War Industry Muster – Keeping a watchful eye on military contracts

Why should you care?

The U.S. military budget (most of which is spent on goods and services from corporations) takes up the largest amount of discretionary spending in the federal budget. This money could be going to education, healthcare, infrastructure, and sustainable energy—each of which creates more jobs than military spending. The state of permanent warfare kills and maims the troops, degrades military professionalism, displaces millions overseas, pollutes the environment, and kills civilians. U.S. military bases, including those overseas, are avenues through which the war industry routes goods & services.
Nobody wins, except Wall Street and corporate executives.

Bring the troops home, take care of them, and transfer the military budget to meet human need.

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This site is a depository for Christian Sorensen’s research about the U.S. war industry.

Sorensen distills the U.S. military’s daily contract announcements into digestible monthly summaries in order to educate the public about the business of war.

Feel free to use Sorensen’s work in accordance with the following Creative Commons license: Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International.

Understanding the War Industry explains how the U.S. war industry wields authority, profits from war, and subverts democracy.

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Lockheed Martin’s 2020 net earnings in billions ¹

flaws in F-35 jet that won't be fixed [2]

million refugees and displaced persons since 2001 ³

counterterrorism, homeland security & intel companies ⁴

billion dollars in weapon sales to allies in one year ⁵

of 3- and 4-star officers go into war industry ⁶

billion in back office Pentagon waste over 5 years ⁷

billion in annual funding from war corporations to think tanks ⁸

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Distillations

The Pentagon’s jumbled list of contracts, distilled into monthly summaries.

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Newscasts

Newscasts are available on SoundCloud.

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Books

Offering hope to today’s youth, Sorensen’s novels are largely grounded in the current capabilities of the U.S. war industry.

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Footnotes

4 – “Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.”

5 – $175B: “The U.S. sold $175 billion in weapons to foreign partners and allies in fiscal 2020, a 2.8 percent rise from the previous year’s total…”

6 – “From 2004 through 2008, 80 percent of retiring three- and four-star officers went to work as consultants or defense executives, according to the Globe analysis. That compares with less than 50 percent who followed that path a decade earlier, from 1994 to 1998.”

7 – $125B: According to the Pentagon, trimming some outsourced administrative waste (e.g. consulting, admin, business logistics) would have saved roughly $125 billion over five years.

Who profits from war?