Defund The Pentagon

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"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." ---------- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his Legendary Sermon Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence[1]

The Pentagon is the world's largest polluter and emitter of greenhouse gasses.[2][3] Its annual budget makes up more than half of the united states federal government's total budget and is greater than the next ten nation-states' budgets combined. [4]

You know -- it's funny -- when it rains it pours
They got money for wars but can't feed the poor
~ 2Pac, Keep Ya Head Up[1]

During the 2020 US congressional elections, Representative Cori Bush (MO-1) made a statement:

"If you're having a bad day, just think of all the social services we're going to fund after we defund the Pentagon."

In response to criticism, she tweeted a longer thread:

"Let’s talk about ignorance. Let’s talk about what actually keeps our communities safe... Militarization makes up 64% of our federal budget. Medicare & Health are 6%. Education is 5%. Social Security, Unemployment, and Labor together are 3%. Ignorance is thinking those priorities keep our families safe... The Department of Defense has never passed an independent audit, yet we continue to give them money unchecked... Ignorance is giving weapons of war to local police departments with no accountability or oversight... Yes I want to change our priorities. We can fund Medicare for All, guarantee housing, and enact a Green New Deal. We can make sure no veteran goes unhoused or without care. We can have a government that actually works for us."[5]

PQ pyrolysis

If you needed further proof of Bernie Sanders’s argument that most Americans stand with him on the issues, consider the reaction to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. Despite attacks from the leadership in, or around, both parties, over 80 percent of voters support the litany of proposals advocated by the House resolution: job and income guarantees, universal health care, a cleaner environment, and lower socioeconomic inequality. Americans turn out, yet again, to be far less conservative than elites have maintained over the last half-century. Nowhere has the gap between majority will and elite consensus been more conspicuous or longstanding than on US foreign policy. Trump’s election is perhaps the best demonstration of that fact. But there is strong evidence that most Americans were never “liberal internationalists” either. While it is notable that support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has waned in recent years, in polls Americans have consistently preferred diplomacy to military “solutions” before (and not long after) 9/11. Nonetheless, US soldiers and mercenaries are now prosecuting the latter in 80 countries, nearly half the planet. This situation has prompted the left to call for a comprehensive alternative in US foreign policy. But the question remains, how, exactly, the left can make inroads against the “American empire,” as it is now casually described even on the right. Any talk of dramatically changing foreign policy must give serious attention to reforming the institutions shaping it. In part, that means creating organizations to compete with the “foreign-policy establishment”—“the blob,” to use its apt nickname. But the left might also do well to consider another idea that has fallen into obscurity: converting the military-industrial complex to peacetime work. Since the end of the Cold War, the military has seemingly become “everything”—gas-station operators in Afghanistan, concert promoters in Africa, and now, potential contractors to build Trump’s wall. Yet the defense industry has gone unchecked, even as the evidence is clear that it has corrupted the democratic process. Just as the popularity of the Green New Deal—and its focus on the job guarantee—can help us fight global warming, so too might it go a long way toward humanizing our foreign policy and creating a better economy. Defense conversion is most closely associated with South Dakota Democrat and 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern, who made it his signature issue in Congress. A recession in the mid-1950s and the military cuts following the Cuban missile crisis gave him the opportunity to push the idea through the Senate, and in 1964 he called for a National Economic Conversion Commission (NECC) that would oversee the work. McGovern wanted to get the defense industry out of job creation, recognizing, as many liberal and conservative elites did privately, that the military-industrial complex was essentially a “gigantic WPA.” McGovern also wanted to free up hundreds of millions of federal monies for domestic welfare, to shore up the welfare state. But the Vietnam War killed the project, as his fellow Democrats denounced him as a “radical” in the middle of a war. McGovern drew his ideas from the Columbia economist Seymour Melman, who made defense conversion his lifelong project. In his most famous book, The Permanent War Economy (1974), Melman argued that the military economy was a form of “state capitalism” whose “relentlessly predatory effects” had caused America’s economic decline. Melman brought an economists’ predilection for statistics and an activist’s zeal to what he called “Pentagon capitalism.” Americans, he insisted, had to eliminate unnecessary military spending if they wanted to prevent any future “Vietnam-type interventions.” Melman had a comprehensive vision for defense conversion. He thought a combination of community-based groups, alternative-use committees, and federal mandates (such as a revitalized NECC) to enforce conversion could lead the country out of the war economy. The military-industrial complex, he argued, had robbed Americans of a manufacturing-based economy, with stable wages for the working class. The result was a “post-industrial economy” where wealth was stratified, jobs were scarce, and a few wealthy elites controlled the labor of most workers. It was the inequality produced by the military-industrial complex, he felt, that was the true tragedy of the Cold War, not just military adventurism and bloated defense budgets. How Melman’s conversion plans would have solved the issue of donor pressure—of Pentagon lobbying—remained a question, however, even without Vietnam. Melman’s answer to this problem was to “send representatives to Congress who would reflect a nonmilitarist organization,” but even the most liberal Democrats were consistently opposed to military cuts in their districts, as they would be in later decades. The problem of the profit motive for military contractors, and how military profits insidiously influenced electoral politics and politicians (ones who aimed to squash conversion efforts), plagued reformers of the military-industrial complex. The solution was left to Harvard’s John Kenneth Galbraith, who had a grander vision for defense conversion: nationalizing the military-industrial complex. His argument was straightforward. Arms manufacturers depended on Washington: Congress funded the research and development. Privately made weapons also routinely underperformed, and cost far more than estimated. By converting these already highly concentrated, essentially public firms into governmental nonprofits, Galbraith believed voters could “substantially civilize the incentive structure.” Obviously, nationalizing arms production would not (immediately) eliminate the military-industrial complex. Like Eisenhower, Galbraith understood that private “merchants of war” were no more puppet masters than were generals, shadowy CIA directors, or presidents. All pushed for greater internationalism; all saw their powers, and budgets, grow enormously. But the only real way to shrink the military-industrial complex, to eliminate the private incentives for increased military spending, lay in severing the connections of for-profit business to national security. Nationalization was thus a necessary first step, before any systematic plan for conversion might be implemented. Galbraith expected the proposal to get attention. (Liberals, he said, were finally beginning to show “a certain minimum of courage” about the Pentagon.) Instead… nothing. Conservatives, unironically, cried socialism. Moderates dismissed it as “fantastic.” Paul Nitze, the main author of NSC-68, said voters and politicians would never stand for it: The Pentagon was too important to America’s economy. Former secretary of state Dean Acheson crowed that Galbraith must have fallen under the spell of anti-war radicals. But letters poured in reporting enormous waste and support—from defense-industry workers. Galbraith’s (and Melman’s) biggest supporters in the 1970s were labor unions. Indeed, despite the AFL-CIO’s deep involvement with Cold War foreign policy and support for the Vietnam War, union leaders such as the UAW’s Walter Reuther and the Machinists’ William Winpisinger backed the idea of conversion to a civilian economy. Over 1,000 labor figures even sponsored a “labor for peace” forum in 1972, demanding an end to American involvement in Vietnam and “to turn our country from the path of killing and destruction to the path of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness through peace, dignity, and full employment.” But little changed. Even as Democrats became the more dovish party, few championed conversion. Meanwhile, the defense industry mirrored larger economic trends: declines in manufacturing, wage cuts, and a shift to white-collar labor. Austerity reinforced militarism at home, as defense jobs, with their good pay and benefits, disappeared—to much local anger. Nationally, however, support for more Vietnams remained low, despite a very loud chorus of bipartisan elites advocating incursions in Africa and Latin America in the name of anti-communism. Reagan’s election in 1980 and his subsequent military buildup postponed defense conversion indefinitely. New York Democratic Representative Ted Weiss—who, like McGovern, was a discipline of Melman—consistently proposed conversion legislation once in office after 1977. House majority leader (and later speaker) Jim Wright remained committed to Weiss’s legislation for much of his tenure; but Reagan, congressional Republicans, and the Department of Defense killed Weiss’s (and Wright’s) bills by the mid-1980s. The unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union forced conversion back onto the table. A series of grassroots campaigns with names such as the Arizona Council for Economic Conversion and the Coalition to Stop the Trident (many of them led by volunteers) waged across the country in the late 1980s and early 1990s pushed for alternative sources of revenue to the Pentagon. Faced with these pressures, 1992 presidential candidate Bill Clinton, who started his political career with McGovern, expressed interest in cutting defense to invest in transportation infrastructure, including “a high-speed rail network.” Yet again, however, liberals and conservatives proved no different in government, voting to keep the military-industrial complex going, even though the United States had become the world’s first truly uncontested superpower. It remains such. And yet the complex has grown exponentially. Nonetheless, potential countervailing forces remain. Considering the overwhelming support for the Green New Deal, which cleverly seeks to reduce global warming through full employment, the left might do well to ground its foreign-policy visions in reform of the military-industrial complex itself. Direct job-creation programs have always been popular, despite opposition from Republican and (more often) Democratic elites. The idea of establishing a public option, as it were, for unprofitable but economically productive and socially valuable work has also consistently won remarkable majorities. Herein lies an opportunity for proponents of the Green New Deal to regulate military contractors and finance job growth by converting the military-industrial complex to peaceful ends. Galbraith’s idea of nationalizing the industry, likewise, offers a practical means for curbing the enormous pressure that military spending bears on elections. In so doing, it also holds out the promise of changing the huge gap between the public and the elite on US foreign policy. Because it is a private industry, free to lobby, Pentagon contractors reinforce the bipartisan echo chamber, from hiring ex-military brass and pundits without diplomatic or scholarly backgrounds to dominate the media conversation, to funding the “think tanks” on which Democratic and Republican presidents rely. The military-industrial complex is not just a product of the “foreign-policy establishment.” It protects and strengthens that establishment. It has served as too great a barrel of pork for elected officials, well-heeled donors, and (more understandably) US workers—so much that private contractors, now, reap almost 50 percent of the military budget. Any effort to reform this “industry,” to figure out how it can be a slave, not a master, of the public interest, is crucial. And conversion (via nationalization) might be one.

  • A specter haunts the USA — the specter of a military-industrial complex. This association of high-tech sadists will strengthen their spiritual hold on the nation absent our alertness & action at the policy level // Eisenhower 61 (President Dwight David -- Nazi killer -- “Farewell Address,” Jan 17)

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peace time, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence--economic, political, even spiritual--is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

  • In order to address a docket of intractable crises—climate change, health care and job automation, to name just a few—we must seize the defense base, take stock of its technoscientific assets, and reimagine the “means of invention” // Jacobin Magazine 19 (Pankaj Mehta, associate professor of physics at Boston University and a member of the Boston chapter of Science for the People, Aug 27, “Defense Spending: the Endless Frontier” <https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/defense-spending-the-endless-frontier>)

At any given time, the United States has four hundred W78 and W87 thermonuclear warheads on hair-trigger alert, loaded on intercontinental ballistic missiles that can travel eight thousand miles, capable of destroying every building and living creature within a four-mile radius. Since 2001, unmanned air vehicles piloted from a Nevada airbase have been used to kill ten thousand people on the other side of the world, many of them civilians. General Atomics’s MQ-9 Reaper drone has visual, infrared, and laser-based sensors for targeting, technology for real-time video streaming, multiple types of radar, and supports a range of bombs and missiles to rain death. Weapons like these did not exist fifty years ago. There is no “natural” scientific or technological progression that accounts for their emergence. They require tremendous amounts of money to develop and immense scientific expertise employed precisely to these ends, highlighting an obvious yet often ignored truth: the military plays a central role in funding and shaping the modern scientific enterprise — an arrangement observers have called the “military-industrial-academic complex.” Scientists have always developed weapons for their patrons. In 200 BC, Archimedes was perfecting catapults and grappling hooks for the rulers of Syracuse. However, the modern relationship between science, capitalism, and the military has its origins in the tremendous mobilization of scientists and engineers during the Second World War through the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) and the Manhattan Project (which resulted in the atomic bomb). Between 1938 and 1945, the US budget for military research and development increased nearly seventyfold from $23 million to $1.6 billion. The technological successes of World War II transformed the perception of scientific research in the eyes of military, industry, and government officials. The shift in sentiment was captured in a seminal 1945 report entitled “Science, the Endless Frontier” by Vannevar Bush, the president of the OSRD. Bush argued that “the research scientists of the country must be called upon to continue in peacetime some substantial portion of those types of contribution to national security which they have made so effectively during the stress of the present war” and that basic scientific research was necessary to “make new and better and cheaper products” and create new jobs. The Bush report profoundly shaped policymakers’ views on the role of science in society. Increasingly, the modern scientific enterprise was conceived as a military-Keynesian project meant to boost both the military might of the United States and capitalist profit-making. The Korean War and fears surrounding the Soviets’ launch of their Sputnik satellite cemented this vision, fueling broad enthusiasm among policymakers for expanding science funding. American science had become permanently yoked to military and corporate prerogatives. In almost all discussions of science, expenditures on scientific research (“Research”) are lumped together with money spent on developing new products (“Development”) into a single category: Research and Development (often abbreviated R&D). The Research subclassification encompasses both basic research — research without “any particular application or use in view” — and applied research — research “directed primarily towards a specific practical aim or objective.” Development, on the other hand, is geared toward exploiting knowledge gained from research to make “new products or processes or improving existing products or processes.” Since the 1950s, the United States has spent roughly 1 percent of its GDP for scientific R&D (in 2018, about $116 billion). But within the broad category of scientific R&D, military spending dominates. This pattern was most evident during the Cold War years, when military R&D consistently accounted for 60–80 percent of total R&D spending. Today, military R&D spending accounts for nearly half of all science spending by the federal government ($70 billion in 2018). The vast majority of these funds (more than $50 billion a year) go directly to developing conventional or nuclear weapons. By contrast, the total amount allocated for basic research in 2018 across all federal agencies in all fields was just under $37 billion. Universities are a major beneficiary of military funding. MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory gets more than a billion dollars a year from the military for everything from ballistic missile defense to intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems and technology. Penn State’s Applied Research Laboratory — one of fourteen Department of Defense University Affiliated Research Centers — recently received more than $2 billion from the Navy. Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory employs more than 6,300 people and touts its role in inventing numerous weapons, including “the world’s first long-range, autonomous, precision guided weapon.” The picture that emerges is clear. The modern scientific enterprise, especially outside of the life sciences, is intimately and directly tied to the military-industrial complex. Basic research — what most people think of when they hear the word “science” — accounts for less than a third of “science funding,” significantly less than what is spent every year on developing weapons. These numbers lay bare the deep contradiction at the heart of the postwar relationship between science and the ruling class. Scientists were finally given the autonomy and institutional resources to practice their craft, but, disproportionately, these resources were earmarked for problems, fields, and technologies with a military and corporate bent. Resources were available for certain questions, but other topics were declared not “fundable” and removed from acceptable pursuit. Scientists were acutely aware of the shift. As physicist Charlie Schwartz quipped: [They] know which side their bread is buttered on … You don’t do things that might offend the powers that be. So you claim to be neutral and apolitical and resist any attempts that might put you in a position where you might encourage the disfavor of important people (that is, those who have the money to give out). Yet, for a brief period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this status quo was dramatically challenged. Radical scientists inspired by new social movements — particularly the antiwar movement — began developing an alternative vision of science. They started to ask heretical questions: “Why are we scientists? For whose benefit do we work? What is the full measure of our moral and social responsibility?” Activists groups such as Science for the People held protests at major scientific meetings, wrote cutting edge exposés calling out the participation of fellow scientists in military-funded think tanks like JASON, and attempted to pass resolutions in major professional societies condemning the role of the military in scientific research. Students and academics directly challenged universities’ role in military research. They occupied buildings and implored scientists to cease weapons research and instead to direct their energies toward solving social problems. Even normally reticent and conservative faculty formed new groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists. The radical science movement envisioned a different kind of science, one that could free itself from the military-industrial complex and truly tackle the needs of society. But with the defeat of the social movements from which it drew its inspiration, this emancipatory vision of science largely disappeared from the scientific community. The ascendancy of neoliberalism and a renewed military spending push by the Reagan administration reinvigorated the military-industrial-academic complex. Under Reagan, science not directly tied to military interests suffered, while military research prospered. Non-defense R&D fell by nearly $10 billion, from $42 billion in 1980 to $32 billion in 1988, while military R&D rose from $40 billion to $73 billion. The legacy of these defeats is felt today. It is still much easier to get funding to develop new bombs than to get the resources to develop new, potentially life-saving antibiotics. Scientists struggling to secure financial support often turn to the military to survive. In a publish-or-perish world where scientists are judged on how many research dollars they bring to their university, the military is often the only realistic source of funding. In this way, the military sets the broad agenda of what science gets done, what questions get asked, and who benefits. To be sure, scientists try hard to create autonomous spaces for their work, but their ability to do so is severely curtailed by the immense power wielded by the military-industrial-academic complex. Yet new movements are emerging, and tackling pressing problems such as climate change will require a radical reenvisioning of our economy. For policies such as the Green New Deal to be truly successful at reaching zero emissions while simultaneously improving the lives of ordinary people, we will need massive investments in new scientific research. This is a daunting prospect. But if we have learned anything from the last century, it is that scientists with ample resources and clearly defined goals can achieve the seemingly impossible. If scientists can make missiles that fly thousands of miles carrying nuclear bombs, and drones that can be controlled from halfway across the world, they can certainly develop technology to actually benefit humanity.

Sources

  1. ↑ https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
  2. ↑ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2022/10/pentagon-climate-change-neta-crawford-book/#:~:text=The%20US%20military%20is%20the,the%20emissions%20of%20most%20countries.
  3. ↑ https://earth.org/us-military-pollution/
  4. ↑ https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2023/04/the-united-states-spends-more-on-defense-than-the-next-10-countries-combined
  5. ↑ https://www.audacy.com/kmox/news/politics/cori-bush-explains-why-she-wants-to-defund-the-pentagon
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