WORLD AFFAIRS

Where Defence dwarfs democracy

George Bush turns the White House into the Pentagon, ignoring Dwight Eisenhower's warning against the dangers of continued dominance by the military and the armaments industry.

FORTY years ago, a Texan soldier warned his nation against the depredations that would befall it if it continued to be dominated by its military and its armaments industry. Today, a Texan non-soldier is cavalier in his dismissal of that admonition; indeed he has turned the White House into the Pentagon, the home of the United States Defence establishment. Dwight Eisenhower, the first U.S. President to be born in the State of Texas, offered his counsel on January 17, 1961. Until the Korean War, Eisenhower remarked, the U.S. did not have a large armaments industry. "American makers of ploughshares could, with time, as required, make swords as well." The context of the Cold War, however, has, as Eisenhower put it, "compelled [the U.S.] to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defence establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations."

The scale of this new sector of the U.S. economy was, and remains, overwhelming. Eisenhower noted, "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 disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." In her 2002 book, The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush and the Military-Industrial Complex, Dr. Helen Caldicott, founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility and winner of the 2003 Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom, shows that Eisenhower's "prophetic predictions have come to pass". The Lockheed Martin Presidency now rules the U.S.

In the reign of George W. Bush, the arms merchants are ascendant. The December 2001 budget is exemplary: it disbursed $343.2 billion on the Department of Defence (DoD), a full $32.6 billion more than in 2000. More than half of the U.S. budget is now committed to the DoD and to the arms merchants. This does not include special and supplemental appropriations for the War on Terror (Afghanistan and Iraq), nor does it include the funds to the Department of Energy and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), nor the secret budget of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), nor the funds for "homeland security." In 2003, the U.S. military will get close to $396.1 billion, just short of half of the world's military expenditure of $839 billion. If we add the funds expended for the Iraq war thus far, the U.S. government spends more on the military sector than on education, employment, food aid, housing, pensions, public health and welfare combined. The U.S. state is truly a warfare state; in any other country, this might be called a military dictatorship.

The military, however, does not coerce the state into submission, but it has integrated itself into the lives of a large section of the educated and well-paid class of people. A full third of U.S. engineers and scientists either work for the DoD or else for military contractors of the DoD. They are not only dependent on the DoD, but also committed to it. Such depth in the country is rewarded with the government's largess. Not only does the U.S. government spend more on its DoD than anyone else on the planet, but also 75 per cent of the government funds for research and development go to military projects (and so, to those scientists and engineers who work on arms). Furthermore, a million workers toil in just 10 of the largest arms firms, and the workshops and research centres for these companies are located in almost all the states of the U.S. - this makes many elected leaders beholden to these firms because they fear job loss if they rub them the wrong way.

Ordinary investors know that the DoD firms are a blue-chip investment on Wall Street. In the week after 9/11, when the market reopened on September 17, 2001, three companies posted generous gains. All of them make weapons: Raytheon (up 37 per cent), Alliant Tech Systems (up 23.5 per cent) and Northrup Grumman (up 21.2 per cent). If the rest of the economy swills down the toilet, at least one can be sure that weapons producers will benefit. Indeed, these firms have enjoyed ceaseless profits over the past several decades. As the average chief executive officers' pay in the U.S. rose by only 6 per cent since 9/11 and the collapse of Enron, the pay of the bosses in the arms sector rose by an astronomical 79 per cent.

In the early 1990s, those arms merchants with the most muscle combined in a series of spectacular mergers to produce the three largest defence producers in the world: Lockheed Martin at $35 billion is followed by Boeing (which only recently swallowed McDonnell Douglas), and then Raytheon (which owns Hughes Aircraft and Texas Instruments). If Lockheed is not a familiar name, its products are well-known around the world: the C-130 Hercules transport plane, the F-16 fighter jets, the Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, the Multiple-Launch Rocket Systems, the Walleye missiles, and the Trident II nuclear submarines. The world's arsenal is now well-stocked by these three firms, and much of their operation is bankrolled by subsidies from the U.S. government: Lockheed gets $15.1 billion, Boeing gets $12 billion and Raytheon is content with $6.3 billion.

The extent of the firms' influence can be measured in their role in government. Conventional wisdom on the U.S. government tends to assume that lobbyists buy influence and therefore urge politicians to take their positions on certain issues. With the arms merchants, there is no distance between the lobbyists and the companies because, as the Chinese proverb goes, they both wear the same pants. Here is a sample of the military-industrial people within the current Bush administration: Vice-President Dick Cheney's wife Lynne once sat on Lockheed's board; Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley's former law firm represents Lockheed; Senior Adviser to the President Karl Rove has held shares in Boeing; Chief of Staff to Cheney Lewis Libby was a consultant for Northrup Grumman; Under-Secretary of Defence Dov Zakheim worked for Systems Planning Corporation, a defence firm, and advised Northrup Grumman; Under-Secretary of Policy Douglas Feith's former law firm represented Northrup Grumman; Under-secretary for Personnel David Chu presided over the Rand Corporation, which consults with the DoD; Air Force Secretary James Roche presided over a Northrup Grumman division; Air Force Assistant Secretary Peter Teets ran Lockheed Martin; and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage came to government from his own consulting firm, which worked with Raytheon, Boeing, Halliburton and others. The Bush administration is an offshoot of the military corporations.

The arms corporations have such an impact on the U.S. military that the DoD boasts in a December 2000 paper called "Business Are Us": "With our military units tracing their roots to pre-revolutionary times, you might say that we are America's oldest company. And if you look at us in business terms, many would say we are not only America's largest company, but its busiest and most successful." The military does employ almost 5.1 million people with a budget that far outstrips the closest U.S. civilian firm (ExxonMobil), and it has the greatest worldwide reach ("Whether on land or at sea, no other company can match our size. We operate in every time zone and in every climate"). The culture of corporations is now the culture of the military. When the DoD/Pentagon claims to be a "business," you know that Eisenhower is more than correct in his prognosis.

EPA-DPA/AFP

Pentagon, the headquarters of the U.S. military establishment.

But Eisenhower's warning is very limited. He saw the military industrial complex as a threat to the idea of U.S. democracy ("We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties of democratic processes"). What he did not say is that the military industrial complex also dampens the planet's aspirations for freedom. The obvious way it does that is by war. But the military industrial complex is not dependant on war, because its vast research and development outfits make its new products necessary by making its old ones vulnerable to the enemy: even without any shots fired, an army will need to buy new products. The U.S. arms merchants are now in control of more than half the world market. When the U.S. arms merchants became the dominant force on the planet in the 1990s, the government renamed its Office of Munitions Control to the Centre of Defence Trade - a surefire way to signal the commercial values of the Pentagon.

The U.S.-based and heavily subsidized military-industrial machine is able to expand across the planet even as it breaks most of the "free trade" regulations of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The loophole that allows this is called the "security exception" and it appears in the original General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) as Article XXI. A country cannot challenge the laws and regulations of another country, it says, if such action is against "essential security interests".

In the U.S., the WTO security exception shelters firms such as Boeing and Lockheed from criticism over government subsidies. Since the government pays for most of the research and development of these firms, states across the world should be able to challenge this in the WTO. But they cannot. For this reason, the global arms market has been slowly absorbed by U.S. firms, mainly because of the massive protections afforded by the U.S. state and by its investment in research.

The WTO "security exception" gives countries the incentive to turn more and more parts of their industrial plant to military or "dual use" so that they can protect themselves from WTO challenges. By the "security exception", national economies around the world are spurred to emulate the U.S. model. But even here most states in the world are at the mercy of the few that dominate the arms trade. As arms trade experts Steven Staples and Mariam Pemberton argue in a 2000 paper, "Since 62 per cent of global military spending is concentrated in the economies of the `Quad' countries of the United States, China, Japan and the European Union, the security exception gives them a competitive advantage over developing countries who have much smaller military budgets and must abide by the trade rules in all other areas."

Unlike Eisenhower, George Bush has no military experience. He treats the armed forces as an important electoral constituency and he uses his steely patriotism to push forward his anti-people agenda. He wears a military uniform when he addresses the troops, he speaks in their idiom and he boasts that he has raised their salaries and improved their work conditions. While doing all this, he also announces his major policy shifts to them: before the Marines, Bush unveiled his controversial new electricity policy. The agenda of neo-liberalism is now cloaked in the language of military patriotism, and the ensemble of the WTO-military-industrial complex is given over to the Bush administration's evangelical imperialism. In this context, Eisenhower's warning is quaint.

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