By John Lawrence
In 1961 President Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex (MIC). He said, “We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.” Since then spending on the military and the MIC has only skyrocketed. Taken together, they, not the rich, are the main job creators in the US. If you graduate from high school and can’t get a job, no problem.
The military will accept you with open arms, provide you with on-the-job training, even give you a signing bonus. Why stand in an unemployment line or apply for a job along with 500 other applicants? Or go into debt to attend some schlock college?
If you’re a college graduate and can’t get hired, try the MIC: the NSA, the CIA, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics – they’re the real job creators.
The cost plus contracts that the defense contractors work under guarantee that there will be lots of jobs available. Why? Because the more they spend on labor including unionized labor, the more they make in profits. That’s the essence of a cost plus contract.
The more something costs, the more profits they make. Usually they make a 10 % profit over and above all they manage to spend including cost overruns. It’s the exact reverse of the commercial economy where they try to get rid of unions. Unions and the MIC are on the same wavelength. The more they pay labor, the more profits they make.
Despite spending trillions of dollars on war and preparation for war since 9/11, the US has managed to destabilize the middle east, incur great loss of life and limb of both US and foreign citizens and create millions of displaced persons and refugees. AND FOR WHAT?
via White House Archives
Iraq was a stable society before George W Bush decided to invade it in order to be a war time President and wrap himself in glory (remember “Mission Accomplished”?). Now it’s being taken over by Al Qaeda and people there have to fear for their lives on a daily basis. When Saddam was there, Iraq was a stable society and there was no possibility of Al Qaeda gaining a foothold because Saddam hated them. Egypt was a stable society before they decided to get rid of Mubarek and now Egypt is in a state of chaos. Syria is busy blowing everyone and everything up. Same goes for Libya.
What has been accomplished by the US military? Answer: the destabilization and widespread misery of the middle east and northern Africa and the waste of trillions of dollars that could have been spent on improving the lives of American citizens.
The Syrian refugee crisis has exploded from about 270,000 people a year ago to today’s tally of more than two million who have fled the country. The pace of the diaspora has been characterized by the United Nations as the worst since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. In addition, an estimated 4.25 million Syrians have been displaced within their country, bringing the total number forced into flight to more than six million.
If we hadn’t spent a cent on the military and the MIC, great portions of the world would be better off today, and we could have spent that money on improving the lives of American citizens and the state of American infrastructure. The United States has spent more than $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security since the attacks of September 11, 2001. Results? Destabilization, chaos, refugee crises and lost opportunities to improve the lives of American citizens and citizens of other countries.
If we want to shrink the size of the MIC, a good place to start is here in San Diego. San Diego is home to the largest concentration of military in the world. Total employment in the sector accounts for one of every four jobs in the San Diego region. This includes uniformed military, defense contracting and civilian employment, and related support employment. San Diego is the home port for more than 60 percent of the ships in the Pacific Fleet. Expertise in the defense-related research and development includes command and control systems, reconnaissance and surveillance systems, unmanned vehicles and cyber security. Not to mention – drones.
If we want to establish a demilitarized-industrial-
via CollapseofCivilization.com
The fact that we are absolutely dependent on military and MIC jobs in San Diego is tantamount to the fact that the US is stuck in the mold of a national militarist state. The US economy is utterly dependent on war and preparation for war despite the fact that all this spending and all these jobs have done nothing to make the world a better place. In fact it has done a lot to make the world a worse place.
The Barrio Logan Community Plan has had to do battle with defense contractor General Dynamics which owns NASSCO, a division that repairs Navy ships. GD even enlisted the help of its unionized workers to lobby against the BLCP on the grounds that jobs would be lost if the BLCP was approved. However, when the union figured out it was lied to by GD and NASSCO, they switched sides. The city council finally gave approval to the BLCP, but GD and NASSCO were not giving up. They have run a campaign to get enough signatures to place the issue on the ballot and have the voters decide. Meanwhile, they can lobby, advertise and try to convince the voters that the BLCP should not go into effect. The MIC is firmly committed to staying in San Diego.
This issue now is at the heart of the mayoral race between Kevin Faulconer and David Alvarez. Alvarez wants the BLCP implemented while Faulconer continues to purvey the lie that 46,000 union jobs will be lost. Imagine that – a Republican campaigning for union jobs! It is inconceivable that any candidate, left or right, would campaign on the platform that military related jobs should leave San Diego. That’s how you know we are deeply and inextricably living in a national militarized state – when military related jobs are necessary to the functioning of the economy and to the maintenance of jobs. All those trillions of dollars spent on the military and MIC went to someone’s job or to corporate profits.
Meanwhile, a staggering number of women and children are at risk of falling into poverty. An estimated 42 million women — and 28 million dependent children — are saddled with financial hardship. According to a recent report, Maria Shriver said, “”These are not women who are wondering if they can ‘have it all’. These are women who are already doing it all — working hard, providing, parenting, and care-giving. They’re doing it all, yet they and their families can’t prosper, and that’s weighing the U.S. economy down.”
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the US gets a D+ on its infrastructure which needs $3.6 trillion in repairs. But fear not. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is continuing a vast construction program in Afghanistan, renovating bridges and building facilities for Afghan security forces. How nice of them. Do you think they might some day renovate bridges in this country?
Will San Diego ever transition to a truly civilian economy and away from a military related economy? 2014 doesn’t auger well for that scenario. “San Diego has emerged as an Unmanned Systems [that’s MIC speak for drones] hub. Recognizing the talent and opportunities present in the region, defense innovator Northrop Grumman designated San Diego its Unmanned Systems Center of Excellence. The designation meant 300 more jobs at the company’s Rancho Bernardo location.”
And then we have this quotidian prognosis: “The United States defense strategy has deemed that a Pivot to the Pacific, aligning defense resources with the Pacific Rim, is a crucial foreign policy strategy. Because of San Diego’s location and existing military footprint, this meant the region was well-positioned, despite sequestration, to gain valuable resources. The USS Reagan and its 2,500 person crew returned to San Diego after a year in maintenance. The USS Vinson, and its 6,000 plus crew, also returned to its port in San Diego. According to the SDMAC Military Economic Impact Study, the two aircraft carriers home ported here will each add about $500 million to the economy.”
John Lawrence
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I am happy you have said this, John.
I think your point is great. Our way of life is built on militarism and we need to change that.
“There is no possibility of transitioning military related jobs to jobs in the civilian sector.” This assumes that the only way and place government creates jobs is the MIC, when in fact, it is because of specific policies that this situation exists. It is telling that Republicans only point to MIC as government creating jobs. Are we really going to buy into that?
What would a peace time economy look like? The federal budget would support massive infrastructure investment to repair crumbling bridges and roads; invest in alternative energy to reduce reliance on fossil fuels; address the need for universal pre-K and child care for working families. These are all policy decisions.
War has been good for business. Peace can be good for business too. The question is where do you want to invest your son or daughter.
Anna, thanks for your comment. We progressives all want the government to stop spending on military related activities and start spending on infrastructure, universal pre-K, alternative energy etc but, despite Obama’s wanting to do these sorts of things, he has been stymied at every opportunity by Republicans and in particular the Tea Party which only want to spend on war and war related activities. If John McCain had been elected instead of Obama, we’d now be at war with Iran and quite possibly with Syria. Republicans are chomping at the bit to elect another President so they can continue their war related aspirations, and they will squelch every effort to spend money on non-war related government programs because that would be “socialism.”
Just an FYI: General Dynamics owns NASSCO. They are one and the same. The other major maritime industry players fighting to continue poisoning Barrio Logan residents are BAE Systems and Continental Maritime. All are major players in the military industrial complex that Ike warned us about.
There’s probably no greater demonstration of the long-run disaster of militarism than the fact that we spend billions of dollars creating systems that are meant to destroy land and people, and their own hardware in the process. The money simply is being burned up. It is a constant destruction of people and resources. It depends on the conscious spreading by those profiting from this destruction of a belief that we are threatened at all times from all directions. Politicians and the MIC depend on that horrid misuse of language and thought.
None of this can be written off as peacenik paranoia and cowardice. Political economists once coined a revealing term for Italy’s government in the early and middle 20th C. under Mussolini; The Corporate State. Its key features were the dedication of ideology to the defense of a chosen people, and the reduction of the government to cabinet ministries that corresponded to major military and industrial activities, the ministers traveling freely between government and industry during their secure careers.
That seems to describe the “post-war” political reality we suffer under.
“Iraq was a stable society before George W Bush decided to invade it in order to be a war time”
Mmm not so sure about that. Granted us going there in the long run made things much much worse and I don’t deny we should have never gone there in the first place but “stable” I think is a bit of a stretch. Quite a few veterans I know in retrospect will be the first to tell you we basically f****d things up going there at all, but If you really want to get an interesting perspective go to Eba’s Lounge and Bistro in Hillcrest and talk to Eba herself. She is an Iraqi expat Catholic whose father was killed under the Saddam regime. She has quite a different viewpoint than “stable” and some interesting stories to tell.
Granted Saddam was not a benevolent dictator and some Iraqis suffered the consequences of that, but I would maintain that Iraq was stable when Saddam was in charge whether or not his rule was benevolent. Certainly there were no outside threats from Al Qaeda or any other group and no hint of civil war.
Perhaps oppressive would have been a better description than unstable. As I said before I DO NOT think we had any business going there, but I think at some point there would have been an uprising.
An internal uprising should not concern us.
No argument.
Thank you John.
The US has military bases in >100 countries around the world (that our tax dollars pay for). How many foreign countries have military bases here? Why can’t we just close them? Answer: it would raise unemployment at home… bad politics for any president including Obama.
Eisenhauer’s quote at the top of the piece is truly remarkable. AND HE WAS A REPUBLICAN! What happened?
911 provided just the excuse the hawks needed to have a field day making war.
John is an ongoing serious issue you raise again.
Staggering military spending is draining resources away from our internal material breakdowns in infrastructure, pre-college education, climate crisis change necessitating incentivising a rapid conversion to green energy for household and commercial heating/cooling, transportation, green land use and agricultural practices, etc.
When it comes to military defense expenditures, we have a political gridlock and an accounting gridlock. Shockingly, between 1998-2012, the U.S. Government Accountability Office could not provide an audit opinion of Department of Defense financial statements. Department of Defense (DOD) financial statements are unauditable — whereby no audit opinion can be expressed — all due to serious material
internal control weaknesses, uncertainties, confusion from data inconsistences, inability to reconcile transfers between agencies, significant financial management problems.
This problem in turn expands the playing ground for data misinformation and distortion. If you examine three different reliable data sources on baseline and non-baseline DOD Military Defense spending for any particular year, you will likely find five different numbers! People play games or make mistakes confounding most with what’s included or not included in a reported budget or actual figure.
Magnifying confusion around federal budgets is the ‘business-as-usual’ widespread money corruption of politicians inherent in our political system. In 2012, for example, firms like Northrop Gruman and Boeing contributed a combined total of $7 million to politicians and spent $33 million on lobbying efforts. This buyong influence culture of ours gives life to the inevitable ‘fait accompli’ Paul Keleher alludes to
“When a nation is militarily loaded up with a melange of destructive weaponry, government officials on the left and particularly the hawkish right are inclined to find enemies everywhere for the next social-engineering target shoot.
There’s a much-needed transparent national debate on America’s extraordinary level of defense spending — now averaging $2,300 per capita versus $200 for rest of the world or $600 per capita for other top 15 nations.
This brings me to a brief overview of U.S. historical military defense spending as a % of GDP. Of course, tying defense spending to GDP can also be very misleading as this approach provides no insights into how much the U.S. should be effectively and efficiently spending and how much is pure waste. As long as we operate under the illusion we are the world’s sole protector and enforcer, absolute defense spending levels will always remain inordinately high, made worse by compounding interest on debt financing cost of the high annual defense expenditures.
Here are some interesting defense spending trends as a % of GDP:
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I. After WWII, defense spending stabilized at 8-9% of GDP, spiking to 15% during the Korean war in 1952.
II. During the Cold War, spending fluctuated around 9-10% of GDP, peaking to 10% at height of the Vietnam War.
III. Spending then began to decline to 7% of GDP in the mid-70s to a low of 5.6% in 1979.
IV. Reagan’s defense spending girated spending back to 7% of GDP in 1985, falling slowly back to 6% by 1990.
V. In the 1990s, a time of relative tranquility, defense spending declined sharply, bottoming to 3.7% of GDP in 2000.
VI. The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars caused a resurge in defense spending to 5.1% of GDP in 2008, peaking to 6% in 2011 and falling back to around 5.2% in 2013.
VII. Spending is expected to decline further to 4.7% of GDP by 2015. The 2011 Budget Control Act is expected to reign in defense spending over the next decade. Optimistically, the baseline Defense spending budget is forecast to be FLAT over the next decade at around 4.5% of GDP.
On the positive side, in 2008-2013, DOD personnel employed fell 66% with another 40% expected in 2014. But personnel costs have still risen sharply in part due to rising health care costs. Also, the % decline in number of personnel is deceptive as many personnel and related contract services are outsourced to private firms who charge very ‘Big’ fees for their services.
Source: Charts of Defense Spending — U.S. Deficit Spending History, compiled by Christopher Chantrill
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Please note the above figures exclude non-DOD military spending of over $250 billion annually for weapons programs, nuclear maintenance, war funding, Homeland Security, and other federal agency spending. This is an additional military spending of 1.5% of GDP on top of figures noted in I. through VII. above.
The 2012 and 2013 DOD $700-$680 billion baseline defense spending was over 5 times China’s +- $130 billion spending level or 1.5% of GDP in 2012. All other leading nations are spending much less than 2.0% of GDP with Canada and Germany at 1.4% and Japan at less than 1%. Still, the Congressional Budget Office reports that U.S. defense spending grew 9% annually on average from fiscal years 2000 to 2009 — largely because of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. Still, the U.S. military baseline budget constitutes Huge 40% of global arms spending. As one study group concluded:
“The fact that military expenditures are continuing to increase even as other areas are cut suggests a clear strategic choice: the fundamental goal of insuring continued dominance across the spectrum of military capabilities, for both conventional and ‘asymmetrical’ warfare, has NOT changed (“Military Expenditure,” Chapter 5, SPIRI yearbook, June 2010).
If we could bring real defence spending down to 3.5% of GDP as in late 1990s, this would release over $200 billion annually to bring our society’s infrastructure and educational system to a far more productive, quality level while creating millions of jobs. One thing is for sure, most studies show that every million dollars spent in the military will produce over the intermediate term 30% 0r more fewer jobs than will the same investment in infrastructure and green energy.
correction first sentence: John, this is an ongoing serious issue you raise again.
John,
Department of Defense (DoD) spending hardly ever gets cut because many Congressmen consider troop cuts, termination of some weapons systems, closure of unneeded domestic and foreign military bases as a national security risk. In fact, they are really concerned about protecting lost revenue and jobs in their Congressional districts. Even the added high costs of Overseas Contingency Operations and costs of military Support activities — amounting to $250-300 billion per year — decline ever so slowly (see data below).
Once we get into a war of invading a grossly unstable sovereign country, it takes a costly years to get out and costly years to stop expenditures AFTER we get out. That’s why the Iraq and Afghan wars have cost our Treasury, or better said our taxpayers, more than $1.5 trillion … and the cost is still climbing.
This is shown in following 2009 through 2013 summary breakdown of defense expenditures, including recently approved 2014 fiscal year defense budget :
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Year……………Defense ………..Overseas Contingency …….Military Support
…………………Spending………………..Operations………………….Activities…….TOTAL
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2009…………..$521………………………$146……………………………$141………….$808
2010…………..$530………………………$167……………………………$154………….$851
2011…………..$528……………………….$159……………………………$160………….$847
2012…………..$530………………………$126…………………………….$154………….$810
2013…………..$525………………………..$99…………………………….$159………….$783
2014 Budget $520………………………..$92……………………………..$159………….$771
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The DoD base budget of $521 billion for 2014 and actual costs for other years do NOT include the cost of wars. Those costs are put into the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) funds budget which covers the Iraq and Afghan Wars. The 2014 OCO budget of $91 billion reflects funds needed just to wind down the Afghan War! The 2014 budget Support funds budget of $159 billion covers military-related expenditures for the VA, the State Department, the National Nuclear Security Administration, Homeland Security, FBI, Military Construction, etc. I’m not sure where Interest on the mountain of debt to finance our trillion-dollar war-thirst in recent years is included.
What is notable is that Total Defense costs have remained consistently high for a number of years despite the gradual phasing out of Iraq and Afghanistan. And God only knows what other ‘hidden’ military expenses are out there. I sometimes have seen reported figures of $1.0 trillion for total annual military expenditures in past years.
The one positive thing that can be said is that the above total Defense expenditures, if accurate and fully inclusive, are slowly declining towards 4.5% of GDP — compared to less than 2% of GDP for the rest of the world.
This insidious dichotomy also makes one think how stunningly conservatively liberal we can be in accepting skyhigh defense expenditures to protect lives threatened by a possible invader … and how stunningly conservatively obtuse we can be about investing aggressively in green energy to save a planet threatened by a possible environmental ecological, human extinction. One would think the latter is a priority investment pre-condition for the former!
In such times, I try to take comfort in Woody Allen’s remark, “I don’t believe in an after-life but I’m taking an extra change of underware.”
Frank,
Thank you for your incisive comments. To be noted is that one of the biggest, if not the biggest, emitters of GHGs is the American military. Their oil purchases are enormous. With all the vehicles, planes and ships they operate all over the world in addition to the bases they maintain, that represents an enormous contribution to the greenhouse gases that are destroying the planet. Has there ever been a calculation done about the total GHGs emitted by the US military? As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and the enemy is us.”
I just finished a very interesting read by Rachel Maddow called “Drift”. In it she lays out in insightful detail how the US has drifted since Kennedy from the situation the forefathers intended that engaging in war not be comfortable for the American public, that there should be vigorous debate and discourse whenever the possibility of this country engaging in war is imminent. However, via a number of manipulations, the country has for the last 40 years “drifted” into a situation where the country is not only perpetually at war, but the American public is barely even aware of it and does not seem to care much that we are.