William D. Hartung / TomDispatch
DEC 16, 2019
I’ve been writing critiques of
the Pentagon, the national security state, and America’s never-ending military
overreach since at least 1979 — in other words, virtually my entire working
life. In those decades, there were moments when positive changes did occur.
They ranged from ending the apartheid regime
in South Africa in 1994 and halting U.S. military support for the murderous
regimes, death squads, and outlaws who ruled Central America in the 1970s and
1980s to sharp reductions in the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals as
the Cold War wound down. Each of those victories, however complex, seemed like
a signal that sustained resistance and global solidarity mattered and could
make a difference when it came to peace and security.
Here’s a striking exception,
though, one thing that decidedly hasn’t changed for the better in all these years:
the staggering number of tax dollars that persistently go into what passes for
national security in this country. In our case, of course, the definition of
“national security” is subsidizing the U.S. military-industrial complex, year
in, year out, at levels that should be (but aren’t) beyond belief. In 2019,
Pentagon spending is actually higher than it was at the peak of either the Korean or
Vietnam conflicts and may soon be — adjusted for inflation — twice the Cold War
average.
Yes, in those four decades,
there were dips at key inflection points, including the ends of
the Vietnam War and the Cold War, but the underlying trend has been ever onward
and upward. Just why that’s been the case is a subject that almost never comes
up here. So let me try to explain it in the most personal terms by tracing my
own history of working on Pentagon spending and what I’ve learned from it.
From the Anti-Apartheid
Movement to Battling the Military-Industrial Complex
I first began analyzing this
country’s weapons-making corporations in the mid-1970s while still a student at
Columbia University and deeply involved in the anti-apartheid movement of that
moment. As one of my topics of research, I spent a fair amount of time tracing
how some of those outfits were circumventing the then-existing arms
embargo on (white) South Africa by using shadow companies, shipping
weapons through third countries, and similar deceptions.
One of the outlets I wrote for
then was Southern Africa magazine, a collectively produced,
independent journal that supported the liberation movements in that part of the
world. The anti-apartheid struggle was ultimately successful, thanks to the
efforts of the global solidarity movement of which I was a small part, but
primarily to the courageous acts of South African individuals and organizations
like the African National Congress and the Black Consciousness Movement.
As it happens, there has been
no such luck when it comes to reining in the Pentagon.
I started working on Pentagon
spending in earnest in 1979 when I landed a job at the New York-based Council on Economic Priorities (CEP), an organization
founded on the notion that corporations could be shamed into being more
socially responsible. Armed with a BA in Philosophy — much to the chagrin of my
father who was convinced I would be unemployable as a result — I was lucky to
get the position.
My initial assignment was as a
researcher for CEP’s Conversion Information Center — not religious conversion,
mind you, but the conversion of the U.S. economy from its deep dependence on
Pentagon spending to something better. The concept of conversion dated back at
least to the Vietnam War era when it was championed by figures like Walter
Reuther, the influential head of the United Auto Workers union, and Seymour
Melman, an industrial engineering professor at Columbia University who wrote a
classic book on the subject, The Permanent War Economy of the United States. (I took an
undergraduate course with Melman which sparked what would become my own abiding
interest in documenting the costs and consequences of the military-industrial
complex.)
My work at CEP mostly involved
researching subjects like how dependent local and state economies were — and,
of course, still are — on Pentagon spending. But I also got to write
newsletters and reports on the top 100 U.S. defense contractors, the top 25
U.S. arms-exporting corporations, and the companies advocating for and, of course,
benefiting from President Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars missile defense initiative. (That vast
program was meant to turn space into a new “frontier” of war, a subject that
has recently lit the mind of one Donald Trump.) In each case, CEP’s goal was to push public
interest and indignation to levels that might someday bring an end to the most
costly and destructive aspects of the military-industrial complex. So many
years later, the results have at best been mixed and, at worst, well… you
already know, given the sky-high 2020 Pentagon budget.
During my years at CEP and
after, work on economic conversion was pursued at the national level by groups
like the National
Commission on Economic Conversion and Disarmament and, when it came to
projects in defense-dependent states, by local outfits from Connecticut to California. Yet all of that work has been stymied for
decades by a seemingly never-ending pattern of rising Pentagon budgets. The
post-Vietnam dip in such spending briefly made the notion of conversion
planning more appealing to politicians, unions, and even some corporations, but
the military build-up in the early 1980s under President Ronald Reagan promptly reduced interest
again. With that gravy train back on track, why even plan for a downturn?
From the Nuclear Freeze to the
1991 Gulf War
There was, however, one
anti-militarist surge that did make progress during the Reagan years: the Nuclear Freeze Campaign. I worked closely with that movement,
authoring a report, for instance, on the potentially positive economic
impacts of an initiative to reduce U.S. and Soviet nuclear forces. Although
President Reagan never agreed to a freeze of any sort, that national grassroots
movement helped transform him from the president who labeled the Soviet Union
“the Evil Empire” and joked that “the bombing will start in five minutes” to
the one who negotiated the elimination of
medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe and declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must
never be fought.” As Frances Fitzgerald documented in Way Out There in the
Blue, her history of Reagan’s missile defense initiative, by
1984 key presidential advisers were concerned that the increasingly mainstream
anti-nuclear movement could damage him politically if he didn’t make some kind
of arms-control gesture.
Still, the resulting progress
in reducing those nuclear arsenals brought only a temporary lull in the
relentless growth of the Pentagon budget. It peaked in 1987, in fact, before
dipping significantly at the end of the Cold War when Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman
Colin Powell famously claimed to be “running out of demons.” Unfortunately,
the Pentagon soon fixed that, constructing a costly new strategy aimed at
fighting “major regional contingencies” against regimes like Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq and North Korea (as Michael Klare so vividly explained in his 1996
book Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws).
President George H.W. Bush’s
1991 intervention in Kuwait to drive out Iraqi forces would provide the
template for that new strategy, while seeming to presage a veritable new way of
war. After all, that conflict lasted almost no time at all, seemed like a
techno-wonder, and succeeded in its primary objective. As an added bonus, most
of it was funded by Washington’s allies, not American taxpayers.
But those successes couldn’t
have proved more illusory. After all, the 1991 Gulf War set the stage for nearly four decades of never-ending war (and operations just
short of it) by U.S. forces across the greater Middle East and parts of Africa.
That short-term victory against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, in fact, prompted a
resurgence of imperial hubris that would have disastrous consequences for the
greater Middle East and global security more broadly. Militarists cheered the
end of what they had called the “Vietnam Syndrome” — a perfectly sensible public aversion to
bloody, ill-advised wars in distant lands. Had that “syndrome” persisted, the
world would undoubtedly be a safer, more prosperous place today.
The Merger Boom, Iraq War II,
and the Global War on Terror
The end of the Cold War
resulted, however, in that rarest of all things: real cuts in the Pentagon
budget. They were, however, not faintly as deep as might have been expected,
given the implosion of the other superpower on the planet, the Soviet Union.
Still, those reductions hit hard enough that the weapons industry was forced to
reorganize via a series of mega-mergers encouraged by the administration of
President Bill Clinton. Lockheed and Martin Marietta formed Lockheed Martin;
Northrop and Grumman became Northrop Grumman; Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas;
and dozens of other firms, large and small, were scooped up by the giant
defense contractors until only five major firms were left standing: Lockheed
Martin, Northrup Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. Where dozens
of firms had once stood, only the big five now split roughly $100 billion in Pentagon contracts annually.
The theory behind this surge
in mergers was that the new firms would eliminate excess capacity and pass on
the savings in lower prices for weapons systems sold to the U.S. government.
That, of course, would prove a fantasy of the first order, as Lawrence Korb,
then at the Brookings Institution, made clear. As I’ve also pointed out, the Clinton administration ended up
essentially subsidizing those mergers, providing billions of taxpayer dollars to
cover the costs of closing factories and moving equipment, while actually
picking up part of the tab forthe golden parachutes given to executives and
board members displaced by them.
Meanwhile, the companies laid
off tens of thousands of workers. Congressman Bernie Sanders (I-VT) dubbed this
process of subsidizing mergers while abandoning workers to their fate “payoffs for layoffs” and pushed through legislation that
prevented some, but not all, of the merger subsidies from being paid out.
Meanwhile, those defense
mega-firms began looking to foreign arms sales to bolster their bottom lines.
An obliging Clinton administration promptly stepped up arms sales to the Middle East, making deals
at a rate of roughly $1 billion a month in 1993 and 1994. Meanwhile, despite
promises made at the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Washington oversaw
the expansion of NATO to the Russian border, including the
addition of Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic to the alliance. As
Tom Collina of the Ploughshares Fund has written, that helped scuttle the prospects for the kind of
U.S.-Russian rapprochement that could have delivered a true “peace dividend”
(the phrase of that moment) and accelerated reductions in global nuclear
arsenals.
For companies like Lockheed
Martin, however, such new NATO memberships looked like manna from heaven in the
form of more markets for U.S. arms. Norman Augustine, that
company’s CEO at the time, even took a marketing tour of nascent NATO members,
while company Vice President Bruce Jackson found time in his busy schedule to
head up an advocacy group with a self-explanatory name: the U.S.
Committee to Expand NATO.
The 1990s also saw the
beginnings of movement towards a second war with Iraq, pushed in those years by
the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), an
advocacy group whose luminaries, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and
Paul Wolfowitz, would all too soon become part of the administration of
President George W. Bush and the architects of his 2003 invasion of Iraq.
You won’t be surprised to
learn that they were joined at PNAC by Lockheed Martin’s ubiquitous Bruce
Jackson. Nor, at this late date, will you be shocked that those merger
subsidies, NATO expansion, and the return to a more interventionist policy
helped get military spending back on a steady growth path until the 9/11
attacks opened the spigots, launched the Global War on Terror, and sent a flood
of new money pouring into the Pentagon and the national security state. The
budget of the Department of Defense would only increase for the first 10 years of this century, a
record not previously matched in U.S. history.
New World Challenges:
Prospects for Shrinking the Pentagon Budget
Why has it been so hard to
reduce the Pentagon budget, regardless of the global security environment? The
power of the arms lobby, strengthened by the merger boom of the 1990s, was
certainly one factor. Fear of terrorism generated by the 9/11 attacks, which
set the stage for 18 years of ill-advised military adventures, including the
never-ending (and disastrous) war in Afghanistan, is certainly another. The political
fear of losing elections by being seen as either “soft” on defense or
unconcerned about the fate of military-industrial jobs in one’s home state or
district made many Democrats view taking on the Pentagon as the true “third
rail” of American politics. And the military itself has blindly adhered to a
strategy of global dominance that’s essentially been on autopilot, no matter the
damaging consequences of near-endless war and preparations for more of it.
Still, even decades later,
hope is not entirely lost. It remains possible that all of this might change in
the years to come as a war-weary public — from progressives to large parts of
Donald Trump’s base — has tired of the country’s forever wars, which have
minimally cost something like $6.4 trillion, while resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths, according to the
latest analyses by Brown University’s Costs of War project.
As even Donald Trump has acknowledged, those trillions could have gone far in
repairing America’s infrastructure and doing so much else in this country. In
truth, as Lindsay Koshgarian of the National Priorities Project has pointed out, that sort of money could have underwritten
significant parts of major initiatives like the Green New Deal or Medicare for
All that would change the nature of this society rather than destroying other
ones.
But that money’s gone. The
question is: What will the nation’s budget priorities be going forward? Both
Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have called for reductions in Pentagon
spending, with Warren singling out the Pentagon’s war budget, the so-called
Overseas Contingency Operations account, or OCO, in particular for elimination.
OCO has been used as a slush fund not only to pay for those wars, but also to
fund tens of billions of dollars in Pentagon pet projects that have nothing to
do with our current conflicts. Eliminating it alone could save up to $800 billion over the next decade for other
uses.
There has recently been a
surge of proposals aimed at cutting the soaring Pentagon budget in significant
ways. My own organization, the Center for International Policy, for example,
has created a Sustainable Defense Task Force made up of ex-White
House and congressional budget experts, former Pentagon officials and military
officers, and analysts from think tanks across the political spectrum. Our
group has already outlined a plan that would save $1.25 trillion from current
Pentagon projections over the next decade.
Meanwhile, a group of more
than 20 progressive organizations called #PeopleOverPentagon has
proposed $2 trillion in cuts over that decade and the Poor People’s Campaign,
working from an analysis done by the Institute for Policy Studies,
would up that to $3.5 trillion, while investing the savings in urgent domestic
needs.
Whether any of this succeeds
in breaking the pattern of ever-rising budgets remains an open question. The
most urgent threats to the safety of the planet today are climate change,
nuclear weapons, epidemics, the rise of extreme right-wing nationalism,
poverty, and grotesque levels of inequality. As a recent report from the organization Win Without War noted,
none of these challenges can be addressed through military means. The rationale
for spending more than $700 billion a year on the Pentagon — and well
over $1.2 trillion for national security writ large —
simply does not exist.
There are, of course, no
guarantees that the Pentagon budget will finally be downsized, but 40 years
after beginning my own work on this issue, I’m not giving up and neither is the
growing network of organizations and individuals working to demilitarize
foreign policy and impose budget discipline on the Pentagon. Unfortunately,
neither are the giant defense contractors and those who run the national
security state.
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