The Military Industrial Complex
and their deadly war machine
WAR
“War is the most profitable business on earth”
― Kenneth Eade
The United States of America is in a state of perpetual war, which requires perpetual war spending. The reason for this is simple: money and power.
To be more specific, tax-payer money allocated by politicians to defense contractors who produce wildly expensive and unnecessary equipment, and power of controlling certain resources and markets for profit-driven corporations and industries.
This is allowed to happen because the citizens, the tax-payers, do not know and do not care about money spent on “defense.”
"It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.
its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed." - JFK
The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
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Eisenhower warned that "an immense military establishment and a large arms industry" had emerged as a hidden force in US politics and that Americans "must not fail to comprehend its grave implications".
The core of this expanding (Military Industrial) complex is a nucleus of influence from corporations, lobbyists, and agencies that have created a massive, self-sustaining terror-based industry.
trillions of dollars have flowed to military and homeland security companies. When the administration starts a war, it is a windfall for companies who are given generous contracts to produce everything from replacement missiles to ready-to-eat meals.
There are thousands of lobbyists in Washington guaranteeing the ever-expanding budgets for war and homeland security. One such example is former DHS (Department of Homeland Security) Secretary Michael Chertoff who pushed the purchase of the heavily criticised (and minimally tested) full-body scanners used in airports. When Chertoff was giving dozens of interviews to convince the public that the machines were needed to hold back the terror threat, many people were unaware that the manufacturer of the machine is a client of the Chertoff Group, his highly profitable security consulting agency. (Those hugely expensive machines were later scrapped after Rapiscan, the manufacturer, received the windfall.)
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It is not just the Defense and DHS departments that enjoy the war windfall.
Take the Department of Justice (DOJ). A massive counterterrorism system has been created employing tens of thousands of personnel with billions of dollars to search for domestic terrorists. The problem has been a shortage of actual terrorists to justify the size of this internal security system.
The DOJ has counted everything from simple immigration cases to credit card fraud as terror cases in a body count approach not seen since the Vietnam War. One example, the DOJ claimed to have busted a major terror-network as part of "Operation Cedar Sweep", where Lebanese citizens were accused of sending money to terrorists. They were later forced to drop all charges against all 27 defendants as unsupportable.
Americans find themselves in what seems like perpetual war. No sooner do we draw down on operations in Iraq than leaders demand an intervention in Libya or Syria or North Korea. While perpetual war constitutes perpetual losses for families, and ever expanding budgets, it also represents perpetual profits for a new and larger complex of business and government interests.
Across the country, the war-based economy can be seen in an industry which includes everything from Homeland Security educational degrees to counter-terrorism consultants to private-run preferred traveller programmes for airport security gates. The "black budget" consists of a bonafide alphabet soup of 17 agencies and offices. The group includes agencies strictly focused on intelligence as well as the intelligence arms of other government agencies and of the military. Its total budget in 2015 was $66.8 billion. Up from $52.6 billion in 2013.
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1. Office of the Director of National Intelligence
2. Central Intelligence Agency
3. National Security Agency
4. Defense Intelligence Agency
5. Federal Bureau of Investigation
6. Department of State – Bureau of Intelligence and Research
7. Department of Homeland Security – Office of Intelligence and Analysis
8. Drug Enforcement Administration – Office of National Security Intelligence
9. Department of the Treasury – Office of Intelligence and Analysis
10. Department of Energy – Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence
11. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
12. National Reconnaissance Office
13. Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance
14. Army Military Intelligence
15. Office of Naval Intelligence
16. Marine Corps Intelligence
17. Coast Guard Intelligence
75 percent of the fallen in these wars come from working class families. They do not need war. They pay the cost of the war.
What is the cost of war? what is the bill? Major General Smedley Butler wrote: “This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all of its attendant miseries. Back -breaking taxation for generations and generations. For a great many years as a soldier I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not only until I retired to civilian life did I fully realize it….”
