In a detailed forthcoming study for the Transition Security Project and in her own writings, investigative journalist Taylor Barnes of Inkstick Media has charted the diminishing returns from Pentagon spending. Despite a soaring Pentagon budget, direct jobs in arms production are now one-third of what they were 30 years ago, down from three million then to 1.1 million now, according to the arms industry's own trade association. Unionization rates in the arms production sector are also down sharply, with some big weapons firms like Northrop Grumman having unionization rates of less than 10%. In keeping with that trend, Lockheed Martin moved the production of its F-16 fighter -- a staple of foreign arms exports -- to the anti-union state of South Carolina.
Even worse, many states provide special tax breaks and other subsidies to attract or keep weapons factories -- and that's on top of the hundreds of billions the industry receives in federal tax dollars. In Utah, the state government staunchly refused to reveal how many jobs Northrop Grumman had promised in return for state subsidies, with one official claiming it would "compromise" the interests of the company to do so.Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman's work on the Sentinel, the newest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), has been a poster child for dysfunctional weapons development, with the estimated cost of the program as a whole growing by 81% in just a few years. Part of the problem was that Northrop Grumman somehow managed to ignore the fact that its new missile would be too large to fit in existing silos, creating the need for further costly new construction efforts.
The spending of scarce tax revenues goes to ICBMs that former Secretary of Defense William Perry once labeled "one of the most dangerous weapons we have." After all, a president might literally have only minutes to decide whether to launch them on being warned of a potential enemy attack, greatly increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war prompted by a false alarm. And there have been many false alarms and nuclear accidents in the nuclear age (even if not yet an actual nuclear attack loosed on the world), as meticulously documented in Eric Schlosser's essential book Command and Control.
Then there's the Golden Dome missile "defense" system, a fantasy of President Trump's that, in reality, could never provide the promised "leakproof" protection against weaponry ranging from ICBMs and hypersonic missiles to low-flying drones.By now, more than 40 years after President Ronald Reagan promised a perfect defense against ICBMs in his 1983 "Star Wars" speech, it should be all too obvious that such a leakproof shield is physically impossible, since enemy ICBMs with nuclear warheads would come in at 15,000 -- and no, that is not a misprint! -- miles per hour and could be surrounded by large numbers of decoy balloons that would be indistinguishable from a warhead when floating in space. There could be hundreds of such incoming warheads in a full-scale nuclear attack. To even have a chance of intercepting all of them, a defensive system would have to devote as many as 1,600 interceptors to take down incoming missiles. An analysis by the conservative American Enterprise Institute estimates that a full-blown effort to build a comprehensive Golden Dome shield could cost $3.6 trillion just to construct.
In fact, the Golden Dome concept is so delusional that it barely merits a detailed critique, though many such analyses are available. A more reasonable way to deal with it would, of course, be ridicule.
Ben Cohen, cofounder of Ben & Jerry's and the founder of the "Up in Arms" campaign to cut Pentagon spending, has taken just such an approach.On April Fool's Day, he placed a "Golden Hole-in-Dome" statue on the National Mall that included a Donald Trump, fully clothed, being soaked by water leaking through a faux Golden Dome shield. The Daily Beast's headline on its piece about the event captured the spirit of that day: "Ben and Jerry's Co-Founder Humiliates Trump Outside His House."
Meanwhile, the dysfunctional weapons systems on the Pentagon's shopping list only continue to grow. Take Lockheed Martin's F-35 combat aircraft, which was supposed to do almost anything (and does nothing) well. The plane, which could cost $2 trillion for roughly 2,500 aircraft if the Pentagon's original plans hold, had taken 23 years to develop and still can't operate as advertised, spending almost half its time in its hangar for maintenance.
Similarly, as Dan Grazier of the Stimson Center has pointed out, the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, which had to dock in Cyprus recently after multiple mishaps including a clogged toilet system that spewed feces onto the flight deck, is a $13 billion nightmare, chock full of fancy, untested, and expensive technology that all too often fails to work as advertised. As he points out, a more viable, less expensive carrier could have been built if proven technologies had not been replaced with high-tech fantasies. Unfortunately, that's generally not how Pentagon procurement works these days.
Palmer Luckey Will Not Come to the Rescue
Palmer Luckey, the 32 year-old former game designer who now runs Anduril, one of Silicon Valley's top military tech firms, made news a few months ago when he told a CNBC interviewer that, if the Pentagon were to stop buying the wrong things, it could provide a robust defense for America at a cost of perhaps $500 billion, half of current levels and one-third of the level President Trump is now seeking.Presumably, the wrong things are piloted aircraft like the F-35 and mammoth ships like the Gerald Ford, and the right things are drones, uncrewed submarines, and complex AI-driven targeting and surveillance systems of the type that Anduril and Peter Thiel's Palantir produce.
But count on this: replacing piloted combat aircraft with swarms of drones won't automatically be cheaper, depending on how large the swarms are and how complex their designs may prove to be. Early on, the Ukrainian military decided that U.S.-supplied drones from Silicon Valley were too brittle and expensive, so it launched a do-it-yourself drone program that took cheap commercial drones from China and fitted them with bombs and cameras. U.S. arms companies are now trying to get back in the act by partnering with Ukrainian firms to build more sophisticated drones. Don't be surprised, though, if their price soars and their reliability sinks.
Another reason AI-driven weapons may not be as cheap as advertised is that Luckey, Thiel, and their merry band of unhinged techno-optimists want to eliminate virtually any oversight of their activities, whether through independent testing of their new systems or measures to prevent price gouging by unscrupulous contractors. At present, the motto of the military tech sector is "trust me." I don't know about you, but I'd prefer to have someone minding the store, so that the tech billionaires don't simply rob us blind.
Of course, what would it mean if Silicon Valley could deliver cheaper, more deadly advanced weaponry? After all, artificial intelligence systems were indeed used in recent times to accelerate targeting during Israel's genocidal war on the people of Gaza, and they have been used in President Trump's disastrous assault on Iran. And neither of those situations has yet had a happy ending. But that's the point.The truth is we really don't need ever more new weaponry that kills even faster. We need to stop the killing. And that means blunting the political influence of the warmongers and war profiteers that Donald Trump criticized on the campaign trail in 2024 and then so warmly embraced as president.
And to put all of this in grim perspective, he is now presiding over perhaps the most corrupt, incompetent, repressive regime in the history of this republic. And worse yet, some of his most dismal policies -- like unstinting support for Israeli aggression -- have, sadly enough, had bipartisan backing in Washington.In short, he has taken what were already some of the worst American policies and accelerated them, even as he destroys positive aspects of the government like the U.S. Agency for International Development's provision of food, clean water, and public health services abroad or any further engagement in constructive international institutions.
Among other things, he is now narrowing America's foreign policy options by dismantling civilian tools of statecraft, while doubling down on military approaches that haven't "won" a war in this century (or the second half of the last one either). Meanwhile, the economic damage and humanitarian costs are spreading globally, including to his own supporters.
The challenge now is to build a movement that not only turns back Trump's policies, but gets at the underlying economic, political, and cultural forces that have kept the United States in a permanent state of war for so long, while robbing us of opportunities to build a better, more peaceful, tolerant, and just future. Given the pace of destruction and chaos being visited upon us, it's important to act now and continue to do so until we build enough power to rein in the war machine and begin creating actual structures of peace.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
Post Article Comment and Rate This Article
