SUNS 4335 Tuesday 1 December 1998
UNITED STATES: ARMS MAKERS WIELD POLITICAL CLOUT
Washington, Nov 27 (IPS/Abid Aslam) -- Nearly 40 years after President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of "the acquisition of unwarranted influence... by the military-industrial complex" U.S. arms makers continue to hold sway over American politics.
So says veteran defence and political analyst William Hartung in a new report, 'Military-Industrial Complex Revisited: How Weapons Makers are Shaping U.S. Foreign and Military Policies'.
"On issue after issue... the arms industry has launched a concerted lobbying campaign aimed at increasing military spending and arms exports," says Hartung, senior research fellow at the World Policy Institute of New York's New School for Social Research.
Examples of that influence include expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and eased restrictions on arms sales to repressive regimes, according to the report - published by the think tanks Inter-hemispheric Resource Center and Institute for Policy Studies.
As a result, U.S. military and foreign policy is unnecessarily expensive and based on unrealistic assessments of military preparedness.
Military spending "could be sharply reduced if our government would take concerted action to prevent conflict," argues Hartung. "Contrary to initial expectations, the military-industrial complex did not fade away with the end of the cold war. It has simply reorganised itself."
Central to that reorganisation has been a round of corporate mergers undertaken with billions of dollars in subsidies from the administration of President Bill Clinton.
Results of subsidised consolidation include a new generation of "military-industrial behemoths" who enjoy greater leverage over the Pentagon because of decreased competition, according to Hartung. The 'Big Three' weapons makers alone - Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon - have come to account for more than one-fourth of all government spending on weapons.
The mergers, urged by officials soon after Clinton took office in 1993, were intended to "cut overhead by reducing the number of underutilised factories in the military industry." They also would make it easier for production of existing weapons systems, like the F-16 fighter, to make room for future systems, including a 'Joint Strike Fighter'.
Yet, the "companies and their allies in Congress have fiercely resisted closing weapons production lines, preferring instead to lay off workers even as industry profits hit near-record levels," Hartung notes.
The government's merger subsidy programme came to be termed as "payoffs for layoffs" by Bernie Sanders, an Independent congressman from Vermont.
This should have come as no surprise, according to Hartung: The programme was designed by defence officials who, prior to joining the Clinton administration, had been paid consultants of the arms industry.
It then received support from Congress.
Weapons makers are generous supporters of the Democratic and Republican parties. In 1997, the top six defence companies poured some $2.5 million into political coffers. Bolstering the persuasive power of money, according to the report, is the "geopolitical reach" of the firms.
Boeing, which absorbed McDonnell Douglas, has more than 250,000 employees. Lockheed Martin - itself the product of a series of mergers - made a point of boasting that it has "facilities in all 50 states."
As Federation of American Scientists analyst John Pike put it, giant firms leave huge "political footprints" on the legislative landscape.
Corporate influence alone could not explain why the purchasing power of the $270 billion military budget has remained roughly constant since the peak period of U.S.-Soviet rivalry. According to Hartung, defence officials needing to justify high spending after the end of the Cold War argue that "there is no longer one powerful superpower adversary to contend with, but U.S. forces still need to be equipped to fight two major regional conflicts simultaneously against 'rogue states' like Iraq and North Korea."
This 'two war' doctrine, devised by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell, is "implausible in the extreme," argues Hartung. He draws on assessments by former military officers and government officials, according to one of whom, "the Pentagon's two war strategy is just a marketing device to justify a high budget."
Merrill McPeak, Air Force Chief of Staff during the 1991 Gulf War, notes that "we've had to fight three major regional contingencies in the past 45 years (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq). One comes along every 15 years or so - two have never come along simultaneously."
Yet, according to former Reagan administration defence official Lawrence Korb, the current Pentagon budget could be trimmed by $40 billion even if one accepts the 'two war' doctrine.
That is because the doctrine assumes that so-called 'rogue states' are far better equipped and trained than is the case, and because it fails to take into account support from U.S. allies. As a consequence, Washington spends 19 times more on its military than all of the 'rogue states' combined.
"The point about the relative strength of... allies is underscored by the fact that the United States and its key allies (NATO, Japan, and South Korea) now account for 62% of total global military spending," says Hartung.
"Despite repeated calls for higher military spending to remedy the alleged 'readiness crisis' facing U.S. forces, the United States and its allies currently account for a much higher share of global military spending than they did at the height of the Reagan military build-up in the mid 1980s."
Hartung, however, favours an alternative policy package including weapons non-proliferation measures and support for a strong International Criminal Court.
"Tens of billions of dollars" could be saved, he argues, "if we were to abandon the outdated notion that the United States needs to maintain the capability to project force to every corner of the globe and focus instead on developing better diplomatic, economic, and cultural relations with other nations."
To achieve an "efffective, affordable defence, it will be necessary to rein in the power and profits of the Pentagon and the military contractors," Hartung concludes.