Introduction to the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC)
Fifty Things to Know About the MIC
1.
They are not “defense companies.” They are war corporations. They market
and sell goods and services to the U.S. military, intelligence agencies, and
allied governments.
2.
The U.S. financial industry sits at the top of the war industry.
Investment banks and asset management firms hold shares of the top public war
corporations. The largest private war corporations include Sierra Nevada
Corporation and General Atomics, run by billionaires Fatih
& Eren Ozmen and the
Blue brothers, respectively. Private equity firms regularly buy and sell war corporations. For example, Lindsay Goldberg
owns Amentum and Veritas Capital owns Peraton
and Cubic. The financial
industry and top corporate executives profit greatly from war.
3.
Corporations have captured the U.S. government, primarily via campaign finance,
lobbying, and rotating corporate
officials through the halls of authority, such as the Pentagon’s top civilian
offices.
4.
The U.S. Supreme Court is largely responsible for the rise of corporate
authority, and the ensuing corporate capture of government. Limits on election
spending were ruled unconstitutional in Buckley v. Valeo
(1976). Corporations received a First Amendment right to put money toward
ballot initiatives in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978). FEC
v. Massachusetts Citizens for Life (1986) gave corporations more authority
to influence politics by utilizing nonprofits. Citizens United v. FEC
(2010) allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts on political
contributions. McCutcheon v. FEC (2014) got rid of limits on the total
number of political contributions one can give over a two-year period. Now,
corporations are in charge of the political process and enjoy far more legal
rights than a human person. As corporate personhood gains more and more
authority, more and more parts of life are commodified. Human needs such as
water, healthcare, and shelter are all in the corporate domain.
5.
Members of U.S. Congress regularly profit by
investing in war-industry stock. Senators
and representatives also invest in complementary industries, such as fossil fuel. Congress
does not exercise effective oversight of the war industry. The average congressperson is uninformed regarding
the intricacies of war, espionage, and peace.
6.
Most of the U.S. military budget goes to
corporations.
7.
The U.S. government funds the military and pays for war
by collecting taxes and by selling Treasury marketable securities. Many war
corporations, including but not limited to Accenture, Amazon, Booz Allen Hamilton, Textron, go to
great lengths to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.
8.
The war industry doesn’t just sell bullets, bombs, tanks, ships, and aircraft.
It also sells base operations, espionage software, physical security,
artificial intelligence, nuclear weaponry, border sensors, ways to knock drones
out of the sky, cloud computing, satellites, satellite launch, kits that
convert dumb bombs into GPS-guided weaponry, office administration, construction,
missile defense systems, warehousing and distribution, ordnance disposal, information
technology, radar, maintenance and cataloguing of prepositioned stock, logistics and consulting, military clothing, and all manner of
training and simulation. Corporations such as BAE Systems run what remains of
the government’s arsenals and ammunition plants.
9.
War corporations don’t just sell such products. They fabricate, test,
evaluate, qualify, assemble, inspect, package, deliver, maintain, upgrade,
monitor, and redesign products—all billable activities. Additionally, war
corporations regularly charge their military and intelligence customers for
such services as configuration management, data, documentation, engineering,
incidental materials, integration, logistics, “obsolescence management”, operational
security, parts, revitalization, spares, support equipment, technical
order updates, technical services, and additional
training.
10.
Corporations have gradually encroached upon military policymaking.
Recent examples include SAIC strategic plans and policy support for the Air Force, Deloitte policy assessment and management for the Navy, and CACI policies and practices for Navy acquisition.
11.
The largest scientific project in the United States is war- and espionage-related
research and development (R&D) and manufacturing. No other scientific
endeavor comes close in terms of dollars and time allocated. The U.S. military spent over $110
billion on research, development, testing & evaluation (RDT&E) in
fiscal 2021, not including other militarized R&D, such as the Department of
Energy’s work on nuclear weaponry and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) studies. Total
federal government R&D funding amounted to
roughly $140 billion. These figures do not include the war industry’s independent
R&D. The Government Accountability Office recently concluded,
“DOD does not
know how contractors’ independent R&D projects fit into the department’s
technology goals.”
12.
The U.S. government has many research labs pursuing military and
intelligence R&D, including but not limited to the Army Research Lab, the
Air Force Research Lab, the Naval Research Lab, the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA), and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Engineer
Research & Development Center. Work for these labs is mostly carried out by
corporations and academic institutions, not uniformed military personnel.
Corporations even run the Department of Energy’s national labs that develop
nuclear weaponry. Los Alamos Lab, for example, is run by Battelle, Texas A&M, and the University of
California.
13.
Academia is part of the war industry. Many universities in the United
States research and develop technology for military and espionage purposes. The
main academic participants in the war industry include but are not limited to
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Johns Hopkins University,
Stanford University, the University of Dayton, Georgia Tech, and Pennsylvania
State University.
14.
Telecoms,
including your smartphone carrier, contract regularly with the U.S. military
and intelligence agencies. In the most
recent fiscal year, AT&T has supported the
Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, provided networks
and transmission circuits for military communication, and run
cyber defenses for Space Force. (AT&T and its billionaire owner Robert
Herring were reportedly instrumental
in the establishment of the rightwing media network One America News, or OAN.) Comcast
is
upgrading U.S. military communication infrastructure. And
Verizon just announced a massive
new military contract for technical support and network
upgrades. Telecoms form
the backbone of the federal government’s domestic
surveillance apparatus.
15.
With no accountability and a guaranteed flow of money, the war industry
regularly produces overbudget, underperforming weapon systems. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the most famous example. Other struggling systems
include the KC-46 tanker, the
Zumwalt-class destroyer, the
Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), and the
Ford-class aircraft carrier.
The Pentagon could help solve this problem by no longer allowing corporations
to develop and test products as they produce them (a process called “concurrency”),
but that would cut down on corporate profit.
16.
Though the war industry is spread across all fifty United States, a few
locations are industry hotspots: greater
Boston, Massachusetts; Tampa and Orlando, Florida; Huntsville, Alabama; the
Dallas-Fort Worth region of Texas; Silicon Valley; southern California; and the
corridor stretching from northeast Virginia to Baltimore (consistently home to
the wealthiest counties in the country).
17.
U.S. military leaders facilitate corporate profit. Officers who make it
to the highest military ranks are very good at conforming to the system. These
officers support nonstop wars of choice and broad military deployments, and
defer to pro-war pretexts coming from the war industry’s think tanks
and pressure
groups. They judge military activity
in terms of numbers (dollars spent, weapons purchased, bases active, troops
deployed) instead of clear soldierly goals. Many officers are unable or
unwilling to distinguish between the needs of a corporation and the needs of a
professional military. These officers don’t see war corporations; they see a total force in which military and
industry work together. As individuals, they do not lead by example. Physical
prowess is not mandatory, understanding cultural nuance not necessary, language
fluency exceedingly rare. And they do not have to win wars.
18.
The war industry recruits retired high-ranking military officers. For
example, Adm. McRaven joined
Palantir, Gen. Dunford
Lockheed Martin, Adm. Stavridis the Carlyle Group, Gen. Votel Business
Executives for National Security. Some, such as Gen. Petraeus,
Gen. Odierno, and
Gen. Goldfein,
make a beeline to financial firms. Retired generals and admirals in Corporate
America convert their connections and knowledge into profit. Corporate jobs for
these retirees can include manager, vice president, lobbyist, consultant, and
director.
19.
The troops themselves—the average soldier, sailor, airman, guardian, or
Marine—enlist in the U.S. Armed Forces largely for economic reasons
(though it can be comfortable for them to embrace traditionally patriotic justifications), as donning the military uniform offers one of the
few stable jobs remaining in an economy that Wall Street and Washington have
gutted through the implementation of neoliberal economic policies. Most
military recruits don’t become cannon fodder, but rather serve as vessels for
corporate goods and services.
20.
The leadership of the military-industrial complex is rarely punished. Broadly
speaking, war profiteering
is perfectly legal. On an individual level, former Director of Central Intelligence
Richard Helms set the standard in 1977 when he received a
$2,000 fine and a suspended sentence after lying to the Senate about CIA
activities in Latin America. The bankers at the top of the MIC, who engaged in
illegal activity and crashed the global economy in 2008, never went to jail.
Indeed, they gave themselves lavish bonuses after
the U.S. government bailed out the banks. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper infamously lied to Congress
in 2013 and faced no legal consequences for such perjury. Air Force Lieutenant
General Sami Said, who determined
that the military’s domestic use RC-26 spy planes during the summer 2020
protests was legal and not aimed at protestors, was the same officer who held no one responsible for the U.S. military’s August 2021 drone strike in
Afghanistan that killed 10 civilians, including an aid worker and his children.
General David Petraeus, who gave his
biographer highly-classified material for which she did not have clearance,
spent no time behind
bars. Yet workers who leak crucial information in the public’s interest about
government criminality (e.g., Chelsea
Manning, Edward Snowden,
and Daniel Hale) are met with a
hefty punishment.
21.
Ad agencies, not the Pentagon, design the military’s recruitment
campaigns and advertisements. GSD&M is currently
in charge of that endeavor for the Air Force and Space Force, Wunderman Thompson for the Marine Corps, Young & Rubicam for the Navy, and DDB Chicago
for the Army.
22.
Diversity—sexual orientation, gender, skin color—in the top ranks of the
military-industrial complex does not change the structural imperatives of the
system. The Central Intelligence Agency with a female director still pursued regime change
abroad. Lockheed Martin with a female CEO still made record profits
in the business of war. The Pentagon with a black Secretary still kills
Africans.
23.
Military and industry classify information (Confidential, Secret, Top
Secret) in order to keep weapons systems secret and to keep the public
ignorant of the scope of the corporate run surveillance state, the full costs of war,
and fraud, waste and abuse. Classifying information prevents the public from
understanding and acting against entrenched, costly militarism.
24.
Secrecy harms science. Effective science is based on free, open
discussion. Military funding and stipulations (compartmentation, shoehorned
focus, classification, near-term deadlines, stovepiped fields) oppose free,
open discussion. Breakthroughs benefitting humanity rarely happen when people
are tied to military-industry confines, funding priorities, and schedules. The
war industry shuns the polymath, the free thinker, and the uninhibited
tinkerer. The war industry’s science demands strong minds, but it does not often
make the scientific breakthroughs that society needs.
25.
Corporate executives use public-relations expertise and amenable media
to play the “jobs” card with politicians. Industry fudges the jobs figures: Some
jobs are not in the U.S. (e.g. Textron and Raytheon in Mexico, or microchips
manufactured overseas), while other jobs are “induced” (e.g. the mom making
less-than-minimum wage on a ridesharing app driving a computer programmer from
work to the pub, or the waiter at a St. Louis restaurant where a missile
engineer dines). Industry lawyers ensure that a given war corporation
establishing a production facility in a town does not have to come through with
the number of jobs it promises.
The claim that the “defense industry” brings many jobs hides the truth:
Spending on healthcare, education, or sustainable energy creates more
jobs than spending on the military.
26.
Most workers within the war industry are intelligence and diligent. Jobs
range from manual labor (blaster, electrician, machinist, pipefitter, painter,
rigger, shipwright, welder) to office jobs (system administrator, public
relations specialist, psychologist, attorney) to computer programmer, engineer,
metallurgist, physicist, chemist, and mathematician. Whatever the workers
produce is not theirs to use or sell. Instead, corporate executives determine what
to produce, how to produce it, and to whom to sell it. The profit that the workers create goes toward the executives (CEO
pay at the top five war corporations totaled almost half a billion dollars during 2015-19), stock
buybacks, and building new facilities to make
more profit.
27.
It is very difficult for workers to step back and understand how the
larger military-industrial complex functions. Group think, hierarchy, nondisclosure
agreements, compartmentation, economic incentives, and a rigid chain of command
enforce the status quo. Violence and social isolation deter the few who consider
pushing back against the machinery of war. Advertising,
public relations, propaganda, and disinformation keep the working class (which
greatly outnumbers the ruling class) disorganized and compliant.
28.
People who
profit from war often make large public donations. The former CEO of Lockheed Martin gave millions
of dollars to the University of Alabama. The owners of Sierra Nevada
Corporation (SNC) gave $1
million to the University of Nevada-Reno. The co-founder of the Carlyle Group gave $5
million to Harvard University. Corporate executives, who hoard wealth
and exploit the workers, look generous and get a tax write-off. Most
importantly, these donations very effectively whitewash the business of war.
29.
The war industry contracts regularly with NASA, the National Aeronautics
& Space Administration. The James Webb telescope was a Northrop Grumman
product, for example, and Lockheed Martin was recently selected to
build a rocket to carry samples from Mars to Earth. Anyone who tells you it is
impossible to fully convert the war industry to civilian purposes is lying. The
war industry is already involved in civilian projects, particularly civilian
aviation and space exploration, and it will follow the money if non-military
budgets are boosted as Defense’s budget is decreased. With enough political
will and a federal jobs guarantee, workers of the war industry could easily get
to work improving the nation’s infrastructure and pursuing scientific inquiry
for the sake of the species.
30.
Supporters of the war industry regularly invoke the civilian benefits
that have come from the U.S. government’s immense investment in war technology.
The internet, the jet engine, and radar all came from military research and
development. But these are ancillary benefits.
(Unlike products from other industries, the public cannot eat, consume, play
with, learn from, or interact with most goods and services sold by the war
industry.) Imagine what technological benefits society could achieve if $750 billion per year was instead directed deliberately toward research and
development of technology that benefits human wellbeing and the natural world,
not military and war.
31.
The Pentagon is irresponsible with money. The federal government has a
long-standing policy that guides military units of all sizes to spend their
budgets by the end of the fiscal year. If military units spend all of their
money, they are typically allocated the same amount of money or more in the
next budget appropriation. However, if they economize, find savings, or do more
with less, they likely see their budgets cut in the next appropriation. This
policy, often called “use it or lose it,” does not incentivize fiscal responsibility.
32.
The U.S. military has never passed
an audit, though many corporations (e.g., Ernst & Young, Kearney & Co.,
KPMG, PwC) have made a lot of money conducting that audit. These corporations
can simultaneously contract elsewhere within the military establishment. For
example, Kearney & Co. is helping the
Air Force analyze its mission and has advised the
Air Force regarding public relations, special access programs, and strategy.
Corporations auditing the U.S. military have also audited large war
corporations. PwC, for example, has audited
Raytheon. The conflicts of interest are immense.
33.
Classified military- and civilian-intelligence budgets are unconstitutional.
Opaque budgetary practices violate the Constitution’s requirement
that Congress publish an accounting of the receipts and expenditures of all
public money.
34.
There are thousands of U.S. military installations of varying sizes inside
the United States. Military ranges are massive swaths of land that the Pentagon
uses to practice bombing and train aircrew. These locations, which corporations
typically administer, include Dare County Range in North Carolina, the Mountain
Home Ranges in Idaho, White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, and the Pacific
Missile Range in Hawai‘i. Given the worldwide collapse of ecosystems,
these military ranges are a great place to start rewilding.
35.
Overseas, the largest concentrations of U.S. troops and corporate
contractors are on bases in the Persian Gulf, Europe, and the Western Pacific. Countries
run by undemocratic regimes house some of the Pentagon’s most active overseas
installations (e.g. al-‘Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in
Bahrain, and the “largest overseas military medical research facility” in Egypt).
36.
The military-industrial complex’s “forever wars” kill people. Ordnance is made in
such locations as Garland, Texas (General Dynamics), Holston, Tennessee (BAE
Systems), Orlando, Florida (Lockheed Martin), Radford, Virginia (BAE Systems),
St. Charles, Missouri (Boeing), and Tucson, Arizona (Raytheon).
37.
War corporations break the law
all the time. Infractions have included bribery, overcharging
the government, false claims, and
violation of
export control laws. The government then fines these corporations—those it
catches, at least. The fines are not prohibitively expensive, and corporations
continue to contract with the government and profit greatly.
38.
The Pentagon has multiple programs to bring small corporations
into the business of war. Some large corporations reportedly contract as small businesses in order to obtain the advantages of such a
classification. Comparable legal tricks were used by Corporate America to obtain small
business loans during the early COVID-19 pandemic.
39.
The U.S.
war industry contracts heavily with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Corporations include the famous (Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin,
Northrop Grumman); IT and espionage powerhouses (Accenture, Booz Allen
Hamilton, CACI, IBM, Leidos, ManTech, SAIC); large engineering and project
management firms (AECOM, Fluor, Jacobs); corporations owned by private equity (Amentum, Peraton); and U.K. firms with a sizeable presence in the U.S. (BAE
Systems, Serco). Raytheon is prime
contractor for DHS’ Network Security Deployment Division (NSD).
40.
Some multinational corporations headquartered outside the United States (e.g.
London’s BAE Systems, Dublin’s Accenture, Herstal’s Fabrique Nationale, Rome’s
Leonardo DRS, Haifa’s Elbit Systems, Ottawa’s Canadian Commercial Corporation)
contract heavily with U.S. military and/or intelligence.
41.
Corporate media is part of the military-industrial complex. A handful of
business interests owns media outlets in the United States. The baseline of
information aired on corporate media reflects capitalist dogma. Corporate media
such as CNN, NBC, and FoxNews, all follow the same
business model: air what attracts the highest ratings and the most clicks in
order to generate advertising revenue. Drawing funding
from the wealthy donor class and large corporate interests, National Public
Radio is similarly penned in. NPR’s CEO, John Lansing, previously ran a U.S.
propaganda organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Section 1078 of the 2013
National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)
increased such propaganda in U.S. media. Politically
conditioning the U.S. public, corporate media do not blame the military-industrial
complex or the economic system for any of the problems in the world. Aiming
for high ratings and lucrative advertising revenue, corporate media self-censor
and taper the spectrum of acceptable foreign policy debate. War corporations purchase
advertisements on news shows to hinder the debate even more, as pundits and
newscasters typically do not speak out against advertisers. Corporate media then
hire career militants (e.g., former CIA Director John Brennan, MSNBC; former
CIA Deputy Director Mike Morrell, CBS News; retired General Jack Keane, FoxNews) who further confine the debate. Pundits and
scribes within corporate media rarely disclose their professional ties to war
corporations and/or financial investments in the industry.
42.
Big business
runs other media through which people learn about war. Regent Equity Partners owns
Sightline Media Group, whose products include most of the major
military-focused periodicals: Air Force Times, Army Times, C4ISRNET, Defense
News, Federal Times, Marine Corps Times, and Navy
Times. Sightline recently acquired the periodical American
Police Beat. The Pentagon runs its own massive media
empire coordinated by the Assistant to the Secretary
for Public Affairs.
43.
Hollywood
gets matériel from the Pentagon, and, in exchange, allows
the federal government to alter
movie scripts. Hollywood also regularly demonizes
official enemies, priming the public to loathe the stereotypical enemies on the
receiving end of U.S. ordnance. Hollywood also functions as a recruiter, offering
alluring portrayals of military and intelligence activities, seducing new
generations into believing the thrill or benevolence of such undertakings.
44.
Think tanks
guide the government’s discourse on matters of war and peace. Think tanks
promote views advantageous to their funders. And it is the military-industrial
complex that funds
major Washington think tanks. In turn, the think tanks invent, hype, and
promote new threats and new rationalizations for why the United States must
maintain a global military presence and fight wars. Such an environment
reliably and loudly produces report after report, panel
after panel, and interview after interview, about Iran’s
“malign activities,” China’s “destabilizing influence,” Russian “meddling,” and
Arab “terrorism.” Corporate media then amplify this disinformation. Think tanks
also swarm
presidential candidates when they are assembling their foreign policy teams,
ensuring foreign policy options remain within familiar, profitable confines. Lastly,
there is no need for you, a congressperson, to go to the Congressional Budget
Office when a think tank (that takes money from the same corporations your
campaign takes money from) will promptly provide you with a fine-tuned, pro-war
report. Many think tanks draft legislation for congresspeople who receive
campaign funding from the war industry.
45.
Threat
inflation sustains the racket:
Advanced persistent threats, affiliates, biological agents, black identity
extremists, a bomber gap, China, Cuba, dark networks, dirty bombs, great
powers, guerrillas, hackers, insurgents, Iran, lone wolves, malicious actors, a
missile gap, non-compliant governments, non-state actors, a non-state hostile
intelligence service, North Korea, people who don’t accept state violence or
intimidation, regimes, rogue states, Russia, special interest aliens,
terrorists, unaccompanied immigrant children, unprivileged enemy belligerents,
and Venezuela. All of these groups, threats or not, are hyped. Reality—for
example, you have a greater
chance of getting struck by lightning in the United
States than falling victim to an armed attack carried out by a Muslim—is
ignored. The war industry benefits, as threats can sell any good or service
imaginable. The Pentagon benefits, as threats justify sky-high budgets,
invasive legal authorities, and massive bureaucracies.
46.
The two main ways that the U.S. war industry sells weaponry to foreign
governments are foreign military sales (FMS) and direct commercial
sales (DCS). In FMS,
the U.S. government acts as the intermediary between the corporation and the
foreign government. DCS, on the other hand, are negotiated privately between
foreign governments and U.S. corporations. The State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs is in
charge of issuing the export licenses that permit DCS. The war industry’s sale
of goods and services to foreign governments is incredibly profitable. In
fiscal year 2020, the war industry sold $50.8
billion in foreign military sales and $124.3 billion in direct commercial sales.
The U.S. war industry leads the world
in arms exports.
47.
U.S. legal code facilitates, not hinders, weapon sales to foreign
governments. The Arms Export Control Act requires recipients of U.S. war
industry goods and services to use them only in self-defense, and the Leahy Law
(as codified in Foreign Assistance Act, Section 502B) prevents U.S. military
assistance from reaching militaries that have committed serious human rights
violations. Washington merely certifies that the weapons sold are used defensively
and that the foreign government is not substantially violating human rights.
48.
The
military-industrial complex is an incorrigible polluter, poisoning the air,
soil, and water. This pollution comes in many forms, including fossil
fuel combustion, leaky
petroleum storage tanks, detonation of ordnance, burn
pits, radioactive
waste, nuclear
fallout, polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS),
corporate dumping,
chemical solvents and coatings (such as hexavalent chromium, used in protecting
weaponry from corrosion), and depleted uranium (DU).
The substances used to put out aircraft fires are highly
toxic.
49.
How does
the Pentagon clean up its pollution?
By turning to Corporate America. Many corporations tackle the Pentagon’s
pollution. The bigger ones, such as Jacobs
and Tetra
Tech, are best known for their engineering and
construction prowess. Contracting announcements indicate
that Corporate America conducts studies and environmental assessments; prepares
plans, drafts documents, and issues reports; surveys sites, oversees wetlands,
and supervises land use; writes up Comprehensive Environmental Response,
Compensation, and Liability Act documentation; monitors environmental
compliance; peruses Executive Orders; plots basing patterns; reviews the
National Environmental Policy Act; removes contaminated soil; excavates,
characterizes, separates, and transports waste; studies socio-economic issues
and demographics; drafts emergency response preparedness; relocates radioactive
material; and runs community outreach and public engagement.
50.
The military-industrial complex comes before the wars. The
structure—a large standing military and an immense industry—needs enemies and
thrives on conflicts hot and cold. The Cold War, the “war on terror,” the domestic
surveillance state, and today’s “great power competition” against both Moscow
and Beijing are outward expressions of the permanent warfare state. When
war is your business, peace is your enemy.