The US Military-Industrial Complex Is a Giant Malignant Virus Eating Away at America’s Actual Military Power

Source: Check Point Asia

It's an organism concerned only with self-preservation and expansion and perfectly happy to do so at the expense of actual US military effectiveness

by Andrew Cockburn | 18 May 2019

"If we understand that the MIC exists purely to sustain itself and grow, it becomes easier to make sense of the corruption, mismanagement, and war, and understand why, despite warnings over allegedly looming threats, we remain in reality so poorly defended"

For a country that spends such vast sums on its national security apparatus—many times more than the enemies that supposedly threaten it do—the United States has a strangely invisible military establishment.

Military bases tend to be located far from major population centers. The Air Force's vast missile fields, for instance, are hidden away in the plains of the northern Midwest. It is rare to see service uniforms on the streets of major cities, even Washington.

Donald Trump did dream of holding a “beautiful” military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, complete with "a lot of planes going over and a lot of military might," but the Pentagon nixed the scheme by putting out word that the extravaganza would cost $92 million.

The estimate was surely inflated—­it was four times greater, in real dollars, than the price tag for the 1991 Gulf War victory parade—­suggesting that the military prefers a lower profile. It often takes an informed eye to appreciate signs of defense dollars at work, such as the office parks abutting Route 28 south of Dulles Airport, heavily populated with innocuously titled military and intelligence firms.

Largely out of sight, our gargantuan military machine is also increasingly out of mind, especially when it comes to the ways in which it spends, and misspends, our money.

Three decades ago, revelations that the military was paying $435 for a hammer and $640 for an aircraft toilet seat ignited widespread media coverage and public outrage. But when it emerged in 2018 that the Air Force was now paying $10,000 for a toilet-seat cover alone, the story generated little more than a few scattered news reports and some derisive commentary on blogs and social media. (This was despite a senior Air Force official's unblushing explanation that the ridiculous price was required to save the manufacturer from “losing revenue and profit.") The Air Force now claims to have the covers 3-D–printed for $300 apiece, still an extravagant sum.

Representative Ro Khanna of California, a leading light of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who has spearheaded the fight to end U.S. participation in the Saudi war of extermination in Yemen, told me recently that he sees this indifference as a sign of the times. "There's such cynicism about politics, such cynicism about institutions," he said, "that the shock value of scandals that in the past would be disqualifying has diminished."


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