The military-industrial complex, MIC (Military Industrial Complex), which President Dwight Eisenhower strongly criticized in 1961, is still alive and very active.
In fact, it consumes much more money from American citizens’ taxes and feeds the largest war industries-arms producers, with much more money, since Eisenhower sounded the alarm about the “undue influence” and the danger that the MIC posed to the nation.
The statistics are astonishing, as revealed on the excellent American website Responsible Statecraft.
The revelation is that almost every new weapons system ends up costing much more than the one it replaces. So on the one hand the cost of weapons systems increases, on the other hand the number of systems decreases.
Thus the US Army ended up with only 21 B-2 stealth bombers, instead of the 132 originally planned, 187 F-22s, instead of the 750 originally planned, and just three Zumwalt-class destroyers, instead of the 32 originally planned. This phenomenon creates what is known as the Defense Death Spiral, when the total cost of new weapons exceeds defense budgets.
President Eisenhower warned that only “an alert and informed citizenry can force the proper connection of the vast industrial and military defense machinery with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and freedom may prosper together.”
This statement remains as true today as it was 63 years ago. Only, President Eisenhower’s 1961 warning statement came in the last days of his presidency, not at the beginning – when he could have used his office to do something about it.
At the end of the Cold War, John Boyd and his friends in the Military Reform Movement also warned us about the military-industrial complex in Congress.
The Movement, a small group of Pentagon insiders, saw firsthand how the political economy created by the economic and political connections of the military elite, the defense industry, and the ruling class of society wasted precious resources and produced a series of bad and defective weapons.
This group analyzed, identified the underlying pathologies of the system and then did what they could to influence a substantial change, without achieving it.
The Death Spiral, probably the main pathology of the Pentagon, consumes more and more resources for its defense, while receiving less and less in return.
The US Air Force had 10,387 aircraft in 1975, while today it has 5,288, about half. The Navy had 559 active ships in the same period and today the US fleet has only 296.
On the other hand, the Pentagon budget is over 60% higher today than it was in 1975, even adjusting for inflation.
In other words, the American people are simply spending far more on defense and receiving far fewer weapons systems.
One would argue that modern weapons systems are more expensive, more complex, more efficient, and more expensive because of their capabilities, but this is highly debatable, as many of the high-profile acquisition programs of the past 25 years have been disappointing at best and often outright failures.
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Norman Augustine, a former Defense Department official and CEO of Lockheed Martin, predicted in 1983, with a hint of harsh satire, that by 2054, “the entire defense budget will be able to buy only one aircraft.
That aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy for three and a half days each week, except in leap years, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day each year.”
The only and proper way to combat an ominous and inevitable fate, according to Norman Augustine’s prediction, would be to stop the infamous “business as usual” in defense procurement. Furthermore, the heads of the various Pentagon agencies and Congress should abandon the practice of pursuing cutting-edge and technologically advanced weapons.
Instead of the military industries trying to add every possible and cutting-edge “gadget” to every plane, ship and ground vehicle to make them more attractive, the Pentagon, the US military should simplify plans and requests. A quality and useful weapon, we estimate, is one that is easy to use, effective and capable of performing its intended task.
The Pentagon should approve future development programs only when component technologies have already been proven effective in practice.
And that’s how the Pentagon can avoid another acquisition disaster like the F-35, which is still in development 23 years after Lockheed Martin was awarded the contract, Grazier concludes.
In 2020, Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in Pentagon contracts, more than the entire budgets of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined.
Furthermore, the Institute for Policy Studies recently revealed that the average taxpayer spends $1,087 annually on weapons contractors, compared to $270 on K-12 education and just $6 on renewable energy.
And the cost of just the company’s overpriced, underperforming F-35 fighter jets, according to the highly respected monthly magazine “The Nation,” is equal to the entire budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It comes as a surprise to many that realism is not the right approach for the national security establishment. The establishment leaders (the Pentagon and Congress) are mistakenly trying to combat the death spiral by throwing more money at the problem, which instead of eliminating it, is actually making it bigger.
Take, for example, Senator Roger Wicker, who wants to drastically increase defense spending to 5% of GDP. Such an increase would add an additional $5 trillion to Pentagon spending over the next ten years, on top of the already impressive $9.3 trillion currently projected for the same period, a 50% increase in defense spending over the next decade, reaching approximately $1.5 trillion in defense spending annually, a figure that is literally staggering even for the US.
It is clear that the US, as the global hegemonic power, at least of the Western world, needs an effective military force to defend and serve its interests.
But if the country fails in the pursuit and maintenance of global hegemony, then what is the result? Obviously the loss of its hegemonic role and the creation of a bipolar-multipolar system will cause cosmogenic changes in the international geopolitical system.
Like new alliances that are already being created, such as the so-called “Global South” and the alliance of Russia, China, India and other powers, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, etc. as is woven with the expansion of the BRICS and possibly a world war.
A unique Hyper Power will thus be created, which will be very difficult to impossible to confront for many reasons, which are not of the present.
The good news for the United States is that the solution to the Defense Death Spiral conundrum, which does not require additional legislation and will save countless billions of taxpayer dollars, is available.
All that is really required is a leadership capable of instilling the necessary discipline in the truly complex and often opaque process of weapons procurement, rife with financial interests, effectively confronting the all-powerful military-industrial complex and the interests it
