"The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War"

 Eisenhower warned of a "military industrial complex".  Shortly thereafter a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union was discovered and the Kennedy administration poured money into resolving that gap which it was discovered later never existed.  That series of coincidental events has repeated itself for the past seven decades.  Whenever the increase in military spending falls to just 5% some external threat will be discovered that requires an immediate spending increase in order to maintain our national security. Alexander Cockburn in his article, "The Military Industrial Virus"** documents the virtual sine wave of military spending increase as a result of some imagine external threat every time spending reaches the magic floor of 5% annual increases. 

We have become immune to military excess. Remember the kerfuffle over the $640 toilet seat?  It cause quite a stir at the time, yet in 2018 it was revealed that the Air Force was now paying $10,000 for a toilet seat cover and there was nary a ripple of protest.  When asked to explain, an Air Force official justified the cost  because it was required to save "the manufacturer from 'losing revenue and profit.'"

So now we have really expensive weapons and the evidence is accumulating they don't work very well and the money spent comes at the expense of training and maintenance. Mines are an inexpensive yet devastating threat to American warships but the Navy has only 11 dilapidated minesweepers of which only three are allocated to the Middle East where Iran has thousands that could be laid in the Straits of Hormuz through which a large portion of the world's oil supply must travel.  The Navy is said to rely on the MH-53E mine search and destroy helicopter that has proven to be the most dangerous machine for those who fly them, killing 132 crewmen in some 58 crashes since their introduction in 1980.  They are the most dangerous aircraft in the military's arsenal, just not for the enemy.  The Osprey follows close behind. The new multi-billion dollar Littoral ships, nicknamed "little crappy ships" by the crew that was supposed to be able to sweep for mines has yet to get that equipment working.  New helmets worn by soldiers in Afghanistan and Ira have been shown to cause more damage to solder's brains from explosions rather than less. And the F-35 that saw its first combat operations 17 years after the program was initiated could make only one sortie per plane every three days because of maintenance and cost issues. The Pentagon's former chief testing official said they would not have survived combat without protection from other planes. They are so expensive only a small portion of the original order could be purchased.

Has it helped? Indeed, we have become a fearful nation, a bunkered nation, bogged
down in never-ending wars abroad accompanied by shrinking civil liberties at home. We now spend almost as much on defense as the rest of the world combined, yet the sinews of our supporting economy, particularly the all-important manufacturing sector, are weakening
at an alarming rate, threatening the existence of the high-income, middle-class consumer society we built after World War II.

 

That quote is from an essay by Franklin Spinney*** that he wrote after he retired entitled "The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War"* in which he argues that the current war-centric foreign policy has placed Congress and the White in a straitjacket with regard to military funding which has made the control much less safe. The end of the Cold War, rather than producing a "peace dividend" had precisely the opposite effect.  The military bureaucracy, politicians, and business interests had become so intermingled and dependent on one another that cutting back on defense expenditures would ha e caused massive disruptions to the economy. Even Bernie Sanders, for example, who fought against the F-35, was more than happy to approve their purchase when assured some would be based in Vermont. 

 

The corruption of the system affects the military as well. While Seventh Fleet ships were colliding with civilian tankers and freighters, killing several seamen, the admirals, many of them senior, were being bought off with prostitutes and money to have the ships serviced by "Fat" Leonard's shipyards.  So far, sixteen admirals have been found guilty of bribery and fraud.  Twelve more await trial.  Politicians of both parties will do anything to get parts for new weapons manufactured in their districts, so contracts are spread around the country to make sure of political support.  

 

 The beauty of the system lies in its self-reinforcing nature. Huge cost overruns on these contracts not only secure a handsome profit for the contractor, but also guarantee that the number of weapons acquired always falls short of the number originally requested... These bureaucratic belief systems  slowly  insinuated  themselves  deeply  and  almost  invisibly into a domestic political economy that nurtures financial-political  factions  of  the  Military-Industrial-Congressional  Complex  (MICC). The result is a voracious appetite for money that is sustained by a self-serving flood of ideological propaganda, cloaked by a stifling climate of  excessive  secrecy.  President  Dwight  D.  Eisenhower  warned  us  to guard against the corrosive danger of exactly this in his 1961 farewell address.2  He  was  ignored,  and  today,  fifty  years  later,  the  domestic political imperative to steadily increase the money flowing into the MICC reaches into every corner of our society. It distorts and debases our economy, our politics, our universities and schools, our media, our think tanks, and our research labs, just as Eisenhower predicted it  would. [p.57]

Continuous small wars (or the threat of them) are essential to the MICC. Those companies are usually not in a position to convert their business to civilian use. Having been tied to the military procurement system that virtually guarantees them a profit, moving into the civilian realm would require expertise in marketing and dealing with competition they're simply not prepared for.  It's much easier and rewarding to simply have a Congressman in the pocket and a system that feels constantly under threat. Congressional and bureaucratic staff who deal with procurement of weapons systems are virtually guaranteed a job at one of the big military conglomerates at substantial salaries when they decide to leave government. 

We have fallen into the trap of believing that ever-increasing complexity and complicated technology is the answer to military success, yet we have failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam and Afghanistan nor the Soviet experience there that showed how simple local forces can beat better technology. It does not appear we have learned the lessons of the Millenium 2002 War Games in which a vastly inferior force in Iran destroyed an American naval battle group. "“The impact of the [opposing force’s] ability to render a U.S. carrier battle group — the centerpiece of the U.S. Navy — militarily worthless stunned most of the MC ’02 participants.”  It was all over in ten minutes.**** "The dogmatic belief that greater weapons-system complexity and, even worse, greater organizational complexity enhance combat effectiveness is at the epicenter of the belief system sustaining the MICC." After a seventy-nine day bombing campaign in Kosovo (a tiny country with an economy smaller than Fairfax County, Virginia) the Serbs left. Sophisticated radar of the US planes was defeated by microwave ovens used to decoy expensive homing missiles.

Fans of Reagan continue to brag how he caused the decline of the USSR, mostly by forcing them into an unsustainable weapons development and purchase cycle that corrupted and  bankrupted them.  Should we fail to rein in the MICC, I fear we will follow them down the same path? 

*https://www3.nd.edu/~druccio/Spinney.pdf

**https://archive.harpers.org/2019/06/pdf/HarpersMagazine-2019-06-0087519.pdf

***In 1983, Franklin Spinney, was "a thirty-seven-year-old analyst in the Pentagon’s Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation, who testified to Congress that the cost of the ever-more complex weapons that the military insisted on buying always grew many times faster than the overall defense budget. In consequence, planes, ships, and tanks were never replaced on a one-to-one basis, which in turn ensured that the armed forces got smaller and older. Planes, for instance, were kept in service for longer periods of time and were maintained in poor states of repair owing to their increasing complexity. As to be expected, the high command did not react favorably to these home truths. They allowed Spinney to keep his job, but stopped assigning him anything of importance. He spent the rest of his career ensconced in a Pentagon office at the heart of the military-industrial machine, pondering and probing its institutional personality."

****https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/millennium-challenge-iran-destroyed-america-war-game-197261  and https://warontherocks.com/2015/11/millennium-challenge-the-real-story-of-a-corrupted-military-exercise-and-its-legacy/