President Trump and the Military-Industrial Complex
By Maggie Hannick
Defense means providing security for a person or a group of people. Our economy provides our people with the goods and services they need to survive. Right now, our economy is being militarized in the name of defense. Many believe more and more investment in the military will make our economy better. Donald Trump, beyond his Twitter rants and spontaneous speeches, has a plan for reform, a plan to make changes in the economy that will support the military-industrial complex. He uses a study from the Pentagon – “Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States” – to achieve his aim. This sounds official and professional for Trump. Strengthening defense and making the US resilient sound like great ideas. These ideas come from the same realm as Trump’s trade wars, with help from his adviser for trade and manufacturing policy, Peter Navarro. This plan has involved not only the President and the Pentagon but also the Department of Commerce, National Intelligence, and many others coming together in an “interagency task force” – composed of 16 groups, 300 experts in different subjects, and several listening sessions of industries like the National Defense Industrial Association – which works with over 1,500 other companies in the sector of defense and advocacy. To touch on the importance of the hundreds of experts involved in this, Trump is using many people with specific expertise, which he certainly does not do for every matter.
Trump believes national security is economic security, they equal each other and are of the same crucial importance and significance. He has made an effort to manufacture weapons in America to help the economy. This aligns with his “America First” policy and nationalist trends. His plan for the Pentagon is to prepare as much as possible for war and help the economy in this preparation, using it for military production. A way to achieve this is to remove the hundreds of vulnerabilities in the economy of defense such as single supporters for weapons and relying on foreign inputs.
Overall, Trump and the Pentagon want more money. Let us keep in mind that the US spends more on the military than the next seven countries combined and five of them are allies of the US. Also, the Pentagon has increased its spending in just two years to an amount larger than Russia’s entire military budget. The US will spend $716 billion in 2019 on Pentagon related spending. Spending this much on the military-industrial complex is not relevant because it involves too much spending for an already overblown sector of our economy.
Conservatives have traditionally criticized the old Soviet Union for doing something similar to what we do now in funding their military-industrial complex. The Soviet Union did, and we might, see a hard transition to not being able to survive with economic changes globally. Shouldn’t conservatives, who didn’t support the Soviet Union’s spending on the military, be opposed to Trump’s tax cuts for the upper class, spending on the Pentagon, and trade wars that are ruining our foreign policy? Shouldn’t the US be avoiding exactly what the Soviet Union did?
A solution to this mess is to take the Pentagon out of the driver’s seat on industrial policy. Creating good jobs in the civilian economy where workers are paid well makes industrial policy better and more effective. Jobs that work to advance the crucial needs of our country, such as those improving infrastructure and energy policies that prevent climate change.
Proponents of these failed policies see the Pentagon as a jobs creation entity and work to prevent changes in the institution’s power and to stop efforts to reform how the US manages the economy, military, and security. For example, the supporters of protecting the current level of military spending have made politicians fear losing jobs in their districts or states if they do not support spending on things such as the F-35 aircraft, which is a disgustingly expensive plane that underperforms and will probably never be used in combat.
By its nature the Pentagon does not use taxpayer money to fix all of our infrastructure problems, help grow the alternative energy sector, improve healthcare, or support education. A study by an economist at the University of Massachusetts – Heidi Garrett-Peltier – titled for the Costs of War Project at Brown University stated that “had the government invested in civilian activities the $230 billion per year wasted on America’s post-9/11 wars, that sum would have created 1.3 million additional jobs.” The fact that military spending is prioritized over job creation in other areas should enrage every American and is an absolute disgrace and injustice. Additionally, one proposal from the Congressional Progressive Caucus found that a $2 trillion infrastructure program that would create and help 2.5 million jobs in its first year.
A recent study showed that the market in renewable energy could hit $2.1 trillion by 2025. This is 20 times the size of the global arms trade currently. In addition, an analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies showed that the US spends 28 times that amount of money on its military. Our country also needs to invest in diplomacy and the State Department which has been underfunded for years. Priorities in the US budget must be adjusted to support the American people, their jobs, education, health, the environment, our diplomatic apparatus, and our country.
