Time to look at history from the point of view of the arms industry?

(Jacobin NL ) – An article published in the Dutch daily newspaper Financieel Dagblad on Friday 6 September 2024 stated that we need to ‘make the armed forces as a whole more of a deterrent’, and that €1 billion has been appropriated for this purpose. Society must ‘become … more aware of our growing insecurity and … make the necessary preparations, otherwise life in the Netherlands may be disrupted.’ It is as if this growing insecurity has come out of nowhere and all we can do is prepare for it – as if there are no forces that are actively contributing to it. Such scaremongering about warfare implies that this is a completely new and exceptional situation.

But there are forces that benefit from war and will do all they can to boost this sense of insecurity – first and foremost, the arms industry. It has constantly been looking for threats in order to sell its weapons; and again and again it seems to find a reason to use those weapons, so there are always plenty of opportunities to perfect their military use. A cunning example is the recent ‘pager attack’ on people in Lebanon who were assumed, without any investigation or judicial procedure, to be members of Hezbollah.

To rid ourselves of the idea that ‘our growing insecurity’ is some kind of natural phenomenon that ‘just happens’, it is useful to look at developments in war and peace over the past century from the point of view of the global arms industry. This automatically brings us to the two threats that have predominated in the most recent cases of warfare: the Russians who will soon be on our borders, and the Muslims who want to take over the whole of the West. And it also brings us to what is perhaps even more important to the arms industry: creating a warlike atmosphere that will let it continue operating unabated.

The arms industry after the First World War

Let us start in 1918, just after the First World War. A war which had really been about nothing at all, or in fact only about supposed threats stirred up on either side – was over, and a disappointed arms industry had to look around for a suitable replacement. Luckily the search did not take long, for the Germans felt so humiliated by their defeat and the high cost of Allied war reparations that they swiftly found a new military target: their former enemies. For the arms industry it was back to business as usual.

After the Nazis had come to power in Germany in 1933, they were first joined by likewise fascist Italy in 1936, and later also by Japan. Meanwhile General Franco was mounting his coup in Spain – but there was so much armed resistance to it, including from international brigades, that it took him until 1939 to finally seize power and establish his dictatorship.

From the outset, all these fascist and autocratic states worked feverishly to build up a military apparatus, especially to carry out their own domestic purges. But the newly-made aircraft, bombs, tanks, cannons and rifles were soon able to display their deadly capabilities, for in 1939 Nazi Germany began attacking its European neighbours, and in 1940 it was the turn of the Netherlands to be invaded.

On the other side of the world, in the Pacific, Japan had been attacking other countries for far longer. In 1941 it bombed the American fleet in Pearl Harbor in an act of war against the United States; and in 1942 it attacked the Dutch East Indies colony, where we Dutch still held sway. That was where I was enjoying my colonial life of luxury as a child along with my parents, sister and little brother, and a host of Indonesian servants at our beck and call. I can still see my mother sitting at the breakfast table, issuing instructions to our female cook who was squatting on the ground.

An anti-fascist alliance

In response to all this fascist warfare, France, Great Britain, Canada and the United States formed the Western alliance, and so a new world war had begun. In 1941 the Allies were also joined by the Soviet Union.

During the Second World War, the weapons first destroyed homes, schools, factories and other buildings, and claimed millions of dead and injured. And during the ensuing occupations the weapons were used to capture, starve and torture the thousands of local people who dared to resist. The many traumatised survivors and refugees would remain filled with feelings of revenge, for generations to come. The same was true of the survivors of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis in a cunning military system – a mechanism whereby the Jews were gradually excluded from everyday life, and were finally destroyed by an industrial killing machine.

On 8 May 1945 Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies; Italy had already surrendered, and Spain was for the time being allowed to remain fascist. But in the Pacific there were several more months of fighting against a Japanese army which, although very much weakened, was still trying to postpone its inevitable defeat with its desperate kamikaze flights – flying bombs manned by pilots who were prepared to commit suicide for their homeland.

The spectre of communism had begun to haunt Europe at the start of the century, and the Western Allies had deplored the fact that they had needed the Soviet Union to beat Nazi Germany. But in 1945 the possibility had fortunately arisen to launch what came to be known as the ‘Cold War’. After Nazi Germany had signed its surrender on 8 May 1945, the Allies discussed how to pursue the war in the Pacific. The Soviets let it be known that the huge losses in human life they had suffered meant they would need some time to recover – and so they could only join in with the war against the Japanese in the Pacific precisely three months later, on 8 August 1945.

But rather than wait for this, the United States rushed to drop atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on 6 and 9 August 1945. Hundreds of thousands of civilian victims were killed, and the thousands of survivors who had been exposed to nuclear radiation many miles away would suffer the consequences for decades, including cancer and foetal deformities. But Japan did surrender on 15 August 1945.

In the Japanese concentration camp on the island of Java, where I was imprisoned together with my mother, sister and brother, we were told it was this miracle of engineering, the atomic bomb, that had forced the Japanese to surrender. I was then nearly eleven years old, and could already understand quite a lot of what was going on. I imagined all those men, women and children falling to the ground and slowly dying, and thought how terrible it was that all this had been necessary just to give me back my freedom. It was true that the Japanese had kept us locked up for all those years, and the grown-ups said the Americans had had to show the Japanese how powerful they were.

But then why hadn’t they dropped the bombs on an uninhabited island? No-one would give me an answer, and once I had reached adulthood it became clear to me that things had been even worse: the inhabited city of Hiroshima had been chosen with cynical meticulousness because the surrounding mountains would amplify the force of the explosion. Nor could I help wondering whether, and if so to what extent, the fact that the victims were not white had played a part in the decision to drop the bomb there.

“Arms Trade,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

This notion that the Second World War was brought to an end by the two atomic bombs is still often heard, but must be dismissed as a myth – for negotiations about Japan’s surrender were almost over, and were now really only about the Japanese fear that their emperor would lose his divine status.

Creation of myths to justify unjust acts of war

What really mattered to the Americans was to sideline the Soviet Union; they wanted to make sure the Russians would not be involved in the postwar occupation of Japan and would have as little influence as possible in the Pacific – and in this they succeeded. This effectively marked the start of the Cold War, the rift between the capitalist West and the communist East; and at the same time it gave the Western arms industry a monopoly on nuclear weapons, a situation that would remain unchanged until 1949, when the Soviet Union developed an atomic bomb of its own.

The Cold War divided Europe into two with an ‘Iron Curtain’, and to the delight of both the Western and the Eastern arms industries both sides immediately embarked on an arms race – involving, in particular, vast quantities of nuclear weapons which between them would be capable of wiping out all life on earth. There were a few scary incidents that could have ended in disaster, but it is generally assumed that the mutual ‘balance of terror’ ensured that those weapons were not in fact used.

At the same time, the arms industries on both sides eagerly began developing long-range weapons which could also carry nuclear warheads. This had the deadly advantage that the people pressing the buttons would no longer be troubled by the sight of the damage they had done. This had already happened when bombs were dropped on civilians from the air, for instance when the British bombed German cities in the closing days of the Second World War, and also when the Americans bombed the inhabitants of Japanese cities; one of the pilots involved is said to have later gone insane with remorse.

In all these cases the perpetrators could still see their targets from a distance, or at least have some inkling of what was happening there. But the missiles and drones that were subsequently developed broke the link between individual feelings of guilt in the air and the people killed on the ground. If human compassion had ever played a part in warfare, this was now entirely eliminated. An added boon for the arms industry was that the users of the weapons – the ‘consumers’, if you will – were themselves at less and less risk as the distance from their targets increased.

In 1948 another country, Israel, had joined the Western camp, and soon began to build up an impressive stock of armaments, which eventually included nuclear weapons. At first its conventional weapons were used to expel some of the original inhabitants of the area, the Palestinians, and then to keep them under control, including those in the numerous refugee camps. And later Israel used the weapons to defend itself against the Islamic countries that surrounded it and in fact attacked it in 1967. Israel then occupied parts of those countries; and the occupations have continued up to the present day.

The use of weapons in global decolonisation

Outside Europe, the Cold War was thus far from ‘cold’, and this bore plenty of juicy fruit for the Western arms industry. Now that there was no longer an alliance with the Soviet Union, the communist threat was gratefully exploited to cast suspicion on independence fighters all over the world and take up weapons against them. After the Second World War they had found the courage to cast off their Western colonisers’ stranglehold, and by no means all of them considered it self-evident that their future economic system would be a capitalist one. At the same time, communist rebels had been making inroads in the Chinese countryside, and in 1949 they proclaimed the People’s Republic of China – which, together with the Soviet Union, was to serve as a role model for the decolonised new states.

The arms industries in the countries that were then communist, such as the Soviet Union, Cuba and China, worked at full steam during the Cold War. Their weapons, sometimes backed by military personnel, were deployed all over the world to support the freedom fighters who had risen in revolt against their colonial masters.

One of the countries that adopted a communist social system was North Vietnam; and from 1955 to 1975 the United States waged a terrifying war there, in which the country was ‘carpet-bombed’. Large numbers of cluster or fragmentation bombs, which have no impact on military targets but do all the more damage to human bodies, were also dropped on the population. An ugly feature of these bombs is that, after entering a body, the fragments travel on inside it and cause acute pain, so that the victim can no longer take part in the fighting. Not forgetting napalm, which was intended to destroy their crops and at the same time deprive them of their hiding places, which they then rebuilt underground. North and South Vietnam together eventually managed to drive the Americans out of their country.

Another colony where a bloody four-year battle for independence was fought during the Cold War was the Dutch East Indies, now renamed Indonesia. My parents, who had started out in the colony as typical colonials, had experienced for themselves in the Japanese camps what it meant to be oppressed, and then gave the Indonesians their unconditional support. This made our family the target of much aggression. Most Dutch minds were poisoned by colonial racial prejudice, and so failed to see that no people on earth will let itself be oppressed for centuries; they disguised their military assaults on the local population as legitimate ‘policing operations’; and our family’s support for the independence struggle made them think of us as traitors.

Soon after gaining its independence, Indonesia began wondering which economic system to adopt, and looked to countries including communist China. This was viewed with utter dismay in the West. But in 1965, as the failure of the Americans’ openly military attempts to dissuade Vietnam from making the same choice was growing increasingly clear, use was made of a secret weapon that was to prove far more effective. Intelligence services in the Netherlands and several other Western countries conspired with right-wing forces in Indonesia itself to unleash an unprecedented massacre of presumed communists. This destroyed the democratically elected Indonesian communist party, and for the next thirty years the West could rely on the support of a thoroughly pro-capitalist dictatorship. The dictator’s opponents were jailed without trial and tortured, and the West did not lift a finger.

Of course, this overt and covert tyranny had the same effect as tyranny always does: large numbers of people were killed and injured; the resulting traumas festered for generations, sowing the seeds of new warfare; and thousands of refugees had to build up new lives for themselves in foreign countries to escape from their unspeakable suffering.

The new threat Islam

If  one threat comes to an end, a new one is needed. 1989 saw the end of the Iron Curtain and in Europe the capitalist West and the communist East came back into contact, and for the time being it looked as if the capitalist/communist conflict could no longer be exploited to produce and sell new weapons. Nor could all the stocks of atomic bombs turn any profit in the short term, for they had to be carefully guarded until they could actually be used.

Gloom and despondency spread through the global arms industry – where could new, profitable enmities now be generated? But suddenly, just in time for the West, a useful new threat appeared on the world stage: Islam. Islamophobia was already widespread in the former colonising countries of Europe, due to the age-old contemptuous racism that had prevailed during the colonial era. This Islamophobia now found a convenient target in the many Islamic migrant workers who had moved into Europe. And in 1987 the largely Islamic Palestinians had begun their first intifada in Israel.

On 11 September 2001, amid this growing anti-Muslim mood, the Western arms industry received an unexpected boost: the assault on the Twin Towers. Islam now seemed to have found its ultimate justification as a threat, and the Western arms industry had little difficulty in unleashing a new wave of warfare: the ‘War on Terror’. The Muslim countries Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya were reduced to rubble by vast quantities of weapons. And in the midst of all this, in 2011, Syria appeared on the scene, with easy pickings for the arms industry on both sides; and here again the result was total chaos.

In the meantime, the global arms industry had been working assiduously to provide digital backup for its long-range weapons, missiles and drones. One ironic spin-off of this technological innovation is that it has nullified a former advantage of the original long-range weapons – namely that the perpetrators no longer had to see the damage they had done. The people pressing the buttons can now see in full detail what they are firing at, and how their victims are dying. What is unchanged is that they themselves are not at risk; but at least a few of them will again feel twinges of conscience. But not to worry, the arms industry has again found an answer: great improvements in PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) therapy.

The arms industry shows its true face

The arms industry has taken its biggest step backwards in terms of human decency by developing missiles that can take out people in distant countries without causing an explosion. Just before the head of the projectile reaches the neck of a living person who is suspected of something, it ejects six rapidly revolving blades that do the dirty work. Such killings are not preceded by any form of judicial procedure, there is no prior declaration of war against the country concerned, and the victims have no chance of escaping. Israel has recently killed two Muslim men in this way: one in Beirut, and another in Tehran.

And before long, on 17 September 2024, a moral low point was reached when the Israelis caused thousands of ‘pagers’ to eliminate people in Lebanon whom they suspected of belonging to the organisation that provides support for the Palestinian struggle in Gaza and on the West Bank. Just before exploding, the pager emitted a signal, and when the victims took it out to answer it they lost the hand they were holding it in or one or both of their eyes – or, if they did not respond to the signal, the pager exploded in their trouser pockets and they lost vital organs or were castrated.

Yet the Western arms industry kept looking for threats other than Islam. Not that the threat was about to disappear in the short term, for as early as 2014 the Palestinians who had to live in the Gaza Strip faced Israeli bombardments that lasted seven weeks and claimed thousands of dead and injured. In addition, the bitter truth was that the men, women and children could not flee, because they were enclosed behind fences equipped with the most advanced equipment and watchtowers in order to fire at the refugees. In this case the reason was the killing of three young Israelis on the West Bank.

But meanwhile the Russian arms industry was working at top speed, and making use of its experience with the surrounding NATO, so that Ukraine could become its new threat. This suited the Western arms industry right down to the ground. In the Western world there was still enough anti-Soviet resentment to revive the existing tension and hostility between Ukraine and Russia (which has long ceased to be communist) from 2014 onwards. The Cold War slogan ‘The Russians are coming’ was still working.

These two threats – the Russian threat to Europe, and the Muslim threat to the entire Western world, have now culminated in two bloody wars that are bringing huge profits to the global arms industry. And so all their weapon systems have had an ideal opportunity to be tested and perfected in warfare – in other words, on human bodies. But, perhaps better still, the two threats have made people’s minds ripe for an atmosphere in which the arms industry can continue to operate in the same old way for many years to come.

Once again there have been all kinds of reasons involved, and the last word has not been spoken. But whatever people eventually conclude, the arms industry is bound to profit from it. One reason was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, to which the Ukrainians at first responded defensively, but eventually, with Western aid, more offensively. The other reason arose in 2023, in the form of an armed Palestinian break-out from Gaza in which over two hundred Israelis were taken hostage. To which the Israeli army responded – and is still responding – with disproportionate military force, leaving the local population enclosed within a concentration camp less than a few hundred square kilometres in area. Men, women and children are being starved, deprived of medical facilities and drinking-water, and repeatedly expelled to supposedly safe areas where they are again bombarded – always on the pretext that all this is aimed at members of Hamas. Tens of thousands have already been killed, including 16,000 children.

And now that there is a ‘risk’ of negotiations about the latter two wars, the Ukrainians, with support from the West, are making a last desperate attempt to prolong the war by making attacks on Russian territory. And the Israelis seem so fearful of their oppression of the Palestinian people finally being brought to an end that they are thwarting every opportunity to achieve a lasting truce.

All wars eventually come to an end. But not to worry – if world peace should unexpectedly break out, the West is already gearing itself up for a new war, with a no longer communist China. And grateful use can then be made of yet another echo from the past: ‘the Yellow Peril’.

Anne-Ruth Wertheim, Amsterdam, 2024

This article was published in the Dutch magazine Jacobin.NL:

https://jacobin.nl/wapenindustrie-geschiedenis-anne-ruth-wertheim/

The move elicited an outcry from Israeli officials (National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir tweeted “Hamas loves Biden”), as well as Republicans, staunch anti-Palestinian Democrats and pro-Israel donors. Republicans immediately prepared a bill entitled the Israel Security Assistance Support Act to prohibit the administration from withholding military aid to Israel.

Many people have been asking the U.S. to halt weapons to Israel for seven months, and of course Biden’s move comes too late for 35,000 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza, mainly by American weapons.

Lest one think the administration is truly changing its position, two days after announcing the pause, the State Department released a convoluted report saying that, although it is reasonable to “assess” that U.S. weapons have been used by Israeli forces in Gaza in ways that are “inconsistent” with international humanitarian law, and although Israel has indeed delayed or had a negative effect on the delivery of aid to Gaza (which is illegal under U.S. law), Israel’s assurances regarding humanitarian aid and compliance with international humanitarian law are “credible and reliable.”

By this absurd conclusion, the Biden administration has given itself a green light to keep sending weapons and Israel a flashing one to keep committing war crimes with them.

In any event, as Colonel Joe Bicino, a retired U.S. artillery officer, told the BBC, Israel can “level” Rafah with the weapons it already has. The paused shipment is “somewhat inconsequential,” Bicino said, “a little bit of a political play for people in the United States who are… concerned about this.” A U.S. official confirmed to the Washington Post that Israel has enough weapons already supplied by the U.S. and other allies to go ahead with the Rafah operation if it chooses to ignore U.S. qualms.

The paused shipment really has to be seen in the context of the arsenal with which the U.S. has equipped its Middle Eastern proxy over many decades.

A Deluge of American Bombs

During the Second World War, the United States proudly called itself the “Arsenal of Democracy,” as its munitions factories and shipyards produced an endless supply of weapons to fight the genocidal government of Germany. Today, the United States is instead, shamefully, the Arsenal of Genocide, providing 70% of the imported weapons Israel is using to obliterate Gaza and massacre its people.

As Israel assaults Rafah, home to 1.4 million displaced people, including at least 600,000 children, most of the warplanes dropping bombs on them are F-16s, originally designed and manufactured by General Dynamics, but now produced by Lockheed Martin in Greenville, South Carolina. Israel’s 224 F-16s have long been its weapon of choice for bombing militants and civilians in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.

Israel also has 86 Boeing F-15s, which can drop heavier bombs, and 39 of the latest, most wastefully expensive fighter-bombers ever, Lockheed Martin’s nuclear-capable F-35s, with another 36 on order. The F-35 is built in Fort Worth, Texas, but components are manufactured all over the U.S. and in allied countries, including Israel. Israel was the first country to attack other countries with F-35s, in violation of U.S. arms export control laws, reportedly using them to bomb Syria, Egypt and Sudan.

As these fleets of U.S.-made warplanes began bombing Gaza in October 2023, their fifth major assault since 2008, the U.S. began rushing in new weapons. By December 1, 2023, it had delivered 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells.

The U.S. supplies Israel with all sizes and types of bombs, including 285-pound GBU-39 small diameter glide bombs, 500-pound Mk 82s, 2,000-pound Mk 84s and BLU-109 “bunker busters,” and even massive 5,000-pound GBU-28 bunker-busters, which Israel reportedly used in Gaza in 2009.

AP Video: “UCLA faculty and staff denounce university’s handling of student Gaza protest”

General Dynamics is the largest U.S. bomb manufacturer, making all these models of bombs. Most of them can be used as “precision” guided bombs by attaching Raytheon and Lockheed Martin’s Paveway laser guidance system or Boeing’s JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munitions) GPS-based targeting system.

Little more than half of the bombs Israel has dropped on Gaza have been “precision” ones, because, as targeting officers explained to +972 magazine, their Lavender AI system generates thousands of targets who are just suspected rank-and-file militants, not senior commanders. Israel does not consider it worth “wasting” expensive precision munitions to kill these people, so it uses only “dumb” bombs to kill them in their homes—obliterating their families and neighbors in the process.

In order to threaten and bomb its more distant neighbors, such as Iran, Israel depends on its seven Lockheed Martin KC-130H and seven Boeing 707 in-air refueling tankers, with four new, state-of-the-art Boeing KC46A tankers to be delivered in late 2025 for over $220 million each.

Ground force weapons

Another weapon of choice for killing Palestinians are Israel’s 48 Boeing Apache AH64 attack helicopters, armed with Lockheed Martin’s infamous Hellfire missiles, General Dynamics’ Hydra 70 rockets and Northrop Grumman’s 30 mm machine guns. Israel also used its Apaches to kill and incinerate a still unknown number of Israelis on October 7, 2023—a tragic day that Israel and the U.S. continue to exploit as a false pretext for their own violations of international humanitarian law and of the Genocide Convention.

Israel’s main artillery weapons are its 600 Paladin M109A5 155 mm self-propelled howitzers, which are manufactured by BAE Systems in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. To the layman, a self-propelled howitzer looks like a tank, but it has a bigger, 155 mm gun to fire at longer range.

Israel assembles its 155 mm artillery shells from U.S.-made components. One of the first two U.S. arms shipments that the administration notified Congress about after October 7 was to resupply Israel with artillery shell components valued at $147.5 million.

Israel also has 48 M270 multiple rocket launchers. They are a tracked version of the HIMARS rocket launchers the U.S. has sent to Ukraine, and they fire the same rockets, made by Lockheed Martin. U.S. Marines used the same rockets in coordination with U.S. airstrikes to devastate Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, in 2017. M270 launchers are no longer in production, but BEA Systems still has the facilities to produce them.

Israel makes its own Merkava tanks, which fire U.S.-made tank shells, and the State Department announced on December 9, 2023, that it had notified Congress of an “emergency” shipment of 14,000 120 mm tank shells worth $106 million to Israel.

U.S. shipments of artillery and tank shells, and dozens of smaller shipments that it did not report to Congress (because each shipment was carefully calibrated to fall below the statutory reporting limit of $100 million), were paid for out of the $3.8 billion in military aid that the United States gives Israel each year.

In April, Congress passed a new war-funding bill that includes about $14 billion for additional weapons. Israel could afford to pay for these weapons itself, but then it could shop around for them, which might erode the U.S. monopoly on supplying so much of its war machine. That lucrative monopoly for U.S. merchants of death is clearly more important to Members of Congress than fully funding Head Start or other domestic anti-poverty programs, which they routinely underfund to pay for weapons and wars.

Israel has 500 FMC-built M113 armored personnel carriers and over 2,000 Humvees, manufactured by AM General in Mishawaka, Indiana. Its ground forces are armed with several different types of U.S. grenade launchers, Browning machine-guns, AR-15 assault rifles, and SR-25 and M24 SWS sniper rifles, all made in the USA, as is the ammunition for them.

For many years, Israel’s three Sa’ar 5 corvettes were its largest warships, about the size of frigates. They were built in the 1990s by Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mississippi, but Israel has recently taken delivery of four larger, more heavily-armed, German-built Sa’ar 6 corvettes, with 76 mm main guns and new surface-to-surface missiles.

Gaza Encampments Take On the Merchants of Death

The United States has a long and horrific record of providing weapons to repressive regimes that use them to kill their own people or attack their neighbors. Martin Luther King called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” and that has not changed since he said it in 1967, a year to the day before his assassination.

Many of the huge U.S. factories that produce all these weapons are the largest employers in their regions or even their states. As President Eisenhower warned the public in his farewell address in 1960, “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” has led to “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

So, in addition to demanding a ceasefire, an end to U.S. military aid and weapons sales to Israel, and a restoration of humanitarian aid to Gaza, the students occupying college campuses across our country are right to call on their institutions to divest from these merchants of death, as well as from Israeli companies.

The corporate media has adopted the line that divestment would be too complicated and costly for the universities to do. But when students set up an encampment at Trinity College in Dublin, in Ireland, and called on it to divest from Israeli companies, the college quickly agreed to their demands. Problem solved, without police violence or trying to muzzle free speech. Students have also won commitments to consider divestment from U.S. institutions, including Brown, Northwestern, Evergreen State, Rutgers and the Universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin.

While decades of even deadlier U.S. war-making in the greater Middle East failed to provoke a sustained mass protest movement, the genocide in Gaza has opened the eyes of many thousands of young people to the need to rise up against the U.S. war machine.

The gradual expulsion and emigration of Palestinians from their homeland has created a huge diaspora of young Palestinians who have played a leading role in organizing solidarity campaigns on college campuses through groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Their close links with extended families in Palestine have given them a visceral grasp of the U.S. role in this genocide and an authentic voice that is persuasive and inspiring to other young Americans.

Now it is up to Americans of all ages to follow our young leaders and demand not just an end to the genocide in Palestine, but also a path out of our country’s military madness and the clutches of its deeply entrenched MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media- academia-think-tank) complex, which has inflicted so much death, pain and desolation on so many of our neighbors for so long, from Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan to Vietnam and Latin America.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books in November 2022.

Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

Via Code Pink

( Human Rights Watch ) – This week, United States President Joe Biden announced that his administration has “held up” at least one shipment of 3,500 bombs and artillery shells to Israel, saying the US wouldn’t transfer certain weapons to Israel if it proceeded with an assault on the city of Rafah’s densely populated areas.

This partial pause on weapon transfers doesn’t go far enough in response to Israel’s international law violations and US rules on arms transfers. Nonetheless, Biden’s decision represents a shift from the unconditional support the US has offered Israel, particularly since Biden acknowledged that “civilians have been killed as a consequence of those bombs and other ways [Israel] goes after population centers.”

Biden should resist congressional opposition to the pause and go further. Immediately stopping all transfers of arms and military support would be consistent with the US’s international and domestic legal obligations.

Since November, Human Rights Watch has called for the suspension of arms transfers to Israel and Palestinian armed groups given the real risk that weapons would be used to commit grave abuses. Providing weapons that knowingly and significantly would contribute to unlawful attacks can make those providing them complicit in war crimes. Other human rights organizations and dozens of United Nations human rights experts have echoed with their own calls to stop transfers to Israel.

Recently, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) considered Nicaragua’s legal challenge to bar Germany’s military assistance to Israel, among other things. The ICJ declined that request based on Germany’s assertion that it was not exporting any “war weapons” for use by Israeli forces. However, the court allowed the case to move forward and left the door open for a different outcome if Germany begins providing more “war weapons,” language that two legal scholars have characterized as “might hang like a sword of Damocles over States providing military support to Israel.” 

Several of the US’s Western allies have already revised their policies of supplying weapons to Israel. In March, Canada announced it would cease future arms exports to Israel. Italy and Spain also stopped new licenses.

Legal action has also effected changes in state policies. In the Netherlands, a lawsuit forced the government to pause sales of F-35 fighter jet parts. In Germany, civil society groups filed a similar suit seeking to stop weapon sales.

Mounting public and legal pressure is making it harder for governments such as the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Denmark to continue selling arms to Israel. Biden’s shift in tone will add to the pressure. In the face of continuing atrocities, “full-blown famine” in northern Gaza, and Israel’s obstruction of aid for Gaza, these countries need to stop sending weapons now.

Human Rights Watch

A more permissive attitude toward guns in Israel following Oct. 7 will only lead to greater Israeli violence and impunity.

The New York Times headline said it all: “Middle East War Adds to Surge in International Arms Sales.” The conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, and beyond may be causing immense and unconscionable human suffering, but they are also boosting the bottom lines of the world’s arms manufacturers. There was a time when such weapons sales at least sparked talk of “the merchants of death” or of “war profiteers.” Now, however, is distinctly not that time, given the treatment of the industry by the mainstream media and the Washington establishment, as well as the nature of current conflicts. Mind you, the American arms industry already dominates the international market in a staggering fashion, controlling 45% of all such sales globally, a gap only likely to grow more extreme in the rush to further arm allies in Europe and the Middle East in the context of the ongoing wars in those regions.

In his nationally televised address about the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine wars, President Biden described the American arms industry in remarkably glowing terms, noting that, “just as in World War II, today patriotic American workers are building the arsenal of democracy and serving the cause of freedom.” From a political and messaging perspective, the president cleverly focused on the workers involved in producing such weaponry rather than the giant corporations that profit from arming Israel, Ukraine, and other nations at war. But profit they do and, even more strikingly, much of the revenues that flow to those firms is pocketed as staggering executive salaries and stock buybacks that only boost shareholder earnings further.

President Biden also used that speech as an opportunity to tout the benefits of military aid and weapons sales to the U.S. economy:

“We send Ukraine equipment sitting in our stockpiles. And when we use the money allocated by Congress, we use it to replenish our own stores, our own stockpiles, with new equipment. Equipment that defends America and is made in America. Patriot missiles for air defense batteries, made in Arizona. Artillery shells manufactured in 12 states across the country, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas. And so much more.”

In short, the military-industrial complex is riding high, with revenues pouring in and accolades emanating from the top political levels in Washington. But is it, in fact, an arsenal of democracy? Or is it an amoral enterprise, willing to sell to any nation, whether a democracy, an autocracy, or anything in between?

Arming Current Conflicts

The U.S. should certainly provide Ukraine with what it needs to defend itself from Russia’s invasion. Sending arms alone, however, without an accompanying diplomatic strategy is a recipe for an endless, grinding war (and endless profits for those arms makers) that could always escalate into a far more direct and devastating conflict between the U.S., NATO, and Russia. Nevertheless, given the current urgent need to keep supplying Ukraine, the sources of the relevant weapons systems are bound to be corporate giants like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. No surprise there, but keep in mind that they’re not doing any of this out of charity.

Raytheon CEO Gregory Hayes acknowledged as much, however modestly, in an interview with the Harvard Business Review early in the Ukraine War:

“[W]e don’t apologize for making these systems, making these weapons… the fact is eventually we will see some benefit in the business over time. Everything that’s being shipped into Ukraine today, of course, is coming out of stockpiles, either at DoD [the Department of Defense] or from our NATO allies, and that’s all great news. Eventually we’ll have to replenish it and we will see a benefit to the business over the next coming years.”

Hayes made a similar point recently in response to a question from a researcher at Morgan Stanley on a call with Wall Street analysts. The researcher noted that President Biden’s proposed multi-billion-dollar package of military aid for Israel and Ukraine “seems to fit quite nicely with Raytheon’s defense portfolio.” Hayes responded that “across the entire Raytheon portfolio you’re going to see a benefit of this restocking on top of what we think will be an increase in the DoD topline as we continue to replenish these stocks.” Supplying Ukraine alone, he suggested, would yield billions in revenues over the coming few years with profit margins of 10% to 12%.

Beyond such direct profits, there’s a larger issue here: the way this country’s arms lobby is using the war to argue for a variety of favorable actions that go well beyond anything needed to support Ukraine. Those include less restrictive, multi-year contracts; reductions in protections against price gouging; faster approval of foreign sales; and the construction of new weapons plants. And keep in mind that all of this is happening as a soaring Pentagon budget threatens to hit an astonishing $1 trillion within the next few years.

As for arming Israel, including $14 billion in emergency military aid recently proposed by President Biden, the horrific attacks perpetrated by Hamas simply don’t justify the all-out war President Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has launched against more than two million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, with so many thousands of lives already lost and untold additional casualties to come. That devastating approach to Gaza in no way fits the category of defending democracy, which means that weapons companies profiting from it will be complicit in the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe.

Repression Enabled, Democracy Denied

Over the years, far from being a reliable arsenal of democracy, American arms manufacturers have often helped undermine democracy globally, while enabling ever greater repression and conflict — a fact largely ignored in recent mainstream coverage of the industry. For example, in a 2022 report for the Quincy Institute, I noted that, of the 46 then-active conflicts globally, 34 involved one or more parties armed by the United States. In some cases, American arms supplies were modest, but in many other conflicts such weaponry was central to the military capabilities of one or more of the warring parties.

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Nor do such weapons sales promote democracy over autocracy, a watchword of the Biden administration’s approach to foreign policy. In 2021, the most recent year for which full statistics are available, the U.S. armed 31 nations that Freedom House, a non-profit that tracks global trends in democracy, political freedom, and human rights, designated as “not free.”

The most egregious recent example in which the American arms industry is distinctly culpable when it comes to staggering numbers of civilian deaths would be the Saudi Arabian/United Arab Emirates (UAE)-led coalition’s intervention in Yemen, which began in March 2015 and has yet to truly end. Although the active military part of the conflict is now in relative abeyance, a partial blockade of that country continues to cause needless suffering for millions of Yemenis.  Between bombing, fighting on the ground, and the impact of that blockade, there have been nearly 400,000 casualties. Saudi air strikes, using American-produced planes and weaponry, caused the bulk of civilian deaths from direct military action.

Congress did make unprecedented efforts to block specific arms sales to Saudi Arabia and rein in the American role in the conflict via a War Powers Resolution, only to see legislation vetoed by President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, bombs provided by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin were routinely used to target civilians, destroying residential neighborhoods, factories, hospitals, a wedding, and even a school bus.

When questioned about whether they feel any responsibility for how their weapons have been used, arms companies generally pose as passive bystanders, arguing that all they’re doing is following policies made in Washington. At the height of the Yemen war, Amnesty International asked firms that were supplying military equipment and services to the Saudi/UAE coalition whether they were ensuring that their weaponry wouldn’t be used for egregious human rights abuses. Lockheed Martin typically offered a robotic response, asserting that “defense exports are regulated by the U.S. government and approved by both the Executive Branch and Congress to ensure that they support U.S. national security and foreign policy objectives.” Raytheon simply stated that its sales “of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia have been and remain in compliance with U.S. law.”

How the Arms Industry Shapes Policy

Of course, weapons firms are not merely subject to U.S. laws, but actively seek to shape them, including exerting considerable effort to block legislative efforts to limit arms sales. Raytheon typically put major behind-the-scenes effort into keeping a significant sale of precision-guided bombs to Saudi Arabia on track. In May 2018, then-CEO Thomas Kennedy even personally visited the office of Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Robert Menendez (D-NJ) to (unsuccessfully) press him to drop a hold on that deal. That firm also cultivated close ties with the Trump administration, including presidential trade adviser Peter Navarro, to ensure its support for continuing sales to the Saudi regime even after the murder of prominent Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi.

The list of major human rights abusers that receive U.S.-supplied weaponry is long and includes (but isn’t faintly limited to) Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, Turkey, Nigeria, and the Philippines. Such sales can have devastating human consequences. They also support regimes that all too often destabilize their regions and risk embroiling the United States directly in conflicts.

U.S.-supplied arms also far too regularly fall into the hands of Washington’s adversaries. As an example consider the way the UAE transferred small arms and armored vehicles produced by American weapons makers to extremist militias in Yemen, with no apparent consequences, even though such acts clearly violated American arms export laws. Sometimes, recipients of such weaponry even end up fighting each other, as when Turkey used U.S.-supplied F-16s in 2019 to bomb U.S.-backed Syrian forces involved in the fight against Islamic State terrorists.

Such examples underscore the need to scrutinize U.S. arms exports far more carefully. Instead, the arms industry has promoted an increasingly “streamlined” process of approval of such weapons sales, campaigning for numerous measures that would make it even easier to arm foreign regimes regardless of their human-rights records or support for the interests Washington theoretically promotes. These have included an “Export Control Reform Initiative” heavily promoted by the industry during the Obama and Trump administrations that ended up ensuring a further relaxation of scrutiny over firearms exports. It has, in fact, eased the way for sales that, in the future, could put U.S.-produced weaponry in the hands of tyrants, terrorists, and criminal organizations.

Now, the industry is promoting efforts to get weapons out the door ever more quickly through “reforms” to the Foreign Military Sales program in which the Pentagon essentially serves as an arms broker between those weapons corporations and foreign governments.

Reining in the MIC

The impetus to move ever more quickly on arms exports and so further supersize this country’s already staggering weapons manufacturing base will only lead to yet more price gouging by arms corporations. It should be a government imperative to guard against such a future, rather than fuel it. Alleged security concerns, whether in Ukraine, Israel, or elsewhere, shouldn’t stand in the way of vigorous congressional oversight. Even at the height of World War II, a time of daunting challenges to American security, then-Senator Harry Truman established a committee to root out war profiteering.

Yes, your tax dollars are being squandered in the rush to build and sell ever more weaponry abroad. Worse yet, for every arms transfer that serves a legitimate defensive purpose, there is another — not to say others — that fuels conflict and repression, while only increasing the risk that, as the giant weapons corporations and their executives make fortunes, this country will become embroiled in more costly foreign conflicts.

One possible way to at least slow that rush to sell would be to “flip the script” on how Congress reviews weapons exports. Current law requires a veto-proof majority of both houses of Congress to block a questionable sale. That standard — perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn — has never (yes, never!) been met, thanks to the millions of dollars in annual election financial support that the weapons companies offer our congressional representatives. Flipping the script would mean requiring affirmative congressional approval of any major sales to key nations, greatly increasing the chances of stopping dangerous deals before they reach completion.

Praising the U.S. arms industry as the “arsenal of democracy” obscures the numerous ways it undermines our security and wastes our tax dollars. Rather than romanticizing the military-industrial complex, isn’t it time to place it under greater democratic control? After all, so many lives depend on it.

Copyright 2023 William D. Hartung

Via Tomdispatch.com

If the U.S. auto industry has recently shown sparks of new life (though we’re not making T-Birds or Mercuries or Oldsmobiles or Pontiacs or Saturns anymore), there is one form of manufacturing in which America is still dominant. When it comes to weaponry, to paraphrase Seger, we’re still young and proud and makin’ Predators and Reapers (as in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones) and Eagles and Fighting Falcons (as in F-15 and F-16 combat jets), and outfitting them with the deadliest of weapons. In this market niche, we’re still the envy of the world.

Yes, we’re the world’s foremost “merchants of death,” the title of a best-selling exposé of the international arms trade published to acclaim in the U.S. in 1934. Back then, most Americans saw themselves as war-avoiders rather than as war-profiteers. The evil war-profiteers were mainly European arms makers like Germany’s Krupp, France’s Schneider, or Britain’s Vickers.

Not that America didn’t have its own arms merchants. As the authors of Merchants of Death noted, early on our country demonstrated a “Yankee propensity for extracting novel death-dealing knickknacks from [our] peddler’s pack.” Amazingly, the Nye Committee in the U.S. Senate devoted 93 hearings from 1934 to 1936 to exposing America’s own “greedy munitions interests.” Even in those desperate depression days, a desire for profit and jobs was balanced by a strong sense of unease at this deadly trade, an unease reinforced by the horrors of and hecatombs of dead from the First World War.

We are uneasy no more. Today we take great pride (or at least have no shame) in being by far the world’s number one arms-exporting nation. A few statistics bear this out. From 2006 to 2010, the U.S. accounted for nearly one-third of the world’s arms exports, easily surpassing a resurgent Russia in the “Lords of War” race. Despite a decline in global arms sales in 2010 due to recessionary pressures, the U.S. increased its market share, accounting for a whopping 53% of the trade that year. Last year saw the U.S. on pace to deliver more than $46 billion in foreign arms sales. Who says America isn’t number one anymore?

For a shopping list of our arms trades, try searching the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute database for arms exports and imports. It reveals that, in 2010, the U.S. exported “major conventional weapons” to 62 countries, from Afghanistan to Yemen, and weapons platforms ranging from F-15, F-16, and F-18 combat jets to M1 Abrams main battle tanks to Cobra attack helicopters (sent to our Pakistani comrades) to guided missiles in all flavors, colors, and sizes: AAMs, PGMs, SAMs, TOWs — a veritable alphabet soup of missile acronyms. Never mind their specific meaning: they’re all designed to blow things up; they’re all designed to kill.

Rarely debated in Congress or in U.S. media outlets is the wisdom or morality of these arms deals. During the quiet last days of December 2011, in separate announcements whose timing could not have been accidental, the Obama Administration expressed its intent to sell nearly $11 billion in arms to Iraq, including Abrams tanks and F-16 fighter-bombers, and nearly $30 billion in F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, part of a larger, $60 billion arms package for the Saudis. Few in Congress oppose such arms deals since defense contractors provide jobs in their districts — and ready donations to Congressional campaigns.

Let’s pause to consider what such a weapons deal implies for Iraq. Firstly, Iraq only “needs” advanced tanks and fighter jets because we destroyed their previous generation of the same, whether in 1991 during Desert Shield/Storm or in 2003 during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Secondly, Iraq “needs” such powerful conventional weaponry ostensibly to deter an invasion by Iran, yet the current government in Baghdad is closely aligned with Iran, courtesy of our invasion in 2003 and the botched occupation that followed. Thirdly, despite its “needs,” the Iraqi military is nowhere near ready to field and maintain such advanced weaponry, at least without sustained training and logistical support provided by the U.S. military.

As one U.S. Air Force officer who served as an advisor to the fledging Iraqi Air Force, or IqAF, recently worried:

“Will the IqAF be able to refuel its own aircraft? Can the Iraqi military offer adequate force protection and security for its bases? Can the IqAF provide airfield management services at its bases as they return to Iraqi control after eight years under US direction? Can the IqAF ensure simple power generation to keep facilities operating? Will the IqAF be able to develop and retain its airmen?… Only time will tell if we left [Iraq] too early; nevertheless, even without a renewed security agreement, the USAF can continue to stand alongside the IqAF.”

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Put bluntly: We doubt the Iraqis are ready to field and fly American-built F-16s, but we’re going to sell them to them anyway. And if past history is a guide, if the Iraqis ever turn these planes against us, we’ll blow them up or shoot them down — and then (hopefully) sell them some more.

Our Best Arms Customer

Let’s face it: the weapons we sell to others pale in comparison to the weapons we sell to ourselves. In the market for deadly weapons, we are our own best customer. Americans have a love affair with them, the more high-tech and expensive, the better. I should know. After all, I’m a recovering weapons addict.

Well into my teen years, I was fascinated by military hardware. I built models of what were then the latest U.S. warplanes: the A-10, the F-4, the F-14, -15, and -16, the B-1, and many others. I read Aviation Week and Space Technology at my local library to keep track of the newest developments in military technology. Not surprisingly, perhaps, I went on to major in mechanical engineering in college and entered the Air Force as a developmental engineer.

Enamored as I was by roaring afterburners and sleek weaponry, I also began to read books like James Fallows’s National Defense (1981) among other early critiques of the Carter and Reagan defense buildup, as well as the slyly subversive and always insightful Augustine’s Laws (1986) by Norman Augustine, later the CEO of Martin Marietta and Lockheed Martin. That and my own experience in the Air Force alerted me to the billions of dollars we were devoting to high-tech weaponry with ever-ballooning price tags but questionable utility.

Perhaps the best example of the persistence of this phenomenon is the F-35 Lightning II. Produced by Lockheed Martin, the F-35 was intended to be an “affordable” fighter-bomber (at roughly $50 million per copy), a perfect complement to the much more expensive F-22 “air superiority” Raptor. But the usual delays, cost overruns, technical glitches, and changes in requirements have driven the price tag of the F-35 up to $160 million per plane, assuming the U.S. military persists in its plans to buy 2,400 of them. (If the Pentagon decides to buy fewer, the cost-per-plane will soar into the F-22 range.) By recent estimates the F-35 will now cost U.S. taxpayers (you and me, that is) at least $382 billion for its development and production run. Such a sum for a single weapons system is vast enough to be hard to fathom. It would, for instance, easily fund all federal government spending on education for the next five years.

The escalating cost of the F-35 recalls the most famous of Norman Augustine’s irreverent laws: “In the year 2054,” he wrote back in the early 1980s, “the entire defense budget will [suffice to] purchase just one aircraft.” But the deeper question is whether our military even needs the F-35, a question that’s rarely asked and never seriously entertained, at least by Congress, whose philosophy on weaponry is much like King Lear’s: “O, reason not the need.”

But let’s reason the need in purely military terms. These days, the Air Force is turning increasingly to unmanned drones. Meanwhile, plenty of perfectly good and serviceable “platforms” remain for attack and close air support missions, from F-16s and F-18s in the Air Force and Navy to Apache helicopters in the Army. And while many of our existing combat jets may be nearing the limits of airframe integrity, there’s nothing stopping the U.S. military from producing updated versions of the same. Heck, this is precisely what we’re hawking to the Saudis — updated versions of the F-15, developed in the 1970s.

Because of sheer cost, it’s likely we’ll buy fewer F-35s than our military wants but many more than we actually need. We’ll do so because Weapons ‘R’ Us. Because building ultra-expensive combat jets is one of the few high-tech industries we haven’t exported (due to national security and secrecy concerns), and thus one of the few industries in the U.S. that still supports high-paying manufacturing jobs with decent employee benefits. And who can argue with that?

The Ultimate Cost of Our Merchandise of Death

Clearly, the U.S. has grabbed the brass ring of the global arms trade. When it comes to investing in militaries and weaponry, no country can match us. We are supreme. And despite talk of modest cuts to the Pentagon budget over the next decade, it will, according to President Obama, continue to grow, which means that in weapons terms the future remains bright. After all, Pentagon spending on research and development stands at $81.4 billion, accounting for an astonishing 55% of all federal spending on R&D and leaving plenty of opportunity to develop our next generation of wonder weapons.

But at what cost to ourselves and the rest of the world? We’ve become the suppliers of weaponry to the planet’s hotspots. And those weapons deliveries (and the training and support missions that go with them) tend to make those spots hotter still — as in hot lead.

As a country, we seem to have a teenager’s fascination with military hardware, an addiction that’s driving us to bust our own national budgetary allowance. At the same time, we sell weapons the way teenage punks sell fireworks to younger kids: for profit and with little regard for how they might be used.

Sixty years ago, it was said that what’s good for General Motors is good for America. In 1955, as Bob Seger sang, we were young and strong and makin’ Thunderbirds. But today we’re playing a new tune with new lyrics: what’s good for Lockheed Martin or Boeing or [insert major-defense-contractor-of-your-choice here] is good for America.

How far we’ve come since the 1950s!

Copyright William J. Astore 2023

Via Tomdispatch.com

As a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel from a working-class background who volunteered to serve more than four decades ago, who am I to argue with Austin? Shouldn’t I just bask in the glow of his praise for today’s troops, reflecting on my own honorable service near the end of what now must be thought of as the First Cold War?

Yet I confess to having doubts. I’ve heard it all before. The hype. The hyperbole. I still remember how, soon after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush boasted that this country had “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.” I also remember how, in a pep talk given to U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2010, President Barack Obama declared them “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.” And yet, 15 years ago at TomDispatch, I was already wondering when Americans had first become so proud of, and insistent upon, declaring our military the world’s absolute best, a force beyond compare, and what that meant for a republic that once had viewed large standing armies and constant warfare as anathemas to freedom.

In retrospect, the answer is all too straightforward: we need something to boast about, don’t we? In the once-upon-a-time “exceptional nation,” what else is there to praise to the skies or consider our pride and joy these days except our heroes? After all, this country can no longer boast of having anything like the world’s best educational outcomes, or healthcare system, or the most advanced and safest infrastructure, or the best democratic politics, so we better damn well be able to boast about having “the greatest fighting force” ever.

Leaving that boast aside, Americans could certainly brag about one thing this country has beyond compare: the most expensive military around and possibly ever. No country even comes close to our commitment of funds to wars, weapons (including nuclear ones at the Department of Energy), and global dominance. Indeed, the Pentagon’s budget for “defense” in 2023 exceeds that of the next 10 countries (mostly allies!) combined.

And from all of this, it seems to me, two questions arise: Are we truly getting what we pay so dearly for — the bestest, finest, most exceptional military ever? And even if we are, should a self-proclaimed democracy really want such a thing?

The answer to both those questions is, of course, no. After all, America hasn’t won a war in a convincing fashion since 1945. If this country keeps losing wars routinely and often enough catastrophically, as it has in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, how can we honestly say that we possess the world’s greatest fighting force? And if we nevertheless persist in such a boast, doesn’t that echo the rhetoric of militaristic empires of the past? (Remember when we used to think that only unhinged dictators like Adolf Hitler boasted of having peerless warriors in a megalomaniacal pursuit of global domination?)

Actually, I do believe the United States has the most exceptional military, just not in the way its boosters and cheerleaders like Austin, Bush, and Obama claimed. How is the U.S. military truly “exceptional”? Let me count the ways.

The Pentagon as a Budgetary Black Hole

In so many ways, the U.S. military is indeed exceptional. Let’s begin with its budget. At this very moment, Congress is debating a colossal “defense” budget of $886 billion for FY2024 (and all the debate is about issues that have little to do with the military). That defense spending bill, you may recall, was “only” $740 billion when President Joe Biden took office three years ago. In 2021, Biden withdrew U.S. forces from the disastrous war in Afghanistan, theoretically saving the taxpayer nearly $50 billion a year. Yet, in place of any sort of peace dividend, American taxpayers simply got an even higher bill as the Pentagon budget continued to soar.

Recall that, in his four years in office, Donald Trump increased military spending by 20%. Biden is now poised to achieve a similar 20% increase in just three years in office. And that increase largely doesn’t even include the cost of supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia — so far, somewhere between $120 billion and $200 billion and still rising.

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Colossal budgets for weapons and war enjoy broad bipartisan support in Washington. It’s almost as if there were a military-industrial-congressional complex at work here! Where, in fact, did I ever hear a president warning us about that? Oh, perhaps I’m thinking of a certain farewell address by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961.

In all seriousness, there’s now a huge pentagonal-shaped black hole on the Potomac that’s devouring more than half of the federal discretionary budget annually. Even when Congress and the Pentagon allegedly try to enforce fiscal discipline, if not austerity elsewhere, the crushing gravitational pull of that hole just continues to suck in more money. Bet on that continuing as the Pentagon issues ever more warnings about a new cold war with China and Russia.

Given its money-sucking nature, perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the Pentagon is remarkably exceptional when it comes to failing fiscal audits — five of them in a row (the fifth failure being a “teachable moment,” according to its chief financial officer) — as its budget only continued to soar. Whether you’re talking about lost wars or failed audits, the Pentagon is eternally rewarded for its failures. Try running a “Mom and Pop” store on that basis and see how long you last.

Speaking of all those failed wars, perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that they haven’t come cheaply. According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University, roughly 937,000 people have died since 9/11/2001 thanks to direct violence in this country’s “Global War on Terror” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere. (And the deaths of another 3.6 to 3.7 million people may be indirectly attributable to those same post-9/11 conflicts.) The financial cost to the American taxpayer has been roughly $8 trillion and rising even as the U.S. military continues its counterterror preparations and activities in 85 countries.

No other nation in the world sees its military as (to borrow from a short-lived Navy slogan) “a global force for good.” No other nation divides the whole world into military commands like AFRICOM for Africa and CENTCOM for the Middle East and parts of Central and South Asia, headed up by four-star generals and admirals. No other nation has a network of 750 foreign bases scattered across the globe. No other nation strives for full-spectrum dominance through “all-domain operations,” meaning not only the control of traditional “domains” of combat — the land, sea, and air — but also of space and cyberspace. While other countries are focused mainly on national defense (or regional aggressions of one sort or another), the U.S. military strives for total global and spatial dominance. Truly exceptional!

Strangely, in this never-ending, unbounded pursuit of dominance, results simply don’t matter. The Afghan War? Bungled, botched, and lost. The Iraq War? Built on lies and lost. Libya? We came, we saw, Libya’s leader (and so many innocents) died. Yet no one at the Pentagon was punished for any of those failures. In fact, to this day, it remains an accountability-free zone, exempt from meaningful oversight. If you’re a “modern major general,” why not pursue wars when you know you’ll never be punished for losing them?

Indeed, the few “exceptions” within the military-industrial-congressional complex who stood up for accountability, people of principle like Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, were imprisoned or exiled. In fact, the U.S. government has even conspired to imprison a foreign publisher and transparency activist, Julian Assange, who published the truth about the American war on terror, by using a World War I-era espionage clause that only applies to American citizens.

And the record is even grimmer than that. In our post-9/11 years at war, as President Barack Obama admitted, “We tortured some folks” — and the only person punished for that was another whistleblower, John Kiriakou, who did his best to bring those war crimes to our attention.

And speaking of war crimes, isn’t it “exceptional” that the U.S. military plans to spend upwards of $2 trillion in the coming decades on a new generation of genocidal nuclear weapons? Those include new stealth bombers and new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) for the Air Force, as well as new nuclear-missile-firing submarines for the Navy. Worse yet, the U.S. continues to reserve the right to use nuclear weapons first, presumably in the name of protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And of course, despite the countries — nine! — that now possess nukes, the U.S. remains the only one to have used them in wartime, in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Finally, it turns out that the military is even immune from Supreme Court decisions! When SCOTUS recently overturned affirmative action for college admission, it carved out an exception for the military academies. Schools like West Point and Annapolis can still consider the race of their applicants, presumably to promote unit cohesion through proportional representation of minorities within the officer ranks, but our society at large apparently does not require racial equity for its cohesion.

A Most Exceptional Military Makes Its Wars and Their Ugliness Disappear

Here’s one of my favorite lines from the movie The Usual Suspects: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.” The greatest trick the U.S. military ever pulled was essentially convincing us that its wars never existed. As Norman Solomon notes in his revealing book, War Made Invisible, the military-industrial-congressional complex has excelled at camouflaging the atrocious realities of war, rendering them almost entirely invisible to the American people. Call it the new American isolationism, only this time we’re isolated from the harrowing and horrific costs of war itself.

America is a nation perpetually at war, yet most of us live our lives with little or no perception of this. There is no longer a military draft. There are no war bond drives. You aren’t asked to make direct and personal sacrifices. You aren’t even asked to pay attention, let alone pay (except for those nearly trillion-dollar-a-year budgets and interest payments on a ballooning national debt, of course). You certainly aren’t asked for your permission for this country to fight its wars, as the Constitution demands. As President George W. Bush suggested after the 9/11 attacks, go visit Disneyworld! Enjoy life! Let America’s “best and brightest” handle the brutality, the degradation, and the ugliness of war, bright minds like former Vice President Dick (“So?”) Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald (“I don’t do quagmires”) Rumsfeld.

Did you hear something about the U.S. military being in Syria? In Somalia? Did you hear about the U.S. military supporting the Saudis in a brutal war of repression in Yemen? Did you notice how this country’s military interventions around the world kill, wound, and displace so many people of color, so much so that observers speak of the systemic racism of America’s wars? Is it truly progress that a more diverse military in terms of “color, creed, and background,” to use Secretary of Defense Austin’s words, has killed and is killing so many non-white peoples around the globe?

Praising the all-female-crewed flyover at the last Super Bowl or painting rainbow flags of inclusivity (or even blue and yellow flags for Ukraine) on cluster munitions won’t soften the blows or quiet the screams. As one reader of my blog Bracing Views so aptly put it: “The diversity the war parties [Democrats and Republicans] will not tolerate is diversity of thought.”

Of course, the U.S. military isn’t solely to blame here. Senior officers will claim their duty is not to make policy at all but to salute smartly as the president and Congress order them about. The reality, however, is different. The military is, in fact, at the core of America’s shadow government with enormous influence over policymaking. It’s not merely an instrument of power; it is power — and exceptionally powerful at that. And that form of power simply isn’t conducive to liberty and freedom, whether inside America’s borders or beyond them.

Wait! What am I saying? Stop thinking about all that! America is, after all, the exceptional nation and its military, a band of freedom fighters. In Iraq, where war and sanctions killed untold numbers of Iraqi children in the 1990s, the sacrifice was “worth it,” as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once reassured Americans on 60 Minutes.

Even when government actions kill children, lots of children, it’s for the greater good. If this troubles you, go to Disney and take your kids with you. You don’t like Disney? Then, hark back to that old marching song of World War I and “pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag, and smile, smile, smile.” Remember, America’s troops are freedom-delivering heroes and your job is to smile and support them without question.

Have I made my point? I hope so. And yes, the U.S. military is indeed exceptional and being so, being #1 (or claiming you are anyway) means never having to say you’re sorry, no matter how many innocents you kill or maim, how many lives you disrupt and destroy, how many lies you tell.

I must admit, though, that, despite the endless celebration of our military’s exceptionalism and “greatness,” a fragment of scripture from my Catholic upbringing haunts me still: Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.

Copyright 2023 William J. Astore

Via Tomdispatch.com )

Enormous Pentagon budgets are also inflating CEO pay at major military contractors. Here’s how to rein in this taxpayer-funded excess.