The United States spends about $1 trillion a year on its war machine.
How much would it cost to run an efficient and effective war machine?
Maybe one tenth that — $100 billion.
That’s the take of Andrew Cockburn, author of The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine (2021).
“We have to ask – what is the objective? Is it to dominate the world and have 800 bases all around the world? Or is it to mount an effective defense against likely threats? In which case, we don’t need very much,” Cockburn told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week.
Despite so-called gridlock in Washington over almost every piece of legislation, the Democrats and Republicans came together to vote for a $778 billion defense bill. How did they pull that off?
“The Democrats in Congress increased the military budget beyond what even Trump had asked for,” Cockburn said. “And again this year, they increased the budget beyond what Biden had asked for. You have to consider who the real electorate is. On important matters, the electorate isn’t you and me going to the polls. The real electorate are the major corporations, the major donors, the Wall Street banks. They are the people who call the shots on important matters. And the important matters to them was to pour more money into their pockets as opposed to wussy stuff like universal pre-K and negotiating drug prices. The only ones who care about that are the people.”
“Once you see the system for what it is, it is quite easy to see why they waived through a $778 billion defense budget and balked at spending actually less money over the long term on what people actually need.”
Your book is filled with detail about this profligate waste that has been going on for a long time. You tell a story about U.S. soldiers in the Korean war not being able to get decent boots.
“In the first winter of the Korean War, half the U.S. casualties were from frostbite. The reason they were getting frostbite was that they didn’t have proper boots. The U.S. Army boots were woefully ill-designed for protecting soldiers’ feet. There was a former Army officer who told me that he would conduct raids into the enemy trenches to capture boots because the communist troops had nice, well padded, very adequate boots.”
“And he said to himself – here am – a soldier from the richest country in the world. Why am I risking my life and the lives of my men to steal boots from soldiers from the poorest country in the world? It wasn’t like there wasn’t enough money to buy proper boots.”
“There just wasn’t any particular interest. Meanwhile, they were spending the bulk of the huge proportion of the exploding defense budget at that time, certainly not on adequate boots for the soldiers, but on so-called strategic nuclear bombers. There was a huge program to buy B-47 bombers, which actually were not that strategic. They couldn’t actually reach Russia from the United States. But never mind. That’s where the political influence went. The Air Force was expanding. And all of the money was going into strategic delivery vehicles.”
“If the boot makers had been as politically powerful and there had been as many rewards in making decent boots, then they would have done so. But as it was, the system pointed in a different direction.”
Former Senator William Proxmire (D-Wisconsin) used to give out a monthly Golden Fleece Award to draw attention to military contractors and others who would rip off the government. There used to be a cadre of members of Congress who would be critical of wasteful defense spending. Do we have that now?
“No and yes. Effective critics, no. Close to 100 members of the progressive caucus voted against the defense bill. But there is no Proxmire. They don’t really focus on what is going on in the system. They will say – we need to cut the defense budget ten percent. Fair enough. Let’s start with ten percent. With some exceptions, Congressional staff is not educated enough on the subject.”
“You go and talk to the staff of the defense committees and they are not really that well informed. There is not a cadre of not just committed, but deeply informed people in Congress – both members and staff – that can hold the feet of these criminals to the fire.”
“And the support of the waste is bipartisan. The Democrats and the Republicans are one on this. On the right, there have been some effective critics. Justin Amash used to be quite good, but he’s gone from Congress. Walter Jones, who I respected a lot, was a very right wing member of Congress. He’s the one who came up with Freedom Fries. Everyone laughed at that. His district included Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. But then when the 9/11 wars got going, he found himself going to a lot of military funerals. And he said to me – it dawned on him that he was responsible for killing and maiming all of these young men and women. And it changed him completely. Every time there was a casualty in Iraq and Afghanistan, he would write a signed letter to the family apologizing saying – I feel terrible about this and I’m working to stop these wars. And he was an effective critic.”
You have a chapter titled – The Military Industrial Virus – and you show how it spreads to infect everyone, including Sanders on the F-35.
“The F-35, the new Air Force fighter plane, along with everything else that’s wrong with it, it’s incredibly noisy. It’s about four times as noisy as the F-16, which itself is pretty noisy. It was actually Senator Patrick Leahy, with Senator Sanders’ willing acquiescence, who lobbied the Air Force to give the F-35s to the Vermont National Guard, which is based at the Burlington, Vermont airport. It is surrounded by low income suburbs, mostly immigrants, who live close up against the fence.”
“The F-35 is so noisy that thousands of these people have had to sell their houses and go somewhere else. When people pointed this out to Sanders, he said – Oh well, I’m against the F-35, I don’t think it should have been built, but as long as it is being built, as long as we do have it, I support bringing those jobs to Burlington.”
“That’s always the argument. It’s jobs and I have to get jobs for my constituents. As it so happens, deploying the F-35 to Burlington actually meant a loss of jobs connected to the air base because the F-35 was made deliberately so complex that it can only be maintained back at the factory, to the profit of Lockheed rather than by the service people at Burlington. He couldn’t get that right.”
“That’s just one example of just how corrupting the whole system is. I’m sure Sanders genuinely wants to cut the defense budget. But once they dangle the prospect of jobs and political favors – he could earn brownie points with his colleague Leahy, who had a particular interest in this deployment – then he is going to go along with it.”
“Another example I give is Barack Obama instituting a whole new nuclear force. New ballistic submarine, new bomber, new missiles. It will amount to a couple of trillion dollars. Part of this program was to produce more plutonium pits. They are semi round pieces of plutonium that go in the heart of a nuclear weapon. Those are produced mainly at the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory in New Mexico.”
“As it so happens, we have a surplus of plutonium pits anyway. They last for 100 years and we dismantled many nuclear weapons. So there is no need to make any more plutonium pits. But this was good work and money for the Los Alamos Nuclear Lab. And so in defense of this outrageous boondoggle, then New Mexico Senator Mark Udall, who was among the most decent of the progressive liberal Senators in Congress, a very good guy, was tigerish in his demands for these useful pieces of deadly nuclear weapons material being produced in quantity just to please this very powerful corporation that runs the local nuclear laboratory.”
“You can find many examples like that. Sherrod Brown, another progressive Senator, is equally tigerish in favor of the Lima, Ohio M-1 tank plant. The Army has a huge surplus of M-1 tanks. They have thousands in storage. But to keep the factory running in Lima, Senator Brown demanded that the Army buy more.”
“It is so insidious. This virus has taken over the body politic. In the chapter I titled – The Military Industrial Virus – I show how it has a life of its own. It grows overall at a rate of five percent a year. Wars come and go. It goes up and down. But it’s an organism that exists to protect its food supply. And we can see it protecting its food supply when there are threats.”
[For the complete q/a format Interview with Andrew Cockburn, see 36 Corporate Crime Reporter 3, January 17, 2022, print edition only.]