from Covert Magazine
Wars R Us: A Review of Christian Sorensens New Book Understanding the War
Industry
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - November 28, 2020
[Source: outsidethebeltway.com]
Pay no attention to all those nasty left-wing allegations about how military
contractors collude and conspire with the Pentagon to warp our economy,
impoverish our citizens, pervert our national goals, and foment needless
bloody wars that slaughter millions in order to fatten corporate profits.
The truth is actually much worse than you could ever imagineas this
chilling new book by Christian Sorensen makes startlingly clear.
Rather than simply having what President Dwight Eisenhower called the
military-industrial complex, we actually have a
military-industrial-congressional complex, with a media and academic
adjunct.
The network of overseas military bases extends to remote regions of the
world, which were traditionally the domain of other imperial powers.
With only 195 countries in the world, the U.S. empire has over 800 military
installations worldwide with 200,000 active troops deployed in more than 170
countries. [Source: nytimes.com and jacobinmag.com]
Since the creation of AFRICOM in 2007, for example, the U.S. military has
obtained an outpost in Mali, drone bases in Niger, Djibouti, the Seychelles
and Kenya, National Security Agency (NSA) facilities in Ethiopia, and flies
drones over war-ravaged Libya and Somalia.
U.S. Special Forces train soldiers across Africa. [Source: stripes.com]
The U.S. military is today one of the worlds largest emitters of greenhouse
gases that cause climate change, having been exempted from the 1998 Kyoto
protocol and Paris climate change agreement (when the U.S. was abiding by
it). There are also now at least 39,000 contaminated military sites across
the U.S. and growing numbers of species threatened with extinction and
people sickened by the toxic residues of American weapons systems.
In 2018, the top-five war corporations made more than $16 billion at a time
when 500,000 Americans were homeless on an average every day. To sustain
their obscene profits, they spend millions lobbying Capitol Hill and divvy
out millions in campaign contributions to Congress. In 2012 alone, war
corporations gave around $30 million and $25.5 million in 2014.
Much of this money has gone to appropriation and armed services committees,
which rubber stamp gargantuan military budgets that amount to more than the
total of the next ten countries combined.
[Source: pgpf.org]
The ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Rhode Islands
Jack Reed (D), characteristically took money from General Dynamics,
Raytheon, Textron, Apollo Global Management (a private equity firm heavy
into war industry) and large investment banks like Merrill Lynch and
Citigroup, and used his position to help Textron win a U.S. contract valued
at $641 million to build 1,300 cluster bombs for Saudi Arabia.
James Inhofe, Oklahomas Republican climate-change denying Senator who has
headed the committee under Donald Trump, has taken donations from Boeing,
General Dynamics, Honeywell, Huntington-Ingalls, and Orbital TK, along with
over $338,000 in the last five years from the oil and gas industry, which
profits significantly from overseas military intervention and huge military
budgets that Inhofe has always championed.
Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), left, has supported huge military budgets while
receiving millions of dollars in campaign donations from defense contractors
and the oil industry. [Source: tulsaworld.com]
Besides a corrupted Congress, the military-industrial complex is sustained
by the revolving door of Generals who transition from high-ranking military
posts to the executive boards of defense contractors where they lobby for
ever higher military budgets. James Mattis characteristically went from
Commander of the U.S. Central Command to a member of the board of General
Dynamics, where he swore before Congress that reduced military spending was
a threat to U.S. national security, to appointment in January 2017 as
Secretary of Defense, where he oversaw increases in weapons sales and the
U.S. war budget. Other high-ranking officials, like former CIA Director John
Brennan, have found lucrative jobs peddling new wars on television or in
think tanks financed by military corporations.
[Source: claritypress.com]
Sorensen writes that, after pumping the War on Terror for trillions in
military spending, the war industry is now returning to targeting Russia
and China through Great Power competition. This has given the Pentagon
an excuse to deploy more corporatized troops, mercenaries and goods and
services right up to Russias borders, while Pentagon leadership has
stylized such a permanent war footing as conducive to peace.
The U.S. Executive Branch has meanwhile come to take on the function of an
international arms peddler.
On any given day, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) manages
14,000 open foreign military sales cases with 185 countries. The latter
include some of the most oppressive on the planet like Israel, which
systematically oppresses the Palestinians, using weapons manufactured by
Boeing, Caterpillar, General Electric, Lockheed Martin, Motorola and
Northrop Grumman, and Saudi Arabia, which has used hardware from General
Dynamics and Lockheed Martin to pulverize Yemen.
From May 2015 through March 2016, American war corporations sold over $30
billion worth of goods and services also to anti-democratic Gulf allies such
as the United Arab Emirates, which waged the dirty war in Yemen by proxy and
was known for the brutal suppression of dissenting groups. In the Southern
Hemisphere, U.S. military and corporate action yielded devastating costs in
countries like Honduras and Colombia, where aerial defoliation programs have
poisoned the landscape and paramilitary death squads have terrorized trade
union activists and supporters of the left-wing Fuerzas Armada
Revolucionario de Colombia (FARC) whose principal platform is to
redistribute land and wealth.
[Source: Inthesetimes.com]
By law, the U.S. is not allowed to sell weapons to regimes that come to
power through coup détats. However, the war industry successfully lobbied
the government not to recognize blatant coups, like that in Egypt in 2013
and Ukraine in 2014. The war industry at the same time does everything in
its power to sustain conflicts like in the Koreas, where it profits from an
endless military standoff.
A pie chart showing global military expenditures by country for 2018, in US$
billions, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
(SIPRI). [Source: wikipedia.org]
It is also in the process of provoking new ones through the Asia Pivot
policy that has resulted in the military encirclement of China, promotion of
NATO expansion towards Russias borders, and deployment of missile
technology in Poland and Romania aimed directly at Russia. The inauguration
of a $1.74 trillion nuclear modernization effort could ultimately lead
humanity down the road to apocalypse.
One of Sorensens contributions is to show how the war industry sustains a
progressive veneer by stressing its green initiatives and the diversity of
its workforce.
John Brennans tenure as CIA Director from 2013 to 2017 was marked by his
extending new opportunities for African Americans, and many CEOs are now
women, like Marilyn Hewson of Lockheed Martin who was voted as Forbes most
powerful woman in business for three years in a row. Hewsons feminism,
however, does not go very far if we consider her praise for the Saudi
regime, which systematically persecutes women, or support for wars which
kill women and children, and destroy families.
Lockheed Martin CEO Marilyn Hewson with President Trump. [Source:
defenseone.com]
In 2018, the Pentagonwhich Sorensen rightfully calls the War
Departmentfailed an audit of more than 2.7 trillion dollars in assets. The
accounting firms carrying out the audit concluded that the Pentagons
financial records were riddled with so many bookkeeping deficiencies,
irregularities and errors that a reliable audit was simply impossible.
Franklin Chuck Spinney, a former Pentagon employee, pointed out a
pertinent accounting trick where the Pentagon routinely overestimates
inflation rates for weapons systems and does not return the excess funds to
the Treasury when actual inflation rates turn out to be lower. Tricks like
this result in surplus slush funds which are used to fund shady covert
military operations in places like sub-Saharan Africa, whose mineral wealth
multi-national corporations covet.
The Puerto Rican nationalist leader Pedro Albizu Campos (1891-1965) once
stated that we live in an era of the scientific savage, where all the
wisdom of science, mathematics and physics are used for the purpose of
assassination. These remarks were made before the popularization of the
drone, one of the war industrys favorite products, which has been used to
kill at least 8,000 people.
Residents carry the bodies of civilians killed in a U.S. airstrike in Mosul,
Iraq on March 24, 2017. [Source: mintpress.com]
What if all the geniuses who worked on these machines had applied their
talents to something more usefullike new vaccines or curing cancer or
carbon trapping technologiesthen the world would be a far better place.
[Source: nationalpriorities.org]
A good first step toward challenging the power of the war industry would be
a program of peace education that would create a broader awareness of its
harmful activities among the U.S. electorate. Unfortunately, the American
educational system has been corrupted and conditions kids from a young age
to go along with the status quo. During the height of the Vietnam War,
student protests forced the removal of military-related research from major
universities, but such research returned with a vengeance starting with the
budgetary cutbacks of the 1980s and then as part of the War on Terror.
Professors now compete with one another for grants that will help enhance
the militarys efficiency, as genuine scientific innovation, good
scholarship, and the pursuit of truth are stifled.
The subservience of the U.S academy to war profiteers was epitomized in 2011
by the naming of a leadership institute after Lockheed Martin at Miami
University of Ohio. Admiral William McRaven, who oversaw the Joint Special
Operation Command (JSOC), which specialized in terrorist manhunts and
assassination, was also tellingly appointed as chancellor of the University
of Texas system in 2015.
Admiral William McRaven delivers the commencement address at the University
of Texas, 2014. [Source: abc13.com]
The War Industry makes for a depressing read because the information
presented is factually grounded and based on deep research. The one thing
the author might have better emphasized is the war industrys being rooted
in the nations founding as a settler colonial state. The book nevertheless
follows in the noble tradition of muckrakers who have exposed the bloody
business of war. Whereas in the 1930s, the profiteers were derisively called
merchants of death, today they are honored for being civic-minded and
sponsor endowed chairs and departments in major universities. The peace
movement clearly has a lot of work to do.
