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military spending
Sanders Says 'Congress Must Investigate' War Profiteering by US Military Contractors
"The greed of these companies is fleecing the American taxpayer and killing Ukrainians," said the senator.
Aug 29, 2024
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday said "there's a name for" the billions of dollars in stock buybacks and dividends that major U.S. defense contractors have doled out to their shareholders while taking taxpayer money, and it's this: "war profiteering."
Sanders, the independent from Vermont who chairs the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee in the Senate, took aim at Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and RTX—formerly known as Raytheon—for taking in $255 billion in public funds since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, only to reward shareholders and executives with $52 billion via the benefits of stock buybacks and dividends.
"The greed of these companies is fleecing the American taxpayer and killing Ukrainians," said Sanders. "Congress must investigate."
Sanders reiterated his strong support for backing Ukraine as it continues to defend against Russia's incursion, but said he does not support military contractors "making huge profits on the weapons systems they produce."
With the companies increasing prices for weapons systems and equipment while showering their shareholders with payouts, he said "our taxpayers pay more than they should, and Ukraine receives less weaponry than it needs."
Following the consolidation of dozens of defense contractors into just five companies in the 1990s, the cost of weapons and supplies have risen dramatically. As CBS News reported last year, a stinger missile costs more than $400,000 at Raytheon, now the weapon's sole supplier—a seven-fold increase over its cost in 1991, even accounting for inflation.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) noted when introducing the Stop Price Gouging the Military Act in 2022 that defense contractors "regularly charge the military excessive prices, including $71 for a pin that should have cost less than a nickel and $80 for a drain pipe segment that should have cost $1."
Sanders said the companies are price gouging "all while saying they need emergency supplemental funding to ramp up production for the war effort."
"I strongly support getting the Ukrainians what they need to defend their country," said Sanders. "What I do NOT support is the war profiteering of major defense contractors."
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The Military-Industrial Complex Is Killing the American Dream and Hopes for World Peace
As long as official Washington clings to the illusion that arms racing is the magic key to peace, stability, and global dominance, we will waste large sums of scarce resources while increasing the risks of unnecessary conflict.
Aug 24, 2024
America’s commitment to arm Israel and Ukraine while attempting to stockpile large quantities of weapons for a potential war with China is putting strains on America’s weapons manufacturing base, leading many influential policy makers and corporate officials to suggest measures that would supersize this nation’s already enormous military-industrial complex.
This argument is taken to the extreme in a new piece in The National Interest by Arthur Herman of the arms contractor-funded Hudson Institute, entitled “Three Cheers for the Military-Industrial Complex.” The article repeats many of the stock arguments of current advocates of higher Pentagon spending while throwing around misleading statistics and dubious assumptions along the way.
Advocates like Herman need to step back and question the basic assumptions underpinning their calls for a new military buildup.
Myth number one routinely put forward by today’s proponents of throwing more money at the Pentagon is that the U.S. military has somehow been neglected over the past few decades, and that therefore we need to inject hundreds of billions of dollars in additional spending into the arms sector to restore our defenses to an acceptable level. This argument has appeared in a recent report by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) on the need for a renewed policy of “peace through strength,” as well as in an analysis from a congressional commission charged with assessing the state of America’s defenses.
Both reports—as well as Herman’s article—are based on a false premise.
The Pentagon budget is rapidly spiraling toward $1 trillion per year, one of the highest levels since World War II. And once other military-related items are taken into account—from military aid and veterans’ affairs to the nation’s vast intelligence gathering network—the figure for total national security spending is more like $1.5 trillion. This comes after a decade in which the Pentagon received well over $6 trillion, roughly the same as was spent during the 10 years that included the peaks of the Iraq and Afghan wars.
The above-mentioned numbers are mind-boggling, but the main point is that recent and proposed spending is far more than enough to defend the United States and its allies, if it is spent more wisely and managed more effectively.
The bottom line is that the Pentagon needs more spending discipline, not more spending. For example, it is the only federal agency that is unable to pass an audit, a sad state of affairs that means that the department doesn’t even have an accurate count of how much equipment or spare parts it possesses, or in some cases even where these items are being stored.
Nor, according to former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, does the Pentagon know how many private contractors it employs, although rough estimates suggest that the number is well over half a million people. These management failures waste untold billions of dollars, year in and year out.
source of waste is the Pentagon’s penchant for building dysfunctional weapons systems at exorbitant prices. Cases in point are the F-35 combat aircraft and the Littoral Combat Ship, systems that are so riddled with flaws that they frequently can’t carry out basic functions. Both systems have required billions of dollars in expensive retrofits and have spent large chunks of time out of commission due to needed downtime for repairs and maintenance. The two systems are the poster children for what is wrong with the Pentagon’s system for developing and buying new weapons, from seeking extreme and overly complex performance characteristics to giving away the store to contractors in negotiations over price and performance.
In the meantime, the most expensive element of the Pentagon’s $2 trillion, three decades-long nuclear modernization plan, the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, has undergone cost growth of 81%in the past few years alone.
These weapons development fiascos do absolutely nothing to promote the defense of the United States, but they still manage to enrich the major weapons contractors charged with building them, whether or not they are effective or affordable. Absent reforms in the system that produces these dismal outcomes, simply giving the Pentagon more money is no guarantee of more defensive capability.
Poor management is one thing, but the real pressure to spend more on the military-industrial complex is America’s overly ambitious, outmoded view of the global role of the U.S. military. Current U.S. strategy calls for the ability to beat Russia or China in a conflict; project decisive force against adversaries like Iran and North Korea; quietly continue a global war on terrorism that involves dozens of overseas operations by U.S. forces every year; a massive program to build a new generation of nuclear weapons; and a surge of investment in high-tech, high-speed, pilotless weapons that incorporate artificial intelligence and can operate with little or no human input.
A truly realistic defense strategy would scale back current plans to be prepared to fight wars in any corner of the globe on short notice, pursue a deterrence-only nuclear strategy that would eliminate the need for a costly nuclear modernization plan, and limit military aid to nations engaged in defending themselves or holding off aggressive neighbors.
On the aid front this would mean continuing to arm Ukraine while exploring a diplomatic resolution of the conflict there. But it would involve cutting off assistance to Israel, whose brutal war in Gaza has gone far beyond any reasonable definition of defense, killing 40,000 people in an operation that has involved the commission of numerous war crimes which, according to a growing number of independent human rights and international law experts, may amount to genocide.
It is notable that many proponents of making America a garrison state have little to say about the non-military challenges we face, from climate change to epidemics to political and economic inequality, much less how to address these problems. And if they reference diplomacy at all, it is often as an adjunct to the use or threat of force, not a tool for preventing conflict in the first place.
Advocates like Herman need to step back and question the basic assumptions underpinning their calls for a new military buildup. First, we need to craft a viable strategy. Only then can we have an intelligent discussion about what size budget is required and what sort of manufacturing base is needed to sustain it. But as long as official Washington clings to the illusion that military buildups and arms racing are the magic key to peace, stability, and global dominance, we will waste large sums of scarce resources while increasing the risks of unnecessary conflict.
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Blank Checks for War: Congress Has Abdicated Its Power From Tonkin to Gaza
As the 60th anniversary of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution approaches, it’s time to reflect on how Congress solidified its long-standing deference to the presidency on foreign policy and how the people can make their voices heard.
Aug 01, 2024
With the U.S.- backed carnage in Gaza continuing and the threat of growing violence looming throughout the region (in Lebanon, Iran, and who knows where else), we need to think more deeply than ever about how the American people have historically been excluded from foreign policy decision-making. An upcoming anniversary should remind us of what sent us down this undemocratic path.
Sixty years ago, on August 7, 1964, U.S. Congress handed President Lyndon B. Johnson the power to wage a major war in Vietnam, solidifying its long-standing deference to the presidency on foreign policy. Not once since World War II has Congress exercised its constitutional responsibility to vote on declarations to decide if, when, and where the United States goes to war.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 flew through Congress, in part because most members trusted the president’s assurance that he sought “no wider war.” Their trust was misplaced. The Johnson administration kept secret and lied about its plans for future military escalation in Vietnam. It also lied about the incident used to persuade Congress to give LBJ a blank check to use military force however he wanted: the false claim that American ships had been the targets of unprovoked and unequivocal attacks by North Vietnamese patrol boats.
We have long had more than enough evidence to demand fundamental changes in U.S. foreign policy. We can’t wait for Congress to represent us faithfully.
In fact, the United States had been fighting a secret war against North Vietnam since 1961. The U.S. destroyers that LBJ said were innocently sailing on the “high seas” were there to support South Vietnamese attacks (organized by the U.S. military and CIA) on North Vietnamese coastal villages. On August 2, 1964, these ongoing acts of war finally provoked a few Vietnamese patrol boats to chase after a U.S. destroyer which, firing first, easily disabled the small vessels. The Vietnamese managed to fire a few torpedoes but missed. There were no American casualties. Not exactly Pearl Harbor.
What’s more, the White House also claimed it had “unequivocal” evidence that North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked again on August 4. In fact, the U.S. commander on the scene sent a “flash message” urging civilian authorities to delay any decision—because what first seemed like an attack may have been a false alarm caused by “freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonarmen.” Within days it was all but certain that no second attack had occurred. As President Johnson said to an aide, “Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!”
Nonetheless, Johnson went on television near midnight on August 4 to announce that it was his “duty” to launch a “retaliatory” airstrike. As he spoke, 64 U.S. warplanes were on their way to bomb North Vietnam. The next day LBJ asked Congress for a resolution giving him the authority “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States.” We now know that the heart of this resolution had been drafted months earlier. The administration had just been waiting for a pretext to ram it through Congress.
We also know the lies didn’t stop there. That fall, as Johnson campaigned for the presidency, he sounded like a peace candidate, promising that he would not send “our boys to do the fighting for Asian boys.” Running against pro-war Republican Barry Goldwater, LBJ won in a landslide. Americans voted for peace and ended up with a war that killed more than 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans.
Virtually every top U.S. foreign policy official knew the Johnson administration was lying about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, including 33-year-old Daniel Ellsberg. By chance, Ellsberg’s first full day on the job, as one of Robert McNamara’s Pentagon “whiz kids,” was August 4, 1964. Ellsberg was then a Cold War hawk who supported the U.S. mission in Vietnam. Like all his colleagues, he raised no internal objections to Johnson’s airstrikes or the administration’s effort to sell the Tonkin Gulf Resolution through deceit. And no insider gave a second’s thought to revealing those lies to Congress, the media, or the public.
After a year in the Pentagon, nearly two years in Vietnam, and two more years meeting young anti-war activists and intensely studying the 7,000-page top-secret history of decision-making in Vietnam that became known as the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg underwent a dramatic political and moral conversion. By 1967, he believed the war an unwinnable stalemate from which the U.S. should find a face-saving exit. By 1969, he regarded it as fundamentally immoral and unjust, and thought the U.S. should withdraw unilaterally and immediately.
At that point, Ellsberg decided to photocopy the Pentagon Papers and make them public, hoping that their sordid record of government lying would further ignite anti-war activism. He did so with the knowledge that it might bring him a life sentence in prison. First Ellsberg tried to persuade anti-war senators to put the Pentagon Papers into the public record. When that effort failed, he took the papers to The New York Times and 18 other newspapers. Each of them published substantial portions in June 1971.
Later that year, Ellsberg spoke with former Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, one of only two members of Congress who voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. They talked about the documents in the Pentagon Papers that contained detailed evidence of the Johnson administration’s lies about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Morse said to Ellsberg, “If you’d given me those documents, at the time, in 1964, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution would never have gotten out of committee. And if they had brought it to the floor, it would have lost.”
You can’t replay history, so we can’t test Morse’s claim, but Ellsberg has many times said that the greatest regret of his life was not exposing the government’s lies about Vietnam much earlier. There were many reasons why he didn’t, and why so few officials ever expose national security wrongdoing. The biggest reason, Ellsberg came to realize, was the intense culture of power, loyalty, and careerism that characterizes foreign policy circles. Almost no one in those positions, even those who have serious objections to ongoing policies, is willing to risk their insider status and their access to power and privileged information. Most fully internalize the arrogant assumption that the foreign policy elite understands far better than Congress or the people how the world works and how the U.S. should exercise its power.
And Congress, for its part, continues to enable an ever more imperial presidency that decides when and where the U.S. goes to war. It almost never uses the power of the purse to reduce U.S. militarism or to cut funding for unpopular wars. The nearly trillion-dollar Pentagon budget is rubber-stamped every year. There is no guarantee that a more engaged Congress would give us a less militarized and interventionist foreign policy. But it would make that policy more accountable to a public which historically has been substantially more anti-war than its representatives. As in the Vietnam era, a majority of Americans opposed the 21st century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan many years before they ended. And since at least March 2024 a majority of Americans have opposed the Israeli government’s war on Gaza, yet Congress continues to bankroll U.S. support for it.
We have seen, in the last 10 months, an unprecedented outpouring of American protest in support of Palestinian rights. For good reason. Nearly 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians, and many of them children, have been killed by the Israeli military’s indiscriminate and disproportionate response to the Hamas killing of some 1,100 Israelis on October 7, 2023. Around 1.7% of the Gazan population (2.3 million) have been killed and at least 90% displaced from their homes (many have had to flee multiple times). A recent study by the medical journal The Lancet, estimates that the death toll in Gaza could reach 186,000 even if there is a cease-fire today.
For most Americans, this level of suffering is unimaginable. Yet we must try to imagine it. If we were Gaza, at least 5.7 million of us would be dead, the vast majority women, children, and other civilians. Many millions more would be among the uncounted dead and dying—buried, lost, sick, starving. More than 300 million of us would be forced from our homes, on the road seeking shelter, food, and water under ongoing military attacks and perils beyond description.
That is the reality in Gaza.
In the end, only a mass democratic movement has the potential to dramatically change U.S. foreign policy. The first challenge is to overthrow the baseless claim that the United States is the greatest force for good in the world, the “indispensable nation” that stands for the rule of law, freedom, and democracy. Our record does not warrant such a delusion. Only when that ideology and naïve faith is broadly undermined can we hope to chip away at the long-standing infrastructure of U.S. militarism—the over 750 military bases on foreign soil, the annual military exercises in two-thirds of the world’s nations, and the “defense” budget that equals the next nine most militarized nations combined.
Ellsberg and Morse were right. The people must know the truth. But we have long had more than enough evidence to demand fundamental changes in U.S. foreign policy. We can’t wait for Congress to represent us faithfully. The people’s voice must be heard.
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