We've Been Had

If the American public only knew—really understood—the jaw-droppingly massive amount of their hard-scrabble taxpayer dollars which the Bush administration has spent on military machines that are outdated, useless, and pure boondogglism, I wonder what would happen. If they only knew how they are still being swindled, robbed blind, while military industrialists sit back chuckling at the latest avowals by presidential candidates to continue the never-ending "war on terror."

It's not like it's some big secret. There's plenty of information readily available if you only take a look. The basic outline behind the biggest hornswoggle in world history—to the tune of trillions—is this:

When the Cold War ended, Bush I and Clinton began scaling back military spending. The so-called "peace dividend" began to appear in government budget surpluses. The ever-powerful-in-Washington military industrial complex started whining and complaining—even getting government bailouts—because they weren't reaping as much profit as when they had the Soviets to justify continually churning out more guns, bullets, bombs and planes.

Then came "the gift of 9/11," as author Robert Scheer calls it. (9/11 truth activists would go further and call it something else, but never mind.) With a new enemy to fight—terror!, or tare! as Bush II pronounces it—the war interests began pushing their products again, some of them products which were designed to fight a completely different type of enemy, decades before, and the government of the neo-cons lavished them with no-bid contracts. Some of the people dispensing the budgets were in a revolving-door situation between the government and those companies receiving contracts, by the way.

A lot of it was just unnecessary cronyism—although we were told our very safety depended on it. And now, today, the New York Times reports, the Bush administration will slink back to the swamp from which it came leaving a $482 billion deficit. They have endangered the future prosperity and even stability of this country, and all just to make themselves and their campaign-contributing buddies rich.

But the real question is how to stop it. How to lasso this runaway military spending with some political pressure and some plain old-fashioned logic. The so-called war on terror—arguably an invention; to equate terrorism with the Soviet threat, as even Barack Obama has done recently, is a stroke of irrationality that would make Mr. Spock's Vulcan blood boil—cannot be fought with outmoded weapons systems that benefit only the people who sell them.

"Consider," as Robert Scheer writes in the Pornography of Power (2008), "the stunning example of Lockheed Martin's F-22 Raptor fighter, at nearly $360 million a pop, with its stealth cover and elaborate electronics designed to counter threatened leaps in Soviet war-fighting capability that had evaporated with the end of the Cold War. The Center for Defense Information published an article...on August 18, 2005, by Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, in which he wrote that the F-22 Raptor 'is the most unnecessary weapon system being built by the Pentagon. In fact, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld tried to do away with it in the summer of 2002 but backed off when his Air Force secretary threatened to resign over the issue. It was originally designed to achieve air superiority over Soviet fighter jets, which will never be built.'

"The only good thing to say about this plane is that the Pentagon is only planning to buy around $65 billion worth, which is considerably less than the $300 billion price tag for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. That aircraft is also manufactured by Lockheed Martin, the nation's top defense contractor, and the one that doles out the most in campaign contributions. Whatever the value of these planes, why should 9/11 be cited by their proponents as justification for their purchase? As Korb points out, 'The performance of the current generation of Air Force fighters in Afghanistan and Iraq makes it clear that the Air Force already has the capability to achieve air superiority against any enemies. The Taliban, al Qaeda, and Iraqi insurgents do not have jet fighters for the Raptor to conquer.'

"On September 9, 2001, two days before the al Qaeda attacks, Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News carried a report on the strenuous efforts of Lockheed to reverse congressional cut in the F-22 fighter jet program. With profit and jobs at stake, lobbyists for the corporations, suppliers, and labor unions involved in the plane's production were scurrying around Capitol Hill under Lockheed's direction. It was not an easy sell, since the proposed plan no longer enjoyed even the most remote claim to military purpose, and according to the Knight Ridder article, 'what critics say is a classic example of the 'military industrial complex' at wok,' the lobbying centered more on jobs than on national security.

"Two days later, that all changed. Even though the F-22 had no conceivable role in preventing future hijackings of civilian planes or any other imagines terrorist tactic, the stealth plane and every other weapons system rendered obsolete with the end of the Cold War were suddenly repackaged as antiterrorist weapons. The most ludicrous example of the new antiterrorist mission created for the F-22 was the use of the plane to fly over Florida to protect the launch of space shuttles, presumably from an alien air force capable of shooting down older F-16 planes that might have bee assigned to the task. The point is that the existing fighter fleet was more than adequate to handle any intrusion by a more mundane invader of Florida's skies...

"But the stealthier F-22 was not the only high-tech wonder left purposeless with the end of the Cold War. The B-2 stealth bomber was designed to penetrate Soviet air defenses to destroy anyone or anything of value that had survived the initial retaliatory strike of our enormous nuclear-armed missile fleet. Of course, the bombers were redundant because by the time they arrived, if even a minority of the missiles had worked, there would be precious little left to destroy. Building a fleet of stealth bombers at more than $1.2 billion a piece was patently absurd.

"Still, as long as the Cold War had endured, proponents of the B-2, led by primary contractor Northrop Grumman, were successful in making the case for the plane's development. What terrible timing for the company that the Cold War was ending wen the plane made its first flight test on July 17, 1989. There were immediate technical problems with the plane—it lost much of its stealth cover in the rain, among other performance issues—but the clear problem for its continued development in the next years was that it had no military purpose. Indeed, Senator William Cohen of Maine, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee and later secretary of defense under Clinton, predicted in 1989 that, 'the B-2 won't make it.' He instead called for money to be spent on rapid deployment forces better suited to a post-Cold War world.

"However, the plane, as these weapons systems do, managed to retain some funding despite a lack of utility. Matters did look gloomy when Bush I, in his January 1992 State of the Union speech, announced that the B-2 fleet, once envisioned as totaling 135 aircraft, would be cut back to a mere twenty. Then came the war on terror, and, amazingly, a use was found for a stealth bomber designed to avoid super-sophisticated defense systems that neither the Taliban regime in Afghanistan nor Saddam Hussein's in Iraq possessed.

"But don't let those facts get in the way of a good photo op. There was Vice President Dick Cheney, photographed in the belly of a B-2 bomber parked at Missouri's Whiteman Air Force Base on October 27, 2006, taking credit for this boondoggle: 'I was proud, as secretary of defense, to be involved with the B-2 program during its early years,' he said, insisting that he was vindicated by the plane's usefulness in the war on terror."