War and Profit

War, what is it good for? Revenue and profits, that’s what. 

I’ve known CEOs and other upper execs of several defense firms. I’d say that most were basically good, smart guys who knew the technical stuff well and had business acumen. They thought they were doing “the right thing”…They were building “the bulwark of democracy”.  Their companies rode the wave of US military adventurism and especially the mutual fear and distrust of the Soviet Union. There was a reality to it. After Stalin and the start of the Cold War there was Khrushchev and his blustering.  After the Cuban Missile Crisis the Soviets maintained an illusion of strength as they dumped a huge amount of its wealth into massive armaments — especially tanks — and posed much of this on their Western front arrayed against our armor.  In the Pentagon new leadership — Harold Brown (Secretary of Defense) and Bill Perry (Director of Defense Research and Engineering—DDR&E) in particular — and others devised an alternative to facing massed armor with armor. They determined this would be a disaster whether or not we came out on top. Europe would be ravaged and much of it destroyed.  They (with Perry as the key contributor) came up with the notion of the “Offset Strategy” which was to use our superior technologies to defeat Soviet massed armor. He correctly gauged the USSR was a Potemkin village — its economy and technology was foundering and there was a growing gap between them and us  technologically. I know the details and history of this — I actually wrote it. The base of this tech leadership came from DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.  

Yes, this led to huge expenses and advances in military technology—but there was an aim.  We thought we were in a zero sum long term game versus the USSR.  The result was 1) we “buried” the USSR as they tried to keep building more systems to match the US; 2) when the USSR collapsed we had a massive advanced arsenal of smart weapons and sensor systems and such which far surpassed anything that anybody else had. Perry himself on becoming SecDef under Clinton explicitly told defense contractors that the halcyon days were over.  Defense budgets were going to shrink.  Retrenchment with mergers was necessary.  

Then what? 

A new “enemy” came to the fore. Al Queda and the Middle East became the focus with the Global War on Terror. ISIS arose.  Budgets burgeoned.  What was to be a reasoned cutback in our military was reversed under true champions of the Military Industrial Complex—Rumsfeld and Cheney. 

And now we’ve got the likes of Hogsbreath who has only massive use of force against anything as his mantra—so much so he renamed DoD the Department of War.  

While I’m not persuaded that Raytheon, Northrop or LockMart,  et al, are responsible for this turn of events, it’s pretty clear that the “bomb’em back to the Stone Age” thinking of Hogsbreath and his troglodyte brethren certainly feeds their bottom lines. 

The defense company CEOs I knew would abhor what Trump & Co. have done to US national security and particularly what’s been done to our NATO partnership. They and their successors did not make the decisions to attack Venezuela or Iran. These decisions belong to Trumphuk, Hogsbreath, and their partner in crime—Lil’Marco. They broke it, they own it.