This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
In our present social media world, who even remembers that the Internet's first "mothership," as Ben Tarnoff put it at the Guardian years ago, was the U.S. military, thanks to a Cold War era urge to link computer communication to the potential front lines of war? The world that we now know began in 1969 with a computer network created by the Pentagon's lavishly funded Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA. That network was then called Arpanet, wasn't yet mobile, and couldn't be used to communicate with forces in the field or, say, American bombers then flying over Vietnam.
It took another two decades-plus before there was a World Wide Web and even longer before none of us, military or otherwise, could go anywhere without being more in touch with the rest of the world than once might have been faintly imaginable. More than half a century later, we're now entering an even newer, potentially far more daunting world in which artificial intelligence, or AI, is threatening to have its way with us. And once again, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare so vividly describes today, the U.S. military is helping reshape our world in a fashion that someday we may all live (or die) to regret.
Only recently, hundreds and hundreds of worried tech types, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Twitter head and billionaire Elon Musk, and experts of many kinds, unnerved by how quickly AI is developing into its own version of us, called for a six-month pause in experimentation on its development. Think of it as a moment when we can all try to take in the world we're heading into, lest we end up in an all too artificial and deeply unrecognizable hell on earth. But I'll put my money on one thing, having read Klare's piece today: the Pentagon isn't going to agree to any six-month pause in its AI research and Congress won't either -- not when it comes to the military. For the members of both parties, not even the sky is the limit for the Pentagon, financially speaking. In fact, as Klare makes all too clear today, when it comes to that military and the sky (not to speak of the land and the high seas), there are no limits at all. Tom
Spurring an Endless Arms Race
The Pentagon Girds for Mid-Century Wars
Why is the Pentagon budget so high?
On March 13th, the Biden administration unveiled its $842 billion military budget request for 2024, the largest ask (in today's dollars) since the peaks of the Afghan and Iraq wars. And mind you, that's before the hawks in Congress get their hands on it. Last year, they added $35 billion to the administration's request and, this year, their add-on is likely to prove at least that big. Given that American forces aren't even officially at war right now (if you don't count those engaged in counter-terror operations in Africa and elsewhere), what explains so much military spending?
The answer offered by senior Pentagon officials and echoed in mainstream Washington media coverage is that this country faces a growing risk of war with Russia or China (or both of them at once) and that the lesson of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is the need to stockpile vast numbers of bombs, missiles, and other munitions. "Pentagon, Juggling Russia, China, Seeks Billions for Long-Range Weapons" was a typical headline in the Washington Post about that 2024 budget request. Military leaders are overwhelmingly focused on a potential future conflict with either or both of those powers and are convinced that a lot more money should be spent now to prepare for such an outcome, which means buying extra tanks, ships, and planes, along with all the bombs, shells, and missiles they carry.
Even a quick look at the briefing materials for that future budget confirms such an assessment. Many of the billions of dollars being tacked onto it are intended to procure exactly the items you would expect to use in a war with those powers in the late 2020s or 2030s. Aside from personnel costs and operating expenses, the largest share of the proposed budget -- $170 billion or 20% -- is allocated for purchasing just such hardware.
But while preparations for such wars in the near future drive a significant part of that increase, a surprising share of it -- $145 billion, or 17% -- is aimed at possible conflicts in the 2040s and 2050s. Believing that our "strategic competition" with China is likely to persist for decades to come and that a conflict with that country could erupt at any moment along that future trajectory, the Pentagon is requesting its largest allocation ever for what's called "research, development, test, and evaluation" (RDT&E), or the process of converting the latest scientific discoveries into weapons of war.
To put this in perspective, that $145 billion is more than any other country except what China spends on defense in toto and constitutes approximately half of China's full military budget. So what's that staggering sum of money, itself only a modest part of this country's military budget, intended for?
Some of it, especially the "T&E" part, is designed for futuristic upgrades of existing weapons systems. For example, the B-52 bomber -- at 70, the oldest model still flying -- is being retrofitted to carry experimental AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapons (ARRWs), or advanced hypersonic missiles. But much of that sum, especially the "R&D" part, is aimed at developing weapons that may not see battlefield use until decades in the future, if ever. Spending on such systems is still only in the millions or low billions, but it will certainly balloon into the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in the years to come, ensuring that future Pentagon budgets soar into the trillions.
Weaponizing Emerging Technologies
Driving the Pentagon's increased focus on future weapons development is the assumption that China and Russia will remain major adversaries for decades to come and that future wars with those, or other major powers, could largely be decided by the mastery of artificial intelligence (AI) along with other emerging technologies. Those would include robotics, hypersonics (projectiles that fly at more than five times the speed of sound), and quantum computing. As the Pentagon's 2024 budget request put it:
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
