Insatiable money sinkhole
Call it a colossal victory for a Pentagon that hasn’t won a war in this century, but not a victory for the rest of us. The US Congress only recently passed and President Donald Trump approved one of the largest Pentagon budgets ever. It will surpass spending at the peaks of both the Korean and Vietnam wars.
As last year ended, as if to highlight the strangeness of all this, The Washington Post broke a story about a “confidential trove of government documents” interviews with key figures involved in the Afghan war by the US Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction revealing the degree to which senior Pentagon leaders and military commanders understood that the war was failing. Yet year after year, they provided “rosy pronouncements they knew to be false,” while “hiding unmistakable evidence that the war had become unwinnable.”
However, as the latest Pentagon budget shows, no matter the revelations, there will be no reckoning when it comes to America’s endless wars or its military establishment – not at a moment when Trump is sending yet more US military personnel into the Middle East and has picked a new fight with Iran. No less troubling: how few in either party in Congress are willing to hold the president and the Pentagon accountable for runaway defense spending or the poor performance that has gone with it.
Given the way the Pentagon has sunk taxpayer dollars into those endless wars, in a more reasonable world that institution would be overdue for a comprehensive audit of all its programs and a reevaluation of its expenditures. (It has, by the way, never actually passed an audit.)
According to Brown University’s Costs of
War Project, Washington has already spent at least US$2 trillion on its war in Afghanistan alone and, as the Post made clear, the corruption, waste and failure associated with those expenditures was (or at least should have been) mindboggling. Of course, little of this was news to people who had read the damning reports released by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction in previous years.
They included evidence, for instance, that somewhere between $10 million and $43 million had been spent constructing a single gas station in the middle of nowhere, that $150 million had gone into luxury private villas for Americans who were supposed to be helping strengthen Afghanistan’s economy, and that tens of millions more were wasted on failed programs to improve Afghan industries focused on extracting more of the country’s minerals, oil, and natural-gas reserves.
In the face of all this, rather than curtailing Pentagon spending, Congress continued to increase its budget, while also supporting a Department of Defense slush fund for war spending to keep the efforts going. Still, the special inspector general’s reports did manage to rankle American military commanders (unable to find successful combat strategies in Afghanistan) enough to launch what, in effect, would be a public relations war to try to undermine that watchdog’s findings.
All of this, in turn, reflected the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex that the late US president (and former five-star general) Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans about in his memorable 1961 farewell address. That complex only continues to thrive and grow almost six decades later, as contractor profits are endlessly prioritized over what might be considered the national security interests of the citizenry.
The infamous “revolving door” that regularly ushers senior Pentagon officials into defenseindustry posts and senior defense-industry figures into key positions at the Pentagon (and in the rest of the national-security state) just adds to the endless public relations offensives that accompany America’s forever wars. After all, the retired generals and other officials the US media regularly look to for expertise are often in essence paid shills for the defense industry.
The lack of public disclosure and media discussion about such obvious conflicts of interest only further corrupts public debate in the US on both the wars and the funding of the military, while giving the arms industry the biggest seat at the table when decisions are made on how much to spend on war and preparations for the same.
That lack of disclosure regarding potential conflicts of interest recently came into fresh relief as industry boosters beat the media drums for war with Iran. Unfortunately, it’s a story we’ve seen many times before. Back in 2008, for instance, in a Pulitzer Prize–winning series, The New York Times revealed that the Pentagon had launched a program to cultivate a coterie of retired-militaryofficers-turned-pundits in support of its already disastrous war in Iraq.