INTRODUCTION
This article has been updated to adjust the amount of the national debt in the concluding paragraph from what was then 16 Trillion in 2012 when we first began to discussing this topic to what is now exceeding 34 Trillion.
We offer in this posting not only our opinion on the massive Military
Industrial Complex, but also the opinions of three experts who have
lived war fighting - on the recent fields of battle, and in
weapons systems development.
The
quotations are extracts from larger articles. We suggest the reader follow the links after each to become further informed.
It is
our hope that the facts offered here will contribute to the knowledge
of US citizenry regarding hard decisions forthcoming on the nature
of war fighting and its role in the future of our country.
OUR
VIEW
Ken Larson
This Blog was founded in 2006, based on the 36 years experience of a soldier in war zones and major corporations in the US Military Industrial Complex. Our view is
expressed in the below article, an extract of which reads:
“Presidents,
Congressmen, Cabinet Members and Appointees project a knowledgeable
demeanor but they are spouting what they are told by career people
who never go away and who train their replacements carefully. These
are military and civil servants with enormous collective power, armed
with the Federal Acquisition Regulation, Defense Industrial Security
Manuals, compartmentalized classification structures and "Rice
Bowls" which are never mixed.
Our society has slowly given this power structure its momentum which is constant and extraordinarily tough to bend. The cost to the average American is exorbitant in terms of real dollars and bad decisions. Every major power structure member in the Pentagon's many Washington Offices and Field locations in the US and Overseas has a counterpart in Defense Industry Corporate America. That collective body has undergone major consolidation in the last 10 years. What used to be a broad base of competitive firms is now a few huge monoliths, such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Boeing.
Government oversight committees are carefully stroked. Men like Sam Nunn and others who were around for years in military and policy oversight roles have been cajoled, given into on occasion but kept in the dark about the real status of things until it is too late to do anything but what the establishment wants. This still continues - with increasing high technology and potential for abuse.”
Our society has slowly given this power structure its momentum which is constant and extraordinarily tough to bend. The cost to the average American is exorbitant in terms of real dollars and bad decisions. Every major power structure member in the Pentagon's many Washington Offices and Field locations in the US and Overseas has a counterpart in Defense Industry Corporate America. That collective body has undergone major consolidation in the last 10 years. What used to be a broad base of competitive firms is now a few huge monoliths, such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Boeing.
Government oversight committees are carefully stroked. Men like Sam Nunn and others who were around for years in military and policy oversight roles have been cajoled, given into on occasion but kept in the dark about the real status of things until it is too late to do anything but what the establishment wants. This still continues - with increasing high technology and potential for abuse.”
A
FELLOW VETERAN’S VIEW
Paul
Riedner is a graduate
student at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of
Management. December 13, 2011 – Minneapolis Star Tribune
Commentaries. Personally,
sacrificed four years in support of the war effort -- one deployed as
an army engineer diver.
“There
remain countless inner struggles that lurk in dark corners of my
psyche. They are difficult to measure or even explain.
What does it mean to have
been a part of this war?
To have been a part of:
4,500 American deaths; 33,000 Americans wounded; estimates as high as
600,000 Iraqi deaths; more than $1 trillion in taxpayer money spent;
$9 billion lost or unaccounted for; huge corporate profiteering; a
prisoner-abuse scandal; a torture record worthy of the Hague; a hand
in the financial crisis, and runaway unemployment when we get home.
I've learned that we are
easily duped and that we quickly forget. Saddam has WMDs. No, we are
exporting democracy. No, we are protecting human rights, and by the
way, their oil will pay for it all.
I've learned that 9/11
was used against us. We gladly handed over our civil liberties in the
name of security. And recently our Congress quietly reapproved the
unconstitutional Patriot Act.”
AN
OFFICER’S VIEW
Lieutenant-Colonel
Daniel L. Davis
in
the United States Army, serving as a Regular Army officer in the
Armor Branch. He has just completed his fourth combat deployment. (Desert Storm, Afghanistan in 2005-06, Iraq in 2008-09, and
Afghanistan again in 2010-11). In the middle of his career he served
eight years in the US Army Reserve and held a number of civilian
jobs, one of which was an aide for US Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison
(Legislative Correspondent for Defense and Foreign Affairs).
From
“Dereliction of Duty II
Senior
Military Leaders’ Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort 27
January 2012”
“We
have lavished praise a few of our senior military leaders for being
“warrior-scholars” whose intellectualism exceeds those of most
wearing the uniform. But what organization in the world today –
whether an international terrorist organization or virtually every
major company on the globe – needs physical territory on which to
plan “future 9/11 attacks”? Most are well acquainted with the
on-line and interconnected nature of numerous global movements. We
here in the United States know video conferencing, skyping, emailing,
texting, twittering, Facebooking, and virtually an almost limitless
number of similar technologies.
And
a few men have convinced virtually the entire Western world that we
must
stay on
the ground in one relatively postage-stamp sized country – even
beyond a decade
and a half –
to prevent “another 9/11” from being planned, as though the rest
of the world’s geography somehow doesn’t matter, and more
critically, that while the rest of the world does its planning on
computers and other electronic means, al-Qaeda must be capable only
of making such plans on the ground, and only on the ground in
Afghanistan.
When one considers what
these few leaders have asked us to believe in light of the facts
pointed out above, the paucity of logic in their argument becomes
evident. What has been
present in most of those arguments, however, has been emotionally
evocative words designed to play strongly on American patriotism:
“…this is where 9/11 was born!” “these young men did not die
in vain” “this is a tough fight” etc. It is time – beyond
time – for the evidence and facts to be
considered in their comprehensive whole in a candid and honest public
forum before we spend another man or woman’s life or limbs in
Afghanistan.”
A
PENTAGON DEFENSE ANALYST’S VIEW
Franklin
C. "Chuck " Spinney
Pentagon’s
Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation (better-known by its former
name, Systems Analysis, set up to make independent evaluations of
Pentagon Policy)
Author
- "Defense Facts of Life: The Plans-Reality Mismatch",
which sharply criticized defense budgeting, arguing that the defense
bureaucracy uses unrealistic assumptions to buy in to unsustainable
programs, and explaining how the pursuit of complex technology
produced expensive, scarce and inefficient weapons. Spinney spent his
career refining and expanding this analysis. The report was largely
ignored despite a growing reform movement, whose goal was to reduce
military budget increases from 7% to 5% after inflation. Two years
later, he expounded on his first report, including an analysis on the
miscalculation of the burden costs of a majority of the weapon
systems and re-titled it "Defense facts of life: The
Plans/Reality Mismatch", which later became simply known as the
"Spinney Report":
“And
that's why we ought to treat the defense industry as a public sector;
and if we did that then you wouldn't see these gross disparities in
salaries creeping in. But essentially if you try to understand what's
going on in the Pentagon and this is the most important aspect, and
it gets at the heart of our democracy. Is that we have an accounting
system that is unauditable. Even by the generous auditing
requirements of the federal government.
Now what you have to
understand is the kind of audits I'm talking about these are not what
a private corporation would do with a rigorous accounting system.
Essentially the audits we are required to do are mandated under the
Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990, and a few amendments
thereafter. But it's the CFO Act of 1990 that's the driver.
And it basically was
passed by Congress that required the inspector generals of each
government department, not just the Pentagon, but NASA, health,
education, welfare, all the other departments, interior department
where the inspector general has to produce an audit each year.
Saying, basically verifying that the money was spent on what Congress
appropriated it for. Now that's not a management accounting audit.
It's basically a checks and balances audit.
Well, the Pentagon
has never passed an audit. They have 13 or 15, I forget the exact
number, of major accounting categories. That each one has it's own
audit. The only one of those categories that's ever been passed is
the retirement account.
Now under the CFO
Act of 1990 they have to do this audit annually. Well, every year
they do an audit and the inspector general would issue a report
saying we have to waive the audit requirements, because we can't
balance the books. We can't tell you how the money got spent.
Now what they do is
try to track transactions. And in one of the last audits that was
done the transactions were like… there were like $7 trillion in
transactions. And they couldn't account for about four trillion of
those transactions. Two trillion were unaccountable and two trillion
they didn't do, and they accounted for two trillion.”
CONCLUSION:
The material here is submitted on its own merits. Consider it carefully as the Pentagon has consumed nearly 70% of US disposable tax revenue in recent years and our national debt approaches $34 Trillion. National Debt Clock
Ask yourself if there are other alternatives for the future of our country, to include statesmanship, international economic cooperation and de-weaponizing efforts among great nations.
Ask yourself if there are other alternatives for the future of our country, to include statesmanship, international economic cooperation and de-weaponizing efforts among great nations.
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