US Military Rot: New Dimensions and New Dangers

David Kerans

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed…. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people…. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. –President Dwight Eisenhower

Eisenhower’s warnings regarding the insidious influence of the military are some of the best known of all reflections on American society, owing to their prescience. Diligent observers have kept a close watch on the manner in which the swelling military-industrial complex has been shaping the country’s economy and affecting its foreign policy, such that a significant portion of the public is at least somewhat aware of the relevant issues. Much less well known, however, are the ways in which the long hegemony of the military-industrial complex has allowed it both to expand its influence and to rot. As we shall see, the last decade of military adventurism has revealed alarming new processes at work, raising problems which not even Eisenhower anticipated.

Sorry, No Peace Dividend for You

The enormity of US military budgets is no secret. Even leaving out expenses directly related to ongoing conflicts, the country now spends more on the military every year than do the next 14 nations combined. (1) The defense budget did shrink modestly in the 1990s with the end of the Cold War, but the so-called Peace Dividend was short-lived indeed. From 9-11 to 2005 the defense budgets jumped 40%--not including direct costs of conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq-- and have continued to rise quickly from there. (2) Current military spending and interest payments on debt from past wars now absorbs about 45% of the Federal budget. (3) Insofar as the mainstream media bothers to reflect on the burden the defense budget imposes on taxpayers, it highlights the ever-increasing sophistication of American weaponry as an expensive but eminently desirable national achievement, and lauds almost every outlay meant to support the men in uniform. But close inspection of the defense industry yields far less flattering explanations for the expenses.

“The Pentagon, a Moral Sewer…” (4)

The most succinct characterization of the route to higher defense budgets is “low-ball the cost projections and back-load the political engineering”. In other words, the military agencies systematically understate the cost of proposed weapons systems, so as to ease their inclusion in defense budget authorizations. Jobs and money for the programs are then farmed out to selected congressional districts, which helps to harness the economic fortunes of those areas to the continuation of those programs, even after the inevitable cost overruns come to light (the gap between stated costs and actual costs for weapons programs is astonishing, in the range of $50-100 billion annually as of 2005 (5)). Congressmen and Senators are then beholden to the Pentagon and the defense contractors to keep programs in their districts running. They approve additional funding, they do nothing to enforce tough standards of testing on dubious weapons systems, and upon leaving Capitol Hill they eagerly anticipate lucrative offers from the defense contractors they have favored during their terms of office. The upshot is a military-industrial-congressional complex with an insatiable appetite for raising defense budgets, and an intrinsic antipathy to reforms that would cut the colossal amount of waste by 1) establishing competitive bidding on military projects, 2) establishing ruthlessly realistic testing of weapons systems, and 3) forbidding public servants from jumping to private sector jobs in the defense industry. (6)

Unsurprisingly, a flourishing culture of corruption accompanies the escalating defense budgets, and motivates well placed politicians to resist reform of the system. At the turn of the century the Inspector General of the Department of Defense conceded it could not account for at least $1 trillion in money spent, and in 2001 Secretary Rumsfeld allowed that the total could be as high as $2.3 trillion. (7) There is no evidence that matters have improved since. In 2005 both the Government Accountability Office and Office of Management and Budget identified the Pentagon as particularly lax in managing its money. (8) And field operations in Iraq and Afghanistan offer many more opportunities to overspend on one’s friends. (9)

Corporate Bedfellows

Having securely coopted the Congress, the Pentagon has not neglected to cement alliances with the US corporatocracy. The Department of Defense has outsourced all manner of functions to the private sector, including to corporations that have no intrinsic connection to the defense sector. In the spirit of free market religion, the military advertises its wholesale privatization of functions and services as efficiency minded. But the argument is a farce--one need only notice the gargantuan (up to 100 percent) disparity in the cost of contract employees and government functionaries to expose it. (10) And the bill is enormous. A recent count found the Department had 47,000 primary contractors, or over 100,000 firms, including subcontractors, and if a full tally of the Federal money headed their way were made, it would lift the published defense budget by about two-thirds, or $300 billion. (11) The avalanche of money sustains and coopts everyone from Halliburton ($6 billion in one recent year) to Electronic Data Systems Corporation ($2.4 billion) to Verizon ($277 million) to Proctor & Gamble ($362 million) to Russell’s Donuts shop in Oklahoma ($163,000). (12) Even academia is in tow, with about 350 colleges and universities agreeing to do Pentagon-funded research. (13)

Amid all this waste the Pentagon spares no effort to keep the media on its side, both in the US and elsewhere. Believe it or not, the military allocated at least $4.7 billion this year to "influence operations" and has more than 27,000 employees devoted to such activities. (14)

“Fire the Generals!”

With Congress and the corporatocracy in its pocket, the military can afford itself the luxury not merely of mediocrity, but staggering episodes of incompetence. Analysis of the 2003 war in Iraq provides overflowing evidence of this incompetence. Spineless careerists have predominated in the US Army in earlier periods, but perhaps never so thoroughly as now, and so the dismal conduct of the Iraq War is no accident, argues Douglas MacGregor in a vehement and authoritative summary. (15) The advance into Iraq was far too timid, delaying the occupation of Baghdad and allowing Saddam Hussein and innumerable Baathists to escape capture. The US commanders did not sense the desirability of minimizing Iraqi casualties in the fighting, so as to position themselves as liberators. They did not foresee the usefulness of the Iraqi Army, electing instead to disband it, and thereby fuel the insurgency. They were tone-deaf to the humiliations the Iraqis were suffering amid the occupation. They did not anticipate the insurgency, nor recognize it once it began, nor compose any coherent strategy to defeat it, nor imbibe the lessons of analogous campaigns (from the French experience in Algeria, for instance). And they lost the moral high ground in spectacular fashion at Abu Ghraib. Most telling of all, as poorly as the top command has performed, none of them have been sacked. Field commanders used to be held accountable in the US Army, but times have apparently changed.

Black Operations and Lawlessness

The rot does not end with the collapse of budgetary responsibility and command accountability, unfortunately. The shift from a citizen army to a professional force after the Vietnam War has transformed the officer corps as well as the lower ranks, and has eroded commitment to values consistent with a republic. Lifelong career officers now preponderate even in wartime. Very few are disposed to resist the expansion of secrecy and lawlessness under the military umbrella. (16) The Department of Defense now rivals the intelligence agencies in the pursuit of black operations, which not even Congress can inspect. About 4 million people now have security clearances to work on classified projects, which is more than twice the number of all federal government employees. (17) And in 2004 Secretary Rumsfeld won a duel versus the CIA, to have the Unified Command Plan for the Global War on Terror designate his Special Operations Command (SOCOM) the “lead combatant commander for planning, synchronizing, and, as directed, executing global operations.” (18) As it happens, SOCOM is less subject to political control—even from the President—than is the CIA. (19) And control from the judicial branch is even less likely, given the precedent of the Supreme Court’s verdict on United States vs. Reynolds 60 years ago, which enshrined the executive branch’s right to withhold evidence of any kind from judges, even in private, upon the assertion of a national security interest. (20

In sum, therefore, the US is saddled with a military colossus boring ominous holes in its budget, its moral standing, and its constitutional foundations. And there is little sign of reform on the horizon.

NOTES

1 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, figures for 2008. (http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending)

2 Winslow T. Wheeler & Lawrence J. Korb, Military Reform: A Reference Handbook, Praeger, 2007, op. cit., p.75.

3 Friends Committee on National Legislation, July 2008 (http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending)

4 “…the Pentagon, a moral sewer dedicated to using other people’s money to feed the predators in the Hobbesian jungle known as the military-industrial-congressional complex.” Franklin C. Spinney, “Genghis John,” Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute, July 1997, p.44.

5 As per a Congressional Budget Office study, cited in Wheeler & Korb, op. cit., p.24).

6 an amendment Senator Pryor promoted in the 1980s barely had 20 supporters in the Senate. A diluted version passed into law, whereupon the Pentagon summarily bypassed it in execution (Wheeler & Korb, op. cit., pp.13, 37, Ch. 3 passim, and elsewhere). A recent overview of Congressmen’s complicity in padding defense budgets is Bob Edgar and Bill Goodfellow, “Where our Defense Money Goes”, Boston Globe, August 5th, 2009.

7 Nick Turse, The Complex: How the Military Invades our Everyday Lives, Metropolitan Books, 2008, p.53. Presumably only a fraction of the untraceable funds was actually embezzled.

8 Wheeler & Korb, op. cit., pp.14, 16.

9 See e.g., Robert Naiman, “Our Corrupt Occupation of Afghanistan”, CommonDreams.org, November 13th, 2009. Many more could be added.

10 See, e.g. Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: the Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World, Dutton Adult, 2009, p.278, citing the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2007, and Frida Berrigan, “Military Industrial Complex 2.0: Cubicle Mercenaries, Subcontracting Warriors, and Other Phenomena of a Privatizing Pentagon”, TomDispatch.com, September 15th, 2008, citing a 2008 GAO report.

11 Turse, op. cit., p.3.

12 Turse, op. cit., pp. 2, 42, 73, 75; Frida Berrigan, op. cit.

13 Turse, op. cit., p.35.

14 John Hanna, “AP CEO: Military Emphasizes Spin, New Rules Needed”, Associated Press, February 7th, 2009.

15 Douglas MacGregor, “Fire the Generals!”, Defense and the National Interest, March 2006.

16 See, e.g., William Pfaff, “America Owned by its Army”, CommonDreams.org, November 9th, 2009.

17 Paglen, op. cit., p.4.

18 Paglen, op. cit. pp.267-8.

19 See e.g., Paglen, op. cit., p. 268.

20 See e.g., Paglen, op. cit., pp.166-7. There is some room to challenge the verdict of US vs. Reynolds.

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Source: http://en.fondsk.ru/article.php?id=2609