Editor's note: This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

On June 3rd, President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that lifted the government’s debt ceiling and capped some categories of government spending. The big winner was — surprise, surprise! — the Pentagon.

Congress spared military-related programs any cuts while freezing all other categories of discretionary spending at the fiscal year 2023 level (except support for veterans). Indeed, lawmakers set the budget for the Pentagon and for other national security programs like nuclear-related work developing nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy at the level requested in the administration’s Fiscal Year 2024 budget proposal — a 3.3% increase in military spending to a whopping total of $886 billion. Consider that preferential treatment of the first order and, mind you, for the only government agency that’s failed to pass a single financial audit!

Even so, that $886 billion hike in Pentagon and related spending is likely to prove just a floor, not a ceiling, on what will be allocated for “national defense” next year. An analysis of the deal by the Wall Street Journal found that spending on the Pentagon and veterans’ care — neither of which is frozen in the agreement — is likely to pass $1 trillion next year.

Compare that to the $637 billion left for the rest of the government’s discretionary budget. In other words, public health, environmental protection, housing, transportation, and almost everything else the government undertakes will have to make do with not even 45% of the federal government’s discretionary budget, less than what would be needed to keep up with inflation. (Forget addressing unmet needs in this country.)

And count on one thing: national security spending is likely to increase even more, thanks to a huge (if little-noticed) loophole in that budget deal, one that hawks in Congress are already salivating over how best to exploit. Yes, that loophole is easy to miss, given the bureaucratese used to explain it, but its potential impact on soaring military budgets couldn’t be clearer. In its analysis of the budget deal, the Congressional Budget Office noted that “funding designated as an emergency requirement or for overseas contingency operations would not be constrained” by anything the senators and House congressional representatives had agreed to.

As we should have learned from the 20 years of all-American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the term “overseas contingency” can be stretched to cover almost anything the Pentagon wants to spend your tax dollars on. In fact, there was even an “Overseas Contingency Operations” (OCO) account supposedly reserved for funding this country’s seemingly never-ending post-9/11 wars. And it certainly was used to fund them, but hundreds of billions of dollars of Pentagon projects that had nothing to do with the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan were funded that way as well. The critics of Pentagon overspending quickly dubbed it that department’s “slush fund.”

So, prepare yourself for “Slush Fund II” (coming soon to a theater near you). This time the vehicle for padding the Pentagon budget is likely to be the next military aid package for Ukraine, which will likely be put forward as an emergency bill later this year. Expect that package to include not only aid to help Ukraine fend off Russia’s ongoing brutal invasion but tens of billions of dollars more to — yes, of course! — pump up the Pentagon’s already bloated budget.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) made just such a point in talking with reporters shortly after the debt-ceiling deal was passed by Congress. “There will be a day before too long,” he told them, “where we’ll have to deal with the Ukrainian situation. And that will create an opportunity for me and others to fill in the deficiencies that exist from this budget deal.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) made a similar point in a statement on the Senate floor during the debate over that deal. “The debt ceiling deal,” he said, “does nothing to limit the Senate’s ability to appropriate emergency/supplemental funds to ensure our military capabilities are sufficient to deter China, Russia, and our other adversaries and respond to ongoing and growing national security threats.”

One potential (and surprising) snag in the future plans of those Pentagon budget boosters in both parties may be the position of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). He has, in fact, described efforts to increase Pentagon spending beyond the level set in the recent budget deal as “part of the problem.” For the moment at least, he openly opposes producing an emergency package to increase the Pentagon budget, saying:

“The last five audits the Department of Defense [have] failed. So there’s a lot of places for reform [where] we can have a lot of savings. We’ve plussed it up. This is the most money we’ve ever spent on defense — this is the most money anyone in the world has ever spent on defense. So I don’t think the first answer is to do a supplemental.”

The Massive Overfunding of the Pentagon

The Department of Defense is, of course, already massively overfunded. That $886 billion figure is among the highest ever — hundreds of billions of dollars more than at the peak of the Korean or Vietnam wars or during the most intensely combative years of the Cold War. It’s higher than the combined military budgets of the next 10 countries combined, most of whom are, in any case, U.S. allies. And it’s estimated to be three times what the Chinese military, the Pentagon’s “pacing threat,” receives annually. Consider it an irony that actually “keeping pace” with China would involve a massive cut in military spending, not an increase in the Pentagon’s bloated budget.

It also should go without saying that preparations to effectively defend the United States and its allies could be achieved for so much less than is currently lavished on the Pentagon. A new approach could easily save significantly more than $100 billion in fiscal year 2024, as proposed by Representatives Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Mark Pocan (D-WI) in the People Over Pentagon Act, the preeminent budget-cut proposal in Congress. An illustrative report released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in late 2021 sketched out three scenarios, all involving a less interventionist, more restrained approach to defense that would include greater reliance on allies. Each option would reduce America’s 1.3-million-strong active military force (by up to one-fifth in one scenario). Total savings from the CBO’s proposed changes would, over a decade, be $1 trillion.

And a more comprehensive approach that shifted away from the current “cover the globe” strategy of being able to fight (though, as the history of this century shows, not always win) wars virtually anywhere on Earth on short notice — without allies, if necessary — could save hundreds of billions more over the next decade. Cutting bureaucracy and making other changes in defense policy could also yield yet more savings. To cite just two examples, reducing the Pentagon’s cohort of more than half-a-million private contract employees and scaling back its nuclear weapons “modernization” program would save significantly more than $300 billion extra over a decade.

But none of this is even remotely likely without concerted public pressure to, as a start, keep members of Congress from adding tens of billions of dollars in spending on parochial military projects that channel funding into their states or districts. And it would also mean pushing back against the propaganda of Pentagon contractors who claim they need ever more money to provide adequate tools to defend the country.

Contractors Crying Wolf

While demanding ever more of our tax dollars, the giant military-industrial corporations are spending all too much of their time simply stuffing the pockets of their shareholders rather than investing in the tools needed to actually defend this country. A recent Department of Defense report found that, from 2010-2019, such companies increased by 73% over the previous decade what they paid their shareholders. Meanwhile, their investment in research, development, and capital assets declined significantly. Still, such corporations claim that, without further Pentagon funding, they can’t afford to invest enough in their businesses to meet future national security challenges, which include ramping up weapons production to provide arms for Ukraine.

In reality, however, the financial data suggests that they simply chose to reward their shareholders over everything and everyone else, even as they experienced steadily improving profit margins and cash generation. In fact, the report pointed out that those companies “generate substantial amounts of cash beyond their needs for operations or capital investment.” So instead of investing further in their businesses, they choose to eat their “seed corn” by prioritizing short-term gains over long-term investments and by “investing” additional profits in their shareholders. And when you eat your seed corn, you have nothing left to plant next year.

Never fear, though, since Congress seems eternally prepared to bail them out. Their businesses, in fact, continue to thrive because Congress authorizes funding for the Pentagon to repeatedly grant them massive contracts, no matter their performance or lack of internal investment. No other industry could get away with such maximalist thinking.

Military contractors outperform similarly sized companies in non-defense industries in eight out of nine key financial metrics — including higher total returns to shareholders (a category where they leave much of the rest of the S&P 500 in the dust). They financially outshine their commercial counterparts for two obvious reasons: first, the government subsidizes so many of their costs; second, the weapons industry is so concentrated that its major firms have little or no competition.

Adding insult to injury, contractors are overcharging the government for the basic weaponry they produce while they rake in cash to enrich their shareholders. In the past 15 years, the Pentagon’s internal watchdog has exposed price gouging by contractors ranging from Boeing and Lockheed Martin to lesser-known companies like TransDigm Group. In 2011, Boeing made about $13 million in excess profits by overcharging the Army for 18 spare parts used in Apache and Chinook helicopters. To put that in perspective, the Army paid $1,678.61 each for a tiny helicopter part that the Pentagon already had in stock at its own warehouse for only $7.71.

The Pentagon found Lockheed Martin and Boeing price gouging together in 2015. They overcharged the military by “hundreds of millions of dollars” for missiles. TransDigm similarly made $16 million by overcharging for spare parts between 2015 and 2017 and even more in the following two years, generating nearly $21 million in excess profits. If you can believe it, there is no legal requirement for such companies to refund the government if they’re exposed for price gouging.

Of course, there’s nothing new about such corporate price gouging, nor is it unique to the arms industry. But it’s especially egregious there, given how heavily the major military contractors depend on the government’s business. Lockheed Martin, the biggest of them, got a staggering 73% of its $66 billion in net sales from the government in 2022. Boeing, which does far more commercial business, still generated 40% of its revenue from the government that year. (Down from 51% in 2020.)

Despite their reliance on government contracts, companies like Boeing seem to be doubling down on practices that often lead to price gouging. According to Bloomberg News, between 2020 and 2021, Boeing refused to provide the Pentagon with certified cost and pricing data for nearly 11,000 spare parts on a single Air Force contract. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative John Garamendi (D-CA) have demanded that the Pentagon investigate since, without such information, the department will continue to be hard-pressed to ensure that it’s paying anything like a fair price, whatever its purchases.

Curbing the Special Interest Politics of “Defense”

Reining in rip-offs and corruption on the part of weapons contractors large and small could save the American taxpayer untold billions of dollars. And curbing special-interest politics on the part of the denizens of the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) could help open the way towards the development of a truly defensive global military strategy rather than the current interventionist approach that has embroiled the United States in the devastating and counterproductive wars of this century.

One modest step towards reining in the power of the arms lobby would be to revamp the campaign finance system by providing federal matching funds, thereby diluting the influential nature of the tens of millions in campaign contributions the arms industry makes every election cycle. In addition, prohibiting retiring top military officers from going to work for arms-making companies — or, at least, extending the cooling off period to at least four years before they can do so, as proposed by Senator Warren — would also help reduce the undue influence exerted by the MICC.

Last but not least, steps could be taken to prevent the military services from giving Congress their annual wish lists — officially known as “unfunded priorities lists” — of items they want added to the Pentagon budget. After all, those are but another tool allowing members of Congress to add billions more than what the Pentagon has even asked for to that department’s budget.

Whether such reforms alone, if adopted, would be enough to truly roll back excess Pentagon spending remains to be seen. Without them, however, count on one thing: the department’s budget will almost certainly continue to soar, undoubtedly reaching $1 trillion or more annually within just the next few years. Americans can’t afford to let that happen.

Copyright 2023 William D. Hartung and Julia Gledhill

Featured image: Pentagon by Thomas Hawk is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 / Flickr

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

Julia Gledhill, a TomDispatch regular, is an analyst at the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight.

William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of "More Money, Less Security: Pentagon Spending and Strategy in the Biden Administration."

Gledhill and Hartung: Wasting Away at the Pentagon

Recently, New York Times reporter Eric Lipton produced a remarkable piece on a group of small, supposedly fleet (as in speedy) U.S. naval vessels called littoral combat ships. Produced by Fincantieri Marinette Marine in partnership with Lockheed Martin, one of the five weapons-making giants of the military-industrial complex, their final cost proved to be $500 million each — about $280 million dollars more than initially proposed. In a way, all you need to know from Lipton’s report is that, after just four years, the Pentagon recently decided to retire nine of those vessels. No matter that they were designed to last a quarter of a century, “operate in coastal waters, and hunt down enemy submarines, destroy anti-ship mines, and repel attacks from small boats like those often operated by Iran.”

Why? Reasons abound. Their engines proved flawed. They are anything but speedy and incredibly vulnerable to anti-ship missiles or mines. They’re also “gas hogs,” which limits their range, and remarkably incapable of hunting down submarines. In short, those littoral combat ships are all-too-literal floating disasters. No wonder they’ve been dubbed by some in the Pentagon “little crappy ships.” So, the Navy decided retirement was in order.

But wait! That’s anything but the end of Lipton’s tale. On hearing of the Navy’s decision, he writes, “A consortium of players with economic ties to the ships — led by a trade association whose members had just secured contracts worth up to $3 billion to do repairs and supply work on them — mobilized to pressure Congress to block the plan, with phone calls, emails and visits to Washington to press lawmakers to intervene.” They targeted “members of Congress who represent communities with large Navy stations and have collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the same military contractors that help maintain and operate these ships.”

And I know you’ll be shocked by this, but it worked. Congress added amendments to the 2022 spending bill that stopped the Navy from retiring at least five of those nine ships.

Now, in the context of the military-industrial (and yes, you can indeed add -congressional to that) complex, consider Lipton’s article a perfect parable for our all-American world of 2023. And with that in mind, let Pentagon experts and TomDispatch regulars Julia Gledhill and William Hartung take you on a balloon ride … oops, sorry, that’s probably the wrong image to use right now… over that very complex and the waste and wasteful weaponry it routinely produces (with a distinct helping hand from Congress and your tax dollars). Consider what follows, in fact, a parable from hell. Tom

Merger Mania in the Military-Industrial Complex: Tackling Pentagon Waste Means Battling the Big Weapons Makers and Asking More of Congress

It’s early in the new Congress, but lawmakers are already hotly debating spending and debt levels. As they do so, they risk losing track of an important issue hiding in plain sight: massive Pentagon waste. At least in theory, combating such excess could offer members of both parties common ground as they start the new budget cycle. But there are many obstacles to pursuing such a commonsense agenda.

Pentagon waste is a longstanding issue in desperate need of meaningful action. Last November, the Department of Defense once again failed to pass even a basic audit, as it had several times before. In fact, independent auditors weren’t even able to assess the Pentagon’s full financial picture because they couldn’t gather all the necessary information to complete an evaluation. In some ways, that should have been devastating, the equivalent of a child receiving an incomplete on an end-of-year report card. No less alarming, the Pentagon couldn’t even account for about 61% of its $3.5 trillion in assets. Yet the last Congress still approved $858 billion in defense programs for fiscal year 2023, a full $45 billion more than even the Biden administration requested.

Spending levels aside, poor financial management has a serious negative impact on both service members and taxpayers. Last month, for example, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) revealed that the Pentagon can’t account for at least $220 billion worth of its property, including such basics as ammunition, missiles, torpedoes, and their component parts. For its part, Congress (and so the average taxpayer) doesn’t have the faintest idea how much it’s spent on weapons or their components distributed to contractors for maintenance and upgrades. Worse, the GAO reports that the $220 billion in unaccounted-for equipment and parts is “likely significantly understated.”

Such irresponsible financial management also applies to Pentagon weapons purchases, creating another set of problems. The Department of Defense commits staggering numbers of taxpayer dollars to new weapons programs without doing its due diligence, all too often resulting in dysfunctional systems. The GAO has reported on this issue for 20 years and yet there’s been little discernible change in Pentagon behavior.

There is a better way, though. For example, in its most recent Annual Weapons Systems Assessment Report, the GAO notes that obtaining basic information at critical points in the weapons-buying process produces better cost and delivery outcomes. In defense-speak, this is called “knowledge-based acquisition.” Of course, requiring crucial information about a program before proceeding to its development stage should be a no-brainer. Yet the Pentagon has wasted untold billions of dollars on ill-functioning weaponry like the F-35 combat aircraft by proceeding to the development stage without faintly adequate information.

And the status quo guarantees future disasters like the F-35. According to the GAO, more than half of the major defense-acquisition programs it reviewed in fiscal year 2022 “did not demonstrate critical technologies in a realistic environment before beginning system development.” That’s like buying a house without checking whether the water pressure is adequate or the roof leaks — or, in the case of the F-35, a few thousand houses. An independent assessment of that fighter jet in fiscal year 2021 found more than 800 unresolved deficiencies, six of which are so serious that they may cause death or serious injury to those operating the plane, or critically restrict its capabilities in a combat setting. In the 20 years since the program began, the Pentagon has yet to approve that deeply deficient, wildly expensive plane for full production. Put another way, it has already spent nearly $200 billion on a system that may never actually be fully ready for combat.

Aside from the fact that the F-35’s engine doesn’t work, the main reason the Pentagon hasn’t gone full speed ahead on production is that even its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, can’t assess the aircraft’s performance. Why? Because the company hasn’t finished developing the simulator required to properly test it. Still, the money keeps flowing and, by current estimates, the program’s lifecycle cost will exceed $1.7 trillion, making it one of the most expensive weapon programs in Pentagon history.

Looking Down from the (Capitol) Hilltop

Pentagon waste is, of course, nothing new. Still, the need to trim the fat only grows more urgent as this country faces mounting security challenges ranging from the increasing devastation of climate change to strategic competition with other powers. The war in Ukraine is already straining the Pentagon’s buying system in striking new ways. As the need to get weapons out the door quickly becomes its number one priority, its penchant for wasting taxpayer dollars will undoubtedly only grow worse.

Still, there are reforms that could quickly improve the situation. There’s no need for Congress or the Pentagon to reinvent the wheel, since the steps toward making weapons-buying more accountable have been clear for years — as have the roadblocks along the way.

One of the biggest obstacles to reform is that so many lawmakers have vested interests in a hands-off approach to the Pentagon budget. As a start, striking numbers of them have instant conflicts of interest with respect to the defense industry, since they own stock in major weapons-making firms. Those companies make major campaign contributions to keep the lawmakers in their camp. Open Secrets.org, a group that tracks money in politics, reported, for instance, that, in the 2020 election cycle, the arms sector contributed $50 million to political candidates and their committees.

To mask such obvious conflicts of interest and their wasteful consequences, lawmakers generally prefer to change the subject. When the Pentagon budget is threatened with even modest reductions, they routinely trot out tired arguments about how such enormous sums create jobs, jobs, and more jobs. Forget that the data shows education spending produces more than twice as many jobs, while clean energy and healthcare generate 50% more. In short, taxpayers would be far better off if Congress repurposed significant amounts of Pentagon spending for more productive endeavors.

Beyond long-overdue campaign finance reform and a congressional stock-trading ban, lawmakers have a lot of ground to cover when it comes to making Pentagon spending more accountable. The GAO has clear recommendations for ways to mitigate the risks and challenges of prospective weapons programs before making investment decisions. It has also recommended developing significantly better ways of assessing “military readiness” (the fitness of units to engage in combat). Too often, an alleged lack of readiness is used as another excuse to further pump up the Pentagon budget. The Congressional Research Service has, however, pointed out that Congress doesn’t even have a standard definition of military readiness, so how can legislators begin to evaluate the real-world impact of the hundreds of billions of dollars they routinely authorize for the Department of Defense?

The bottom line is simple enough: Congress needs to cut the Pentagon budget dramatically. It’s not only outrageously oversized, but some parts of it are genuinely dangerous. Take, for instance, the newest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) now being prepared by Northrop Grumman for a prospective $264 billion over its lifetime. Such missiles will only increase the risk of an accidental nuclear war because a president will have just minutes to decide whether to launch them in a crisis (and once they’re launched, you can’t take them back).

Unfortunately, lawmakers have proven remarkably unwilling to address the issue of Pentagon waste. Take the chair of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, for example. The new incumbent Ken Calvert (R-CA) recently offered this boilerplate response on the subject:

Despite various reports on budget numbers, while I support reforms that will yield cost savings in any government program, I do not support cuts to national security that would negatively impact readiness or slow our ability to deliver capability to the warfighter.

Never mind that Congress can’t assess military readiness, his statement obscures the fact that he undoubtedly intends to press for even higher budgets, while threatening to make the search for “waste” a modest sideshow.

Such an approach, of course, directly benefits politicians like Calvert. After all, he was the second-highest recipient of defense-industry contributions in Congress between 2021 and 2022 at $415,850. Only current House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-AL) received more. So don’t expect either of them to go after the F-35, despite its cost overruns and dismal performance, or any other major weapons system.

In fact, last December, Rogers said all too bluntly that his priority this year would be “no cuts whatsoever to defense spending.” In January, he turned around and told a Defense News reporter, “We’re going to start meeting right away about what I see as threats and challenges that we’ve got to meet… because we intend to do some cutting. There’s some legacy systems and fat. There’s a lot that can be taken out.” Count on one thing, though, as with Calvert, Rogers’ idea of what can be “taken out” will not include spending on any of the Pentagon’s costliest weapons programs.

Still, these days even retiring some old weapons programs would count as a modest victory in Washington. Rogers and Adam Smith (D-WA), the ranking Democrat on the armed services committee, do appear to agree on the importance of dumping outmoded systems, so maybe they’ll actually trim a little fat.

Thankfully, there are a number of lawmakers across the ideological spectrum who are genuinely interested in broader Pentagon spending cuts. While some progressive Democrats press for a smaller Pentagon budget and refocusing “national security” on people, not corporations, a few on the Republican right argue for military cuts with the debt ceiling in mind. Unfortunately, supporters of such reductions are fighting an uphill battle.

Contractors First, Taxpayers Last

Members of Congress routinely favor major weapons makers over the needs of taxpayers and military personnel. As lawmakers fight for military contracts that will generate revenue in their districts or states, they have become remarkably complicit in the consolidation of the industrial part of the military-industrial complex, which threatens actual national security, in part by reducing corporate competition.

For decades, Congress stood by while weapons companies gobbled each other up through mergers and acquisitions. The result: the five largest contractors — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — have, in recent years, split a staggering $150 billion-plus in Pentagon funding annually, often in “sole-source contracts” that virtually guarantee overcharging and cost overruns.

In 2015, for instance, Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest weapons manufacturer, acquired Sikorsky aircraft for $9 billion. At the time, the Pentagon expressed some concern about the impact of corporate conglomeration, without actually opposing the deal because, as the Justice Department decided, Sikorsky wasn’t a direct competitor. It manufactured helicopters and Lockheed didn’t. The Justice Department later rebuked Frank Kendall, a Pentagon official who expressed concerns about the deal, while pushing back on his calls for a more formal Pentagon role in potentially blocking such mergers.

Three years later, Northrop Grumman acquired Orbital ATK, then the biggest manufacturer of rocket motors in the country. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) imposed guardrails on the deal because Northrop also made missiles and acquiring a company that produced motors for its missiles could give it an unfair advantage over other missile manufacturers. Still, the merger went through.

In 2019, L3 Technologies and the Harris Corporation combined in a “merger of equals” to create L3Harris, the sixth-largest defense contractor. Both companies were the sole suppliers of critical components for the military’s night-vision equipment. As a result, the Justice Department concluded that the merger would monopolize that technology and required Harris to sell its night-vision business. The company is now, however, trying to acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne, the last remaining independent supplier of missile propulsion systems in the United States. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) recently called on the FTC to block the deal, arguing that it would decrease competition in rocket motors.

In 2020, Raytheon and United Technologies combined in the biggest defense merger in decades, valued at about $121 billion. The resulting company, Raytheon Technologies, now an aerospace conglomerate, has established itself as a global supplier of everything from jet engines to missiles. As this country’s second-biggest weapons contractor, only Lockheed Martin outdoes it in annual defense revenues.

It is, of course, long past time for Congress to push back against such merger mania in the arms industry and the wild Pentagon overspending, waste, and poor weaponry that goes with it. Reducing the political clout of the major weapons makers would do more than just save billions of tax dollars. It just might prompt a broader debate about the purpose of a Pentagon budget now rising toward the trillion-dollar mark annually, a sum that would undermine the very concept of defense.

Hartung and Gledhill: How the Arms Industry Scams the Taxpayer

Yep, you’ve read this before, haven’t you? Once again, heat records were set over Labor Day weekend from California to Colorado as the West, in a historic megadrought, continues to burn, with fierce fires bursting out and some areas experiencing temperatures 20 degrees above the norm for this season. Yawn…

And ho-hum as well: With Covid officially more or less over, masking in this country largely left to the dead, and a mere 380 or so of us a day (yes, you read that right!) still dying from the disease that’s slaughtered more than a million Americans, with a new booster arriving but sure to be underused, and another nearly 40,000 of us hospitalized by the pandemic at any moment, all’s well in this nation, right?

Oh, and then there was that state capital, Jackson, Mississippi, which, after massive floods, couldn’t provide its inhabitants with drinking water for days on end, thanks in part to decades of deferred maintenance on a failing water treatment plant. But, honestly, no big deal, not in the larger scheme of things, right?

And don’t forget that, “post”-pandemic, the reading and math scores of American nine-year-olds have fallen, on average, “by the largest margin in more than 30 years.”

And I almost forgot that hunger has risen in this country by 9% since 2019.

Now, let me turn for a moment to a personal high, I’m 78, at a time when life expectancy in this country has plummeted to 76, the “sharpest two-year decline in nearly 100 years,” so, honestly, I feel great and you should, too (if you happen to be more than 76 yourself, that is)!

And all of that, of course, is after Donald Trump’s presidency but before we’ve felt the full impact of gun sales rising to nearly 20 million a year in a country that may all too literally be coming apart at the seams.

Let me just add that if, however irrationally, any of the above worries you, you should stop fretting right now! Instead, read the latest piece from TomDispatch regulars and Pentagon experts William Hartung and Julia Gledhill and you’ll feel enormous relief. After all, isn’t it an upper to know that, in such times, our congressional representatives, Republicans and Democrats alike, are endlessly ready to raise staggering sums annually… no, not to help you (please!), but to support… yep, the Pentagon and the rest of the military-industrial complex in the fashion they deserve. So, relax, read the piece, and know that this country couldn’t be better defended — or do I mean more defensive? Or, actually, do I mean more offensive? You decide. Tom

Spending Unlimited: Contractors Cash in as Congress Adds Billions to the Pentagon Budget

Congress has spoken when it comes to next year’s Pentagon budget and the results, if they weren’t so in line with past practices, should astonish us all. The House of Representatives voted to add $37 billion and the Senate $45 billion to the administration’s already humongous request for “national defense,” a staggering figure that includes both the Pentagon budget and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. If enacted, the Senate’s sum would push spending on the military to at least $850 billion annually, far more — adjusted for inflation — than at the height of the Korean or Vietnam wars or the peak years of the Cold War.

U.S. military spending is, of course, astronomically high — more than that of the next nine countries combined. Here’s the kicker, though: the Pentagon (an institution that has never passed a comprehensive financial audit) doesn’t even ask for all those yearly spending increases in its budget requests to Congress. Instead, the House and Senate continue to give it extra tens of billions of dollars annually. No matter that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has publicly stated the Pentagon has all it needs to “get the capabilities… to support our operational concepts” without such sums.

It would be one thing if such added funding were at least crafted in line with a carefully considered defense strategy. More often than not, though, much of it goes to multibillion-dollar weapons projects being built in the districts or states of key lawmakers or for items on Pentagon wish lists (formally known as “unfunded priorities lists”). It’s unclear how such items can be “priorities” when they haven’t even made it into the Pentagon’s already enormous official budget request.

In addition, throwing yet more money at a department incapable of managing its current budget only further strains its ability to meet program goals and delivery dates. In other words, it actually impairs military readiness. Whatever limited fiscal discipline the Pentagon has dissipated further when lawmakers arbitrarily increase its budget, despite rampant mismanagement leading to persistent cost overruns and delivery delays on the military’s most expensive (and sometimes least well-conceived) weapons programs.

In short, parochial concerns and special-interest politics regularly trump anything that might pass as in the national interest, while doing no favors to the safety and security of the United States. In the end, most of those extra funds simply pad the bottom lines of major weapons contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Technologies. They certainly don’t help our servicemembers, as congressional supporters of higher Pentagon budgets routinely claim.

A Captured Congress

The leading advocates of more Pentagon spending, Democrats and Republicans alike, generally act to support major contractors in their jurisdictions. Representative Jared Golden (D-ME), a co-sponsor of the House Armed Services Committee proposal to add $37 billion to the Pentagon budget, typically made sure it included funds for a $2 billion guided-missile destroyer to be built at General Dynamics’ shipyard in Bath, Maine.

Similarly, his co-sponsor, Representative Elaine Luria (D-VA), whose district abuts Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News Shipyard, successfully advocated for the inclusion of ample funding to produce aircraft carriers and attack submarines at that complex. Or consider Representative Mike Rogers (R-AL), the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee and a dogged advocate of annually increasing the Pentagon budget by at least 3% to 5% above inflation. He serves a district south of Huntsville, Alabama, dubbed “rocket city” because it’s the home to so many firms that work on missile defense and related projects.

There are even special congressional caucuses devoted solely to increasing Pentagon spending while fending off challenges to specific weapons systems. These range from the House shipbuilding and F-35 caucuses to the Senate ICBM Coalition. That coalition has been especially effective at keeping spending on a future land-based intercontinental ballistic missile dubbed the Sentinel on track, while defeating efforts to significantly reduce the number of ICBMs in the U.S. arsenal. Such “success” has come thanks to the stalwart support of senators from Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming, all states with ICBM bases or involved in major ICBM development and maintenance.

The jobs card is the strongest tool of influence available to the arms industry in its efforts to keep Congress eternally boosting Pentagon spending, but far from the only one. After all, the industrial part of the military-industrial-congressional complex gave more than $35 million in campaign contributions to members of Congress in 2020, the bulk of it going to those on the armed services and defense appropriations committees who have the most sway over the Pentagon budget and what it will be spent on.

So far, in the 2022 election cycle, weapons firms have already donated $3.4 million to members of the House Armed Services Committee, according to an analysis by Open Secrets.org, an organization that tracks campaign spending and political influence. Weapons-making corporations also currently employ nearly 700 lobbyists, more than one for every member of Congress, while spending additional millions to support industry-friendly think tanks that regularly push higher Pentagon spending and a more hawkish foreign policy.

The arms industry has another lever to pull as well when it comes to the personal finances of lawmakers. There are scant, if any, restrictions against members of Congress owning or trading defense company stocks, even those who sit on influential national-security-related committees. In other words, it’s completely legal for them to marry their personal financial interests to those of defense contractors.

The Cost of Coddling Contractors

Legislators arbitrarily inflate Pentagon spending despite clear evidence of corporate greed and repeated failures when it comes to the development of new weapons systems. Under the circumstances, it should be no surprise that weapons acquisitions are on the Government Accountability Office’s “High Risk List,” given their enduring vulnerability to waste and mismanagement. In fact, overfunding an already struggling department only contributes to the development of shoddy products. It allows the Pentagon to fund programs before they’ve been thoroughly tested and evaluated.

Far from strengthening national defense, such lawmakers only reinforce the unbridled greed of weapons contractors. In the process, they ensure future acquisition disasters. In fact, much of the funding Congress adds to the Pentagon budget will be wasted on price gouging, cost overruns, and outright fraud. The most notorious recent case is that of the TransDigm Group, which overcharged the government up to 3,850% for a spare part for one weapons system and 10 to 100 times too much for others.

The total lost: at least $20.8 million. And those figures were based on just a sampling of two-and-a-half years of that company’s sales to the government, nor was it the first time TransDigm had been caught price gouging the Pentagon. Such practices are, in fact, believed to be typical of many defense contractors. A full accounting of such overcharges would undoubtedly amount to billions of dollars annually.

Then there are weapons systems like Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter aircraft and that same company’s Littoral Combat Ship (LCS). Both are costly programs that have proven incapable of carrying out their assigned missions. The F-35 is slated to cost the American taxpayer a staggering $1.7 trillion over its life cycle, making it the most expensive single weapons program ever. Despite problems with its engine performance, maintenance, and basic combat capabilities, both the House and the Senate added even more of them than the Pentagon requested to their latest budget plans. House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith (D-WA) famously remarked that he was tired of “throwing money down that particular rat hole,” but then argued that the F-35 program was too far along to cancel. Its endurance has, in fact, forced the Pentagon to restart older jet fighter production lines like the F-15, developed in the 1970s, to pick up the slack. If the U.S. is going to be forced to buy older fighters anyway, cutting the F-35 could instantly save $200 billion in procurement funding.

Meanwhile, the LCS, a ship without a mission that can’t even defend itself in combat, nonetheless continues to be protected by advocates like Representative Joe Courtney (D-CT), co-chair of the House shipbuilding caucus. The final House and Senate authorization bills prevented the Navy from retiring five of the nine LCS’s that the service had hoped to decommission on the grounds that they would be useless in a potential military faceoff with China (a conflict that should be avoided in any case, given the potentially devastating consequences of a war between two nuclear-armed powers).

No surprise, then, that a substantial part of the tens of billions of dollars Congress is adding to the latest Pentagon budget will directly benefit major weapons contractors at the expense of military personnel. In the House version of the military spending bill, $25 billion — more than two-thirds of its additional funding — is earmarked for weapons procurement and research that will primarily benefit arms contractors.

Only $1 billion of the added funds will be devoted to helping military personnel and their families, even as many of them struggle to find affordable housing or maintain an adequate standard of living. In fact, one in six military families is now food insecure, a devastating reflection of the Pentagon’s true priorities.

In all, the top five weapons contractors — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — split more than $200 billion in “defense” revenue in the last fiscal year, mostly from the Pentagon but also from lucrative foreign arms sales. The new budget proposals will only boost those already astounding figures.

Pushing Back on Contractor Greed

Congress has shown little intent to decouple itself in any way from what’s still known as “the defense industry.” There is, however, a clear path to do so, if the people’s representatives were to band together and start pushing back against the greed of weapons contractors.

Some lawmakers have begun making moves to prevent price gouging while improving weapons-buying practices. The Senate Armed Services Committee, for instance, included in its version of the defense budget a provision to establish a program that would improve contractor performance through financial incentives. Its goal is to make the Pentagon a smarter buyer by addressing two main issues: delivery delays and cost overruns, especially by companies that charge it above-market prices to pad their bottom lines. It would also curb the ability of contractors to overcharge on replacement parts and materials.

The program to prevent further price gouging has a couple of possible paths to President Biden’s desk. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative John Garamendi (D-CA) also included it in the bicameral Stop Price Gouging the Military Act, an ambitious proposal to protect the Pentagon from outrageous contractor overcharges. The bill would close loopholes in existing law that allow companies to eternally rip off the Defense Department.

There are obviously all too many obstacles in the path of eliminating moneyed interests from defense policy, but creating an incentive structure to improve contractor performance and transparency would, at least, be a necessary first step. It might also spur greater public input into such policy-making.

Secrecy, Inc.

Here’s the sad reality of the national security state: we taxpayers will fork over nearly a trillion and a half dollars this year in national security spending and yet the policy-making process behind such outlays will essentially remain out of our control. The Senate Armed Services Committee typically debates and discusses its version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) behind closed doors. The subcommittee hearings open to the public rarely last — and yes, this is not a mistake! — more than 15 minutes. Naturally, the House and Senate will reconcile any differences between their versions in secret, too. In other words, there’s little transparency when it comes to the seemingly blank check our representatives write for our defense every year.

Sadly, such a system allows lawmakers, too many of whom maintain financial stakes in the defense industry, to deliberate over Pentagon spending and other national security matters without real public input. At the Pentagon, in fact, crucial information isn’t just kept private; it’s actively suppressed and the situation has only gotten worse over the years.

Here’s just one example of that process: in January 2022, its Office of the Director of Operational Test & Evaluation issued an annual report on weapons costs and performance. For the first time in more than 30 years, however, it excluded nearly all the basic information needed to assess the Pentagon’s weapons-buying process. Redacting information about 22 major acquisition programs, the director treated data once routinely shared as if it were classified. Given the Pentagon’s rocky track record when it comes to overfunding and under-testing weapons, it’s easy enough to imagine why its officials would work so hard to keep unclassified information private.

Scamming the taxpayer has become a way of life for the national security state. We deserve a more transparent, democratic policy-making process. Our elected officials owe us their allegiance, not the defense-industry giants that make such hefty campaign contributions while beefing up lawmakers’ stock portfolios.

Isn’t it time to end the national-security version of spending unlimited in Washington?