s suggested increase in the Pentagon budget isn’t just reckless; it may well wreck not just what’s left of our democracy, but the military, too.
Like any massive institution, the Pentagon always wants more: more troops, more weapons, more power, invariably justified by inflating (or simply creating) threats to this country. Yet, clarity of thought, not to speak of creativity, rarely derives from excess. Lean times make for better thinking, fat times make for little thought at all.
Not long ago, Trump occasionally talked sense by railing on the campaign trail against the military-industrial complex and its endless wars. Certainly, more than a few Americans voted for him in 2024 because they believed he truly did want to focus on domestic health and strength rather than pursue yet more conflicts globally (and the weapons systems that went with them). Tragically, Trump has morphed into a warlord, greedily siphoning oil from Venezuela, posturing for the annexation of Greenland and all its resources, while not hesitating to bomb Iran, Nigeria, or most any other country. Meanwhile, China and Russia lurk in the wings as scary “near-peer” rivals and threats.
Although Trump’s supporters may indeed have been conned into imagining him as a prince of peace, this country’s militarism and imperialism clearly transcend him. Generally speaking, warfare and military boosterism have been distinctly bipartisan pursuits in America, making reform of any sort that much more difficult. Replacing Trump in 2028 won’t magically erase deep-rooted militarism, megalomaniacal imperial designs, or even the possibility of a $1.5 trillion military budget. Clearly, more, more, more is the bipartisan war song being sung inside the Pentagon, Congress, and the White House these days.
Taking on the MICIMATTSHG, or Blob
Ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern coined a useful acronym from the classic military-industrial complex, or MIC. He came up with MICIMATT (the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex) to highlight its blob-like growth. And it’s true that Congress and the rest are all deeply implicated in the blob. To which I’d add an “S” for the sporting world, an “H” for Hollywood, and a “G” for the gaming sector, all of which are implicated in, influenced by (as well as influencing), and often subservient to Ike’s old MIC. So, what we now have is the MICIMATTSHG. Recall that Ike warned us about the “disastrous rise of misplaced power” if we failed to challenge it back in 1961. Recall that he also warned us that the MIC could change the very structure of our society, making America far less democratic and also far less free. And most subtly, he warned us that it might also weaken America spiritually.
What did he mean by that? To reference a speech Ike made in 1953, he warned then that we could end up hanging ourselves from a cross of iron. He warned that we could become captives of militarism and war, avid believers in spending the sweat of our laborers, the genius of our scientists, and the blood of our youth, pursuing military dominance globally, while losing our democratic beliefs and liberties at home in the process. And that, it seems to me, is exactly what did indeed happen. We the people were seduced, silenced, or sidelined via slogans like “support our troops” or with over-the-top patriotic displays like military parades, no matter that they represented something distinctly less than triumphant in their moment.
And it never ends, does it? Americans in various polls today indicate that they don’t want a war against either Venezuela or Iran, but our opinions simply aren’t heeded. Increasingly, we live in a “might makes right” country, even as military might has so regularly made for wrong since 1945.
And what in the world is to be done? Many things, but most fundamentally it’s time as a society to perform an “about-face,” followed by a march in double-time away from permanent war and toward peace. And that, in turn, must lead to major reductions in Pentagon spending. The best and only way to tackle the inexorable growth of the blob is to stop feeding it money — and stop worshipping it as well. Instead of a $500 billion increase, Congress should insist on a $500 billion decrease in Pentagon spending. Our task should be to force the military-industrial complex to think, improvise, become leaner, and focus on how most effectively to protect and defend America and our ideals, rather than fostering the imperial dreams of the wannabe warlords among us.
Trump’s current approach of further engorging the imperial blob is the stuff of national nightmares, not faintly a recipe for American greatness. It is, in fact, a sure guarantee of further decline and eventual collapse, not only economically and politically but spiritually as well, exactly as Ike warned in 1961. More wars and weapons simply will not make America great (again). How could they when, as Civil War General William T. Sherman so famously observed, war is “all hell”?
Americans, we must act to cut the war budget, shrink the empire, embrace diplomacy, and work for peace. Sadly, however, the blob has seemingly become our master, a well-nigh unstoppable force. Aren’t you tired yet of being its slave?
On the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, which was predicated on resistance to empire and military rule, it should be considered deeply tragic that this country has met the enemy — and he is indeed us. Here the words of Ike provide another teachable moment. Only Americans can truly hurt America, he once said. To which I’d add this corollary: Only Americans can truly save America.
As we celebrate our nation’s birthday this July 4th, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could save this deeply disturbed country by putting war and empire firmly in the rearview mirror? A tall task for sure, but so, too, was declaring independence from the mighty British Empire in 1776.
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'
