War Pay: Another
Good Year for Weapons Makers Is Guaranteed
William
D. Hartung
January
11, 2018
TomDispatch
President Trump
moved boldly in his first budget, seeking an additional $54 billion in
Pentagon funding for fiscal year 2018. That figure, by the way, equals
the entire military budgets of allies like Germany, France, the
United Kingdom, and Japan. Then, in a bipartisan stampede, Congress egged on
Trump to go even higher, putting forward a defense authorization bill that
would raise the Pentagon’s budget by an astonishing $85 billion. (And don’t
forget that, last spring, the president and Congress had
already tacked an extra $15 billion onto the 2017 Pentagon budget.)
The authorization bill for 2018 is essentially just a suggestion, however --
the final figure for this year will be determined later this month, if Congress
can come to an agreement on how to boost the caps on domestic and defense
spending imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011. The final number is
likely to go far higher than the staggering figure Trump requested last spring.
And that’s only
the beginning of the good news for the big weapons companies. Industry
officials and Beltway defense analysts aren’t expecting the real
increase in Pentagon spending to come until the 2019 budget. It’s a subject
sure to make it into the mid-term elections. Dangling potential infusions of
Pentagon funds in swing states and swing districts is a tried and true way to
influence voters in tight races and so will tempt candidates in both parties.
President Trump
has long emphasized job creation above much else, but if he has an actual jobs
program, it mainly seems to involve pumping more money into the Pentagon and
increasing overseas arms sales. That such spending is one of the least
effective ways to create new jobs evidently matters little. It is,
after all, an easy and popular way for a president to give himself the look of
stimulating economic activity, especially in an era of steep tax cuts favoring
the plutocratic class and attacks on domestic spending.
Trump’s
much-touted $1 trillion infrastructure plan may never materialize,
but the Pentagon is already on course to spend $6 trillion to $7
trillion of your taxes over the next decade. As it happens though, a
surprising percentage of those dollars won’t even go into the military
equivalent of infrastructure. Based on what we know of Pentagon expenditures in
2016, up to half of such funds are likely to go directly into the coffers
of defense contractors rather than to the troops or to basic military tasks
like training and maintenance.
While the full
impact of Trump’s proposed Pentagon spending increases won’t be felt until
later this year and in 2019, he did make a significant impact last year in his
role as arms-dealer-in-chief. Early estimates for 2017 suggest that arms sales
approvals in the first year of his administration exceeded the Obama
administration’s record in its last year in office -- no mean feat given that
President Obama set a record for overseas arms deals during his
eight-year tenure.
You undoubtedly
won’t be surprised to learn that President Trump greatly exaggerated the size
of his administration’s arms deals. Typically enough, he touted “$110 billion”
in proposed sales to Saudi Arabia, a figure that included deals already struck
under Obama and highly speculative offers that may never come to
fruition. While visiting Japan in November, he similarly took
credit for sales of the staggeringly expensive, highly overrated F-35
combat aircraft, a deal that was actually concluded in 2012. To add
insult to injury, those F-35s that the U.S. is selling Japan will be assembled
there, not in the good old U.S.A. (So much for the jobs benefits of
global weapons trading.)
Nonetheless, when
you peel away the layers of Trumpian bombast and exaggeration, his
administration still posted one of the highest arms sales figures of the last
decade and there’s clearly much more to come. In all of this, the president may
not have done major favors for America’s workers, but he’s been a genuine
godsend for the country’s arms manufacturers. After all, such firms extract
significantly greater profits on foreign deals than on sales to the
Pentagon. When selling to other countries, they normally charge higher prices
for weapons systems, while including costly follow-on agreements for
maintenance, training, and things like additional bombs, missiles, or
ammunition that can continue for decades.
In fact, Trump’s
biggest challenge in accelerating U.S. arms exports may not be foreign
competition, but the fact that the Obama administration made so many high-value
arms deals. Some countries are still busy trying to integrate the weapons
systems or other merchandise they’ve already purchased and may not be ready to
conclude new arms agreements.
The Good News for
Arms Makers: More War
There are,
however, a number of reasons to think that the major weapons makers will do
even better in the coming years than they did in the banner year of 2017.
Start with
America’s wars. As defense expert Micah Zenko of Chatham House explained recently
at Foreign Policy, President Trump has been doubling down on many
of the wars he inherited from Obama. The moves of his administration
(peopled, of course, by generals from those very wars) include
the increasing use of Special Operations forces, a dramatic rise
in air strikes, and an increase in troop levels in conflicts ranging from
Afghanistan and Yemen to Syria and Somalia. It remains to be seen whether the
president’s favorite Middle Eastern ally, Saudi Arabia, will be
successful in goading his administration -- replete with
Iranophobes, including Secretary of Defense James Mattis and CIA
Director Mike Pompeo -- into taking military action against Tehran.
Such calculations have been complicated by recent anti-government protests
there, which the president and his inner circle hope will lead to
regime change from within. (Trump’s crowing about unrest in Iran has, however,
been decidedly unhelpful to genuine advocates of democracy in that
country, given the low esteem in which he’s held throughout Iranian society.)
Such far-flung
military operations will naturally cost money. Lots of it. Minimally, tens of
billions of dollars; hundreds of billions if one or more of those wars
escalates in an unexpected way -- as happened in Afghanistan and Iraq in the
Bush years. As a study by the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson
Institute recently noted, our post-9/11 wars have already cost at least
$5.6 trillion when one takes into account both direct budgetary
commitments and long-term obligations, including lifetime care for the hundreds
of thousands of American veterans who suffered severe physical and
psychological damage in those conflicts. It’s important to remember that
such immense costs emerged from what was supposed to be a quick, triumphant war
in Afghanistan and what top Bush administration officials were convinced would
be a relatively inexpensive regime change operation in Iraq and the garrisoning
of that country. (That invasion and occupation was then projected to cost just
a cut-rate $50 billion to $200 billion.)
Don’t be surprised
if the conflicts that Trump has inherited and is now escalating follow a
similar pattern in which actual costs far outstrip initial estimates, even if
not at the stratospheric levels of the Afghan and Iraq wars, which involved the
commitment of hundreds of thousands of “boots on the ground.”
All of this spending will again be good financial news for the producers of
combat aircraft, munitions, armored vehicles, drones, and attack helicopters,
among other goods and services needed to sustain a policy of endless war across
significant parts of the planet.
Beyond the hot
wars that have involved U.S. troops and air strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq,
Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, there are scores of other places
where this country’s Special Operations forces are on the ground training local
militaries and in many cases accompanying them on missions that could quickly
turn deadly, as happened to four Green Berets operating in Niger in
October 2017. With Special Ops personnel engaged in a staggering 149
countries last year and a pledge to step up U.S. activities yet more in
Africa -- there are already 6,000 U.S. troops and scores
of “train and equip” missions on that continent -- spending is
essentially guaranteed to go up, whatever the specifics of any given conflict.
There are already calls by leading members of Congress
to increase the size of U.S. Special Operations forces, which,
as TomDispatch’s Nick Turse notes, already number nearly
70,000 personnel.
Boondoggles, Inc.
Rest assured,
however, that so far we’ve only taken a dip in the shallow end of the deep,
deep pool of military spending. Equally important to the bottom lines of
Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and
their cohorts is the Trump administration’s commitment to continue funding
weapons systems the Pentagon doesn’t need at prices we can’t afford. Take
the F-35 combat plane, a Rube Goldberg contraption once designed to carry out
multiple missions and now capable of doing none of them well.
In fact, as the
Project on Government Oversight has pointed out, it’s an aircraft that
may never be fully ready for combat. To add insult to injury,
billions more will be spent to fix defects in planes that were rushed through
production before they had been fully tested. The cost of this “too big
to fail” program is currently projected at $1.5 trillion over the
lifetimes of the 2,400-plus aircraft currently planned for. This means it
is likely to become the most expensive weapons program in the history of
Pentagon procurement.
Unfortunately, the
F-35 is hardly the only boondoggle that will continue to pad the coffers of
defense contractors while offering little in the way of defense (no less the
usual offense). A recent estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, for
example, suggests that a projected three-decade Pentagon plan to build a new
generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines, initiated under
President Obama and close to the heart of Donald Trump, will cost up to
$1.7 trillion dollars. This stunning figure
includes spending on new nuclear warheads under development at the
Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, one
of many channels for military spending that are outside the
Pentagon’s already bloated budget. And given the history of such weapons
systems and the cost overruns that regularly accompany them, keep in mind that
$1.7 trillion will probably prove a gross underestimate. The Government
Accountability Office, for instance, has released a
report suggesting that the program to build a new generation of
ballistic missile submarines, now priced at $128 billion, is going to blow
past that figure.
In recent years,
hawks in Congress have been pressing for more funding for missile defense and
Donald Trump (with the help of “Little Rocket Man”) is their guy. David
Willman of the Los Angeles Times reports that the Trump
administration wants to spend more than $10 billion over the next five years
beefing up a deeply flawed project for placing ground-based missile
interceptors in Alaska and California. This is just one of a number of
missile defense initiatives under way.
In 2018, Lockheed,
Boeing, and General Atomics are also scheduled to test drones that
will reportedly use lasers to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles
like those being developed by North Korea. It’s a program that will
undoubtedly garner tens of billions of dollars more in taxpayer funding in the
years to come. And Congress isn’t waiting until a final Pentagon budget
for 2018 is wrapped up to lavish more money on missile defense contractors. A
stopgap spending bill passed in late December 2017 kept most programs at
current levels, but offered a special gift of nearly $5 billion extra
for anti-missile initiatives.
In addition, a
congressionally financed study of the best place to base an East Coast
missile defense system -- a favorite hobbyhorse of Republicans on the
House Armed Services Committee that even the Pentagon has little interest in
pursuing -- is scheduled to be released later this year. The
Congressional Budget Office already suggests that the price tag for
that proposed system would be at least $3.6 billion in its first five years of
development. Yet deploying it, as the Union of Concerned Scientists
has pointed out, would have little or no value when it comes to protecting
the United States from a missile attack. If the project moves ahead, it
won’t be the first time Congress has launched a costly, unnecessary spending
program that the Pentagon didn’t even request.
Cybersecurity has
been another expanding focus of concern -- and funding -- in recent years, as
groups ranging from the Democratic National Committee to
the National Security Agency have been hit by determined hackers. The
concern may be justified, but the solution -- throwing billions at the Pentagon
and starting a new Cyber Command to press for yet more funding -- is
misguided at best. One of the biggest bottlenecks to crafting effective cyber
defenses is the lack of personnel with useful and appropriate skills,
a long-term problem that short-term infusions of cash will not resolve. In any
case, some of the most vulnerable places -- from the power grid to the banking
system -- will have to be dealt with by private firms that should be prodded by
stricter government regulations, a concept to which Donald Trump seems to be
allergic. As it happens, though, creating enforceable government standards
turns out to be one of the most important ways of addressing cybersecurity
challenges.
Despite the likely
spending spree to come, don’t expect the Pentagon, the arms makers, their
lobbyists, or their allies in Congress, to stop crying out for more. There’s
always a new weapons scheme or a new threat to hype or another ill-conceived
proposal for a military “solution” to a complicated security problem.
Trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives later, the
primary lesson from the perpetual wars and profligate weapons spending of this
century should be that throwing more money at the Pentagon isn’t making us any
safer. But translating that lesson into a change in Washington's spending
patterns would take major public pushback at a level that has yet to
materialize.
Genuine opposition
to runaway Pentagon spending may yet emerge, if, as expected, President Trump,
Paul Ryan, and the Republican Congress follow up their trillion-dollar tax
giveaway with an assault on Medicare and Social Security.
At that point, the devastating domestic costs of overspending on the Pentagon
should become far more difficult to ignore.
This year will
undoubtedly be a banner year for arms companies. The only question is:
Might it also mark the beginning of a future movement to roll back
unconstrained weapons expenditures?
William D.
Hartung, a TomDispatch regular,
is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for
International Policy and the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin
and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and
join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred
McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline
of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower's The Violent American
Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer's dystopian
novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come
to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower
World.
Copyright 2018
William D. Hartung Reprinted with permission.
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
