Then U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis (L) and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford prepare to testify before the House Armed Services Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill April 12, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Meet the Former US
Generals Making Bank Off Afghan War Bloodshed
August 26, 2021
Many of the military generals who directed the war in Afghanistan over the last two decades have taken up lucrative jobs as members of the boards of directors of major military contractors that take in billions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon every year.
Take General Joseph Dunford Jr., who was
in charge of the International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces
Afghanistan. Back in 2012, Dunford testified in the U.S. Congress that he was
very optimistic about the situation in Afghanistan. “When I look at the Afghan
national security forces and where they were in 2008, when I first observed
them, and where they are today in 2012, it’s a dramatic improvement,” he said.
He was rewarded by
President Barack Obama with the job of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff from 2015 where he served until his retirement in September 2019. Six
months after he retired, Dunford joined the board of Lockheed Martin,
the biggest military contractor in the U.S. and was asked to lead a bipartisan panel charged by the U.S.
Congress to examine the February 2020 peace agreement with the Taliban.
“It’s not in anyone’s
best interest right now for precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Dunford concluded in May 2021.
Certainly it was not
in the interests of Lockheed Martin which was awarded $74.2 billion in U.S.
government contracts in 2020 alone, mostly from the Pentagon. Nor was it for
Dunford who is paid over $300,000 a year by Lockheed
to attend occasional board meetings. (In his previous job as chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was paid just shy of $190,000 a year.)
Or take General James Mattis, who effectively
took a leave of absence from the board of directors of General Dynamics to
serve as Secretary of Defense [sic] from January 2017 to January 2019 under
President Donald Trump. He assured the Washington Post that
the U.S. military efforts were succeeding.
“The Taliban's goal is
to take over this country and they've been stopped in that at great cost to the
Afghan people, at great cost to the Afghan army,” Mattis said in 2019. “If you read [the
articles], you'd almost think it's a total disaster, and it's not that at all.
It's been hard as hell but it’s not just one undistinguished defeat after
another. They [the Taliban] are the ones on the back foot.”
Mattis is now paid $127,458 to serve on the board
of General Dynamics, which received $22.6 billion in U.S.
government contracts in 2020.
Then there is General Mark Welsh III, a former Air Force
Chief of Staff, who played a major role in growing the drone pilot program as well as in
directing air strikes in Afghanistan. He was
elected to the board of Northrop Grumman in 2016 just after he retired, where
he was paid $299,261 a year, more than
double what he would make if he had kept his Air Force job. Northrop Grumman
was awarded $12.7 billion in U.S.
government contracts in 2020.
Another former four
star general, Jack Keane, who has been making the rounds
to condemn the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, was a member of the Defense
[sic] Policy Board Advisory Committee that advised President George Bush on the
invasion of Iraq. Today he is a national security analyst on Fox News where
he stated that Biden “made a terrible
mistake in pulling our troops out and giving the Taliban the opportunity to
take the country over.” Keane is a former board member at General Dynamics
where he was paid $257,884 in 2016, and is now the
chairman of AM General, the company that makes military Humvees.
Other members of top
military contractors include General Bruce Carlson, a retired Air Force
general, who now serves on the board of both Lockheed & L3 Harris
Technologies, and Admiral James Winnefeld Jr., the former
vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who directed the operation to bomb
Afghanistan in October 2001 from the USS Enterprise. Today Winnefeld serves on
the board of Raytheon where he is paid $292,446. His employer received $27.4 billion in U.S.
government contracts in 2020.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons
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Pratap
Chatterjee is an Indian/Sri Lankan investigative
journalist and progressive author of two books about the war on terror: "Halliburton's Army: How a
Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War"
(2009) and "Iraq, Inc." (2004).
He is the executive director of CorpWatch and serves
on the board of both Amnesty USA and the Corporate Europe Observatory.
Donations can be sent
to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206,
Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at]
comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"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
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