Kyle Kim, “Here are the top 10 American corporations profiting from Egypt’s military,” GlobalPost, 16 August 2013
For decades, Egypt has been one of the largest recipients of US foreign military aid, receiving everything from F-16s to teargas grenades.
So who are the companies reaping the benefits?
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Scot J. Paltrow, “Special Report: The Pentagon’s doctored ledgers conceal epic waste,” Reuters, 18 November 2013
Because of its persistent inability to tally its accounts, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has not complied with a law that requires annual audits of all government departments. That means that the $8.5 trillion in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996, the first year it was supposed to be audited, has never been accounted for. That sum exceeds the value of China’s economic output last year. …
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Paul Jay, “America Has an Industrial Policy – It’s Run by the Pentagon,” The Real News Network, 11 November 2013
Ray Locker, “Is Pentagon paying for study it can get for free?,” USA TODAY, 6 November 2013
Is the Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon’s futurist think-tank, paying $184,000 to a conservative Washington research group for a study on nuclear deterrence that has already been published and is available for free?
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Chris Hellman and Mattea Kramer, “War Pay,” TomDispatch, 22 May 2012
Here, then, is a simple question that, for some curious reason, no one bothers to ask, no less answer: How much are we spending on national security these days? With major wars winding down, has Washington already cut such spending so close to the bone that further reductions would be perilous to our safety?
In fact, with projected cuts added in, the national security budget in fiscal 2013 will be nearly $1 trillion — a staggering enough sum that it’s worth taking a walk through the maze of the national security budget to see just where that money’s lodged.
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Sam Husseini, “The ‘Unusual’ Yet Ubiquitous Left-Right Alliance: Towards an Anti-Establishment Center,” Sam Husseini’s Blog, 28 July 2013
Every time you have this convergence of progressives and conservatives against the establishment, it’s regarded as “unusual” “odd” or “bizarre” — even though it keeps coming up on issue after issue: war, military spending, trade, corporate power, Wall Street, fossil fuel subsidies, as well as — in the case of the NSA spying on the citizenry — the central issue of Constitutional rights and civil liberties.
As documented below, the meme in the media and elsewhere is a permanent note of surprise, when it should be an established aspect of U.S. politics: There are in fact two “centers” — one that is pro-war and Wall Street (the establishment center) — and another that is pro-peace and populist (the anti-establishment center)
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Benjamin Freeman, “The Pentagon Has Too Many Generals,” U.S.News & World Report, July 24 2013
Over the past 10 years, as the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan raged, the U.S. military’s enlisted ranks shrank, while the officer corps – particularly the general and flag officer ranks – and the bureaucracy supporting these top commanders, grew immensely.
Earlier this month Third Way released a report on this trend, reaching a disquieting conclusion – the U.S. military is more top-heavy than it has ever been. While I, and others, have documented this trend before, it’s only gotten worse. The U.S. military now has an officer-to-enlisted personnel ratio that’s at an all-time high; this imbalance will only worsen with the recent announcement of further reductions to the force. …
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Daniel Drezner, Military Primacy Doesn’t Pay (Nearly as Much as You Think), International Security, Vol. 38, No. 1, Summer 2013.
This article evaluates whether the economic benefits of military preeminence and deep engagement are as great as proponents suggest. This evaluation begins by breaking down the arguments that military primacy yields economic returns into the most commonly articulated causal mechanisms. It then assesses what the scholarly literature and evidence can conclude about those causal mechanisms. The three most plausible pathways are the geoeconomic favoritism that foreign capital inflows provide for military super-powers; the geopolitical favoritism gained from an outsized military presence; and the public goods benefits that flow from hegemonic stability.
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Jill Lepore, “The Force,” The New Yorker, January 28 2013
The United States spends more on defense than all the other nations of the world combined. Between 1998 and 2011, military spending doubled, reaching more than seven hundred billion dollars a year—more, in adjusted dollars, than at any time since the Allies were fighting the Axis. …
The long history of military spending in the United States begins with the establishment of the War Department, in 1789. At first, the Secretary of War, a Cabinet member who, from the start, was a civilian, was called the Secretary at War, a holdover from the Revolution but also a prepositional manifestation of an ideological commitment: the department was chiefly to be called upon only if the nation was at war. Early Americans considered a standing army—a permanent army kept even in times of peace—to be a form of tyranny. “What a deformed monster is a standing army in a free nation,” Josiah Quincy, of Boston, wrote in 1774. Instead, they favored militias. About the first thing Henry Knox did when he became George Washington’s War Secretary was to draft a plan for establishing a uniform militia.
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Frank Slijper, “Guns, Debt and Corruption“, Transnational Institute, 14 April 2013
High levels of military spending played a key role in the unfolding economic crisis in Europe and continues to undermine efforts to resolve it.
Download Guns, Debt and Corruption: Full report (pdf, 525KB)
Download Guns, Debt and Corruption: Executive Summary (pdf, 77KB)
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“The real cost of getting rid of Trident from Scotland: £150m“, HeraldScotland, 14 July 2013
Westminster warnings that the bill for ridding an independent Scotland of Trident would run into billions have been undermined by revelations that the UK Government previously put the cost at £150 million.
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Hayes Brown, “U.S. Wastes Millions On Base In Afghanistan It Will Never Use“, ThinkProgress, Jul 10 2013
The United States military spent millions of dollars on a shining new command center in the Helmand province of Afghanistan — a center that will never be used and is now likely to be completely demolished.
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Frank Slijper, “Europe’s guns, debt and corruption“, Open Democracy, 27 April 2013
As social infrastructure is being slashed throughout most of Europe, spending on weapon systems has hardly been reduced. Perversely, military lobbyists warn of ‘disaster’ if any further cuts are made to military spending. But the real disaster has emerged from years of high military spending and corrupt arms deals. This second of two essays on military spending and the EU crisis, explores the role of the European arms trade, corruption and the role of arms exporting countries in fuelling a debt crisis, and why these ‘odious’ debts need to be written off.
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Frank Slijper, “Austerity in Europe? Tighten the military belt“, Open Democracy, 6 May 2013
Five years into the economic crisis in Europe and the elephant in the room is the role of military spending in causing and perpetuating the economic crisis. As social infrastructure is slashed, spending on weapon systems has hardly been reduced. Part one of two essays on military spending and the EU crisis.
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(Source: Transnational Institute, http://www.tni.org/article/military-spending-and-eu-crisis-infographic)
Mike Baker, “Costs of U.S. Wars Linger for Over 100 Years,” Associated Press, March 19, 2013.
If history is any judge, the U.S. government will be paying for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the next century as service members and their families grapple with the sacrifices of combat.
An Associated Press analysis of federal payment records found that the government is still making monthly payments to relatives of Civil War veterans — 148 years after the conflict ended.
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Ryan P. Allen, “The 600-pound Gorilla: Why We Need a Smaller Defense Department,” NDU Press, Jauary 2013.
The Defense Department is kept from being proportional to its actual role by organizational inertia and its size. Use of force, and the abundance of manpower and materiel that enable it, are traditional strengths, but the military is unsustainable at its present cost. Without a reduction, the Nation is weakened economically, and overreliance on the military has a corresponding effect on both U.S. status and on domestic regard for the military even as fewer Americans than ever have served or understand what the military does. Relying on the inherent goodness of man is insufficient; the U.S. Armed Forces must remain the most capable, but leaders must assess what is needed and the long-term effects of military responses and adjust accordingly.
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Donna Cassata, “Report: US Footing Greater Bill for Overseas Bases,” Associated Press, April 17, 2013.
The United States is footing more of the bill for overseas bases in Germany, Japan and South Korea even as the military reduces the number of American troops in Europe and strategically repositions forces in Asia, a congressional report says.
The exhaustive, yearlong investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee focused on costs and burden-sharing as the United States spends more than $10 billion a year to back up the U.S. military presence overseas, with 70 percent of the amount expended in the three nations. The figure does not include military personnel costs.
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Micah Zenko, “The Scope of U.S. Global Military Presence,” Council on Foreign Relations, April 30, 2013
That report—with twelve authors—was published yesterday by RAND: “Overseas Basing of U.S. Military Forces: An Assessment of the Relative Costs and Strategic Benefits.” It is, by far, the most impressive and comprehensive study of the scope, benefits, risks, costs, and consequences of America’s global military presence. Many citizens and policymakers are unaware of the number of troops stationed overseas to execute U.S. defense strategy: recent Pentagon data lists over 172,000 U.S. servicemembers on permanent or rotational deployments around the world (not including the 66,000 troops in Afghanistan).
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