I’m
sure you’ve heard about the $65 million. Or was it $86 million? Or was it even
more? You know, the funds the Pentagon sunk into that hotshot plane it was
preparing for its Afghan drug interdiction program. You haven’t?
Well,
as Megan Rose reported at ProPublica,
with its “electro-optical infra-red video capacity,” that counternarcotics
plane was supposed to lend a significant hand in surveilling and disrupting the
Afghan heroin trade. Only one small problem. That single plane never made it
out of a warehouse in Delaware or flew a mission in Afghanistan, whatever its
cost (which the Pentagon was typically incapable of tracking), and when it was
recently offered for sale at auction, no one wanted to put down a red cent for
it. And lest you think of that as a bizarre anomaly, consider, as Rose points
out, the $3 million patrol boats for Afghanistan the Navy purchased that never
made it out of Virginia or the 20 planes for the Afghan air force that the
Pentagon spent a mere $486 million on, even though they never flew and finally
brought in just $32,000 as scrap metal. Or think for a moment about the more
than $65
billion (yep, billion!) that went into the woefulAfghan
military, an inept force long mentored by the U.S. military that remains filled
with “ghost soldiers” and plagued by soaring casualties and
staggering desertion
rates. Or since America’s war zones have, in these years, been sinkholes of
corruption, just recall the $43
million gas stationbuilt by the Pentagon in the middle of an Afghan
nowhere, or the similarly infamous “highway
to nowhere,” or the state-of-the-art U.S. military headquarters in Helmand
Province, Afghanistan, that doubled in cost to $25 million while
under construction and was never used, or the $1.2 billion to $1.6 billion in
cash that was somehow stolen from
the U.S. in Iraq, which itself was just a drop in the bucket, given the $60
billion lost to waste and fraud in that particular morass of a war
zone. And mind you, that’s just to start down a list of catastrophic
“investments” in this country’s wars.
If
you consider them in this fashion, don’t they start to seem like gigantic scam
operations? Yet, as TomDispatch regular William
Hartung often makes
clear at this site, all of that’s just icing on the cake. The real zone of
corruption doesn’t lie in Afghanistan or Iraq but in a five-sided building in
Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., where, as
Hartung explains today, American taxpayer dollars disappear regularly into the
coffers of various giant weapons-makers or into the pockets of their CEOs and
top officials. War, it turns out, is the ultimate domestic scam and your tax
dollars are its heart and soul. Worse yet, in a Washington endlessly riven by
conflict, by the inability of more or less anyone to agree on anything, there
is but one true bipartisan subject: the Pentagon. Into it, the representatives
of both embattled parties couldn’t be happier or more eagerto
pour yet more money.
In
normal terms, 16 years later, the war on terror should be seen as a disaster,
but as Hartung explains, in terms of funding the Pentagon (and the crew
of warrior
corporations that are its heart and soul), it has been a sterling financial
success story from 9/12 on. ~ Tom
The
Scandal of Pentagon Spending
Your Tax Dollars Support Troops of Defense Contractor CEOs
By William D. Hartung
Here’s
a question for you: How do you spell boondoggle?
The
answer (in case you didn’t already know): P-e-n-t-a-g-o-n.
Hawks
on Capitol Hill and in the U.S. military routinely justify increases in the
Defense Department’s already munificent budget by arguing that yet more money
is needed to “support
the troops.” If you’re already nodding in agreement, let me explain just
where a huge chunk of the Pentagon budget — hundreds of billions of dollars —
really goes. Keep in mind that it’s your money we’re talking about.
The
answer couldn’t be more straightforward: it goes directly to private
corporations and much of it is then wasted on useless overhead, fat executive
salaries, and startling (yet commonplace) cost overruns on weapons systems and
other military hardware that, in the end, won’t even perform as promised. Too
often the result isweapons that aren’t needed at prices we can’t afford. If
anyone truly wanted to help the troops, loosening the corporate grip on the
Pentagon budget would be an excellent place to start.
The
numbers are staggering. In fiscal year 2016, the Pentagon issued $304
billion in contract awards to corporations — nearly half of the
department’s $600
billion-plus budget for that year. And keep in mind that not all
contractors are created equal. According to the Federal Procurement Data
System’s top 100 contractors report for 2016, the biggest
beneficiaries by a country mile were Lockheed Martin ($36.2 billion),
Boeing ($24.3 billion), Raytheon ($12.8 billion), General Dynamics ($12.7
billion), and Northrop Grumman ($10.7 billion). Together, these five firms
gobbled up nearly $100 billion of your tax dollars, about one-third of all the
Pentagon’s contract awards in 2016.
And
remember: the Pentagon buys more than just weapons. Health care companies like
Humana ($3.6 billion), United Health Group ($2.9 billion), and Health Net ($2.6
billion) cash in as well, and they’re joined by, among others, pharmaceutical
companies like McKesson ($2.7 billion) and universities deeply involved in
military-industrial complex research like MIT ($1 billion) and Johns Hopkins
($902 million).
The
real question is: How much of this money actually promotes the defense of the
country and how much is essentially a subsidy to weapons makers and other
corporations more focused on their bottom lines than giving the taxpayers value
for their money?
“Modernizing”
the Military-Industrial Complex
Let’s
start with the obvious (but seldom said). Some arms company expenditures
clearly have no more of a national security rationale than Tom Price’s air
travel did for the promotion of American health. Take the compensation
that defense company CEOs get, for example. The heads of the top five Pentagon
contractors — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop
Grumman — made a
cumulative $96 million last year. These are companies that are significantly
or, in the cases of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, almost entirely
dependent on government dollars. That means one thing: your tax dollars are
basically paying their exorbitant salaries. And that $96 million figure doesn’t
even count the scores of other highly paid executives and board members at
major weapons contractors like these. Don’t you feel safer already?
Donald
Trump initially spent a fair amount of tweeting
energy bragging about how he was going to bring such contractors to
heel on their pricing practices for weapons systems. In fact, he’s already
turned out to be good news indeed for major contractors, most of whom have
seen sharp
upturnsin revenues and profits in the first two quarters of this year
(compared to the same period in what was still the Obama era). Among other
things, Trump has proven eager to lift
restrictions on U.S. weapons sales abroad (and enlist State Department
and Pentagon officials to spend more of their time shilling such weaponry). As
a result, future American arms deals are already on a precipitous upward
trajectory and, as one defense industry analyst has noted,
“both commercial aerospace and the defense sectors expect improvement for the
remainder of 2017 with the potential for new records in both revenue and
operating profit.”
Whether
such increases in the funds flowing to major weapons contractors will
accelerate yet more depends, in part, on the outcome of this year’s budget
debate in which Trump and Congress are competing to see who can sponsor the
biggest increase in Pentagon spending. Trump has backed a $54
billion budgetary rise, while the Senate, in the recently passed
National Defense Authorization Act, backed a $90
billion increase. The only thing standing between the contractors and
another huge payday is the question of whether Congress can, in fact, pass a
budget this year or if its representatives will have to fall back on a
continuing resolution that would keep spending at last year’s levels.
Needless
to say, Lockheed Martin and its cohorts are doing everything in their power to
break the budget deadlock and open the spigot to release the huge funding
increases they feel entitled to. In the process, they are spending impressive
sums (undoubtedly, in part, also your tax dollars) to promote their interests
in Washington. The defense industry has, for instance, anted up $65
million on Political Action Committee contributions since 2009.
You
probably won’t be surprised to learn that the bulk of that sum has been
lavished on the congressional representatives who are in the best position to
help the industry — particularly members of the armed services and defense
appropriations committees of the House and Senate. In recent years, these
contributions have tilted Republican, with nearly two-thirds of the
contributions going to GOP candidates. But this ratio will shift back toward
the Democrats, should they retake control of Congress at any point. For weapons
contractors, it’s ultimately not about party or ideology but about buying
access and influence with whoever has the power to appropriate money for them.
The
arms industry’s investment in lobbying is even more impressive. The defense
sector has spent a total of more than $1 billion on
that productive activity since 2009, employing anywhere from 700 to 1,000 lobbyists in
any given year. To put that in perspective, you’re talking about significantly
more than one lobbyist per member of Congress, the majority of
whom zipped through Washington’s famed “revolving door”; they moved, that is,
from positions in Congress or the Pentagon to posts at weapons companies from
which they could proselytize their former colleagues.
This
process, of course, allows newly minted lobbyists to use their privileged
contacts with former government colleagues to promote the special interests of
their corporate clients. It also ensures that congressional staffers, military
officers, and Pentagon bureaucrats nearing the end of their careers and looking
toward a lucrative future will be inclined to cut major contractors some slack.
Why not, when they are looking forward to a big payday with that same cast of
characters after they leave government?
An
egregious example — the
case of Darleen Druyun — offers an inside look at how a Pentagon
official curries favor with future corporate employers. Druyun was a
high-ranking Pentagon procurement officer who rigged contracts for Boeing while
negotiating for a job with that company (which was already employing her
daughter and son-in-law). The Druyun case was the exception that proves the
rule. She actually did nine months in prison for her actions, thanks in large
part to Senator John McCain’s dogged pursuit of the case. Lesser cases of
influence peddling, however, occur all the time and no one faces jail time for
them. As long as the lure of big corporate payoffs remains so central to the lives
of government employees, the game will regularly be tilted toward their
potential future employers.
In
other words, what we’re getting in return for the hundreds of billions of
dollars we shower on those weapons firms is a raw deal and that revolving door
is but one example of it. Don’t forget the endemic waste, fraud, and abuse that
is part and parcel of the Pentagon budget — of that is, an outfit that has
proven incapable of even auditing
itself. As with influence peddling, when it comes to that trio there’s a
scale that ranges from the criminal to the merely outrageous. In the first
category, you might start with the “Fat
Leonard” scandal, named for a corporate executive who bribed dozens of Navy
officials with money, vacations, and prostitutes to get the inside track on contracts
to help maintain U.S. ships based in ports in the Pacific. So far, 29 criminal
indictments have been handed down in the case.
That
one got the headlines, but the biggest sources of corporate waste when it comes
to Pentagon dollars are such a part of everyday life in Washington that they go
largely unnoticed. The Pentagon, for example, employs more
than 600,000 private contractors. There are so many of them and they
are so poorly monitored that the Pentagon (as it has reluctantly acknowledged)
doesn’t even have an accurate count of how many of them it has hired. What we
do know is that many are carrying out redundant tasks that could be done more
cheaply by government employees. Cutting the contractor work force by 15% —
theoretically an easy task but light years beyond anything presently imaginable
— would save a quick $20
billion a year.
Then
there are the big weapons programs. As the Project on Government Oversight has
shown, the Lockheed Martin F-35 combat aircraft — supposedly a state-of-the-art
plane for the twenty-first century — has had so many cost and performance
issues that it may never
be fully ready for combat. That, however, hasn’t stopped the Pentagon
from planning to spend $1.4
trillion to build and maintain more than 2,400 of these defective
planes during the lifetime of the program.
Last
but hardly least, don’t forget the Pentagon’s misguided plan to spend more
than $1 trillion in the next three decades on a whole new generation
of nuclear-armed bombers, submarines, and land- and air-based missiles. The
United States nuclear arsenal already
has more than 4,000 nuclear warheads in its active stockpile, with 1,700
deployed and ready to be launched on a moment’s notice.
Even
if one accepts the idea that there is a need for nuclear weapons to deter other
countries (like, say, North Korea), this could be accomplished with an arsenal
a fraction of the size of the current one. Two analysts from U.S. war colleges
have estimated that about
300 deliverable nuclear warheads would be enough to dissuade any
nation from attacking the United States with a nuclear weapon. Anything else
represents sheer excess, not to mention a huge source of unjustified revenue
and profits for weapons contractors. (And note that the current trillion-dollar
“modernization” program for the nuclear arsenal was initiated under President
Barack Obama, a man who won the Nobel Prize for his urge to abolish all such
weaponry. Take that as a measure of the power of America’s corporate nuclear
lobby.)
Military
Spending Generates Jobs (for Lobbyists and Overpaid CEOs)
In
addition to “supporting the troops,” the other common argument in Washington
for runaway Pentagon spending is: jobs, jobs, jobs. And there can be no
question that if you plow hundreds of billions of dollars into new weapons
systems, you will create some new employment opportunities. What’s surprising
is how relatively few jobs actually flow these days from such Pentagon
expenditures.
In
2011, a study by
economists from the University of Massachusetts made this blindingly clear.
What they showed was that military spending is the worst way to create jobs.
Putting the same money into any other area — from infrastructure to
transportation to alternative energy to health care or education — creates up
to twice as many jobs as military spending does. If it’s about jobs, there are
plenty of alternatives to throwing vast piles of tax dollars at a wasteful
Pentagon.
The
challenge here is political, not economic. The question at hand is how to get a
president and a Congress who are willing to buck the arms lobby and invest in
what would quite literally be more constructive activities.
Contractors
aid and abet the process of investing in the Pentagon by routinely exaggerating
the number of jobs their programs create. The F-35 is a classic example.
Lockheed Martin has a handy interactive map on its
website that claims the program supports 125,000 jobs in 46 states. When I took
a closer look at the company’s analysis and compared it with standard economic
estimating procedures, however, I found that the true number is less
than half that many jobs generated.
In
fact, according to Lockheed’s own figures, more than half of the jobs generated
by the program are in just
two states, Texas and California. In short, the F-35 creates nothing like
the number of jobs the company claims and those jobs aren’t spread as widely or
evenly across the country as their propaganda suggests. In truth, the best jobs
generated by Pentagon spending are the ones for well-heeled lobbyists and
overpaid corporate executives.
So
the next time someone suggests that the Pentagon needs yet more money for the
troops, just remember that what they’re actually talking about are troops of
overpaid defense contractors, not members of the armed forces. If you want to
“defend” this country, maybe it’s time to protect it from the predators that
President Dwight D. Eisenhower once memorably called “the
military-industrial complex.”
Copyright
2017 William D. Hartung
Read
more by Tom Engelhardt
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