Fraud finds new paths during wars, but it is the chief product of Pentagon contracts unrelated to particular wars as well. Often, in fact, it's devoted to preparation for wars that could never happen. This week Chalmers Johnson published an article called "The Looming Crisis at the Pentagon: How Taxpayers Finance Fantasy Wars," in which he wrote:
"The Air Force and the Army are still planning as if, in the reasonably near future, they were going to fight an old-fashioned war of attrition against the Soviet Union, which disappeared in 1991; while the Navy, with its eleven large aircraft-carrier battle groups, is, as William S. Lind has written, 'still structured to fight the Imperial Japanese Navy.'"
Johnson named a few specific items worthy of the chopping block:
"Given the present major recession, whose depths remain unknown, the United States has better things to spend its money on than Nimitz-class aircraft carriers at a price of $6.2 billion each (the cost of the USS George H. W. Bush, launched in January 2009, our tenth such ship) or aircraft that can cruise at a speed of Mach 2 (1,352 miles per hour).
"… Gates is also sympathetic to the desire of a few reformers in the Pentagon to dump the Lockheed-Martin F-22 'Raptor' supersonic stealth fighter, a plane designed to meet the Soviet Union's last proposed, but never built, interceptor.
"… Gates has not yet found the nerve -- or the political backing -- to pull the plug on the F-22; nor has he even dared to bring up the subject of canceling its more expensive and technically complicated successor, the F-35 'Joint Strike Fighter.'"
Johnson tells the familiar story of how military industrial congressional corruption works, with projects underpriced for initial approval and then costs soaring during development, and with jobs scattered across lots of congressional districts. The important piece of information that, as far as I know, even Barney Frank has not mentioned on TV is that military money is not actually a good way to create jobs.
In "The U.S. Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending Priorities," Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier of the Political Economy Research Institute at University of Massachusetts - Amherst found that investing public dollars in military jobs at home in the United States produces fewer and lower-paying jobs for the U.S. economy than does public investment in healthcare, education, mass transit, or home construction. Needless to say, the comparison must weigh more strongly against the military when its investment is overseas. (And any benefit to the occupied nations of U.S. bases has to be weighed against those nations' share of the cost of the bases.) And that's all before considering the non-financial benefits of investing in living rather than in killing.
There is wide agreement among reformers inside the Pentagon and out about some of the areas that can and should be cut. In its "Report of the Task Force on A Unified Security Budget for the United States, FY 2009", the Institute for Policy Studies identified $61 billion that it recommends cutting from the military budget, including a $25 billion reduction in the nuclear arsenal combined with keeping "missile defense" in the research stage and stopping the weaponization of space, plus another $24 billion from scaling back or stopping research on unneeded weapons, $5 billion from unneeded conventional forces, and $7 billion in waste and pork. Oddly, IPS recommends "scaling back" ill conceived weapons systems like the F/A-22 Raptor, missile "defense," the Virginia-class submarine, the V-22 Osprey, the F35 Joint Strike Fighter, and offensive space weapons. Eliminating these programs would save significantly more than scaling them back.
George C. Wilson this week proposed this list of programs to send first to the chopping block:
• Army Future Combat Systems. The Pentagon estimates in its latest SAR that 15 systems in the Army program will cost $159.3 billion, or $10.6 billion for each system. The FCS has all kinds of problems.
• Air Force F-22 fighter. In another example of a mismatch, the F-22 has not been deployed to fight terrorists. The Pentagon’s own price tag for this plane, designed to take on the now-defunct Warsaw Pact air forces, stands at $351 million a copy, according to the Pentagon’s SAR figures, which include research and development costs.
• Navy Littoral Combat Ship. Can you believe, Mr. President, the cost of this supposedly simple ship for brown-water operations is now priced at $1.4 billion each?
• Marine V-22 Osprey. Several Defense secretaries tried to cancel this $118 million aerial taxi cab but got rolled by Congress. Why keep buying such an expensive limo?
Lawrence Korb, former Assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan, and former employee of Raytheon, told RealNews.com a couple of weeks ago that we should stop paying for weapons suited to outdated conflicts. He named the F-22 and the DD(G-1000) Navy destroyer (which is intended for open-ocean warfare), two weapons which IPS recommended scaling back and eliminating, respectively. Asked about nuclear weapons, Korb praised President Obama's comments in support of reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons. Cutting the U.S. arsenal back to 1,000 nuclear weapons would save $20 billion per year, he said. Korb also expressed optimism that "missile defense" bases in Poland and the Czech Republic might not happen.
Back in 2007, the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy In Focus put out a report called "Just Security," which proposed $213 billion in cuts, including $99.1 billion from the war on Iraq, $45.9 billion in cuts to overseas bases, $10.8 billion in overseas military "aid," $7 billion in waste and fraud, $5 billion in force structure, $2 billion in recruitment, and $43.9 billion in unnecessary weapons, including the usual lineup: the F/A 22 Raptor, missile "defense", Virginia class submarine, DD(G-1000) destroyer, V-22 Osprey, C-130J transport plane, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, offensive space weapons, Future Combat System, R&D, and nuclear weapons.
As someone disgusted and repulsed by all military weapons, my initial inclination has never been to distinguish among them, but doing so makes it much easier to eliminate the craziest of the bunch. The Center for Defense Information's Military Almanac 2007 provides a very useful guide. The same group has also just published America's Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress. This is a guide to corruption and reform from military insiders.
There are cultural barriers between the so-called military reform movement and the peace movement. One group wants to eliminate waste but build weapons that kill faster. The other group wants to eliminate waste primarily because the waste is on weapons, no matter how well those weapons work. Clearly these barriers need to be broken down, something the Backbone Campaign has been helping with (this activist group has made military reformer Chuck Spinney a nominee for Secretary of Defense in the Progressive Cabinet). While only those who study the military closely know the best pieces to cut, only peace and justice advocates have a vision of a society and an economy that has moved beyond militarism. We bring to the discussion the works of authors like Seymour Melman, whose expertise was in conversion from a military to a civilian economy.
If the Chalmers Johnson article above interests you, you'll probably also enjoy reading "The American Way of War" by Eugene Jarecki, who earlier produced a film of the same title. This book also helps with the cultural divide. The early chapters address the rise of imperial presidential war powers and the military industrial congressional complex. Jarecki covers topics much loathed by war supporters, including the provocation of Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor, the unnecessity of dropping atomic bombs on Japan to end the war, and the damage wrought by the 1947 National Security Act, the CIA, the National Security Advisor, and the Air Force.
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