Parts I and II in the “Next World Order” series deflated the neoconservative notion that American can establish global dominance through network-centric military applications. Part III examines how the American arms industry’s influence allows this delusion to linger.
Below the fold: pouring defense dollars on a flat rock…
If you think your defense tax dollars are keeping America safe, think again.
This is a tough thing to say, because few people understand and respect the sacrifices the men and women of our armed forces make more than I do. But it has to be said. The United States military does not defend America. It hasn’t repelled an invasion of American soil since 1812, and it certainly didn’t defend us from the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001.
“Fighting them over there” was the military’s job throughout the 20th Century: World War I, World War II, and the Cold War and the third world proxy wars like Korea and Vietnam that sprang from it. When the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, the military’s motivational battle cry “defending our country” was gradually replaced with “protecting our interests overseas.”
Today, the “best trained, best equipped” military in history is bogged down in Hobbesian conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan that have no apparent resolution, much resolutions that support any coherent expression of American national interest.
Yet, in 2006, U.S. taxpayers will pony up somewhere in the neighborhood of a half trillion dollars for our Department of Defense, an expenditure that matches the military spending of the rest of the world combined.
Por que? Are we planning to fight a war with the entire rest of the world all at once? I’m thinking even the chicken hawk neoconservatives who run this country aren’t mad enough to contemplate a move like that. At least I hope they aren’t.
Military Industrial Complexities
In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight David Eisenhower cautioned Americans that…
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
In October of last year, I outlined the state of the military industrial complex’s stranglehold on contemporary America’s economy and foreign and domestic policy for ePluribus Media in an article titled “In an Arms Race with Ourselves.”
Civilian service secretaries, appointed by the President, responsible for weapons and equipment acquisition, largely come from the executive ranks of the U.S. defense industry. Current Secretary of the Navy and Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England is a prime example. Before entering public life, England was a senior officer with defense giants General Dynamics and Lockheed Corporation. Donald Winter, nominated to replace England as Navy secretary, is a highly placed executive with Northrup Grumman, the world’s third largest military contractor.
Supporting these “captains of industry” are the military officers and senior enlisted personnel who establish second careers in the private defense sector as “beltway bandits.” Their’s is a story well known around inner circles, but one seldom told outside of them.
Generals who manage doctrine and weapons programs late in their active-duty days retire from the military and go to work for the very corporations whose programs they sponsored while in uniform. The colonels, majors and sergeant majors who served under the generals retire as well and go back to work for their old bosses.
The retired guys work hand-in-purse with their still on-duty cronies — who are looking to stake out second careers themselves — to insert pet programs into so-called “battle experiments,” war games designed to determine how to fight future conflicts. The games get rigged to ensure that the pet programs prove victorious. Impressive after-action reports are written, contracts are signed, appropriations are passed in Congress, and the gravy caisson goes rolling along.
Here’s an illustration of just how far off the rails the collusion between industry, politicians and the military has gone.
In November of 2005, Representative Randall “Duke” Cunningham (R-California), the Vietnam era Navy fighter ace, pleaded guilty to charges of taking over $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors to steer business in their direction. A key figure in the scandal was Mitchell Wade, CEO of the defense contracting firm MZM who not only bribed Cunningham but whose firm contributed to Cunningham’s congressional campaigns.
One MZM employee said that Wade twisted his subordinates’ arms to donate to his MZM political action committee. “We were called in and told basically either donate to the MZM PAC or we would be fired.”
Coercing employees to make political contributions is a direct violation of federal election campaign laws.
MZM PAC money went to the congressional campaigns of Cunningham, Virgil Goode (R-Virginia) and Katherine Harris (R-Florida).
MZM has a facility in Goode’s Virginia district, from which it supports the Army National Ground Intelligence Center, one of its biggest government customers.
In February of this year, Wade confessed to funneling $32,000 in illegal contributions through his employees to Katherine Harris’s 2004 congressional campaign in order to obtain a $10 million dollar defense contract in Harris’s Florida district. Harris attached the contract as an “earmark” to another bill. The bill didn’t pass, but that’s not the point. The point is that politicians like Harris constitute a bargain basement opportunity for arms contractors.
When Wade stepped down as MZM CEO over the Cunningham controversy in June 2005, his place was taken by retired three-star general James C. King, who’s last job on active duty was head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. In 2001, King retired to join MZM as a vice president. He played a key role in helping Cunningham funnel over $20 million in defense contracts to MZM between 2002 and 2004.
In 2003, MZM partnered with General Dynamics and other defense contractors to support the Air Force Information Warfare Center. As of 2005, General Dynamics was the fifth largest defense contracting conglomerate in the world, and the same General Dynamics that, as we noted earlier, now assistant Secretary of Defense Gordon England was a senior executive with.
Small world, that military industrial complex.
If a relatively little guy defense contractor like MZM was strong-arming employees to contribute to GOP campaigns, what do you think is going on with the big guys like General Dynamics and Northrup Grumman? And how exponentially overbalanced do you think the campaign contribution to the defense dollar is?
You can’t count the hands of everyone who’s knocking down a piece of the defense budget because their hands are all buried in the taxpayers’ pockets.
We won’t be able to build and maintain an effective, affordable military force until we find a way to trust bust the pyramid scheme known as the American arms industry.
Coming up in the Next World Order series: America’s armed force identity crisis.
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Other Jeff Huber articles on national security issues:
In an Arms Race With Ourselves
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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.
