[rad-green] U.S. military spending in 2019 was higher than at the peak of either the Korean or Vietnam conflicts.

*https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/27/the-pentagon-budget-still-rising-40-years-later/#comments
<https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/27/the-pentagon-budget-still-rising-40-years-later/#comments>*


*Consortium News          December 27, 2019*

*The Pentagon Budget Still Rising, 40 Years Later*

*U.S. military spending  in 2019 was  higher than  at the peak of either
the Korean or Vietnam conflicts.*

*By William D. Hartung
<https://consortiumnews.com/tag/william-d-hartung/?print=print-search>*
*TomDispatch.com*
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176641/tomgram%3A_william_hartung%2C_lessons_from_battling_the_pentagon_for_four_decades/#more>

I’ve been writing critiques of the Pentagon, the national security state,
and America’s never-ending military overreach since at least 1979 — in
other words, virtually my entire working life. In those decades, there were
moments when positive changes did occur. They ranged from ending the
apartheid <https://www.history.com/topics/africa/apartheid> regime in South
Africa in 1994 and halting
<https://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/06/world/central-american-peace-accord-goes-into-effect.html>
U.S.
military support for the murderous regimes, death squads, and outlaws who
ruled Central America in the 1970s and 1980s to sharp reductions
<https://www.armscontrol.org/projects-reports/2014-10/section-2-nuclear-reductions-make-united-states-safer>
in
the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals as the Cold War wound down. Each of
those victories, however complex, seemed like a signal that sustained
resistance and global solidarity mattered and could make a difference when
it came to peace and security.

Here’s a striking exception, though, one thing that decidedly hasn’t
changed for the better in all these years: the staggering number of tax
dollars that persistently go into what passes for national security in this
country. In our case, of course, the definition of “national security” is
subsidizing the U.S. military-industrial complex, year in, year out, at
levels that should be (but aren’t) beyond belief. In 2019, Pentagon
spending is actually higher
<https://www.internationalpolicy.org/sustainable-defense-task-force> than
it was at the peak of either the Korean or Vietnam conflicts and may soon
be — adjusted for inflation — twice the Cold War average.

Yes, in those four decades, there were dips
<https://www.internationalpolicy.org/sustainable-defense-task-force> at key
inflection points, including the ends of the Vietnam War and the Cold War,
but the underlying trend has been ever onward and upward. Just why that’s
been the case is a subject that almost never comes up here. So. let me try
to explain it in the most personal terms by tracing my own history of
working on Pentagon spending and what I’ve learned from it.

*Apartheid-Era Arms Embargo *

I first began analyzing this country’s weapons-making corporations in the
mid-1970s while still a student at Columbia University and deeply involved
in the anti-apartheid movement of that moment. As one of my topics of
research, I spent a fair amount of time tracing how some of those outfits
were circumventing the then-existing arms embargo
<http://richardknight.homestead.com/files/armsembargo.htm> on (white) South
Africa by using shadow companies, shipping weapons through third countries,
and similar deceptions.

One of the outlets I wrote for then was *Southern Africa*
<https://www.aluka.org/struggles/collection/SAMAG> magazine, a collectively
produced, independent journal that supported the liberation movements in
that part of the world. The anti-apartheid struggle was ultimately
successful, thanks to the efforts of the global solidarity movement of
which I was a small part, but primarily to the courageous acts of South
African individuals and organizations like the African National Congress
<https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/african-national-congress-anc> and
the Black Consciousness Movement
<https://oxfordre.com/africanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277734-e-83>
.

As it happens, there has been no such luck when it comes to reining in the
Pentagon.

I started working on Pentagon spending in earnest in 1979 when I landed a
job at the New York-based Council on Economic Priorities
<https://gssd.mit.edu/search-gssd/site/council-economic-priorities-53238-mon-07-23-2012-0904>
(CEP),
an organization founded on the notion that corporations could be shamed
into being more socially responsible. Armed with a BA in Philosophy — much
to the chagrin of my father who was convinced I would be unemployable as a
result — I was lucky to get the position.

Even then I had my doubts about whether encouraging social responsibility
would ever be adequate to tame profit-hungry multinational corporations,
but the areas of research pursued by CEP were too important to pass up. One
of their most significant studies at the time was a report
<https://books.google.com/books?id=BNk1AAAAIAAJ&pg=RA5-PA337&lpg=RA5-PA337&dq=Tom+Ridell+Anti-personnel+weapons&source=bl&ots=Ln1XvcmtmH&sig=ACfU3U3atrzhh5JJ4UTeE4K_vYUWh6Ho1Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjk9dfck5zmAhVRY6wKHfjLC5sQ6AEwAHoECAsQAQ#v=onepage>
identifying
the manufacturers of anti-personnel weaponry used to grim effect in the war
in Vietnam. And Gordon Adams, who went on to be the top defense budget
official in the Clinton White House in the 1990s, wrote a seminal study, “The
Iron Triangle
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/0878710124/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>,”
while I was at CEP. That book laid out in a memorable fashion the symbiotic
relationships among congressional representatives, the arms industry, and
the Pentagon that elevated special interests above the national interest
and kept weapons budgets artificially high.

My initial assignment was as a researcher for CEP’s Conversion Information
Center — not religious conversion, mind you, but the conversion of the U.S.
economy from its deep dependence on Pentagon spending to something better.
The concept of conversion dated back at least to the Vietnam War era when
it was championed by figures like Walter Reuther, the influential head of
the United Auto Workers union, and Seymour Melman, an industrial
engineering professor at Columbia University who wrote a classic book on
the subject, “The Permanent War Economy of the United States
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/0671222619/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>.” (I
took an undergraduate course with Melman which sparked what would become my
own abiding interest in documenting the costs and consequences of the
military-industrial complex.)

My work at CEP mostly involved researching subjects like how dependent
local and state economies were — and, of course, still are — on Pentagon
spending. But I also got to write newsletters and reports on the top 100
U.S. defense contractors, the top 25 U.S. arms-exporting corporations, and
the companies advocating for and, of course, benefiting from President
Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars
<https://www.history.com/news/reagan-star-wars-sdi-missile-defense> missile
defense initiative. (That vast program was meant to turn space into a new
“frontier” of war, a subject that has recently lit the mind
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/us/politics/trump-space-command-force.html>
of
one Donald Trump
<https://shop.donaldjtrump.com/products/space-force-raglan-tee>.) In each
case, CEP’s goal was to push public interest and indignation to levels that
might someday bring an end to the most costly and destructive aspects of
the military-industrial complex. So many years later, the results have at
best been mixed and, at worst, well… you already know, given the sky-high
2020 Pentagon budget.

During my years at CEP and after, work on economic conversion was pursued
at the national level by groups like the National Commission on Economic
Conversion and Disarmament <https://ips-dc.org/defense_conversion/> and,
when it came to projects in defense-dependent states, by local outfits from
Connecticut
<https://thehumanist.com/magazine/january-february-2012/features/moving-from-a-war-economy-to-a-peace-economy>
 to  California
<https://www.swarthmore.edu/library/peace/DG201-225/dg215economic.htm>. Yet
all of that work has been stymied for decades by a seemingly never-ending
pattern of rising Pentagon budgets. The post-Vietnam dip in such spending
briefly made the notion of conversion planning more appealing to
politicians, unions, and even some corporations, but the military build-up
in the early 1980s under President Ronald Reagan
<https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bal-te.pentagon08jun08-story.html> promptly
reduced interest again. With that gravy train back on track, why even plan
for a downturn?

*Nuclear Freeze to 1991 Gulf War*

There was, however, one anti-militarist surge that did make progress during
the Reagan years: the Nuclear Freeze Campaign
<https://wagingnonviolence.org/2015/05/the-nuclear-freeze-campaign-prevented-an-apocalypse-so-can-the-climate-movement/>
. I worked closely with that movement, authoring a report
<https://www.amazon.com/Economic-Consequences-Nuclear-William-Hartung/dp/087871023X>
, for instance, on the potentially positive economic impacts of an
initiative to reduce U.S. and Soviet nuclear forces. Although President
Reagan never agreed to a freeze of any sort, that national grassroots
movement helped transform him from the president who labeled the Soviet
Union “the Evil Empire <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_Empire_speech>”
and joked
<https://livableworld.org/64th-anniversary-of-hiroshima-time-for-progress-on-nukes/>
that
“the bombing will start in five minutes” to the one who negotiated the
elimination <https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/INFtreaty> of
medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe and declared
<https://www.hoover.org/research/war-must-never-be-fought-0> that “a
nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” As Frances Fitzgerald
documented in “Way Out There in the Blue,” her history
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/1620972344/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20> of
Reagan’s missile defense initiative, by 1984 key presidential advisers were
concerned that the increasingly mainstream anti-nuclear movement could
damage him politically if he didn’t make some kind of arms-control gesture.

Still, the resulting progress in reducing those nuclear arsenals brought
only a temporary lull in the relentless growth of the Pentagon budget. It
peaked in 1987, in fact, before dipping significantly at the end of the
Cold War when Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell famously claimed
<http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19910409&slug=1276426>
to
be “running out of demons.” Unfortunately, the Pentagon soon fixed that,
constructing a costly new strategy aimed at fighting “major regional
contingencies” against regimes like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and North Korea
(as Michael Klare so vividly explained in his 1996 book “Rogue States and
Nuclear Outlaws
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/1620972344/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>”*).*

President George H.W. Bush’s 1991 intervention in Kuwait to drive out Iraqi
forces would provide the template for that new strategy, while seeming to
presage a veritable new way of war. After all, that conflict lasted almost
no time at all, seemed like a techno-wonder, and succeeded in its primary
objective. As an added bonus, most of it was funded by Washington’s allies,
not American taxpayers.

But those successes couldn’t have proved more illusory. After all, the 1991
Gulf War <https://www.history.com/topics/middle-east/persian-gulf-war> set
the stage for nearly four decades
<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/books/review/americas-war-for-the-greater-middle-east-by-andrew-j-bacevich.html>
of
never-ending war (and operations just short of it) by U.S. forces across
the greater Middle East and parts of Africa. That short-term victory
against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, in fact, prompted a resurgence of imperial
hubris that would have disastrous consequences for the greater Middle East
and global security more broadly. Militarists cheered the end of what they
had called the “Vietnam Syndrome
<https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2013/01/22/its-called-the-vietnam-syndrome-and-its-back/>
” — a perfectly sensible public aversion to bloody, ill-advised wars in
distant lands. Had that “syndrome” persisted, the world would undoubtedly
be a safer, more prosperous place today.

*Merger Boom, Iraq War II & Global War on Terror*

The end of the Cold War resulted, however, in that rarest of all things:
real cuts in the Pentagon budget. They were, however, not faintly as deep
as might have been expected, given the implosion of the other superpower on
the planet, the Soviet Union. Still, those reductions hit hard enough that
the weapons industry was forced to reorganize via a series of mega-mergers
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1997/07/04/how-a-dinner-led-to-a-feeding-frenzy/13961ba2-5908-4992-8335-c3c087cdebc6/>
encouraged
by the administration of President Bill Clinton. Lockheed and Martin
Marietta formed Lockheed Martin; Northrop and Grumman became Northrop
Grumman; Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas; and dozens of other firms, large
and small, were scooped up by the giant defense contractors until only five
major firms were left standing: Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, Boeing,
Raytheon, and General Dynamics. Where dozens of firms had once stood, only
the big five now split roughly $100 billion
<https://www.thenation.com/article/heres-where-your-tax-dollars-for-defense-are-really-going/>
in
Pentagon contracts annually.

The theory behind this surge in mergers was that the new firms would
eliminate excess capacity and pass on the savings in lower prices for
weapons systems sold to the U.S. government. That, of course, would prove a
fantasy of the first order, as Lawrence Korb, then at the Brookings
Institution, made clear
<https://www.brookings.edu/articles/merger-mania-should-the-pentagon-pay-for-defense-industry-restructuring/>
. As I’ve also pointed out
<https://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176586/tomgram%3A_william_hartung%2C_eisenhower%27s_worst_nightmare>
, the Clinton administration ended up essentially subsidizing those
mergers, providing billions of taxpayer dollars to cover the costs of
closing factories and moving equipment, while actually picking up part of
the tab for the golden parachutes given to executives and board members
displaced by them.

Meanwhile, the companies laid off tens of thousands of workers. Congressman
Bernie Sanders (I-VT) dubbed this process of subsidizing mergers while
abandoning workers to their fate “payoffs for layoffs
<https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-07-11-me-23009-story.html>”
and pushed through legislation that prevented some, but not all, of the
merger subsidies from being paid out.

Meanwhile, those defense mega-firms began looking to foreign arms sales to
bolster their bottom lines. An obliging Clinton administration promptly stepped
up <https://www.amazon.com/Weapons-All-William-D-Hartung/dp/0060190140> arms
sales to the Middle East, making deals at a rate of roughly $1 billion a
month in 1993 and 1994. Meanwhile, despite promises made at the time of the
Soviet Union’s collapse, Washington oversaw the expansion
<https://www.armscontrol.org/act/1997-09/features/debate-over-nato-expansion-critique-clinton-administrations-responses-key>
of
NATO to the Russian border, including the addition of Hungary, Poland, and
the Czech Republic to the alliance.  As Tom Collina of the Ploughshares
Fund has written
<https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/11/cold-war-ended-30-years-ago-so-why-are-things-russia-so-bad/161200/?oref=d-river>,
that helped scuttle the prospects for the kind of U.S.-Russian
rapprochement that could have delivered a true “peace dividend” (the phrase
of that moment) and accelerated reductions in global nuclear arsenals.

For companies like Lockheed Martin, however, such new NATO memberships
looked like manna from heaven in the form of more markets
<https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Committee+to+Expand+NATO&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8>
for
U.S. arms. Norman Augustine, that company’s CEO at the time, even took a
marketing tour of nascent NATO members, while company Vice President Bruce
Jackson found time in his busy schedule to head up an advocacy group
<https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Committee+to+Expand+NATO&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8>
with a self-explanatory name: the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO.

The 1990s also saw the beginnings of movement towards a second war with
Iraq, pushed in those years by the Project for the New American Century
<https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Project_for_the_New_American_Century>
(PNAC), an advocacy group whose luminaries, including Dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, would all too soon become part of the
administration of President George W. Bush and the architects of his 2003
invasion of Iraq.

You won’t be surprised to learn that they were joined
<https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Project_for_the_New_American_Century> at
PNAC by Lockheed Martin’s ubiquitous Bruce Jackson. Nor, at this late date,
will you be shocked that those merger subsidies, NATO expansion, and the
return to a more interventionist policy helped get military spending back
on a steady growth path until the 9/11 attacks opened the spigots, launched
the Global War on Terror, and sent a flood of new money pouring into the
Pentagon and the national security state. The budget of the Department of
Defense would only increase
<http://comw.org/pda/fulltext/121114-Reasonable-Defense.pdf> for the first
10 years of this century, a record not previously matched in U.S. history.

*Prospects for Shrinking the Pentagon Budget*

Why has it been so hard to reduce the Pentagon budget, regardless of the
global security environment? The power of the arms lobby, strengthened by
the merger boom of the 1990s, was certainly one factor. Fear of terrorism
generated by the 9/11 attacks, which set the stage for 18 years of
ill-advised military adventures, including the never-ending (and
disastrous) war in Afghanistan
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/>
, is certainly another. The political fear of losing elections by being
seen as either “soft” on defense or unconcerned about the fate of
military-industrial jobs in one’s home state or district made many
Democrats view taking on the Pentagon as the true “third rail” of American
politics. And the military itself has blindly adhered to a strategy of
global dominance that’s essentially been on autopilot, no matter the
damaging consequences of near-endless war and preparations for more of it.

Still, even decades later, hope is not entirely lost. It remains possible
that all of this might change in the years to come as a war-weary
<https://www.charleskochinstitute.org/news/cki-real-clear-politics-foreign-policy-poll/>
public
— from progressives to large parts of Donald Trump’s base — has tired of
the country’s forever wars, which have minimally cost something like $6.4
trillion
<https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2019/budgetary-costs-post-911-wars-through-fy2020-64-trillion>,
while resulting in hundreds of thousands
<https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2019/direct-war-death-toll-2001-801000>
 of deaths, according to the latest analyses by Brown University’s Costs of
War project.

As even Trump has acknowledged
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/12/trump-claims-the-u-s-has-spent-7-trillion-in-the-middle-east-it-hasnt/>,
those trillions could have gone far in repairing America’s infrastructure
and doing so much else in this country. In truth, as Lindsay Koshgarian of
the National Priorities Project has pointed out
<https://www.nationalpriorities.org/pressroom/articles/2019/11/03/analysis-confirms-medicare-for-all-cost-fortune/>
, that sort of money could have underwritten significant parts of major
initiatives like the Green New Deal or Medicare for All that would change
the nature of this society rather than destroying other ones.

But that money’s gone. The question is: What will the nation’s budget
priorities be going forward? Both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have
called for reductions in Pentagon spending, with Warren singling
<https://medium.com/@teamwarren/ending-the-stranglehold-of-health-care-costs-on-american-families-bf8286b13086>
out
the Pentagon’s war budget, the so-called Overseas Contingency Operations
account, or OCO, in particular for elimination. OCO has been used as a
slush fund not only to pay for those wars, but also to fund tens of
billions of dollars in Pentagon pet projects that have nothing to do with
our current conflicts. Eliminating it alone could save
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhartung/2019/11/07/how-to-save-hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars-while-making-america-safer/#560515a41f19>
up
to $800 billion over the next decade for other uses.

There has recently been a surge of proposals aimed at cutting the soaring
Pentagon budget in significant ways. My own organization, the Center for
International Policy, for example, has created a Sustainable Defense Task
Force
<https://67ae62e0-a930-4a42-8f98-6c406ea4d9de.filesusr.com/ugd/3ba8a1_a1203dc863484191bfc9ccb79058f042.pdf>
made
up of ex-White House and congressional budget experts, former Pentagon
officials and military officers, and analysts from think tanks across the
political spectrum. Our group has already outlined a plan that would save
$1.25 trillion from current Pentagon projections over the next decade.

Meanwhile, a group of more than 20 progressive organizations called
#PeopleOverPentagon <https://peopleoverpentagon.org/> has proposed $2
trillion in cuts over that decade and the Poor People’s Campaign, working
from an analysis <https://ips-dc.org/report-moral-budget-2/> done by the
Institute for Policy Studies, would up that to $3.5 trillion, while
investing the savings in urgent domestic needs.

Whether any of this succeeds in breaking the pattern of ever-rising budgets
remains an open question. The most urgent threats to the safety of the
planet today are climate change, nuclear weapons, epidemics, the rise of
extreme right-wing nationalism, poverty, and grotesque levels of
inequality. As a recent report
<https://winwithoutwar.org/policy/reimagining-u-s-security-spending-for-the-21st-century-beyond/>
from
the organization Win Without War noted, none of these challenges can be
addressed through military means. The rationale for spending more than $700
billion a year on the Pentagon — and well over $1.2 trillion
<https://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176561/tomgram%3A_hartung_and_smithberger%2C_a_dollar-by-dollar_tour_of_the_national_security_state>
for
national security writ large — simply does not exist.

There are, of course, no guarantees that the Pentagon budget will finally
be downsized, but 40 years after beginning my own work on this issue, I’m
not giving up and neither is the growing network of organizations and
individuals working to demilitarize foreign policy and impose budget
discipline on the Pentagon. Unfortunately, neither are the giant defense
contractors and those who run the national security state.

William D. Hartung, a *TomDispatch* regular
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176490/tomgram%3A_william_hartung%2C_the_pentagon%27s_plan_to_dominate_the_economy>,
is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for
International Policy and the author of “Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin
and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex
<https://www.amazon.com/Prophets-War-Lockheed-Military-Industrial-Complex/dp/1568586973>
.”

*This article is from **TomDispatch.com <http://www.tomdispatch.com/>**.*

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