The military-industrial-complex has grown into a monster so influential and powerful that even its earliest critics likely never foresaw its evolution.
Where will it go from here, and can anything stop it? Bill Hartung tackles this question.
Chris Hedges: The historian Arnold Toynbee cites an unchecked rampant militarism as the key factor in the collapse of a civilization. This militarism disembowels a society. It fosters social breakdown, the rise of authoritarian governments and demagogues. It deforms a society until it is unable to respond to existential crises, in our case the climate crisis and a growing social inequality. The ruling elites, Toynbee warns, abandon the common good and become sycophantic appendages of oligarchs and a military machine that functions as a state within a state. The United States now spends nearly a trillion dollars a year on its military.
William Hartung and Ben Freeman in their new book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine, examine the role of Pentagon contractors, who receive more than half of the Pentagon’s budget, to the high tech fantasies of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs such as Peter Teal, who pedal unproven and often unworkable technologies to foster, in their eyes, new forms of warfare, including the mass colonization and militarization of space.
The authors have unmasked the bought and paid for enablers of the war machine, including politicians, lobbyists, the media, Hollywood, and think tanks. They explain how this unchecked militarism not only enriches a tiny wealthy elite at our expense, but perpetuates costly and self-defeating military fiascos around the globe, making us less safe and diminishing global power.
This war machine, the authors write, is different from the military-industrial complex President Eisenhower warned us about in his parting speech in 1961. The Pentagon budget is now twice what it was, adjusted for inflation, when Eisenhower gave this nationwide address.
Corporations such as Lockheed Martin, which has 40 to50 billion dollars in annual Pentagon contracts, is able to buy up politicians and provide sinecures for former military and defense officials that ensure loyalty and huge contracts, even for redundant and flawed weapons systems. Those running our war industry know little to nothing about the countries they seek to dominate, leading to debacle after debacle, including two decades of military disasters in the Middle East.
Yet they have a vice grip not only on the media but Hollywood, the gaming industry, professional sports and academia. These institutions in lockstep with the war industry pedal the myths of American exceptionalism, America’s supposed superior virtues and civilization and the mantra of endless war.
Dissident voices especially in Congress such as Senators William Proxmire, Frank Church, James Aberesque, and George McGovern willing to question the folly of this outofcontrol militarism, one that is accelerating our decline, have been largely purged from public office and public debate.
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