National (in)security

The inadequate response of both the federal and state governments to the Covid-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the United States, creating what could only be called a nationalsecurity crisis. Yelp data show that more than 132,000 businesses have already closed and census data suggest that, thanks to lost wages, nearly 17% of Americans with children can't afford to feed them enough.

In this same period, a number of defense contractors have been doing remarkably well. Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon's top contractor, reported that compared with 2019, its earnings are actually up. The company's success led the financial magazine Barron's to call it a "pandemic star." And those profits are only likely to grow, given the Donald Trump administration's recent approval of a 10-year deal to sell $62 billion worth of its F-16s to Taiwan.

And Lockheed Martin is far from the only such outfit. As Defense One reported, "It's becoming abundantly clear that companies with heavy defense business have been able to endure the coronavirus pandemic much better" than, for instance, commercial aerospace firms. And so it was that, while other companies have cut or suspended dividends during the pandemic, Lockheed Martin, which had already raised its gift to shareholders in late 2019, continued to pay the same amount this March and September.

The spread of Covid-19 has created one of the most significant crises of our time, but it has also provided far greater clarity about just how misplaced the priorities Washington have been all these years.

Americans - the Trump administration aside - are now trying to deal with the health impacts of the pandemic and struggling to figure out how to reopen schools safely. It's none too soon, however, to start thinking as well about how best to rebuild a devastated economy and create new jobs to replace those that have been lost.

In that process, one thing is crucial: resisting the calls - and count on it, they will

of come - to "rebuild" the war economy that had betrayed us long before the coronavirus arrived on US shores, leaving the country in a distinctly weakened state.

For the past decade, the budget "debate" in the US has largely been shaped by the Budget Control Act, which tried to save $1 trillion over those 10 years by placing nominal caps on both defense and non-defense spending. Notably, however, it exempted "war spending" that falls in what the Pentagon calls its Overseas Contingency Operations account.

While some argued that caps on both defense and non-defense spending created parity, the ability to use and abuse that war slush fund (on top of an already gigantic base budget) meant that the Pentagon still disproportionately benefited by tens of billions of dollars annually.

In 2021, the Budget Control Act expires. That means the US administration, whether under Trump or his Democratic challenger Joe Biden, will have an enormous opportunity to reshape federal spending significantly. At the very least, that Pentagon off-budget slush fund, which creates waste and undermines planning, could be ended. In addition, there's more reason than ever for Congress to reassess its philosophy of this century that the desires of the Pentagon invariably come first, particularly given the need to address the significant economic damage the stillraging pandemic is creating.

In rebuilding the economy, however, count on one thing: Defense contractors will put every last lobbying dollar into an attempt to convince the public, Congress, and whatever administration is in power that their sector is the country's major engine for creating jobs.

As TomDispatch regular Bill Hartung has shown, however, a close examination of such job-creation claims rarely stands up to serious scrutiny. For example, the number of jobs created by recent arms sales to Saudi Arabia are now expected to be less than a tenth of those President Trump initially bragged about. As Hartung noted in February, that's "well under 0.03% of the US labor force of more than 164 million people."

As it turns out, creating jobs through Pentagon spending is among the least effective ways to rebuild the US economy. As experts at the University of Massachusetts and Brown University have both discovered, the country would get significantly more job-creation bang for the bucks it spends on weaponry by investing in rebuilding domestic infrastructure, combating climate change, or creating more alternative energy.

And such investments would pay additional dividends by making communities and small businesses stronger and more resilient. At the Project On Government Oversight where I work, I spend my days looking at the many ways the arms industry exerts disproportionate influence over what's still called (however erroneously in this Covid-19 moment) "national security" and the foreign policy that goes with it, including America's forever wars.

That work has included, for instance, exposing how a bevy of retired military officers advocated buying more than even the Pentagon requested of the most expensive weapons system in history, Lockheed Martin's F-35 jet fighter, while failing to disclose that they also had significant personal financial interests in supporting that very program.