Preface. Much of this post is based on Miriam Pemberton’s 2023 book “Six Stops on the National Security Tour”.  Large sections of the book are about why past attempts to cash in on the ending of the cold War since 1991 or even before that didn’t work out. She proposes that military funding should be diverted now to prevent the climate crisis to set up companies to build electric vehicles, wind turbines and more.

Of course, that won’t work! That is what my books and this website go to great lengths to explain.  Renewables are not renewable. They depend on fossil fuels every single step of their life cycle.

But I like the idea of using the military money to do whatever we can now to make life better for future generations.  For starters, let’s stop our endless military engagements as much as possible and use more diplomacy.

Any money that can be pried away from the military to civilian uses needs to go towards a vast retraining of the U.S. workforce towards organic agriculture, fixing broken things, birth control and other “what to do” ideas in the last chapter of my book “Life After Fossil Fuels: A reality check on alternative energy”.

Biden’s infrastructure development plan could help this transition, but hasn’t so far, since it takes years to design, gain approval, and hire people to build or repair dams, bridges, roads and more. So much of this is in the red states too that depend on military projects, and since it isn’t happening yet, they have no reason that they can see to stop voting for Trump.

Here’s my very incomplete summary of Pemberton’s book about why it has been so hard to use the peace dividend from the cold war towards reducing the military budget and doing constructive things with it.

We’ve all been hammered with the message that the government should never favor any industries, that Capitalism is in the Driver’s Seat.  That is patently untrue when it comes to government spending on the military. That is where most of the undesignated part of the budget goes. We’ve become the Military Industrial Complex Eisenhower warned us about.   State planning of the military is the American Way.  And there is a lot of money for the government to redistribute, despite the wealthy and corporations not paying their fair share of taxes.

The U.S. is the wealthiest nation that has ever existed, thanks to our natural resources, especially oil, coal, and natural gas, but also many other minerals, fresh water, fantastic topsoil for agriculture, and timber to name just a few. This immense wealth could have been spent on national health care, education, infrastructure improvements, pandemic preparation, child care, affordable housing, drug addiction treatment, and hundreds of other endeavors that benefit civilians, the environment, and future generations rather than military contractors and arms merchants.

The military budget now is far higher than ever in our history, more than at the height of the Cold War, exceeding the grand total of the next highest 11 nations, most of them allies.

Worse yet, we are one of the Bad Guys!  The U.S. has made 392 military interventions since 1776, accelerating in recent decades. Diplomacy has been replaced with force-first invasions.  Over 70% of Ambassadors used to be seasoned experts in the countries they were assigned to, now 70% are rewarded with these positions for having donated money to political campaigns.   Our invasions usually backfire, waste trillions of dollars, and threaten U.S. long-term interests and security (Toft 2023, GPF 2005). At least 337,000 bombs have been dropped over the past 20 years alone (Benjamin 2022).

If only we could convert swords into plowshares, We have tried. This book is full of examples, I’ve only excerpted a few of them. Pemberton has a chapter into attempts to find a use for the 21 square mile Pine Bluff Arkansas military base where chemical weapons used to be made. Brilliant ideas were brainstormed, a great deal of time and money spent trying to recruit new businesses, but in the end, this area is simply too rural to attract educated and skilled workers.  Nor does it have the electric transmission, internet, road, and other essential infrastructure, or restaurants and homes.

This is a problem at most rural bases that should be closed. Despite massive inflows of military money, the areas they are in are still steeped in poverty and citizens fight fiercely to keep pointless bases open.

Yet the military would like to close bases.  They see it as a good way to save money to use for other projects.

In 1990, Congress took base closure decisions mostly out of politics. Power was given to non-partisan commissions on Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC). In the past 30 years, five BRAC rounds have closed more than 350 installations that saved $14 billion a YEAR.

Once a base appeared on the closure list, the BRAC process created a local committee made up of all community stakeholders to come up with a redevelopment plan, to be funded and assisted by the Pentagon’s Office of Economic Adjustment (OEA).

But bases were too lucrative for congressional members to allow to keep going, and in 2005 they effectively shut BRAC down.  Despite that, every year DoD testifies to its current excess base capacity; more than 1 in 5 could be gotten rid of.  Pentagon officials then talk about what they’d do with the savings and ask Congress to authorize another BRAC round.

Every year, Congress says no. They do this even though studies find that communities whose bases have closed can come back stronger to keep the economy afloat. Such as the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, which closed after the Cold War and now supports more jobs than when it was a military base, in a varied microeconomy of  145 enterprises that include retail, marine manufacturing, a clean energy incubator, an art museum, and a hospital complex.

The last BRAC round of 2005 produced cases like the Brunswick Naval Air Station in Brunswick, Maine. Brunswick’s redevelopers wasted a lot of time and money but eventually turned two million square feet of vacant buildings into a home for 150 businesses employing 2,500 people, branch campuses for Southern Main Community College and the University of Maine, a regional business airport, a technology business incubator, and the former base housing units full to capacity next to new housing under construction.

OEA has identified numerous other cases in which converted bases have ultimately generated more civilian jobs than existed when the base was used for military purposes. They’ve been used for industrial parks, civilian airports, educational institutions, and public parks.

The plentiful examples of successful base conversion tend to cluster in or near urban areas, where land is at a premium.  

But today, municipalities around military bases, urban as well as rural, have organized themselves into an Association of Defense Communities, to stop a new BRAC from happening. They have an energetic and well-populated Defense Communities Caucus in Congress to help them. If the Pentagon ever gets its way and convenes a BRAC, these communities will of course be competing with each other to stay off the list.

Of all the forms of Pentagon waste—gold-plated weapons systems that don’t work; contracts that inflate their costs; redundant, gold-plated healthcare plans that retired generals don’t need—excess base capacity is the one the military brass, at least, agrees should be cut.

Most communities resist, having come to depend on this reliable source of “direct” jobs (employees at the base) and “indirect” ones (supplying the base’s needs, including the dry cleaner and the pizza shop where “direct” employees take their business.) This includes those who traffic mightily in the rhetoric of complaint over the oppressions of federal intervention.

For years, this resistance has worked, blocking a new round of closures and realignments since 2005. And the Army continues to pay half a billion dollars annually to maintain scores of these underused buildings and properties across the country. These facilities quietly deteriorate, and the employment they provide shrinks as fewer and fewer people are needed to do less and less.

And rural bases are much harder to close down.  They are often the only place that has jobs in a region.

Converting a base or military factory to civilian purposes anywhere is really hard to do

Most new businesses fail, since they exist solely to provide profits to their shareholders, every quarter. That’s all that matters.  Profits now. The military has never had to worry about this, the government money keeps flowing in.

Most attempts to divert military money to commercial enterprises has failed because funding wsa too small, or ended too soon.   I can’t emphasize enough how cush the military projects are, funded by massive amounts of money for decades.  There are no customers to please!  Failure is rewarded with even more money, especially now that so few contractors exist they are too big to fail, and low bidders with no experience “discover” they can’t deliver without even more time and money too late into projects to turn over to another bidder.  But that is no problem for the politicians in that district, it just means more money flowing in and even better chances of reelection.

The commercial world is the opposite, and operates almost entirely on fixed-price contracts, in ways totally foreign to military contractors who have no idea how to make commercial projects or scale production up. They might produce just 50 a year. Using standards far greater than what’s needed for civilian products – standards and precision that keep complex equipment operating in battle.

It takes many years to retrain military personnel to do something completely different. They can’t walk away from a job of maintaining siloed missiles to constructing wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles and so on. That is completely outside of their experience, and venturing into the unknown is scary for many. It is also hard to convert abandoned defense plants and buildings to a new purpose.

In addition to closing bases, there is a tremendous amount of loose cash in DoD sofas that could be shaken out by identifying the tremendous waste and corruption.  But the military still doesn’t have an accounting system that can keep track of what is spent and trillions of dollars have disappeared. Constant Congressional, inspector general, and congressional budget office demands for reform have gone nowhere for decades.  Guess it’s not hard to imagine why, I can just hear some general saying “it would be a shame if your home and all your family was killed by a bomb someday”.  Okay, they aren’t gangsters, but then again, what do you call a group stealing trillions of taxpayer dollars?

Even when a new project gets funding, it doesn’t last, so constant new funding needs to be found, but it usually isn’t, meanwhile taking time and money away for fund raising rather than towards the new business.  Military projects are endlessly funded with fat contracts.  A completely opposite model.

Here are a few of many examples from Pemberton’s book:

Clinton promised a dollar-for-dollar reinvestment of defense funds into the civilian economy. This didn’t happen. Between 1993 and 1997 federal funding for the conversion of the military economy amounted to about $16.5 billion—a tiny fraction of the defense dollars cut during the post–Cold War period.

Calls to reverse the post–Cold War cuts to Pentagon spending grew louder. While Colin Powell, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, began pointing to the demise of the Soviet Union to observe that, “We are running out of enemies,” defense hawks began arguing for new military budget increases by invoking the fallback enemy: “It’s a dangerous world out there.” Others leaned on the idea that we might someday have one: We needed to “prevent the emergence of a peer adversary.” On 9/11, they found their enemy, and instead of a police action to find and capture terrorists, they launched two wars, framed as a Global War on Terror (GWOT). Its price tag is estimated at $6.4 trillion, and counting. So much for a Peace Dividend.

By 1995, the ranks of Southern California’s laid-off aerospace workers had swelled to 210,000. While they could sign up for brief outplacement services, only 1 or 2 percent were getting substantial retraining.

The Clinton administration adopted two main strategies to deal with the contraction of the defense industry. First were the programs to help companies, workers, and communities adapt to new markets. In addition to those programs, the administration’s flagship was the Technology Reinvestment Project (TRP). It funded teams of defense and commercial companies plus other partners such as academic and economic development institutions, labor unions and nonprofits, to commercialize defense technologies

The program’s technology policy and incentives privileged “dual-use technology,” that is, technology with both military and civilian applications, which steered contractors away from more decisive moves toward civilian markets.

Pemberton explains how Clinton’s attempt to reform the military contracting did the exact opposite: it created just a few too-big-to-fail contractors.  The administration provided financial help for large contractors to merge with one another. In 1994, Lockheed merged with Martin Marietta to create what remains today the largest military contractor in the world. It immediately set in motion plans to acquire General Dynamics’s rocket division, followed by Rockwell defense and space operations. Also in 1994, Northrop acquired Grumman Aerospace Corporation Northrop Grumman then proceeded to absorb Westinghouse’s defense unit. And so on. In 1997 the last of the major post–Cold War mergers fell into place when Boeing acquired McDonnell Douglas, and a month later the defense sector of Hughes Electronics Corporation. These companies devoured each other, so the clout of the remaining behemoths grew.  And with only one or two contractors left to compete for each major aerospace contract, they became too big to fail, and could use this new leverage to push prices, and profits, higher. And the scramble to acquire or be acquired and to manage the radical requirements of staying in business on fewer contracts, preoccupied the majority of the contractors. It diverted the energies and attention that might have been applied to the alternative: keeping their employees busy by working seriously on adapting their assets to civilian markets.

For 40-plus years the United States had concentrated its talents and treasure around the mission of winning the Cold War. It organized the lion’s share of the federal government’s resources around this goal which, in turn, centered the country’s industrial capacity on military production. This was our de facto industrial policy. The term itself was mostly taboo, equated with un-American Soviet-style five-year plans and with impeding the free market by giving government the license to “pick winners and losers.” Only the Pentagon was allowed to do that.

Much of the Clinton administration’s peace dividend instead went to tax cuts and deficit reduction. The amount of civilian investment was far too small for big contractors to diverge from their profitable military contracts. They also thought that this was a temporary aberration that wouldn’t last, and that turned out to be true, when it did in the late 1990s. They also convinced top public officials that the peace dividend could be spent on expanding arms exports to get rid of what couldn’t be sold to the U.S. government.

Above all contractors strategically donated campaign money to the members with the most influence over the budget and spread subcontracts over as many districts as possible to rope in even more congressmen. Since then money making opportunities (for military leaders and contractors at the top of the food chain) have come by shifting manufacturing overseas or states without unions, lower taxes, and fewer regulations.

Other swords to plowshares writing from the book:

Congress commissioned a small federal agency called the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) to scope out how the United States should adjust to these extraordinary developments on the home front. Before being shut down in 1995 by the new Republican congress, OTA produced two landmark reports. The first, After the Cold War: Living With Lower Defense Spending, looked at the role of federal, state, and local governments in helping workers, communities, and businesses adjust.

The second, Defense Conversion: Redirecting R&D, focused mostly on the three nuclear weapons labs. This report began, “The end of the Cold War frees the Nation to turn more of its energies into building a stronger civilian economy.” It examined ways to strengthen the mechanisms of technology transfer from the labs to create jobs in the private sector, particularly the CRADAs between lab scientists and private companies.

The end of the Cold War offered the country an opening to turn these R&D institutions toward national challenges beyond exercising military power—those that have clear benefits to human welfare but need pre-competitive R&D investment.

From academia, the Project on Regional and Industrial Economics (PRIE) at Rutgers University published a year-long study in 1995, “Coming in from the Cold: The Future of Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories.” The report noted that the Labs’ budget had expanded by 60% during the 1980s, and then declined only 12% after the Cold War ended. Based on two independent assessments by nuclear scientists, it concluded that the deterrent could be maintained while reducing the nuclear weapons work by two-thirds.

One-third, they argued, could be shared by deficit reduction, environmental remediation, dismantlement and an expansion of the non-proliferation mission. And the remaining one-third they recommended dedicating to new non-nuclear missions in energy, environment, health, and transportation.

The challenge would be to focus on missions that were clearly in the public interest, were similar in scale to the nuclear mission, and drew on capabilities the lab was uniquely suited to provide.

The Los Alamos Study Group produced its own study in 1992: “The Conversion of Los Alamos National Laboratory to a Peacetime Mission: Barriers and Opportunities.” They examined the pros and cons of four scenarios: (1) the status quo; (2) shifting the Lab’s research agenda toward the non-proliferation mission, with a smaller budget; (3) the lab would become a “Critical Technologies” lab and turn toward more research on alternative energy sources; (4) it would become a “Disarmament Lab” with a smaller budget devoted to overseeing the downsizing of the stockpile to a number necessary for a deterrent while supporting cooperative global security measures.

Amid talk that Los Alamos’s mission might be obsolete, its employees wondered whether they’d have a job the next year. The editor of the Santa Fe Reporter remembers a “weaponeer” describing the Lab as a charging rhino. Its target is gone, but it has too much momentum to stop, too much poundage for quick turns. Meanwhile, lab workers cling to the back of the beast, not knowing where they will be at the end of the ride.

In 1994 the Secretary of Energy convened a Task Force on Alternative Futures for the DoE National Laboratories, unofficially called the Galvin Report after its chair, the former CEO of Motorola. But in the end the task force members’ conception of alternatives leaned heavily toward the status quo. Their idea of post-Cold War change was to shift the Labs from building and explosively testing new nuclear weapons to “stewarding” the existing stockpile and preventing other countries from acquiring them. The task force mostly side-stepped questions of closures, consolidations, and budgets. And they were mostly skeptical of the Labs’ efforts to help commercialize their technologies, particularly through CRADAs. They did urge the Department of Energy to give higher priority, with “a heightened sense of urgency,” to the cleanup. They admonished the labs not to go scrambling for new missions, but rather to stick with what they were good at, defined as national security, energy, and environmental remediation.

Remarkably (or maybe not, given its corporate leadership), the task force trained its greatest rhetorical enthusiasm on this “bold” idea: “The principal organizational recommendation of this task force is that the laboratories be as close to corporatized as is imaginable.”

One brief section of the report gestures toward a genuinely alternative mission for the labs: The Task Force generally believes that the highest priority research areas by the Department [of Energy] and the laboratories are in the areas of energy efficiency, conservation, renewable energy sources (including photovoltaics, biomass, wind, geothermal and hydrogen) and more efficient recovery of gas and oil resources.

But the labs’ missions have remained largely the same, as their budgets have gradually climbed.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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ENDNOTE. To pay for the transition it is essential to cut the budget and shift the money and soldiers and other personnel into building long-lasting roads, buildings, and more. So I may have left out some bits above, here are all my kindle notes

Today the U.S. says that state planning is not the “American Way”.  But it is – Congress votes every year to give most federal money to a state-planned military economy. That needs to change with incentives for a new industrial policy that centers around national health care, infrastructure improvements, pandemic preparation, child care, affordable housing, drug addiction treatment, and hundreds of other endeavors that benefit civilians, not military contractors and arms merchants. Civilian manufacturing should be given the guaranteed funding, R&D, and guaranteed and subsidized markets that military production has today.

The U.S. has become the Bad guy, not the shining Democracy America pretends to be. The U.S. has made 392 military interventions since 1776, with the numbers accelerating in more recent decades. Diplomacy has been replaced with force-first invasions.  Over 70% of Ambassadors used to be seasoned experts in the countries they were assigned to, now 70% are rewarded with these positions for having donated money to political campaigns.  Our invasions usually backfire, waste trillions of dollars, and threaten U.S. long-term interests and security (Toft 2023, GPF 2005). At least 337,000 bombs have been dropped over the past 20 years alone (Benjamin 2022).

And it was the U.S. that revived the Cold War by expanding our nuclear missile program to the tune of $1.2 trillion budgeted so far, pretty damned typical, after all what military project has not gone way over budget with the few contractors left too big to fail? The problem with a nuclear arms project is that it has triggered China and Russia into doing likewise.  Meanwhile hypersonic missiles are being developed. The President only has 10 minutes to decide whether to push the nuclear button, hypersonic missiles reduce that time to just a few minutes.  Surely that is reason enough to turn our swords into plowshares (Perry 2020, Rosenbaum 2011, Schlosser 2014, Philippe 2023, Kaplan 2021).

We need to cut the military budget, yet new funding triggered by the Russian invasion and widening war in the Middle East in 2024 threaten to become a blank check. There is no scarcity of obvious places to cut. In 2016 the Washington Post uncovered an internal Pentagon study showing that the Defense Department could save $125 billion over five years simply by reducing its bloated workforce, which currently includes 200,000 people working in property-management alone. Evidently fearing this tip of the iceberg might inspire more scrutiny underneath, the Pentagon then imposed security restrictions on the data, “ensuring,” the Post said, that “no one could replicate the findings.”

Cutting Isn’t Enough

Throughout the book communities struggling to replace defense dependency with new economic foundations have had a hard time, mainly because the federal budget incentives aren’t generous enough.  Enterprises struggle to get the finance they need from many state, federal, and private sources, mere crumbs compared to the military fountain of money that flows even when contractors fail because there are so few now that they are too big to fail. Failure merely means even more money will be allocated.

Surely we don’t need the immense land and real estate the military occupies – it is expensive.  There are thousands of massive military and contractor buildings in just the DC area. The most well-known is the 6.5 million square foot Pentagon, the largest office building in the world with 26,000 workers in the building.

Then there are hundreds of other military installations such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Defense Mapping Agency, the Defense Information Systems Agency, the U.S. Army National Guard Readiness Center and, upriver, the CIA. Up I-95 at Fort Meade, between Washington and Baltimore, is the National Security Agency (NSA), whose five million square feet is second only to the Pentagon. And, finally, the ground in this area is saturated with defense contractors. The database governmentcontractswon.com lists more than a thousand of them in Arlington County alone, where the Pentagon sits. Since 2000 these Arlington contractors have signed more than 55,000 reported individual military contracts totaling more than $54 billion.

 

Little manufacturing is done here—the fighter jets are assembled far from Washington. The bulk of DC contractors populate sleek, corporate-bland office high-rises, mostly in services such as engineering, logistics, and information technology with names that tell you little about what they do. For many of these companies, the work product consists mostly of interfacing with the Pentagon on behalf of their manufacturing facilities located far away.

 

A high-rise at 1235 Clark Street has many contractors, from small branches of Big Five prime contractors General Dynamics and Raytheon, to lesser knowns such as Syncadd Systems (Army, Navy, and Air Force contracts), Concurrent Technologies, and the Air Force Deputy General Counsel.  Raytheon after a merger with United Technologies, is now the second largest military contractor in the world. Nearby is #8: BAE Systems, and down river #1, Lockheed Martin.

 

And beyond…  Out beyond the Beltway, in every state of the union, and in nearly every congressional district, is the rest of the military’s domestic reach: the missile silos, in places like North Dakota and Missouri, the weapons arsenals in Nevada and Pennsylvania, for example, the vast network of military bases that reaches into every state. And the contractors: In fiscal year 2020 the DoD awarded them more than 3.6 million contracts.

 

The Defense Department reports that its military footprint occupies nearly 5,000 total sites around the world, more than 4,100 of them within U.S. boundaries: 148 are “large sites” defined as worth more than $2 billion; 89 are “medium sites” ($1–2 billion) and 3,208 “small” sites (worth less than $1 billion.) Apart from the coastal bases, most belong to either the Army or the Air Force.

 

Bases on U.S. soil include the Naval Submarine Base at Kings Bay, Georgia, where the Connecticut-built Ohio-class nuclear submarines have their stealth properties refurbished. The largest aircraft “boneyard” in the world is outside Tucson, where a thousand planes that no longer fly sit lined up in the desert to rot and be harvested for parts. There are the missile testing sites, including one at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico which, at more than a million acres, plus nuclear missile silo sites in places like North Dakota and Wyoming. And there are massive bases like Fort Bragg in North Carolina, which houses more than 50,000 active-duty military personnel. DoD’s Base Structure report lists 121 separate military bases in California, including training sites, fuel depots, and munitions arsenals.

And a vast network of 750 military bases in at least 85 countries. Some of them are mere radar stations, while others are as large as mid-size cities, like Camp Humphreys in South Korea and the Baumholder Army base in Germany. To date, no other country has even tried to compete with this: Britain, France, and Russia combined to operate between 10 and 20 each. China has only one military base outside the South China Sea.

 

Plus an active-duty force of nearly 1.4 million, most highly concentrated in the Army, followed by nearly equal numbers in the Navy and Air Force, and much smaller numbers in the Marines and Coast Guard. The reserves add an additional 850,000, plus a civilian work force of 758,000.

 

A total of 63,000 enlisted personnel and 6,500 civilians are assigned to the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), which operates separately and more secretively in, SOCOM says, 70% of the world’s countries. Each of the four main service branches has its own special forces and dedicated arsenal. In addition, a classified number of intelligence service employees work secretively overseas in military operations beyond intelligence gathering

 

We live in a National Security State

 

Building the apparatus of this National Security State coincided with the debut of The Nuclear Age. In the 1950s, the threat to America became the threat of wholesale extinction, and it turned global. In the name of National Security, the reach of the NSA and other intelligence agencies has come to include the clandestine surveillance of millions, including U.S. citizens. The 9/11 attacks became a pretext for the Bush Administration to override, secretly, the legal constraints on such domestic surveillance.

 

Another consequence of living in a National Security State is this: If what constitutes national security has never been defined, and how to achieve it remains contested, how can we know how much money is enough to devote to it? When “security” is at stake, the case for erring on the side of more always starts out ahead. The Department of Defense’s official National Security Strategy (NSS) perennially cites a set of national security needs that can’t be paid for with the current budget, and then uses this disconnect to argue for more money.

 

Eisenhower’s doubts were most forcefully expressed, at the end of his presidency. In his famous Farewell Address he raised the alarm about this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry [which] is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.

 

Which came under radical questioning three decades later, when its rationale—the Cold War against the Soviet Union—fell apart. But the “need” revamped and reasserted itself, and the complex came back as strong as ever. It is now poised to command more money, adjusted for inflation, than it had at any time during the Cold War.

 

The economy created by military spending is deeply embedded in communities across America. Each place has, in some way and at some time, tried to become less dependent on the Pentagon, to find other useful things to do. We will look at these openings at the local level—in communities as well as individual companies—to a less-militarized economy. The book will make the case for what needs to happen for these efforts to succeed on a national scale.

 

Nobody has really improved on Eisenhower’s famous rationale crafted in his Farewell Address—for “not a penny more.” 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. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

 

The cost of weapons systems

 

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.…

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

 

The category “National Defense” occupies the first spot in our annual federal budget’s 20 categories of federal spending. This category funds not just the Department of Defense (DoD), but also about two-thirds of the Energy Department (DoE), since most of DoE’s money actually funds not energy policy but the country’s nuclear weapons complex.

 

Nuclear Weapons

 

The Strategic Command focuses on the equipment of nuclear war, including 3,750 nuclear warheads, 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), 280 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, 66 strategic bombers, and 14 nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, plus the assorted systems attempting to give early warning of a nuclear attack and create a missile shield to protect against one. As of 2020 the Army’s tools of conventional warfare include tanks and armored fighting vehicles, engineering and maintenance vehicles, amphibious landing vehicles, antitank weapons, artillery, and missile-launching platforms, including aircraft, helicopters, and drones.

The United States has roughly 3,800 warheads, 1,750 of them deployed, the remainder held in reserve, plus about 2,000 retired and waiting to be dismantled—enough to blow up the world many times over. They include several warhead designs for each leg of the nuclear triad: about 400 of them deployed on Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles sitting in silos, with roughly 900 Trident missiles cruising the world attached to submarines, and about 450 bombs ready to be loaded on B-52, B-2 and soon B-21 bombers based in the United States and Europe.58 These numbers are approximations because in 2018 the Trump administration began classifying them. And while the Biden administration’s introductory National Security memorandum promised the highest standards of transparency, as of 2021 these numbers remain classified.

During the time the United States has been reducing the numbers of its nuclear weapons, it has been increasing their explosive power and speed of delivery. The majority of the stockpile is located in two places: Kirtland AFB, near the Sandia lab in Albuquerque, and in Kitsap, Washington. Conventional wisdom holds that deterrence requires hanging on to some of them.

In his Prague speech, Obama declared “clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” The path he outlined ran through arms control. The new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty his administration negotiated with the Russians prescribed further stockpile reductions—the preview, he said, to further cuts and negotiations to bring all the nuclear states toward abolition. Integral to the plan was bolstering international control. But when it came time to ratify the treaty, Obama had lost his congressional majority. To get the cuts in each country’s stockpile, he agreed to a (devil’s) bargain: in exchange the United States would commit to replacing almost its entire nuclear arsenal, warheads and delivery systems and all. Under this scenario, a win for arms control requires a trillion dollar-plus win for the arsenal’s military industrial interests.

Then the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review reversed the Obama plan to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in the country’s national security strategy. Whereas Obama’s replacement deal traded off massive new costs for reduced numbers of warheads, Trump began an assault on the structures of arms control—the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, New START, the Open Skies Treaty, flirting with the idea of restarting testing, building a low-yield, destabilizing, “usable” nuclear weapon—while goosing the budget.

In 2020 the Air Force’s chief of nuclear operations described the replacement program not in terms of preventing nuclear war but as giving the United

One long-standing idea for heading in the opposite direction, toward a smaller role for the arsenal in the U.S. defense strategy, is to cut out one of the legs of our nuclear triad. This would reduce both the overkill in our capacity to start a nuclear war and the dangers that we will do so inadvertently. It’s generally agreed that the best leg to choose would be the land-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), because they are the most vulnerable to attack.

The Pentagon appeared to take this idea off the table in September of 2020 by signing a $13.3 billion down payment contract with Northrop Grumman on an $85 billion project to build a whole new set of ICBMs. The contract is sole source, meaning not competitively bid, and will be spread across numerous states, including Utah, Alabama, Colorado, California, and Maryland (60). The Pentagon has projected total costs for the program over decades at $264 billion (61)

The Biden administration has reversed its predecessor by recommitting to the New START framework limiting U.S. and Russian stockpiles for another five years.

The price tag for replacing the whole stockpile and its multiple delivery systems was initially estimated at more than $1 trillion, and has been on the way to doubling since then.62 It included costs such as $100 billion for the B-21 bomber and $350 billion for the new and refurbished nuclear weapons themselves, as well as a successor to the Minuteman missile and 12 new Columbia-class nuclear submarines currently costed out at $109.8 billion (63).

In addition to closeting information about how many weapons our nuclear arsenal holds, the federal government has never released a comprehensive accounting of what they cost. An intensive effort by a team at the Brookings Institution in 1998 produced Atomic Audit, which assessed the total expenditures during the first 50 years since the Manhattan Project, including the costs of the environmental cleanup. They arrived at the figure of $5.5 trillion, noting that since some costs were classified, this was unquestionably a conservative estimate (64).

The extreme disparity between needs and expenditures equals waste, extreme overkill, and increased danger, and it continues.

The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2021 budget request increased the previous year’s spending on the total replacement plan by 19%. Spending on nuclear weapons specifically got the biggest boost, increasing by 25%. In its plan for the outyears, the nuclear budget would absorb an increasingly large percentage of total military spending through the early 2030s.66

In addition to promising his government would reduce the role of these weapons in U.S. security policy, Candidate Biden promised to reduce our “excessive expenditure” on them. So far, he has not. His budget continues the overall Trumpian trajectory, both on funding and on the architecture of the replacement program.67 In May of 2021, the Congressional Budget Office costed out the program up through 2030 at $634 billion, an increase of $28 billion from its estimate two years before (68). The new Nuclear posture review in 2022 would signal whether Biden’s promise to change this trajectory will be kept  ( $$$ DID IT? Read summaries, too long to read all of it)

START I agreement cut U.S. nuclear warhead stockpiles almost in half (from 10,000 to 6,000). And, as mentioned, U.S. military spending dropped by almost a third from its Cold War peak. The new bilateral Cooperative Threat Reduction program began providing funding and technical assistance to the former Soviet states to secure, dismantle, and remove the nuclear weapons and fissile material stockpiles from their territory.

Hypersonic weapons increase the chances of nuclear war

In the mid-fifties the nuclear terror surged into high gear with the arrival of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) that could reduce the timing of a nuclear strike to a matter of minutes. Hypersonic weapons now present the prospect of an array of different delivery vehicles carrying conventional and/or nuclear weapons, following less predictable and therefore harder-to-detect flight paths.

Though these weapons remain in the prototype-phase, the pursuit of them in recent years, and the funding increases to go with it, have surged. The 2018 National Security Strategy calls them one of the key technologies enabling the United States “to fight and win the wars of the future,” in part because military planners see hypersonic weapons being too fast for an enemy’s air and missile defense systems.40

Russia began accelerating its hypersonic weapons program in response to U.S. missile defense deployments and to the 2002 U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.43 According to Putin, the maneuverability of hypersonic weapons would be the only way to evade U.S. missile defenses to get nuclear weapons to their targets. China has developed an operational hypersonic weapon.44 The other countries trying to get into the game include Japan, Australia, India, France, Germany, and North Korea. It looks like a classic arms race in the making, only with more countries than were involved during the Cold War.

These weapons come in two basic types. The first, known as boost-glide, uses a conventional rocket to get the weapon to hypersonic speed, after which the “glide body” carrying the warhead separates from the rocket and coasts, from a point near the upper limits of the atmosphere, to its target. The other prototyped version uses a cruise missile design, flying lower, with more maneuverability, but has air friction problems the boost-glide model doesn’t.45

All the services want in on this next big thing. The Pentagon has assigned to the Navy the task of building the rocket booster while the Army builds the glide-body of a weapon all the services are intended to share. The Air Force wants to adapt these weapons to launch from planes, the Navy wants them launched from submarines, and the Army from trucks.

Some of the Russian and Chinese models are built to accommodate nuclear warheads. The U.S. models, so far, are not. With an overlayered nuclear triad as a backstop, the United States seems to be focusing its hypersonic weapons planning more on gearing up for a Great Power war, most notably in the South China Sea.

Griffin, the R&D director, said that without its own hypersonic weapons, if “the Chinese started throwing hypersonic missiles at American bases in the Pacific and sinking carrier strike groups,” the only options for the United States would be “to let them have their way or go nuclear.”

So begins the push to expand the budget to pay for all this. R&D funding for hypersonics rose gradually during this century but stayed in the millions of dollars until the new push to move toward production. The FY 2022 budget increased Trump administration spending on hypersonics to $3.8 billion, up from $3.2 billion in fiscal year 2021.49 Appropriations for the Army and Navy nearly doubled from the previous year. Assuming the plans for mass production proceed, these amounts will look like a modest down payment.

Missile Defense. The principal attraction of hypersonic weapons to U.S. war planners is, again, that with their speed and maneuverability they’ll be able to get through an adversary’s defense systems. But, of course, if ours can do this, the adversary’s probably can too. U.S. R&D spending has heavily favored developing the offensive weapons themselves over the defensive systems to counteract them: $3 billion in fiscal year 2021 for offense, $206 million for defense.

Of course, this is the sort of promise DoD has been making since the Reagan administration hatched the idea of a technological shield over America blocking all incoming missiles. After decades of effort and billions of dollars to realize Reagan’s dream of a Strategic Defense Initiative, DoD abandoned the idea of making the United States invulnerable to intercontinental ballistic missile attack. They have lowered their sites to defeating medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

The contractors responsible for this decades-long record of repeated failure—including Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, and Northrop—now all have contracts promising to figure out how the rudimentary missile defense systems currently in place might fend off hypersonic attacks. According to physicist and nuclear expert James Acton, it is not plausible that these systems, designed to defend small areas, could protect the entire continental United States.

In the course of the Nuclear Age, near-miss errors bringing one or the other superpower to the brink of launch have been averted by humans pulling them back. Hypersonic weapons reduce the time for humans to judge and act in this way.

In the foreshortened timeframe, some analysts also say they could escalate a crisis toward a nuclear war if an adversary detecting a hypersonic weapon with an unpredictable flight path can’t be certain it is not nuclear-armed.59

The Navy’s arsenal included 53 tactical submarines, 11 aircraft carriers, 24 cruisers, 67 destroyers, 84 patrol and coastal combatant ships, 19 frigates, and 32 principal amphibious ships, for a total of roughly 300 ships, plus nearly 1,000 of its own combat-capable aircraft. In addition to its laser- and GPS-guided bombs, its air- and surface-launched missiles, its transport planes and missile-firing drones, the Air Force had 1,522 combat-capable aircraft, 46 of them nuclear-capable.

 

This is the superstructure in place to achieve global military dominance, which current U.S. military doctrine asserts we must have to protect ourselves. Our controlling National Security Strategy commits the military to prepare to win a war over Russia or China while holding off a second adversary, fight a global war on terrorism, maintain a large presence in the Middle East and Asia, and modernize our entire nuclear weapons arsenal.

 

Paul Light, who studies the size of government at the Brookings Institution, counts 33 layers of bureaucracy at the top of DoD. Between 1998 and 2020 the numbers in the top-five tiers climbed from 193 to 629.

 

The military budget funding these operations is divided into five major areas, providing funding for: Military Personnel (on average about 24% of the total, though with all expenditures including health care included, the percentage is substantially higher); Military Construction (2%); Operations and Maintenance (41%); Research, Development and Testing of new weapons (12%), and the Procurement of the weapons themselves (19%), for each of the four service branches (The Coast Guard is mostly funded through the Department of Homeland Security).

 

Each branch operates its own network of bases around the country, plus about a dozen that are shared by more than one service branch.

 

Why America doesn’t have national health care, child care and more: military corruption and waste

 

The Obama administration ordered DoD to examine whether more jobs could be brought in house to save money. According to Paul Light at Brookings, defense contractor lobbying soon shut this examination down.

 

Pentagon waste has been with us since Truman began exposing it while the Pentagon itself was still under construction. New versions of the $600 toilet seat surface periodically, as do efforts to reform procurement systems to bring waste under control. The astronomical amounts shoveled out in a hurry to fund the Iraq and Afghan wars generated an uncharacteristically serious, meticulous and sustained effort by dedicated inspectors general to document where that money had gone. Their accountings estimated waste in the Iraq War at $60 billion, and $100 billion in Afghanistan.

 

A legislative proposal at the end of 2020 mandated a 10% cut in the military budget, with the money to be redirected to fighting the pandemic. This stirred the National Defense Industrial Association (the leading industry lobbying group) to commission a report that found a 10% cut would have devastating consequences for defense strategy and capabilities.”

 

Such reports are among an extensive portfolio of strategies the Military- Industrial Complex (MIC) employs to make sure cuts are never made. They include the steady stream of campaign contributions defense contractors make to members of Congress, especially the chairs of key committees with jurisdiction over military spending. And they include the advertising budgets from both the military and industrial arms of the MIC dedicated to associating weapons systems with cultural touchstones like the Super Bowl, which in 2021 hosted flyovers by all three of our deployed heavy bombers—the B-52, B-1 and B-2.

 

The military keeps unauditable accounts.

 

To know whether you are buying only what you need, and not spending a penny more, you need to know what you are buying, how much it all costs, and where all the money is going. In part, because of the free rein business negotiated as the price of building weapons for World War II, when it comes to the Pentagon budget, no one actually knows these things. Until recently it was the only federal agency that couldn’t pass an audit. (The Homeland Security department, created by the 9/11 wars, now shares that distinction.)

 

Since 1995 DoD has been on the Government Accountability Office’s High-Risk list designating agencies vulnerable to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. Without a real accounting, all these practices are much easier.

 

Influence: The proverbial revolving door

 

High-ranking contracting officials at DoD routinely set up lucrative second careers in the defense industry by going easy on the private companies sitting on the other side of the negotiating table. In a 2021 report, the Government Accountability Office found that between 2014 and 2019, 1,700 retired generals and admirals and former senior procurement officials went to work for the top 14 Pentagon contractors. Taking up these jobs, they then begin earning their ample salaries by securing priority contracts from their former employer (DoD), for their new employers (private contractors).

 

The Trump administration embraced the revolving door with enthusiasm [mu comment: so much for draining the swamp]. Following Gen. Jim Mattis as his first Defense Secretary, who had received somewhere between $600,000 and $1.25 million on the board of General Dynamics, came two officials whose routes from defense firms through the revolving door were even more direct: Patrick Shanahan, a vice president at Boeing, and Mark Esper, Raytheon’s top lobbyist. Both promised to recuse themselves from decisions relating to their former employers. But as defense analyst William Hartung observed, “If Shanahan were to step back from deliberations related to all [Boeing’s products, including aircraft, bombs, drones, missile-defense systems, ballistic missiles, military satellites] he would, at best, be a part-time steward of the Pentagon.

 

Biden is trying to reform this corruption by lengthening the amount of time government officials have to wait after leaving office before heading through the revolving door

 

 

Contractors are the kings of sucking up public wealth from the government

 

By 2021, the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that in the CENTCOM (Middle East) region, contractors outnumbered military personnel by a factor of 2.8 to 1.12. A 2020 study from the Costs of War project at Brown University found that the previous year more than half of the total defense budget went to private contractors, which was 164% higher than the spending on contractors in 2001. Though privatization is frequently touted as a way to lower costs through competition, the study found that 45% of these contracts—a higher percentage than with any other federal agency—were not competitively bid.

 

And many of the rest of them were designated “cost-plus,” that is, a guarantee up front to cover the contractor’s costs plus an agreed profit. Some contracts also weaken competitive cost mechanisms by locking in lifetime service agreements and sole-supplier contracts.

 

In a 2008 study the Director of National Intelligence’s Office also called into question the idea that privatization saves money, with a finding that private contractors made up 29% of the U.S. intelligence’s community’s workforce while accounting for 49% of the community’s personnel budget.  As to how many people work for the Pentagon in private companies, no one really knows. The prime contractors aren’t required to share information with the Pentagon about who their subcontractors are, let alone how many people work for them, and the subcontractors don’t necessarily tell the primes that information about their subcontractors and suppliers.

 

The website governmentcontractswon.com listed 3.6 million individual Pentagon contracts in 2020, spread among more than 300,000 contractors. The top contractors are in the process of further consolidating their power, however, thereby reducing cost-controlling competition. According to a 2021 Bloomberg study, since 2011 the number of prime contractors has shrunk by 36%, even as the average revenue per company has grown by 83%.

 

For decades, five companies—all of them U.S.-based—have held on to the top spots on the list of global military contractors: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics.

 

it is the House and Senate appropriators, working with what 12 individual appropriations subcommittees send them, who hold the power to agree (or try to) on a final set of line items for the president to sign.

 

Not much about the budget process has actually worked the way it’s supposed to for years, however.

There are actually two budgets: One covering the spending that Congress votes on every year (“discretionary spending”), and one covering the spending on the programs like Social Security and Medicare, whose levels are set by how much people use them (“mandatory spending”). Through all the upheavals and uncertainties of the process, there is one predictable result: The Defense Department, plus the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons complex, will wind up with at least as much money as all the rest of the budget that Congress votes on every year put together. Add in the mandatory accounts, devoted to so-called “entitlements,” and the military budget comes in at number two, after Social Security.

 

To fund the Afghan and Iraq wars, Congress added on top of the “base” National Defense budget a separate Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account. OCO became a device for evading the spending limits imposed by the Budget Control Act (BCA), a ten-year deficit-reduction effort passed in 2011 setting roughly equal limits on defense and non-defense spending. That’s because the law exempted the OCO account from these limits.  The separate OCO account is disappearing. But its funds are simply being folded into an enlarged “base” defense budget. Various parts of the military are hatching new efforts to carve out special funds beyond the regular budget, such as the Pacific Deterrence Fund to counter China.

 

There is also roughly $85 billion in the “black” (classified) budget covering the 17 major agencies of the U.S. intelligence community; most of this budget is believed to be included in the Pentagon budget, but since it’s classified, we don’t really know how much.

 

Not included in these numbers are the federal programs outside the “National Defense” budget category, such as the more than $200 billion a year going to veterans, the $123 billion in interest paid to cover the portion of the national debt coming from decades of high military spending, and the Homeland Security costs of border security.

 

While debate is ongoing about what pieces of federal spending belong under the category of “National Defense,” it is pretty clear the real price tag exceeds $1 trillion a year.

 

Once in office, President Truman expressed his roots as a New Deal Democrat in initiatives to create national health insurance, minority rights in employment, and new public power projects, among other efforts at federal industrial planning. But his efforts on behalf of these goals were quickly overshadowed by his focus on protecting the United States against its former World War II ally, the Soviet Union.

 

Figure 1.1 shows the budget in billions of dollars from 1948 to 2020, at which point it was 7 times greater than 1948 using 2021 dollars.  After 1991 it dipped from 550 billion to 350 billion but since then climbed to over 800 billion during the gulf war, plunged 200 billion to 600 billion during Obama’s administration, and then climbed back to 700 billion when Trump was in office (very rough estimates)

 

Following the “surge” in spending during his first two years in office, President Obama’s efforts to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan created a modest decline. Then the Trump administration sent it climbing again. Between fiscal years 2016 and 2020, the Pentagon added $140.6 billion to its yearly total. As for the Biden administration, though it declared that diplomacy would take over the lead role in foreign policy from the military, its first budget left military spending essentially where Trump left it, close to its historically high levels.

 

While adding to the Trump administration’s enlargements to the Pentagon budget, the Biden administration’s first budget did elevate the importance of non-military tools in securing the country, with real money. It increased the budget for diplomacy and foreign aid expenditures on such priorities as global health security, international climate programs and UN peacekeeping, by 12%, to $58 billion. In context, though, its allocation for military tools is still 13 times larger. And the foreign aid budget includes billions to help other countries, including many in conflict zones, to buy U.S.-made weapons.

 

Is the U.S. Military Budget Enough? Too Much?

 

Answering this question must begin with what we are asking it to accomplish. No other country has committed itself to maintaining a military presence on every continent and the ability to project force rapidly anywhere in the world. And while most military officials don’t like the term “world’s policeman” to describe the U.S. role in the world, no other country casts itself as upholder of the international order and its own interests across the globe. Defense analysts have laid out a strong case that this role acts more as provocation for resistance among the “occupied,” armed and otherwise, than as guarantor of U.S. security. The presence of U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia, for example, was the primary incitement for the 9/11 attacks.

 

Can We Afford It?

 

A major portion of our ballooning national debt comes from decades of deficit military spending. Many economists argue that deficit spending can be useful and necessary—as long as it improves the productivity of the economy as a whole. Such spending includes infrastructure repair and investments to create a healthy and educated workforce. Increasing our stockpile of fighter jets does not qualify.

 

Is it enough for the United States to spend more on our military forces than any other country in the world? Since the end of the Cold War, no other country has come anywhere close. In fact, the two most respected sources estimating national military expenditures, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and the International Institute for Security Studies (IISS), peg U.S. spending at more than the next 11 countries put together. U.S. spending at least three times China’s. China’s non-military spending on its Belt and Road Initiative, on the other hand, is building global influence beyond anything the U.S. military can accomplish.

 

The Military Industrial Congressional Complex is Highly Organized to Inflate Military Spending

 

A former Air Force fighter pilot, Col. John Boyd, reportedly said years before that “People say the Pentagon does not have a strategy.… They are wrong. The Pentagon does have a strategy. It is: ‘Don’t interrupt the money flow, add to it.’”

 

Former Raytheon lobbyist Esper presided over the Pentagon while it permitted the merger of Raytheon and United Technologies, creating the second-largest defense contractor in the world.

 

Contract dispersion makes it hard to cut the military budget

 

This book is about the seeding of the military economy across the American landscape. Sprinkling those seeds wider and deeper, creating stronger political protection against future defense cuts. By systematically spreading their contracts and sub-contracts they sacrificed the norms of industrial efficiency for an open campaign to make their production lines seem to be supporting local jobs everywhere.

 

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter—the largest and most expensive weapons program ever devised—has an all-things-to-all-missions portfolio, including combat airstrikes, electronic warfare, and surveillance, with custom variants for each service branch. Plus, now it is being fitted for nuclear weapons. The all-things mandate has kept the project in development for three decades, working out an apparently endless succession of bugs. By 2013 its lead contractor, Lockheed Martin, was advertising that it had put pieces of the program in 45 states. By 2020 they had filled in three more. For 18 of these states the program does have a significant economic impact from multiple locations and more than $100 million to dole out.

 

The highly bipartisan Congressional Joint Strike Fighter Caucus attracted 130 members in 2020—27 more than the previous year—to propose funding 24 extra F-35s, at $77 million apiece, beyond what the Pentagon itself had requested.

 

Members of Congress routinely frame their support for higher military budgets as support for the troops and the “readiness” funds these troops need for their current operations, which are perennially described as “in crisis.” But their actual budgetary decisions frequently seem to tilt toward their contractor-contributors instead.

 

The House Armed Services Committee (HASC),

 

Membership on this committee is, year after year, one of the most sought-after assignments in Congress and has more members than any other. HASC and the Defense Appropriations subcommittee control more than half of the money Congress votes on every year, money spent in congressional districts across the country. The legislators sitting in those chairs are there mostly to steer it toward their own districts. There are no bipartisan fights here, politicians from both parties get to feed at the trough [my paraphrasing].  As they proceed expeditiously through the subcommittee reports, votes of the full committee affirming these decisions are mostly unanimous.

 

In the Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces its chair, Rob Wittman (R-VA) and ranking member Joe Courtney (D-CT), fall over themselves in praise of each other. While they disagree on gun control and cutting taxes for the rich and government spending in general and most other things, no piece of paper comes between their commitment to give the Pentagon more ships than the Pentagon thinks it needs. The crux of this beautiful friendship is as follows: Nuclear submarines in the United States are built primarily in only two places: General Dynamics’ Electric Boat shipyard in Groton, Connecticut, and Huntington Ingalls Industries shipyard in Newport News, Virginia. The two heads of the House subcommittee in charge of funding submarines represent those two districts. Our system of funding the military has given jurisdiction over the shipbuilding budget to the two legislators who are using it this day to engineer, as Courtney calls it, “the largest Navy contract in U.S. history” primarily for their own districts.

 

Courtney has delivered. In his first term he got the nickname, “Two-Sub Joe,” for his intense focus on making sure Electric Boat got to increase production of Virginia-class attack submarines from one to two a year.2 Then in 2016 he got the company locked into building the replacement for the current fleet of ballistic-missile nuclear submarines, called the Columbia-class at a total cost of $109.8 billion just to build them, and untold billions more to operate them for half a century. Then there’s the Columbia-class. In 2020 Electric Boat got a $10.4 billion contract to start work on the first two. They are projected in fact to absorb upwards of 30% of the Navy’s total shipbuilding budget between 2026 and 2030.

 

Joe Courtney’s state is not the most defense-dependent in the country, but it is right up there. As the third-smallest state in the country, it is 6th on the list of recipients of Pentagon dollars, a share that is more than three times greater than its share of the U.S. population. Only three states—Virginia, Alabama, and Hawaii—derive more of their state GDP from the Pentagon than Connecticut does.

 

The state bases its military economy overwhelmingly on private contracting rather than on troops. In 2019 DoD spent $19 billion on private contracts in Connecticut—the 5th highest amount in any state—and only $700 million on military personnel (38th nationally).

 

The strongholds of Connecticut’s military economy form a triangle across the length of the state’s coastline and up through its central core, nearly to the Massachusetts border. Courtney’s district occupies one corner, where the Thames River empties into the ocean near the Rhode Island border. Head northwest to Hartford and you reach the second corner, where Pratt & Whitney has exclusive rights to make the engines for the F-35. The third corner of the triangle is in Stratford, down between New Haven and the border with New York, where the Merritt Parkway crosses the Housatonic River on the Igor I. Sikorsky Memorial Bridge. This is where Sikorsky’s company now makes an array of military helicopter models, including the Black Hawk, which can be loaded up with forward-firing guns, rockets and air-to-ground missiles. Scattered around the triangle are hundreds of machine shops providing these major operations with parts.

 

The Arms Merchants

 

While competing for the $740 billion U.S. military budget is the main event, exporting provides them a significant secondary market. For 2020 the Defense Department reported it had authorized $175 billion in arms exports. Andrew Miller, a former State Department official now with the Project on Middle East Democracy, “There was a belief that these countries wouldn’t end up using this equipment, and we were just selling them expensive paperweights. These assurances foundered when Saudi Arabia began dropping three billion dollars worth of Raytheon-made bombs onto Yemen, in its war on the Houthi rebels. The war has dragged on for five years and killed by UN estimate more than a quarter of a million people, most of them civilians.

 

American taxpayers are funding significant portions of the contractors’ arms trade profits. Of the $42 billion the contractors pulled in from this trade in 2017, nearly $10 billion was paid for by the government’s Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program and other DoD authorities.

 

The two biggest ticket items in DoD’s procurement budget anchor Connecticut’s military economy. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the biggest. The last Trump defense request proposed giving the program $11.4 billion, and ultimately Congress gave it more money—$12.9 billion

 

The Virginia-class submarine currently underway comes in second on the price list. The 2021 budget provided $7.2 billion to cover the cost of two boats. But factor in the costs of the new Columbia-class, and Connecticut’s submarine franchise surges into the lead.

 

Military planners are beginning to grapple with the conventional wisdom that their aircraft carriers, whose models range from $3 billion to $13 billion apiece, are sitting ducks. So the Navy has begun to focus on building a lot more small ships.

 

Both federal budget watchdog agencies—the Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accountability Office—have also raised concerns that cost overruns will make the gap between what these ships ultimately cost and what is budgeted for them even worse. The number one target of their concern: the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine, the centerpiece of Electric Boat’s long-term plans.

 

One of the Navy’s favored ideas for making more room in the budget for shipbuilding: eliminate “unnecessary” expenditures on oversight. The idea was to cut personnel in the Naval Audit Service—its internal watchdog on the lookout for waste, fraud, and abuse. The budget covers 290 personnel whose job is to investigate problems with hundreds of thousands of Navy contracts at a time. The proposal would cut this force by more than two-thirds.

 

The federal government has invested in its military industrial base far more than any other country on earth, and more of its research dollars than in any other sector of its economy.

 

Studies have repeatedly demonstrated, though, that the same amount of spending would produce far more jobs if directed elsewhere. Researcher Heidi Peltier, now at Brown University, found that $1 billion spent on the military would generate 11,200 jobs, as compared to 26,700 spent on education, 16,800 on clean energy, and 17,200 on health care. Even spreading the money around through tax cuts generated more jobs than targeting it to the military.

 

Connecticut’s contributions to the War on Terror were limited. It is hard to use nuclear-armed submarines and cutting-edge fighter jets to kill terrorists. However, in the money-no-object post-9/11 world, budgeteers left expenditures on such systems intact and simply added equipment for the wars we were actually fighting on top.

 

Johnstown, Pennsylvania, population under 30,000, was the beneficiary of more earmarks than any other city in America

 

What didn’t seem to change was Murtha’s support for ever-increasing funding for the Pentagon. “All politics is local,” House Speaker Tip O’Neill began preaching during Murtha’s first decade in Congress, and no one took this to heart more than his confidante, Murtha. The economic foundations of his home base had all but collapsed. Its local assets—its mountains of coal, its mills, its confluence of rivers—were of limited use. Politics as an economic development strategy would have to take over.

 

You can steer Pentagon money into your district in a variety of ways. You can do it the way Joe Courtney and Rob Wittman do it, by leading the subcommittee controlling spending on a class of weapons that your districts are virtually alone in being able to build. Or you can become a reliable vote for a massive program that is built all over the country (n.b. the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter) and make sure your district gets its piece. Or you can ensure that one line item in the budget specifically and explicitly assigns—earmarks—money to a military project in your district, circumventing the competitive bidding process, so that by law, the money can’t go anywhere else. In 1970, four years before Murtha went to Washington, the defense appropriations bill included about a dozen earmarks. By 2006, it held 2,879.

 

And a remarkable number of them went to Johnstown: between 1992 and 2008, about $2 billion worth.

 

Although the desks on the House floor are mostly unassigned, one of them at the back on the right came to be known as “Murtha Corner.” Members of Congress could often be seen congregating there securing appropriations for military contractors in their districts and hammering out the quid pro quos. They knew that an offer from one of those contractors to set up a branch facility in Johnstown, or to send one of its subcontracts Johnstown’s way, would help a lot.

 

Fyock decided to try his hand at the defense contracting business. Hiring lobbyists of his own became part of the business plan—specifically, Murtha’s brother Kit and three former Murtha aides, who after 1999 collectively earned $725,000 representing the company. Mountaintop had an office a floor below Murtha’s district office. In 2002, Murtha proudly announced that he had added earmarks in that year’s defense bill, awarding three contracts worth $13 million to Mountaintop. The largest had them overseeing others to find military uses for the Bombardier CL-415, a plane that could pour water on fires. (None were found.)

 

Taxpayer watchdog groups wondered why this middleman role was really necessary, and why for military ventures as disparate as robotics, battlefield anesthesiology and emergency communications, Mountaintop was the best candidate to undertake them.

 

The fruits of Murtha’s power weren’t confined to military projects. He cut deals with other appropriators that funded an array of projects in Johnstown, most of which bear his, or his wife’s name: the John. P. Murtha Regional Cancer Center. The John P. Murtha Technology Center. The Joyce Murtha Breast Care Center. The John P. Murtha Center for Public Service and Competitiveness.

 

In keeping with its contract dispersal strategy, Lockheed operates its political influence game on a national scale.  In 2008 the company spread $2.5 million in campaign contributions to 53 Senators and 100 Members of Congress, equally split between Democrats and Republicans. Their targets were, of course, concentrated among the members of the committees with control over the Pentagon budget.

 

When people think about corruption, it is usually the kind of pay-to-play system that benefits the lifestyles of the corrupted. Occasionally, not often, its perpetrators do time in prison.

 

The most notorious might be Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-CA), a colleague of Murtha’s on the Subcommittee on Defense, who went to jail for steering more than $200 million to two defense contractors in exchange for $2.4 million in contributions. (Trump included Cunningham in his flurry of last-minute pardons.) Unlike Murtha, representing one of the poorest cities in Appalachia with no defense industry to speak of at the start, Cunningham represented a wealthy San Diego district concentrating more defense assets than anywhere else in the country, including half of the Navy’s Pacific Fleet. The contractors maneuvering for a piece of that action helped him get his own yacht and Rolls Royce. His trial featured his bribe menu, where he specified the amount of the bribe that would secure the earmark desired. A starting bid was $140,000, plus that yacht, which would be required to win a $16 million Pentagon contract.

 

In contrast to many, perhaps most, of his colleagues, personal enrichment appears not to have figured much in Murtha’s agenda. No Rolls Royce showed up in his driveway. His motivators, it seems, were amassing power and using it to benefit his friends—including his brother—and his district.

 

Murtha provided Magliocchetti’s clients with $30 million in earmarks and they provided him a total of $301,850 in donations to his campaign. Was this (illegal) bribery? Such arrangements had been heading down that slippery slope for years, certainly. More and more members of Congress were joining the slide, fearful of missing out on a system that allowed them to secure, and tout, special benefits for their constituents. A 2009 study by the Center for Public Integrity found that three-quarters of Murtha’s subcommittee members had worked out similar arrangements, in which “former staffers became lobbyists for defense contractors; the contractors received earmarks from the representatives, and the representatives received campaign contributions from the lobbyists or the contractors.” The study was called the “Murtha Method.” His leadership as an innovator and promoter of the system earned him the title “King of Pork.

 

Melanie Sloan, director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) said in 2009, “What Murtha is doing everybody else is doing. It’s just to such a higher degree that it becomes shocking.

 

Where is the legal, as distinct from the ethical, line? It is crossed when arrangements become explicit quid pro quos between favors and money.

 

In 2006 CREW began publishing an annual reckoning of the “Most Corrupt Members of Congress.” Murtha was flagged that first year as a “Member to Watch.” By 2008 he was on the list.

 

One highly lucrative piece of the Pentagon pie has been around since 1983, when President Reagan hatched his dream of a system that could shield the U.S. from nuclear attack. This benign-sounding idea has actually been the catalyst for a new arms race, as more and more countries fear an attack from a potentially invulnerable enemy and so feel the need to buy their own missile defenses. From 1985 to 2019, the United States has spent $200 billion devising, making, tinkering and testing (and manipulating the tests for) an array of systems, from the ground-based to the space-based, from missiles to lasers, trying to fulfill this dream. After a few successes and failure after failure, none have remotely achieved the invulnerability of a “shield.” Yet allied with their contractors, Congress remains bullish on the dream of missile defense, providing its assemblage of programs more than $20 billion in fiscal year 2021.

 

Multi-billion-dollar weapons systems are rushed into production before we know whether they will work, and then the sunk costs are so great that, the argument becomes, they are too big to fail. It’s a principle that proponents of the F-35 are living by. In 2018, following a series of reports critical of the F-35, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the federal government’s principal watchdog agency, recommended that Congress consider withholding development funding for the program until a long list of defects have been fixed.

 

The report pointed out that Lockheed began producing the planes with less than 1% of testing complete. It also noted that in 2008 the company took money from testing and put it into manufacturing, over GAO’s objections. Congress ignored this advice, and accelerated production. It is poised to do so once again. The United States has required a “stealth” skin for only a few of its planes, in part because the process is so hard to pull off. The B-2 bomber became notorious in the late 1990s as the $2 billion plane “that couldn’t go out in the rain”: its outer coating was prone to deteriorate in conditions like rain and humidity. The process has been improved, Lockheed assures us, with robots applying the coatings to the “extremely precise thickness tolerances” required. According to the GAO, though, the stealth features are responsible for about half of the litany of defects that have dogged the program all the way along.

 

In Connecticut we found a military contracting Mecca dominated by the top three primes—Lockheed, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. Southern California beats that, adding major Boeing and Northrop installations into the mix with Lockheed, plus General Dynamics-spinoff General Atomics, and a Raytheon foothold south of San Diego. For 70 years, California received more money from the Pentagon than any other state.

 

While slipping behind Texas and Virginia in 2020, its haul for both private contracts and military personnel totals more than $60 billion per year, or one-twelfth of the U.S. total. But California’s overall economy is huge—it’s usually described as the world’s fifth largest—and is far more diversified than, say, Connecticut’s. So, the percentage of its GDP tied to its military economy ranks the state way down at 28th. By 1953 California had surged ahead of New York and Michigan to become number one in total Pentagon contract awards, where it remained until fiscal year 2020, when as noted it fell to number three, behind Texas and Virginia. In 1990, Los Angeles County was getting twice as much from the Pentagon as any other county in America.

 

San Diego ranks third in the country in total contract dollars, following Fairfax, Virginia, where most DC-area contractors are located, and Tarrant County, Texas, where Lockheed Martin moved most of its aerospace manufacturing, and where 1,500 other Pentagon contractors have also set up shop.

 

San Diego leads the nation in military personnel. More than 100,000 of them are spread among Marine Corps bases at Miramar and Camp Pendleton, and naval bases at Point Loma, Coronado, and in San Diego itself. And large numbers—currently about 240,000—wind up staying after they leave active duty, attracted by the year-round welcoming weather and the company of other vets.

 

For most people, Burbank, north of Hollywood, is known as a TV and film studio hub, the home of the Warner Brothers lot, the NBC lot and Disney’s animation studios. But for almost 50 years this is also where Lockheed worked on its secret military projects. To hide it from potential Japanese attack planes, the set designers of Hollywood covered the entire plant with camouflage netting over which they constructed a bucolic scene of houses and farms, complete with fake three-dimensional trees and rubber cars.

 

Rockwell (since acquired by Boeing) set up shop there to build the B-1 bombers that would drop nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union if the Cold War turned hot.

 

Jimmy Carter ran for president calling the new bomber “an example of a proposed system which should not be funded and would be wasteful of taxpayer dollars.” President Carter’s thinking was also influenced by his privileged knowledge that another bomber was on the drawing boards, a “stealth bomber” with theoretically greater capacity to evade surface-to-air missiles trying to shoot it down.

 

In 1977 he canceled the B-1. And the layoffs at Plant 42 began.  Reagan built his campaign around the idea that Carter was “weak on defense.” Exhibit A was his decision to cancel the B-1. By 1982 the Reagan administration had Rockwell back in business building a hundred more B-1 bombers. This was because the new “stealth” bomber was way behind schedule.

 

GAO calculated the total program price tag, including development and testing, at $2.1 billion per plane, or three times its weight in gold. The usual arguments defended these costs, including the one that usually carries the day: Our National Security required it.

 

But the B-2’s third problem was that it was built to drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union, which by the time it was finished no longer existed. The original plan to build 132 B-2s was whittled down to 21.

To demonstrate the value of its most spectacular, and pricey, weapons systems, flyovers at football games only take you so far.

 

Secretary of Defense William Cohen had described the search for conventional uses for the plane as akin to sending “a Rolls-Royce down into a combat zone to pick up groceries.

 

In 2016 one of the most widely respected U.S. defense budget analysts concluded that between fiscal years 2015 and 2023 the defense budget was on track to rise in real terms by 73%, and cited the Air Force’s new aircraft programs as the biggest contributors. The B-21 is the most expensive item in a trillion-plus-dollar plan to replace the nuclear triad.

 

The F-35 program is projected to match or exceed those costs. The list of other aircraft programs that need to find space in the budget at the same time is long—a new combat rescue helicopter, the Global Hawk unmanned surveillance plane (also built at Plant 42), a new version of the F-15 fighter jet, among several others.

The Border

Active duty and National Guard troops, as many as 5,000 of them at a time, along with their tools of warfare, began massing at the border. The Guard’s presence sparked a Constitutional crisis, since it violated norms going back to 1878, when the Posse Comitatus Act barred the use of the U.S. military for domestic law enforcement. The administration cited the military’s authority to go after drug smuggling; DHS helpfully designated the entire southern border of the United States as a drug-smuggling “corridor.”

Building a wall had appeal as a simple solution to a very complex challenge, and as a focus for xenophobia. To a military-industrial complex accustomed to promoting costly, high-tech bells and whistles for Great Power competition, though, it wasn’t a great fit. It would focus resources on a technology hearkening back to medieval times that the big contractors had no special expertise in making. Not to mention that 21st-century wall violators have had little trouble cutting through it with low-tech tools.

The Reagan administration began expanding its fleet of military helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft to hunt down and intimidate border crossers with aerial spotlights and loudspeakers, resorting to the same drug-interdiction rationale later used by the Trump administration.

As the first President Bush was celebrating the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, his administration was building another one—the first section of steel barrier on the San Diego–Tijuana border.

The Clinton administration turned this germ of an idea into an elaborate strategy of “Prevention through Deterrence.” Its innovations did not focus on wall-building, but on widening the border zone with multiple layers of high-tech cameras and enhanced sensor systems extending a hundred miles out into the desert.6 The policy’s logic of deterring immigration by making it ever more dangerous and deadly remains in force today, though its decades-long result is not deterrence but at least 30,000 deaths in the desert between 2014 and 2018 alone.

After 9/11, in rough tandem with overall military spending, the budgets to pay for all this soared. By 2003 the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had become the largest federal law enforcement agency in the United States, or, as one constitutional scholar called it, a new “standing army on American soil.”

Though its charge focused on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, most of its work focused on immigration enforcement. The combined budgets of the new Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had increased over their predecessor agencies to $9.9 billion, a 1,000 percent increase over ten years. By the time Trump took office, this figure had doubled. The border enforcement budget is only about 3 percent of the military’s budget,

The list of the 14 biggest border contractors from 2005–2019 includes all of the Big Five military primes. During that time Boeing received 17 contracts for planes ICE uses for deportations and a land surveillance system. General Dynamics secured 111 contracts to build surveillance towers. Lockheed Martin got $1 billion for, among other things, surveillance planes. Northrop Grumman got $340 million for biometrics, border screening and radar surveillance. And Raytheon supplied the CBP with surveillance and radar systems for maritime drones.22

In 2017, for example, General Dynamics got $4 billion from the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement to provide “infrastructure services for the shelter care of unaccompanied children.”

General Atomics, the San Diego-based company we met in Chapter 3. It developed its Predator drone for use in the Afghanistan War, and then sold this “combat-proven” product to the CBP; teamed up with Northrop Grumman’s radar systems, this drone can detect people from a height of 25,000 feet. In 2018 General Atomics got a $275.9 million contract to maintain its fleet of border drones.24

The second U.S. border contractor worth noting outside the Big Five is Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest military contractor.

Israel has honed its capabilities on some of the most heavily militarized borders in the world, building physical and technological fortresses around the Palestinian territories. Then it sold that expertise to the United States, constructing most of the towers in Arizona that feed surveillance data from infrared cameras and ground-sweeping radar to command-and-control centers.

In 2006, on the strength of its reputation as a “systems integrator” of complicated military projects, Boeing was awarded a multi-billion-dollar contract for the most ambitious surveillance system yet, to cover the entire border. Drawing on its military experience, the company also knew how to inflate costs and timelines in the course of contracting to build things that it would eventually be clear it didn’t know how to build.

The system didn’t work, and after five years DHS cancelled the contract “due to concerns about the price, timeline, and ‘effectiveness of the technology.’”26 Such costly failures don’t keep the big primes down for long, however. Though each of them has paid numerous penalties for contracting fraud over the years, they are always welcomed back into the game.27 By 2016 a Boeing subsidiary had a contract to build border-patrolling drones.

The Wall itself has not been a winner for the MIC, to the extent it diverted money from the MIC’s more favored projects and into the pockets of Trump’s construction company cronies.

The virtual wall on the other hand—the complicated web of surveillance technologies extending a hundred miles out from the Wall—has been a better fit.39

But in the scheme of overall spending on military hardware, the border project is small potatoes. The real prizes are locked up with the technological push toward a new Cold War, that is, toward Great Power competition with China and Russia.

Artificial intelligence

JAIC has discovered obstacles of other kinds—cultural and ethical—to its goal of mining Silicon Valley’s talent for the military’s purposes. In 2019 the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence found that the stars of AI tend to worry that working in the DoD enterprise would lack a “compelling sense of purpose” as well as “a technical environment … that would maximize their talents.”66 The Obama administration tried, with limited success, to lure this talent for temporary assignments in the Pentagon by setting up a Defense Digital Service—a “tour of duty for nerds,” as its former director called it.67

Disquiet within the ranks of the traditional primes over the ethics of what they are doing is, at least publicly, exceedingly rare. This has not been the case with the new entrants from Silicon Valley.

JAIC contracted with Google to install AI in drones to enable more sophisticated surveillance and targeting on the battlefield. Three thousand Google employees signed an open letter to their CEO asking him to cancel the contract, painting the issue with a broader brush: “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war”—and asking the company to declare “that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology.”

Going ahead with the work, the petition read, “will irreparably damage Google’s brand and its ability to compete for talent. Amid growing fears of biased and weaponized AI, Google is already struggling to keep the public’s trust.” It would violate the company’s core values, the petition went on, putting Google in the company of the likes of Raytheon and General Dynamics. They also mentioned Palantir, whose AI surveillance work on the border is now finding broader application within the Pentagon’s technology designs.

In a milestone in the history of ethics in corporate behavior, Google walked away from the contract, and AI weaponry in general.

we elevate the risks of miscalculation and escalation, threatening ourselves and the world, when we enable our weapons to deliver destruction at hypersonic speeds and hand over the decisions to use them to machines.

The Trump administration’s push to beef up U.S. nuclear capabilities included billions more for the B-21 bomber project underway in Palmdale, the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine, and the newly designed ICBMs—that is, every leg of the nuclear triad. But the largest item in its nuclear modernization budget was designated for the electronic systems governing decision-making over a nuclear strike: NC3: Nuclear Command, Control and Communication.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that this part of the modernization effort will cost $77 billion over ten years.75

During the Cold War, military strategists worried about so-called Catalytic Nuclear War, that is, a third state-or-non-state actor sparking a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 2021 a fellow at West Point’s Modern War Institute and the author of Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Warfare; The USA, China, and Strategic Stability, analyzed the ways that AI made this prospect more likely.76

With their embrace of hypersonic weapons, the assurances of Pentagon planners that this won’t happen in real life become less reassuring. When weapons, which may or may not be nuclear armed, can travel at hypersonic speeds, U.S. leaders detecting an attack have even less time to decide what to do.

Satellites

United States satellites—numbering nearly a thousand, more than any other country—now control some operations of our power grid, for example, of our ability to perceive the patterns of weather and climate, and of our communication and navigation networks. The U.S. military has increasingly come to rely on its satellites for its own functioning—surveillance, communications, and weapons targeting, including for one of the military’s two designs for hypersonic weapons.

And, contemplating what we risk if our satellites are attacked, the military has begun to work on ways to protect these satellites, including with what is termed “orbital warfare.”

In arms-race fashion, the Russians and Chinese accuse the United States of militarizing space, and so are developing their own military “solutions.” In July of 2020 the U.S. military accused Russia for the first time of firing a projectile from a space satellite. Back in 2007 China inadvertently showed the world its own antisatellite missile capability when it shot down its own weather satellite, sending more than three thousand pieces of wreckage into space.

A 2019 Defense Intelligence Agency assessment reported that both China and Russia had reorganized their militaries to put more emphasis on their space operations.79

The Congressional Budget Office estimates the Space Force’s initial set up costs in the range of $3 billion, plus $1 billion for new management and administrative positions. Its overall budget for 2021 is $15.4 billion, projected to grow by $2.6 billion over the following five years.

Government watchdogs call this a down payment on what this new bureaucracy will cost. The military contractors are certainly looking at the Space Force as a major growth opportunity.80 The Government Accountability Office warns that rather than reducing fragmentation and inefficiency, the new force may exacerbate them. Like military contracting in general, GAO says, current space projects routinely go billions over budget and years beyond schedule.81

These dimensions of the new frontier—hypersonic weapons and militarized AI and the increased militarization of space—all suggest that we are ramping up a new Cold War. The solution is arms control: international treaties that verify transparency and compliance to contain the dangers of this new technological arms race. During the Trump administration the U.S. lost valuable time by focusing instead on dismantling most of the existing architecture of nuclear arms control.

Conclusion

But Can the U.S. Addiction to Excessive Military Spending Be Curbed?

Congress While boosting military spending is a cause usually identified with the political right, as we’ve seen, it attracts much more bipartisanship than most

Although many in Congress have responded to the Ukraine crisis with calls to add billions to the military budget, the larger point still holds: In the context of a mounting list of neglected national priorities, a strategy designed to win wars against Russia and China while maintaining the capability to win regional conflicts and wage a global counterterrorism campaign is both misguided and unaffordable in the context of other neglected national priorities.

In April of 2020, the chair of the House Armed Services Committee, Adam Smith, discussed a strategic rationale for cuts in the military budget. When the U.S. builds its national security strategy around preserving its global military dominance, Smith said, it is committing to a goal no longer attainable, and thus making the country less safe. He cited the proliferation of cheap drones available to all as ending the “era of unipolarity.”

“Swarms of these drones … [costing] next to nothing can deliver more firepower than an F-35, which can’t get into the zone because of the surface-to-air missiles that are guarding it.” Beyond switching to a strategy that is “a lot more nimble, a lot smarter, and a lot more diversified,” he prescribed replacing one seeking to dominate all adversaries with one that looks for ways to make it clear that conflict was not in their interests: “Deterrence, not dominance.”

During most of the Cold War the government had an important tool for Pentagon waste reduction it now lacks. In 1951 Congress created a Renegotiation Board that had specific criteria for reviewing defense contracts for excess profits. Where it found them, it could renegotiate the contract and return the excess to the U.S. Treasury. In 1976 Congress let the program die. It needs to come back.25

The Administration Before taking office, the Biden administration made gestures of intent toward restraining military spending. In 2020 the now-Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks wrote an article in Foreign Affairs titled “Getting to Less.” Once installed, the administration adopted the mainstream consensus favoring increases to both the military and domestic spending, and rough parity between them.

Civil Society Non-governmental critics of U.S. military spending have been around since postwar turned into Cold War; quotations of Eisenhower’s Military Industrial Complex speech keep on coming.

Will the U.S. economy, steeped in the structures and self-serving mechanisms of its Military Industrial Complex, be able to adjust before it’s too late?