Right at this moment, we are
witnessing an unprecedented shift of resources from domestic investments in the
United States to the military-industrial complex (aka the war
machine). The only comparable period in our history was the buildup to
World War II, when the United States confronted a powerful adversary in Nazi
Germany with designs to control not just Europe, but the world. The
current buildup is breathtaking in scope and will certainly prove devastating
in its impact — not just on this country’s foreign and domestic policies but
also on the economic prospects of average Americans.
When, in 2023, my colleague Ben
Freeman and I first conceived of our book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine, we
viewed it in part as a cautionary tale about just how high the Pentagon budget
might rise in the years to come (absent pushback from Congress and the
taxpaying public). By the time our book came out in November 2025,
however, the Pentagon budget had already topped the $1 trillion mark and, only
recently, President Trump has proposed to instantly add another $500 billion to that already staggering figure and to
do so in a single year’s time.
And imagine this: such a proposed increase alone
is higher than the total military budget of any other
nation on Earth. Mind you, the current high levels of spending have
already underwritten a provocative, unnecessary intervention in Venezuela and a
region-wide war in the Middle East, and the larger costs of all this in human
lives and damage to the global economy are guaranteed to shape the lives of the
rest of us globally for years to come.
To add insult to injury, the
Pentagon announced that it would seek a $200 billion supplemental appropriation to pay for its
war on Iran, which has spread across the Middle East. That $200 billion
would have been in addition to the $1.5 billion proposed for
the Pentagon’s future budget. According to an analysis by
Pentagon budget expert Stephen Semler, the Iran war, which started on February
28th with Israeli and U.S. air strikes on that country, cost the United States
more than $28 billion just in its first two weeks.
And to put that in
perspective, $28 billion is more than three times the Trump
administration’s proposed annual budgets for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and
the Environmental Protection Agency (at a time when the
climate crisis and the need to head off future pandemics are essential to the
health and security of all Americans). Worse yet, it’s all for a completely
senseless war that should never have been started.
As President Trump alternates
between engaging in negotiations to end the war and threatening to wipe Iran
off the map — or even just walking away to bomb another day — there are reports
that the supplemental budget request to pay for the war on Iran will shrink from the proposed $200 billion to $98 billion.
And that $98 billion will include other things in addition to war costs,
including disaster relief and aviation modernization.
The Garrison State and the
Reign of the War Profiteers
On the campaign trail in 2024,
Donald Trump pledged to drive the “war profiteers” and “war
mongers” from Washington, suggesting that they like wars because “missiles cost
$2 million each,” while bragging that, in his first term in office, “I had no
wars.”
And his rhetoric as the ultimate
champion of peace has continued during his second term, even as he has indeed
launched reckless wars guaranteed to fill the coffers of the “war profiteers”
he railed against on the campaign trail. He has, however, also pledged to help
the weapons industry quadruple production of the same sort of “$2 million
bombs” he decried during the campaign, plus — even better for the arms makers —
missile interceptors that cost up to $12 million each.
Worse yet, the demands
of the current war on Iran, coupled with support for Israel’s war on Gaza and
Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself from Russia, have left the Pentagon and the
giant weapons corporations complaining that, if the U.S. doesn’t radically
increase its production of artillery shells, bombs, and missiles, the cupboard
could soon be bare.
Of course, filling that cupboard
again to the tune of staggering sums of money is exactly the wrong solution.
The answer to the current munitions shortage is not to further supersize this
country’s arms manufacturing base, but to refrain from supplying
the weapons used by Israel to commit genocide in Gaza and ethnic
cleansing in Lebanon, or to fuel unjustified wars like the current conflict
with Iran. The best policy to prevent such stocks of military equipment
from running low would, of course, be a more discriminating approach to
military aid and a more restrained approach to U.S. foreign policy and
war-making (writ large).
Washington should, in fact, put
diplomacy first and only engage in military action if there is a genuine threat
to the United States itself. We need a smarter policy toward military
procurement and military strategy, not the garrison state with its “military-industrial
complex” that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than six decades ago.
In addition, of course, the
Pentagon needs to shift its procurement strategy toward producing more reliable
weapons at a more reasonable cost, while avoiding unnecessary complexity so
that they can be made more rapidly and spend more time ready to be used and
less time down for maintenance. Such a formula was a watchword of the
bipartisan congressional military reform caucus of the 1980s, which at one
point included more than 100 members of Congress and helped roll back the
extremes of the military buildup launched by President Ronald Reagan.
The Diminishing Economic
Returns of Pentagon Spending
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.
-William D. Hartung. CounterPunch, This piece first appeared
on TomDispatch.
