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military contractors
Why a $1,000,000,000,000 Military Budget Makes Us Less Safe—Not More
We need our tax dollars for healthcare, climate, and education—not war and destruction.
Jun 28, 2024
f you looked at the U.S. military budget without knowing otherwise, you’d probably guess we were in World War III.
Our military spending is now the highest it’s been at any point since World War II — and Congress keeps adding more. The House of Representatives just passed legislation that will take military spending to $895 billion, while the Senate Armed Services Committee passed a bill that would total $923 billion.
Those totals don’t even include the military aid to Ukraine and Israel that was included in the $95 billion war package Congress passed this spring. We’re teetering closer and closer to a $1 trillion military budget.
Adjusting for inflation, the last time the national security budget topped $1 trillion was in 1945, the final year of World War II.
Unlike a world war, there’s nothing happening today that can justify this level of spending. Even the war in Ukraine and the decimation of Gaza (which is being carried out with U.S.-supplied weapons) account for just a small fraction of overall spending.
So what’s all this spending for?
We need members of Congress to do three things: focus on the problems we do have, stop trying to rule the world, and have the spine to say no to military contractors.
It’s to keep the U.S. military machine running as it has since World War II, with the more or less explicit goal of global military domination. That goal is shared by many in Congress. But members of Congress also receive constant encouragement — and campaign funds — from for-profit, corporate military contractors who can expect to receive about half of the total military budget.
But it turns out that global military dominance is pretty expensive. And luckily, it’s not at all necessary to safeguard U.S. security.
After 20 years of disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, too many in Congress and military leadership haven’t learned that having the biggest, strongest military in the history of the world costs a lot — more than $21 trillion in the first 20 years of the millennium — but doesn’t make the world any safer.
Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) called for adding another $55 billion to the already-gargantuan Pentagon budget — supposedly justified by competition with China. But the U.S. military budget is already more than three times higher than China’s.
Many experts agree that the military threat from the Chinese has been oversold. But whatever threats the U.S. faces, it should say something more troubling about the U.S. military if we can’t achieve security by spending more than three times what an adversary spends.
Anyone genuinely concerned with the security of the American people should be more concerned about that $1 trillion military budget. The obsession with China and world dominance is bleeding our public coffers. This is money that can’t be invested in infrastructure, education, health care, or other necessities to keep our own country functioning.
Meanwhile, as another summer starts, we face growing bills for disaster relief from floods and heat waves to storms and wildfires. In a world where climate change is making these disasters more frequent, we have to start budgeting for those expenses and doing more to limit the damage by transitioning to renewable energy.
Even a fraction of the $1 trillion soon to be spent on the military would go a long way to making life safer on each of these fronts.
Luckily, we don’t face the same problems the world did in 1945 — and we don’t need a World-War-III-level military budget. Instead, we need members of Congress to do three things: focus on the problems we do have, stop trying to rule the world, and have the spine to say no to military contractors.
Only then will we have a budget designed for 2024, not 1945.
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A California University Reveals Its Ties to Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
The release of previously withheld UCSB military contracts constitutes a win for the the Central Coast Antiwar Coalition and the UCSB Liberated Zone encampment.
May 30, 2024
At long last, on May 20, 2024, the University of California at Santa Barbara, in response to a 2021 California Public Records Act request, finally released copies of its 2016-2021 military contracts with weapons manufacturers. Amid campus “Let Gaza Live” worker walkouts and encampments, UCSB revealed contracts with Israel’s weapons suppliers General Dynamics and Boeing, as well as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman–companies ensconced in nearby Goleta’s “infra-red valley” where engineers design the military eyeballs of fighter jets and night-vision goggles for soldiers to see darkness as daylight for nighttime surveillance.
The release of previously withheld UCSB military contracts constitutes a win for the the Central Coast Antiwar Coalition and the UCSB Liberated Zone encampment, whose supporters confronted administrators at UCSB’s Cheadle Hall to demand the university fulfill its legal obligation to comply with CPRA, as well as disclose UCSB’s financial portfolio, divest from holdings in military contractors and companies profiting from Israel’s occupation and genocide, and sever UCSB military contracts for weapons research and development.
The UCSB Liberated Zone, an autonomous 100-tent encampment amid the campus fig and Eecalyptus trees, features a library or education station, a daily schedule of events that included a teach-in “From Chiapas to Palestine,” 24-hour security teams working three-hour shifts, community meals and concerts, and signs and banners that shout, “WE JUST WANT PEACE” and “END ISRAELI TERROR. NO WAR ON GAZA.”
Students from the UCSB Liberated Zone quoted the military contracts as evidence in a mock trial they conducted in front of the campus library, where the “prosecutor” charged university administrators with complicity in Israel’s genocide.
In a long-delayed response to the CPRA request, marked by the university’s multiple emails for clarifications and deadline extensions, the UCSB Public Records Act office released 24 PDFs for contract awards, contract amendments, and purchase orders worth millions of dollars.
The contract products were described either in an unintelligible string of numbers and letters, like Northrop Grumman’s (SOW-M297-DII-001) or in engineering jargon, such as Boeing’s “Heterogeneous Integration” or Lockheed’s “cell architecture development” or General Dynamics “Agile High Dimensional Locomotion and Full-body Manipulation” with scant upfront reference to the likely purpose or end product: robotic soldiers to weaponize space and laser-guided bombs for “warfighting” aircraft.
The tail end of one near $6-million campus contract with General Dynamics, a subcontractor for the Army Research Laboratory’s “warfighting experimentation” in “unmanned vehicles,” extols the benefits to both private industry and the Department of Defense (DOD) in “exploiting technology and expertise where it exists” to promote “soldier trust and confidence” in semi-autonomous weapons with “biological limbs” perfected for “manipulation and mobility” and artificial intelligence to interpret non-verbal cues in “high tempo environments.”
The contract—in a brazen dismissal of lost lives and toxic ecological footprint—states in its rationale, “Operations Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and Iraqi Freedom have demonstrated the value of robotic platforms both aerial and on ground.”
Another agreement, a $2 million 2016 contract with Lockheed Martin, references “sensor cell development and testing” for a company that describes itself as the “most advanced sensor family” for “precision targeting, navigation, threat detection, and next generation intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities.”
Students from the UCSB Liberated Zone quoted the military contracts as evidence in a mock trial they conducted in front of the campus library, where the “prosecutor” charged university administrators with complicity in Israel’s genocide.
Staff at the UCSB Office of Technology and Industry Alliances (“Our friends call us TIA”) signed the now public military contracts for the office that manages intellectual property contracts, laboratory rentals, and non-disclosure agreements for military industry partners.
Under CPRA, enacted in 1968 and modeled on the Freedom of Information Act, public agencies are required to promptly comply with requests for public documents, unless the documents are exempt due to concerns over lack of privacy or risk to the public.
The released contracts represent a fraction of what the PRA office wrote in 2021 was the university’s 398 DOD-related contracts. Moreover, the office’s assertion that it has no records on current UCSB contracts with Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, or Northrop Grumman strains credulity because all three contractors are listed as Capstone Engineering (CAP) UCSB corporate affiliates on the campus website.
Other UCSB corporate affiliates include Teledyne-Flir, manufacturer of thermal weapons for long-range targeting; the Naval Sea Systems Command, specialist in underwater warfare; and Microsoft, host of research and development centers in Israel to provide the Israeli military with cloud computing services for checkpoints in the occupied West Bank.
Why UCSB Must Divorce Its Deadly Corporate Affiliates
The American Friends Service Committee, in its report “The Companies Profiting from Israel’s 2023-2024 Attacks on Gaza,” documents how Raytheon, with an office on Hollister and 1,500 employees in Goleta, supplies the Israel Defense Forces—or more appropriately named Israeli Occupation Forces—with air-to-surface missiles for F-16 fighter jets, as well as 1,000-pound bunker-buster bombs to annihilate Palestinian neighborhoods on the narrow coastal strip now struggling under Israel’s death sentence of mass starvation. Northrop Grumman, with an office tucked away at the end of a sleepy street in Old Town, Goleta, furnishes Israel with Longbow missile delivery systems, while Lockheed Martin, its local office in a cul-de-sac not far from the teeming Goleta Marketplace, supplies Israel with Hellfire missiles and F-16 and F-35 fighter jets for its assault on Gaza.
Shifting the Narrative
UCSB pro-Palestine activists and their nationwide campus cohort in what has become known as “The Popular University of Gaza” are driving change on two levels: first, rethinking the university as a military research outpost and, second, shifting the narrative to expose Israel as a settler-colonial state rather than a safe refuge for victims of antisemitism. This shift in narrative—supported by anti-Zionist Jews and descendants of Holocaust survivors—cannot be underestimated in its potential to build consensus for ending university complicity in Israel’s occupation and ethnic cleansing.
The New McCarthyism—congressional excoriation of college presidents, Israel lobby lawsuits against universities (including UCSB), a House resolution backed by Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Calif.) to conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism—reflects institutional panic over a generation of youth unmasking the colonizer to link liberatory struggles from Palestine to Tigray to Congo.
Free Palestine!
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Some Abu Ghraib Torture Victims Finally Get Their Day in Court, but All Deserve Justice
Al Shimari et al. v. CACI, which will be heard today, was only able to advance because it targeted a military contractor; U.S. courts have repeatedly dismissed similar cases against the federal government.
Apr 15, 2024
Twenty years have passed since the media broke the story that U.S. forces and the CIA were torturing “war on terror” detainees at Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-run prisons in Iraq. But for the men who were tortured, it feels like only yesterday. The physical and mental scars they carry serve as daily reminders of the abuse they suffered.
Still, several of these men told me they hold out hope that the U.S. government will apologize and give them the redress they deserve.
The U.S. government hasn’t created any official compensation program or other avenues for redress for those who allege they were tortured or abused. Nor are there any pathways available to have their cases heard.
On April 15, a federal court in Virginia will hear the case of Al Shimari et al. v. CACI, a lawsuit brought by the U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of three Iraqi torture victims. The suit asserts that CACI, a private security company which the U.S. government hired in 2003 to interrogate prisoners in Iraq, directed and participated in torture and other abuse at Abu Ghraib. The men are seeking compensatory and punitive damages.
CACI has tried to have the case dismissed 20 times since it was first filed in 2008.
Al Shimari et al. v. CACI was only able to advance because it targeted a military contractor. U.S. courts have repeatedly dismissed similar cases against the federal government because of a 1946 law that preserves U.S. forces’ immunity for claims that arise during war.
What’s more, the U.S. government hasn’t created any official compensation program or other avenues for redress for those who allege they were tortured or abused. Nor are there any pathways available to have their cases heard.
This lawsuit is a critical step towards justice for these three men who will finally have their day in court. But they are the lucky few. For the hundreds of other survivors still suffering from past abuses, their chances of justice remain slim. The U.S. government should do the right thing: take responsibility for their abuses, offer an apology, and open an avenue to redress that has been denied them for too many years.
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