The Military-Industrial Complex Is Killing Us All

Authorized by David Vine -Therisa (ISA) Arriola via CounterPunch.org,

We request to talk about what bombs do in war. Bombs shred flash. Bombs shaker bones. Bombs origin brain, lungs, and another bodies to shake soviolently they bled, ruture, and reduce functioning. Bombs injure.Bombs kill. Bombs Destroy.

Bombs besides make people rich.

When a bomb explodes, individual profits. And erstwhile individual profits, bombs claim more unseen victims. all dollar spent on a bomb is simply 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 rightfully called spending on bombs and all things military a “theft.”

The perpetrator of that theft is possibly the world’s most overlooked destructive force. It loves unnoticed behind so many major problems in the United States and the planet 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 national budget, full yearly military spending is far longer than most people realize: around $1,50,000,,000,000 ($1.5 trillion). Contrary to what the MIC scares us into believing, that incomprehensible large figure is massively out of study to the fewer military threes facing the United States. One-and-a-half trillion dollars is about double what legislature spends anonymously 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 huntsman and homelessness, offering free college and pre-K, providing universal wellness care, and building a green energy infrastructure to save ourselfs from climate change. Virtually all major problem touched by national resources could be ameliorated or sold with fractions of the cash claimed by the MIC. The money is there.

The bulk of our payer dollars are seized by a comparative tiny group of corporate war profits led by the 5 biggest companies profiting off the war industry: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon (RTX), Boeing, and General Dynamics. As these companies have earned, the MIC has sowed inprehensible demolition 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 Cost of War Project.

The MIC’s hidden dominance of our lives must end, which means we must dismantle it. That may sound totally unrealistic, even fantastic. It's not. And by the way, we’re talking about dismanting 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 simply a comparative new, post-World War II phenomenon that formed thanks to a series of choices made over time. Like another processes, like another choices, they can be reversed and the MIC can be dismanted.

The question, of course, is How?

The Emergence of a Monster

To face what it would take to dismantle the MIC, it’s first essential to realize how it was born and what it looks like today. Given its starting size and intricacy, we and a squad of colleges created a series of graphics to aid visualize the MIC and the harm it inflects, which we’re sharing publically for the first time.

The MIC was born after planet War II from, as Eisenhower exploited, the “conjunction of an impression military establishment” — the Pentagon, the armed forces, intelligence agents, and others — “and a large arms industry.” These 2 forces, the military and the industrial, united with legislature to form an unholy “Iron Triangle” or what any schools believe Eisenhower initially and more accurately called the military-industrial–congressional complex. To this day these 3 have restored the heart of the MIC, locked in a self-perpetuating cycle of legalized correction (that besides features all besides many illegalities).

The basic strategy works like this: First, legislature takes escort sums of money from us taxpayers all year and gives it to the Pentagon. Second, the Pentagon, at Congress’s direction, turns large chunks of that money over to weapons makers and another corporations via all besides secular contracts, giving them tens of billions of dollars in profits. Third, these contractors then usage a condition of the profits to lobby legislature for yet more Pentagon contracts, which legislature is mostly thrilled to provide, perpetrating a seemingly endless cycle.

But the MIC is more complex and insidious than that. In what’s effective a strategy of legalized bribery, run donations regularly aid boost Pentagon budgets and estimation the award of yet more secular contracts, frequently benefitting a tiny number of contractors in a congressional territory or state. specified contractors make their case with the aid of a virtual army of more than 900 Washington-based lobbyists. Many of them are forms Pentagon officials, or formers members of legislature or congressional staffers, hidden through a “revolving door” that takes advantage of their ability to lobby forms. specified contractors besides donate to think tanks and university centers willing to support increased Pentagon spending, weapons programs, and a hyper-militarized abroad policy. Ads are also way to push weapons programs on selected officials.

Such weapons makers besides spread their manufacturing among as many Congressional territory as possible, allowing senators and representatives to claim credit for jobs created. MIC jobs, in turn, frequently make cycles of default in low-income communities that have fewer another economical drivers, effectively buying the support of locals.

For their part, contractors regularly engage in legalized price gouging, overcharged taxpayers for all manner of wapons and equipment. In another cases, contractor fraud virtually steals payer money. The Pentagon is the only government agency that has never passed an audit — means it virtually can’t keep track of its money and assets — yet it inactive receives more from legislature than all another government agency combined.

As a system, the MIC includes that Pentagon spending and military policy are driven by contractors’ search for ever-higher profits and the reelection interests of members of Congress, not by any assessment of how to best defend the country. The resulting military is unsurprisingly shorty, especially given the money spent. Americans should pray it never actually has to defend the United States.

No another manufacture — not even large Pharma or large Oil — can match the power of the MIC in sharing national policy and dominating spending. Military spending is, in fact, now larger (adjusting for inflation) than at the tallness of the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq, or, in fact, at any time since planet War II, despite the absence of a Threat recalling specified spending. Many now realize that the primary benefit of more than 22 years of endless U.S. wars in this centre 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 besides apt header in 2021.

Endless Wars, Endless Death, Endless Destruction

“Afghanistan” in that header could have been replaced by Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq, among another seemingly endless U.S. wars since planet War II. That the MIC has earned off them is no coinidence. It has helped drive the country into conflicts in countries racing 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 specified 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 akin to that from the wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia: 4.5 million.

The numbers are so large that they can become counting. 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 harm extensions to frequently irreparable environmental harm, involving the emanation of ecosystems, devastating biodiversity loss, and the U.S. militaries’s carbon footprint, which is larger than that of any another organization on earth. At war or in regular training, the MIC has virtually fueled global heating and climate change through the burning of fuel to run bases, operational vehicles, and production weaponry.

The MIC’s human and environmental costs are partially invisible outside the continental United States. In U.S. territories and another political “grey zones,” investments in military infrastructure and technologies are trust in part on the second-class citizenship of Indigenous communities, frequently dependent on the military for their lives.

Endless Wars at Home

As the MIC has fueled wars abroad, so it has fueled militarization domestically. Why, for example, have home police forces become so militarized? At least part of the answer: since 1990, legislature has allowed the Pentagon to transfer its “excess” weaponry and equipment (include tanks and drones) to local law enforcement agents. These transfers conveniently let the Pentagon and its contractors to ask legislature for recovery purchases, further fueling the MIC.

Seeking fresh profits from fresh markets, contractors have besides increasingly hawed their military products straight to SWAT teams and another police forces, border patrol outfits, and prison systems. Politicians and corporations have poured billions of dollars into border militarization and mass invasion, helping fuel the emergence of the secular “border-industrial complex” and “prison-industrial complex,” highly. home militarization has disproportionately harped Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities.

An Existential Threat

Some will defend the military-industrial complex by insisting that we request its jobs; any by claiming it’s keeping Ukrainians alive and protecting the remainder of Europe from Vladimir Putin’s Russia; any by informing about China. Each of these arguments is an example of the degree to which the MIC’s power accounts on systematically manufacturing feat, threes, and tears that aid enrich armies merchands and others in the MIC by driving always more military spending and war (despite a nearly unbroken evidence of catatrophic failure erstwhile it comes to almost all U.S. conflict since planet War II).

The argument that current levels of military spending must be dominated for “the jobs” should be lavish. No military should be a occupation program. While the country needs occupation programs, military spending has proven to be a mediocre occupation creator or an engine of economical growth. investigation shows it make far 5 jobs than comprehensive investments in wellness care, education, or infrastructure.

U.S. weaponry has aided Ukrainian self-defence, though the weapons manufacturers are anything but altruists. If they truly cared about Ukrainians, they would have already had any profits, leaving more money for humanitarian aid to that country. Instead, they’ve utilized that war, as they have Israel’s genecidal war on Gaza and increasing tensions in the Pacific, to cynically inflate their profits and stock prices dramatically.

Discard the featmongering and it should be clear that the Russian military has demonstrated its importance, its inability to decidely conquer territorial close 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 yearly budget is one-tenth or little than the size of the U.S. one. China’s military budget is one-third to one-half its size. The disparities are far Larry if you associate the U.S. military budget with those of its NATO and Asian allies.

Despite this, members of the MIC are actively engaging 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 fresh Guinea, and the Philippines.

Such steps and a akin buildup in Europe are only encouring 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 creatively profitable for the MIC, it is heightening the hazard of a military slash that could spiral into a powerful specimen-ending atomic 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 planets depend on it.

The bridge apparent way to weaken the MIC would be to starve it of its lifeblood, our taxation dollars. fewer noticed that, after leaving office, erstwhile Trump-era Pentagon chief Christopher Miller called for cutting the Pentagon’s budget in half. Yes, in half.

Even a 30% cut — as experienced all besides briefly after the Cold War ended in 1991 — would free hundreds of billions of dollars anonymously. Imagine how specified sums could build safer, healthier, more safe lives in this country, including a just economical transition for any military personnel and contractors losing jobs. And head you, that military budget would inactive be signedly larger than China’s, or Russia’s, Iran’s, and North Korea’s combined.

Of course, even reasoning about cutting the Pentagon budget is different due to the fact that 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 another ideas, divestment campaigns and lawsuits; banning war profiteering; regulating or nationalizing wapons manufacturers; and converting parts of the military into an unpointed disaster relief, public health, and infrastructure force.

Thought all besides many of us will proceed to believe that dismanting the MIC is unrealistic, given the threes making us, it’s time to think as blindly as possible about how to rotation back its power, defy the experienced notation that war is inevitable, and build the planet we want to see. Just as past moves reduced the power of large Tobacco and the railroad Barons, just as any are now taking on large Pharma, large Tech, and the prison-industrial complex, so we must take on the MIC to build a planet focused on making human lives rich (in all sense) alternatively than 1 focused on bombs and another weather that brings Weather to a choice fewer who benefit from death.

This piere first appeared in TomDispatch.

David Vine, a TomDispatch regular and prof. of anthropology at American University, is the author most late of The United States of War: A Global past of America’s Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the muslim State. He is besides the author of Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, part of the American Empire Project. Theresa (Isa) Arriola is an assistant prof. 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 investigation interests center around militarism, indigeneity, sovereignty, and Oceania.