Paring The Pentagon
No matter how bad the economic crisis gets, don't expect foreclosure signs in front of this building.
Stephen M. Walt has a must read article up at Foreign Policy on the impossibly vast money pit that is our Military-Industrial-Complex.
Here we are in the midst of what every politician has already learned to call, “The greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.” Our new president is preparing to plunge us into TRILLION dollar budget deficits. And yet, just across the Potomac from the White House, the Pentagon devours hundreds of billions of tax dollars every year and regurgitates that squandered public money into the private pockets of politically-connected defense contractors. As Walt says, this sad state of affairs was all predicted half a century ago by “notorious pacifist…I mean, five-star General Dwight D. Eisenhower.”
Walt’s piece is very much worth reading in its entirely, though we couldn’t help but sample a small bite:
Right now, the United States spends more on national defense than almost all of the rest of the world combined. We do this even though we have no enemies on our borders, thousands of nuclear weapons to deter a direct attack, and an array of wealthy and powerful allies. We do have some overseas interest and we do face some real enemies — like al Qaeda — but most of our vital interests are fairly easy to protect and our most fervent adversaries are a rag-tag band of criminals who don’t pose a genuine threat to our way of life.
So you’d think that this would be the ideal time to rethink our global military strategy and look for some savings in the defense area. I’m not talking radical disarmament, but I don’t mean just canceling gold-plated programs like the F-22 or abandoning the chimaera of national missile defense. If America has to tighten its belt, shouldn’t that include DOD?
Why shouldn’t it, indeed! Walt answers the question by citing the sheer number of people employed by the Pentagon and by the arms industry. “Forget GM, Ford and Chrysler: the Department of Defense is the largest single employer in the whole country,” he writes. We certainly see Walt’s point. But he neglects to mention another critical factor–one of our favorite topics around here: good old pay-to-play politics. In an earlier draft of his famous farewell speech, Ike actually dubbed the dangerous new beast, “the military-industrial-congressional complex” and for good reason.
Long before Goldman Sachs embedded itself into the very machinery of our government’s economic oversight apparatus. Long before Blagojevich tried to auction off a Senate seat for a couple bucks or the Bush administration slipped in a tiny bit of legislative language to allow bankers to use bailout money for big salaries and end of year bonuses, arms makers and defense contractors had perfected the art of buying off politicians.
Here’s a link to Open Secrets.org’s breakdown of the “defense and aeronautics” industry’s total political donations over the last 18 years. In 2008 alone, they dropped almost $11 million into political campaigns, spread evenly between Democrats and Republicans.
And here’s a link to the industry’s top recipients last year. Guess who took the most cash from weapons builders? That’s right. Barack Obama. Right behind him was his GOP opponent, John McCain. That kind of expert bet-hedging and “nonpartisan” influence buying is why we won’t be seeing any bomb-makers in bread lines anytime soon.
(h/t: Andrew Sullivan)
Comments
We invite civil and constructive comments about the writings on this web site.