Despite a disagreement over some amendments in the Senate, the U.S. Congress is poised to pass a $778 billion military budget bill for 2022. Elected officials are preparing to hand the lion’s share—more than 65 percent—of federal discretionary spending to the U.S. war machine, all while wringing their hands over spending a mere quarter of that amount on the Build Back Better Act.
The U.S. military’s incredible record of systematic failure—most recently its final trouncing by the Taliban after twenty years of death, destruction, and lies in Afghanistan—cries out for a top-to-bottom review of its dominant role in U.S. foreign policy and a radical reassessment of its proper place in Congress’s budget priorities.
Maintaining a war machine makes us less safe, as each new administration inherits the delusion that U.S. military power can, and therefore should, be used to confront any perceived challenge to U.S. interests.
Instead, members of Congress hand over the largest share of our nation’s resources to this corrupt institution, with minimal scrutiny and no apparent fear of accountability when it comes to their own reelection. Members of Congress still see it as a “safe” political call to carelessly whip out their rubber-stamps and vote for the hundreds of billions in funding that Pentagon and arms industry lobbyists have persuaded the Armed Services Committees they should cough up.
The United States faces critical threats to its security, including the climate crisis, systemic racism, the erosion of voting rights, gun violence, grave inequalities, and the corporate hijacking of political power. But one problem we fortunately do not have is the threat of attack or invasion by a rampant global aggressor or, in fact, by any other country at all.
Maintaining a war machine that outspends the twelve or thirteen next largest militaries in the world combined actually makes us less safe, as each new administration inherits the delusion that U.S. military power can, and therefore should, be used to confront any perceived challenge to U.S. interests anywhere in the world.
While the international challenges we face in this century require a genuine commitment to international cooperation and diplomacy, Congress allocates only $58 billion, less than 10 percent of the size of the Pentagon budget, to the diplomatic corps of our government: the State Department. Even worse, both Democratic and Republican administrations keep filling top diplomatic posts with officials indoctrinated and steeped in policies of war and coercion, with scant experience and meager skills in the peaceful diplomacy we so desperately need.
This only perpetuates a failed foreign policy based on false choices between economic sanctions that United Nation’s officials have compared to medieval sieges, coups that destabilize countries and regions for decades, or wars and bombing campaigns that kill millions of people and leave cities like Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria in rubble.
The end of the Cold War was a golden opportunity for the United States to reduce its forces and military budget to match its legitimate defense needs. The U.S. public naturally expected and hoped for a “Peace Dividend,” and even veteran Pentagon officials told the Senate Budget Committee in 1991 that military spending could safely be cut by 50 percent over the next ten years.
But U.S. officials instead set out to exploit the post-Cold War “Power Dividend”—a huge military imbalance in favor of the United States—by developing rationales for using military force more freely and widely around the world. Ahead of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the soon-to-be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright famously asked General Colin Powell, then chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”
In 1999, as Secretary of State under President Clinton, Albright got her wish, running roughshod over the U.N. Charter with an illegal war to carve out an independent Kosovo from the ruins of Yugoslavia.
Twenty-two years later, Kosovo is the third poorest country in Europe, and its independence is still not recognized by ninety-six countries.
Clinton and Albright’s gruesome and illegal war set the precedent for more illegal U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere, with equally devastating and horrific results. But the U.S. military’s failed wars have not led Congress or successive administrations to seriously rethink the use of military force.
It seems that no amount of killing, torture, mass destruction, or lives ruined in the real world can shake the militaristic delusions of America’s political class, as long as the, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower worded it, “Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex” is reaping the benefits.
Today, most political and media references to the Military-Industrial Complex refer only to the arms industry as a self-serving corporate interest group on a par with Wall Street, Big Pharma, or the fossil fuel industry. But in his Farewell Address, Eisenhower explicitly pointed to, not just the arms industry, but the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.”
Weeks before his 1961 Farewell Address, he told his senior advisors, “God help this country when somebody sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do.” His fears have been realized in every subsequent presidency.
As Eisenhower worried, the careers of figures like Generals Lloyd Austin and Jim Mattis now span all branches of the corrupt Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex conglomerate: commanding invasion and occupation forces in Afghanistan and Iraq; then, donning suits and ties to sell weapons to new generals who served under them as majors and colonels; and finally, re-emerging from the same revolving door as cabinet members at the apex of U.S. politics and government.
So why does the Pentagon brass get a free pass, even as people in the United States feel increasingly conflicted about the arms industry? After all, it is the military that actually uses all these weapons to kill people and wreak havoc in other countries.
Even as it loses war after war overseas, the U.S. military has waged a far more successful one at home to burnish its image in the hearts and minds of Americans and win every budget battle in Washington.
The complicity of Congress, the third leg of the stool in Eisenhower’s original formulation, turns the annual battle of the budget into the “cakewalk” that the war in Iraq was supposed to be, with no accountability for lost wars, war crimes, civilian massacres, cost overruns, or the dysfunctional military leadership that presides over it all.
There is no Congressional debate over the economic impact on the United States or the geopolitical consequences for the world of uncritically rubber-stamping huge investments in powerful weapons that will sooner or later be used to kill our neighbors and smash their countries, as they have for the past twenty-two years and far too often throughout our history.
Sixty years after Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, exactly as he predicted, the “weight of this combination” of corrupt generals and admirals, the profitable “merchants of death” whose goods they peddle, and the Senators and Representatives who blindly entrust them with trillions of dollars of the public’s money, constitute the full flowering of President Eisenhower’s greatest fears for our country.
Eisenhower concluded, “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals.”
That clarion call echoes through the decades and should unite Americans in every form of democratic organizing and movement building, from elections to education and advocacy to mass protests, to finally reject and dispel the “unwarranted influence” of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex.