This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Or so the song lyrics go anyway.
But in the case of this country, war, it turns out, has been good for plenty of high-class Americans, especially our weapons makers. As TomDispatch regular David Vine and Theresa Arriola report today, the military-industrial-congressional complex (MIC) has proven to be a cash cow of the first order (though I hate to insult cows that way). In this century, the money has simply poured into it and yet, somehow, it never seems to be enough. Only recently, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell typically "ripped" President Biden's request for $850 billion for the 2025 Pentagon budget as "inadequate" and demanded even more money for it. So, it goes -- so, in fact, it has long gone.
And in a country in which the Pentagon budget and the far vaster national security budget only continue to rise, the oddest thing of all, it seems to me, is this: since the U.S. emerged victorious from World War II, no matter how much money it's poured into the MIC or how many bases its military has established globally, in no significant war -- from Korea in the early 1950s to Vietnam in the 1960s to the Afghan and Iraq wars of this century and the Global War on Terror that went with them -- has this country ever (that's right ever) emerged genuinely victorious.
Yes, the nation whose "defense" budget equals that of the next nine countries combined can't win a war or stop pouring money into its military and the vast industrial combine that goes with it. Today, backed by an extraordinary set of original images related to the MIC that have never been published before (and can be seen in their original form here), Vine and Arriola offer a look at just what a disaster it's proven to be for this country. Tom
The Military-Industrial Complex Is Killing Us All
Freeing Ourselves from the Monster Destroying Our Planet and Our Futures
By David Vine and Theresa (Isa) Arriola
We need to talk about what bombs do in war. Bombs shred flesh. Bombs shatter bones. Bombs dismember. Bombs cause brains, lungs, and other organs to shake so violently they bleed, rupture, and cease functioning. Bombs injure. Bombs kill. Bombs destroy.
Bombs also make people rich.
When a bomb explodes, someone profits. And when someone profits, bombs claim more unseen victims. Every dollar spent on a bomb is a dollar not spent saving a life from a preventable death, a dollar not spent curing cancer, a dollar not spent educating children. That's why, so long ago, retired five-star general and President Dwight D. Eisenhower rightly called spending on bombs and all things military a "theft."
The perpetrator of that theft is perhaps the world's most overlooked destructive force. It looms unnoticed behind so many major problems in the United States and the world today. Eisenhower famously warned Americans about it in his 1961 farewell address, calling it for the first time "the military-industrial complex," or the MIC.
Start with the fact that, thanks to the MIC's ability to hijack the federal budget, total annual military spending is far larger than most people realize: around $1,500,000,000,000 ($1.5 trillion). Contrary to what the MIC scares us into believing, that incomprehensibly large figure is monstrously out of proportion to the few military threats facing the United States. One-and-a-half trillion dollars is about double what Congress spends annually on all non-military purposes combined.
Calling this massive transfer of wealth a "theft" is no exaggeration, since it's taken from pressing needs like ending hunger and homelessness, offering free college and pre-K, providing universal health care, and building a green energy infrastructure to save ourselves from climate change. Virtually every major problem touched by federal resources could be ameliorated or solved with fractions of the cash claimed by the MIC. The money is there.
The bulk of our taxpayer dollars are seized by a relatively small group of corporate war profiteers led by the five biggest companies profiting off the war industry: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon (RTX), Boeing, and General Dynamics. As those companies have profited, the MIC has sowed incomprehensible destruction globally, keeping the United States locked in endless wars that, since 2001, have killed an estimated 4.5 million people, injured tens of millions more, and displaced at least 38 million, according to Brown University's Costs of War Project.
The MIC's hidden domination of our lives must end, which means we must dismantle it. That may sound totally unrealistic, even fantastical. It is not. And by the way, we're talking about dismantling the MIC, not the military itself. (Most members of the military are, in fact, among that the MIC's victims.)
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