One
Military-Industrial Complex Index
Year the United States established what would become a standing army: 1940
Rank of United States in military spending worldwide: 1
Percent of world’s total military budget: 34
Percent increase in US military spending between 1998 and 2011 (in constant 2011 dollars): 88
Total US military spending annually (in 2014): $609,914,000,000
Minimum number of US military bases in foreign countries: 587
Number of foreign military installations based on US territory: 0
Amount of money to private defense corporations in FY 2015: $272,790,578,374
Percent to top five contractors in 2015: 27
Rank of United States as a global arms dealer (2015): 1
A pervasive and frantically promoted proposition that runs loose in the land is that being a military powerhouse makes the United States (and people everywhere) safe, protects freedoms, and is a force for peace and democracy in a threatening, dangerous, and hostile world. It’s not true—not even close—but it has a huge and sticky hold on our imaginations.
When a random US politician tells antiwar protesters picketing a town hall meeting, “It’s because of the sacrifices our troops are making in [fill in the blank: Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, the “Middle East,” Korea, Panama, or wherever turns out to be next] that you have the freedom to stand here and speak out,” s/he is tapping into that stuttering cliché. When a retired general speaks confidently at a televised congressional hearing, explaining to the credulous audience that the “enemy can be defeated” if only the Pentagon would be granted more funds to purchase more weapons, and then given greater leeway in their deployment and use, he’s issuing the same unexamined and banal truism. When a talking head tells us it’s unfortunate that US economic strength rides on oil, a resource that “happens to come from a nasty neighborhood,” but it’s “a blessing” we have the power to police that part of the world, s/he’s doing the same thing. And when folks across the political spectrum express public gratitude and support for “our fighting men and women overseas,” while refusing to send their own children into those same wars or harboring serious private doubts about the wisdom, purpose, and execution of whatever US adventure is currently in play, they too are situated in that wide open field of received wisdom and diminishing options.
What if we challenged these instances of hypocrisy and defensive dogma, and insisted that there are more honest and straightforward ways to support US military men and women? What if we demanded their immediate decommission and return home, and insisted that they be provided excellent medical and psychological care, good jobs, affordable housing, and the best available educational opportunities—the things every human being deserves? What if we spoke up in the face of that woolly politician and asked him to draw a straight line between free speech and the specific invasion he’s now supporting and explicitly (or at least implicitly) defending? What if we locked arms as we built a growing wave of peace advocates, anticipating and opposing the next aggression, and the next?
Dramatically rethinking the manufactured rationale for war, reframing it, and turning it upside-down brings us closer to the truth: The massive US military-industrial powerhouse and increasingly privatized war machine makes North Americans (and everyone else) unsafe in the world, undermines human security and hard-won rights and freedoms, and is the greatest purveyor of violence on Earth.
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The history of US military actions is a history of conquest and genocide from the start and chaos and catastrophe ever since: invading and occupying Vietnam and then intentionally expanding that war into neighboring Laos and Cambodia as retribution for the US defeat, a disaster that cost the lives of six thousand people every week for ten years; unleashing a massive shock-and-awe attack on Iraq in 2003 that led to the breakup of that nation and the rise of several reactionary fundamentalist and terrorist formations including ISIS; orchestrating a fifty-year campaign to destabilize and topple the Cuban government; propping up nasty regimes from medieval Saudi Arabia to apartheid South Africa; overthrowing elected presidents in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and Chile in 1973; instigating constant civil unrest in Venezuela, for fourteen years including a successful if short-lived coup in 2002; supporting the communist purge and the genocide that followed in Indonesia in the mid-1960s; participating in the murders of the African freedom fighter Patrice Lumumba in Congo in 1961, the Moroccan anti-imperialist Mehdi Ben Barka in Paris in 1965, the internationalist Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967, and the anticolonial leader Amílcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau in 1973; exporting billions of dollars in arms to Israel, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, and reactionary regimes and right-wing subversives the world around. As busy and ambitious as this looks, it’s only the tip of a menacing mega-iceberg, an emblematic list as opposed to an exhaustive survey.
My list so far doesn’t include the “war on terror” launched in 2001, the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the bombing campaigns that followed in Yemen, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Libya, the creation of robot warriors and a unique modern evil called drone warfare as a preferred tactic for delivering massive violence abroad while muting objections at home, the steady spread of offensive US military power in all directions—this never-ending turmoil raises troubling questions: Are the architects of this madness crazy or are they stupid? Are they banal or evil? Is the real goal, in spite of whatever lofty rhetoric about democracy and freedom is on offer, to break things up and smash cities and states to smithereens intentionally? Maybe pandemonium and extensive wreckage are not unintended consequences but represent, instead, “mission accomplished.” Maybe the masters of war expect that at the end of the day there will be no opposing organized armed forces left, lots of rebuilding contracts to give away to their billionaire pals, and plentiful oil or other resources there for the taking.
In any case, the swirling vortex of ruin obscures for many North Americans a central source and seed of this overwhelming maelstrom of hostility and bloodshed: the indefensible relationship between the United States and its chief client, Israel. Israel, as everyone knows, was established in 1948 by a people who had experienced the lash of anti-Semitism for centuries and the immediate colossal horrors of the Holocaust in Europe. What’s often conveniently understated or downplayed in the United States, however, is that while understandably wanting to create a refuge for themselves, the founders of the state of Israel dislodged the indigenous inhabitants and destroyed their society, forcing them to become displaced persons and refugees or second-class citizens in their own land ever since.
With generous and unwavering support from the United States, its protector, enabler, and big brother, Israel has flouted UN resolutions and international law—including nuclear agreements, the Geneva conventions, and the “laws of war”—seized Palestinian land and zealously supported the settler movement in the occupied territories with infrastructure and violent force. Israel would stand completely alone in the world if not for the dysfunctional relationship it clings to with the United States—from which it gains billions of dollars in military aid alone.
The Palestinians have the ongoing misfortune of being the victims of the twentieth century’s most notable victims—whose exceptional suffering at the hands of the Nazis is consistently trotted out to justify Israel’s own crimes against humanity. Reactionaries who dream of a Greater Israel, a Promised Land stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates, plot and organize the elimination of all Palestinians one way or another. Under the banner of agony and pain, Israel unleashes murderous military attacks and conducts massive ethnic cleansing campaigns. And yet the reality on the ground is that the Palestinians and the Israeli Jews are so intertwined that there is no separation between them except for the separation of apartheid—two populations living in one land, unequal today, but not necessarily forever.
The appalling codependency between the United States and Israel is one root cause of the world’s suffering, and another is the deployment of its “global basing strategy” in which the United States maintains nuclear warheads in the air at all times, hides CIA agents in every embassy and behind every tree, spies on everyone everywhere all the time, and sends hundreds of thousands of “fighting men and women overseas” as today’s Spartans. That strategy leads to no lasting solutions. On the contrary, the rise of this domineering nexus creates a culture of fear and social paranoia, encourages deception, dishonesty, and militarism, places the economy in the precarious position of adjunct and subsidiary to the Pentagon, undermines the moral landscape, and enriches a few as it devastates the lives of millions.
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What if seeing this deadly display allows us to discuss war and military might on an entirely different terrain? Could we then come closer to matching our reality with our predicament? What if we echoed Iraq Veterans Against the War: not another drop of blood or another wasted dollar on the “war on terror” or the imperial dreams of the 1 percent? Endless war only deepens the catastrophe and suspends or destroys the possibility of reimagining and rebuilding the United States as a more peaceful, joyous, just, participatory, and cooperative place.
This reimagining taps into plain sense: we want to be good and peaceful people, to be kind and generous and neighborly, to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. The Warrior is not the only American archetype; there is also the Hard Worker, the Good Farmer, the Peace Lover, and the Free Thinker. Two histories, two aspects of the American experience, two spirits in our collective psyche: fighter/peacemaker, trooper/bridge-builder, soldier-at-arms/pacifist. When we reframe the discussion this way, we can dive headfirst into the contradictions, fully engaging that deeply contested space.
Veterans for Peace has thousands of members in chapters from coast to coast and around the globe who call in one unified and rising voice for an end to war: “We, having dutifully served our nation, do hereby affirm our greater responsibility to serve the cause of world peace.”
Their message is spare and unadorned: abolish war as an instrument of international policy; end the arms race and eliminate nuclear weapons; restrain the government from intervening in the affairs of other nations; support universal principles of nonintervention and self-determination; work for human security not national security; increase public awareness of the various and sundry costs of war. In other words, abrogate the military contract in favor of a moral social contract.
Antiwar vets bring a laser-like clarity to war’s perverse and seductive qualities, its myths versus its monstrous reality, and to the ambivalence and conflicted responses returning vets face at home. Like Odysseus, literature’s most famous returning veteran, both war and the journey home are marked by obstacles and challenges, and most often characterized by brutal remembrances of things lost. Lost comrades, lost time, and lost childhoods; loss of a family one once knew; loss of a sturdy sense of well-being; loss of the sweet dreams of youth when everything seemed possible. Veterans can easily feel like dislocated strangers in their own lands: no one and nothing remains quite the same. And like every generation of fighters since Odysseus 2,800 years ago they know too well the emotional trauma and mental shards that travel home with them. Suffering with what was once called “shell shock” or “battle fatigue” (or less generously “irritable heart” and “malingering”), today’s veterans have experienced up close that universal creature whose name has morphed into a sanitized, technologically appointed, and contemporary medical condition, irritable heart with a scientific shine: post-traumatic stress syndrome.
In 2004 a group of young people founded Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), and a month later mustered a small but spirited contingent to march in New York City at the Republican National Convention. Their name emblazoned on a banner brought wild applause and cheering wherever they went in those few days. By the end of the summer their membership had swelled to fifty.
Its numbers have exploded since then. Search for a chapter in your neighborhood; seek out a member. You will likely find—as I have again and again—a person whose rhetoric is strictly no-bullshit and whose message is punctuated with passion and urgency. These are multiracial, multi-ethnic women and men of every creed and every age and background whose stance echoes perhaps the best line from the film Avatar: “I didn’t sign up for this shit.” Each wants to share with the rest of us the difficult and necessary lessons they’ve learned—there’s no time to waste with frothy rhetoric. They intend, as well, to shoulder what they take to be a sacred duty: representing their fallen comrades who believed—incorrectly it turns out—that their sacrifices would advance toward peace. Their zeal is forged in the furnaces of war; their fire is tempered with experiences of pain and loss, self-sacrifice and loyalty, endurance and courage. They demand to be heard.
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The members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) were brave and lucid in their quest for peace in the 1970s. They told the truth about the reality of invasion and occupation, about war crimes committed daily by US air strikes and bombardments and ground troops, about the big lies that led to and then perpetuated the war. They also recognized immediately that the US defeat in Vietnam was not all bad—which is worse for the world, after all, an aggressive, imperial army triumphant or an invading army defeated? The defeat was humbling but at the same time humanizing for the troops and for society as a whole at a certain moment—it provided a space of clarity and grace.
Imagine the force that we would unleash if hundreds of thousands of young people gave up their weapons of war and redeployed their intelligence and their energy to build bridges, repair roads, improve the housing stock across the country; to work with youth in athletic and arts programs; to care for the elderly and the very young; to staff emergency rooms; to create urban farms and rural performance spaces. Imagine who we could become if the Warrior transformed into the Teacher and the Caregiver and the Farmer.
The masters of the Pentagon, insisting that the United States didn’t “lose Vietnam,” but rather chickened out, learned a different set of lessons, of course, and came to a different set of conclusions: First, a citizen army is not feasible for a country bent on permanent war because citizens have the irritating habit of occasionally thinking for themselves, saying or doing the most outrageous things like collectively resisting illegal and immoral actions. Second, a free press—which may act as a public relations arm of nationalistic war-mongering much of the time, but in an era of defeat may ask inconvenient questions and uncover damning truths—must never be allowed unfettered access to a US battlefield. Lo and behold: A citizen army becomes a relic of the past, replaced by a professional (with many features of a mercenary) army; the old selective service system is replaced with an “economic draft”; and since 1975 no establishment, for-profit media conglomerate has sent reporters to a US war zone without a military minder.
I remember a young, war-weary John Kerry testifying in front of the Senate upon his return from war saying that the US military committed war crimes in Vietnam every day, not as a matter of choice but as a matter of policy. An older John Kerry, secretary of state in the second term of a war-hungry administration, denounced Russia’s intervention in Crimea, saying in effect that it’s inappropriate to invade another country in order to force your will on people at the end of a barrel of a gun. Though the mainstream media failed to point out the breathtaking hypocrisy of this scolding from a high US official, Stephen Colbert gave Secretary Kerry a congratulatory “tip of the hat” when he played the full clip, gestured sternly, and said, “Starting now!”
In the empire of lies, every truth-teller is a traitor; in the United States of Amnesia, memory is the first casualty.
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Justice and democracy do not belong to war; on the contrary, each is easily injured and quickly exterminated in its furnaces. John Dewey observed that “All nations, even those professedly the most democratic,” are compelled in war “to turn authoritarian and totalitarian.”1 We can see the wreckage all around us: omnivorous national security and surveillance; the abrogation of privacy and civil liberties; the wide use of mass incarceration; the banality of torture, domestically and internationally; and the undermining of tolerance everywhere. Historically, law and rights yield in the face of war: Abraham Lincoln’s famous suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War; the Palmer Raids following World War I; the mass arrests and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II; illegal imprisonment as policy today. These moves are all defended by the war-makers as necessary during wartime.
Since 9/11 the United States has entered new territory, for we are in our fifteenth year of a government-proclaimed state of permanent war, an absolute war against “terrorism” or “evil.” While there are indeed dreadful and desperate tactics being deployed everywhere—suicide bombings, hijackings, beheadings, random killings—the enemy remains vague and the target elusive: terrorists and “evildoers,” insurgents and radicals, the “worst of the worst” or the “bad actors.” Practically every politician in Washington notes casually that we are at war; it’s completely normalized. George W. Bush proudly called himself a “war president”; Barack Obama too chose to claim the mantle of the warrior. Whoever sits on the throne of American Empire wears the garments of the warmonger—unless and until we bring the power of a popular movement to bear down and end imperialism altogether.
Imagine if every “known terrorist” were dead or in prison. Now try to imagine the state announcing an end to airport searches and phone taps. It’s inconceivable.
Ask one of our careless politicians how we will know if any given war is won, or what the benchmarks of success or failure might be, and they become speechless. For these are perpetual wars, wars without borders, without obvious or easily defined enemies, and without concrete objectives; we can only know they are over when our Dear Leaders tell us they’re over. Until then—and don’t hold your breath—your rights to free speech and association are suspended because the rulers want to keep you safe, and these measures, they assure us, are an unfortunate necessity of war.
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Private Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning) is a US soldier who was isolated in a military dungeon at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia for the crime of truth-telling. She was denied exercise, given no pillow or sheets for the bed, and, while on “suicide watch,” fed antidepressants by military doctors as government agents tried to erase her mind, destroy her spirit, and obliterate any sense of agency. It’s reminiscent of the heartless torturer in 1984 who explains to Winston what will happen to him: “Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
The US government fell over itself to demonize and misdirect, portraying Private Manning as a nut and a repressed homosexual. It labeled Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder and public face, a terrorist, enemy combatant, and irresponsible saboteur, and threatened everything from assassination to charges of espionage and high treason. When anyone is in the crosshairs of the most powerful empire on Earth, everything said about them should be taken with a truckload of salt.
The United States never answers the question of why, in a putative democracy, all the WikiLeaks material was classified to begin with. Nor does it address the content of the documents, the dark and dirty secrets of the war-makers, the cozy “don’t ask, don’t tell” relationships with the nastiest dictators on Earth, the stunning violence and the cold rationalizations, or the murderousness followed by lies, deception, and cover-ups. The US government never faces the most obvious and damning truth of the whole affair: we live in a barricaded, secret society, a garrison state that supports and is supported by a powerfully developed culture of war.
Umberto Eco who, after noting that the Orwellian prophecy is realized once power can monitor with a watchful eye the total movement of every citizen, raised a cheer for the secrecy pirates and the hackers of WikiLeaks because “the surveillance ceases to work only one way” and “the citizens’ self-appointed avenger” can open the crypts of state secrets.2
When in 2014 a federal judge sentenced Jeremy Hammond to ten years in prison for his work with the hacking network Anonymous, she referenced the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg (a Jeremy supporter who exposed the lies that were used to prop up support for the war in Vietnam in the 1960s) as she scolded from the bench. “You’re no Daniel Ellsberg,” she intoned, forgetting that Daniel Ellsberg was no “Daniel Ellsberg” when he was in fact Daniel Ellsberg; back then he was demonized, systematically harassed, threatened, arrested, charged under the Espionage Act, and put on trial, facing 115 years in prison.
Edward Snowden, the latest avenger of the people, offered secret classified documents taken from the National Security Agency to journalists working at mainstream news organizations; several, including the New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Speigel, chose to publish parts of those documents over several months. Snowden fled the country to Hong Kong, and later Moscow, as he was denounced in Congress from all sides, put on trial by the corporate media, and called a traitor, a spy, a lowlife. Perhaps he was no Daniel Ellsberg either, but his courageous actions put him well on his way to becoming as iconic and important now as Ellsberg was then.
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As a little blue-sky exercise, imagine any bit of the war culture transformed into a peace-and-love culture: the Super Bowl opening with thousands of local school kids rushing through the stands distributing their poetry, and then everyone singing “This Land Is Your Land” or “Give Peace a Chance,” or “We Shall Overcome”; an airlines or bus terminal clerk saying, “We want to invite any teachers or nurses in the gate area to board first, and we thank you for your service”; urban high schools eliminating ROTC and banning military recruiters in favor of school-wide assemblies for peace recruiters featuring Code Pink, and after-school programs led by Black Youth Project 100 and the American Friends Service Committee.
Like every culture or subculture, the war culture hangs together with a complex set of shared meanings, webs of significance and common assumptions woven in such a way that members of the culture can communicate with and recognize one another. The war culture promotes a pervasive and growing common sense of American violence unleashed.
The United States spends more than a trillion dollars a year on war and preparation for war, more than the rest of the world combined. The war culture accepts that as a desire for peace. The United States has military bases stretching across the globe, including a base in the Italian Alps, and yet there are no Italian air bases in the Catskills, for example. The war culture sees that as sensible and necessary. The war culture is everywhere, simply taken for granted, always lurking in the shadows and occasionally bursting forth and on full display.
I remember a trailer for a film I saw in a theater several years ago—it looked dreadful, so I never saw the film, but it could well have been Mars Attacks or The Day the Earth Stood Still—in which the repeating trope was an alien confronting a group of startled Earthlings, saying in an eerily mechanical voice, “We come in peace”—just before blasting them into small pieces. It takes a minute for reality to catch up to these hapless Earthlings, but eventually they get it. Like the challenge of the wandering spouse caught in the arms of a lover, the aliens hold to the classic defense, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?”
This is precisely the situation the United States finds itself in all over the world: We come in peace. We always come in peace. But let us ask the youth in the streets of Cairo or Tunis facing US arms in the hands of American-financed dictators, or the women servicing the US military bases stretching across their landscapes, or the farmers and workers all over Latin America, Africa, and Asia whose repressive police forces and militias are trained and supplied by US aid, or any people anywhere who find themselves in the sights of an American-made rocket or a US drone: What are you going to believe? Your own lying eyes?
In our stuttering mechanical message we announce to ourselves and to everyone else that we are a peaceful people, our intentions always righteous and just. It’s comforting, and it’s a deeply held self-description, so compelling that it rises quickly to the status of common sense, requiring no investigation, no fact-checking, no external validation whatsoever. All right-thinking people believe it; everyone simply knows that it’s true.
On any given week you can read or hear the words of a surprised soldier in a US-occupied land saying, “We came to help, but a lot of people don’t seem to like us,” or, “The hardest thing is figuring out who our friends are and who the enemy is among the locals—they smile at you one minute, and toss a bomb the next.” There’s a kind of willful innocence and self-inflicted or forced blindness at work here, for these are the exact words of the British colonial militiaman in India or the French soldier in occupied Algeria or Indochina, the theme song of the troops in every conquering army since time began. See the pictures of US troops searching a home looking for “bad guys” or “insurgents” or “terrorists” in any recent theater of war; take the perspective for a moment of the women watching from the corner, huddled with their terrorized children.
“We come in peace,” but wherever the United States puts down the boot, it brings more war, wider war, and a deeper commitment to war as the way. Marine Corps major general Smedley Butler, two-time winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, said in 1935 that “War is a racket.” That was the title of a popular pamphlet he wrote, and a theme he elaborated in speeches throughout the country over many years: “It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. . . . It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”3 Butler consistently urged citizens to demand the impossible and support three radical proposals: strictly limit all military forces to a defensive posture; hold a referendum of those who would be on the front lines before any military action is undertaken; and take the profit out of war by, among other measures, conscripting the captains of industry and finance as the foot soldiers in any impending fight.
Years later, in his farewell address to the nation, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a career soldier and supreme Allied commander during World War II, warned of the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought,” of a voracious and dangerous “military-industrial complex,” and “a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions” capable of undermining the institutions and culture of democracy. The “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” he said, and its “total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.” He predicted “the disastrous rise of misplaced power” unless Americans refused and resisted it, and committed themselves instead to working “in the interests of world peace and human betterment.”4
Fifty years after this most-famous cautionary message the permanent war economy is well established and interwoven with all other aspects of our lives. Eisenhower’s speculation concerning a shadowy agenda promoted by an all-powerful, corporatized military has been realized: torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo; “black sites” for CIA special rendition cases; warrantless wiretaps; multiyear military detentions without due process; surveillance cameras everywhere; and growing banks of fingerprints, eye scans, and DNA samples. This is a description of what is. This is here; it is us.
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To hope for a world at peace and in balance, powered by love, joy, and justice, to insist that the citizens and residents of the United States become a people among people (not a superior or a chosen people) and that the country becomes a nation among nations (not some kind of crypto-fascist übernation) is to resist the logic and the reality of war, and to see, as well, the war culture itself as a site of resistance and transformation. It’s to break with the frame that acts as if war is natural and inevitable. It’s to do the hard work of making a vibrant and robust peace movement—connecting with the environmental activists, the immigrant rights forces, the Black Lives Matter upsurge, feminists, and the queer movement—organizing to close all US military bases abroad and to bring all troops home now, leaving no US military or paid mercenaries behind; compelling our government to sign all pending international treaties on nuclear disarmament; mobilizing to cut military spending by 10 percent a year for the next ten years, dedicating the savings to education and health; rallying to suspend and then abrogate all contracts between the US government and Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman.
We come together, then, to unleash our wild and free imaginations—our art and humor and creative energies—to defeat the plodding, murderous, and instrumentalist logic of war. Theirs is a calculus of conquest and pain. Ours offers a measure of healing and possibility.