 |
 |
|||
    |
(Editor's note. It's been 16 years since Ronald Reagan declared the Star Wars missile defense system an essential component of U.S. military spending. Since 1983, over $55 billion dollars has been spent in the name of protecting the U.S. against missiles launched by the Soviet Union. The end of the cold war and collapse of the Soviet Union should have made Star Wars obsolete. Instead, the U.S. is continuing to fund Star Wars--now retargeted to protect the U.S. from attacks by "rogue states" like Iraq and North Korea. As William Hartung points out in the following excerpts from his recently updated essay, Military-Industrial Complex Revisited: How Weapons Makers are Shaping U.S. Foreign and Military Policies, the arms industry has once again convinced Congress to continue throwing good money after bad. For the full paper see: http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/papers/micr/).
Back to the Future?
Contrary to initial expectations, the military-industrial complex did not fade away with the end of the cold war. It has simply reorganized itself. As a result of a rash of military-industry mergers encouraged and subsidized by the Clinton administration, the "Big Three" weapons makers--Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon--now receive among themselves over $30 billion per year in Pentagon contracts. This represents more than one out of every four dollars that the Defense Department doles out for everything from rifles to rockets. On issue after issue--from expanding NATO, to deploying the Star Wars missile defense system, to rolling back restrictions on arms sales to repressive regimes--the arms industry has launched a concerted lobbying campaign aimed at increasing military spending and arms exports. These initiatives are driven by profit and pork barrel politics, not by an objective assessment of how best to defend the United States in the post-cold war period. President Eisenhower's warning about the "acquisition of unwarranted influence" by the military-industrial complex is as relevant today as it was in 1961. Despite the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the breakup of the Soviet Union, the U.S. military budget is higher today than it was when Eisenhower gave his military-industrial complex speech in 1961. At more than $276 billion per year, the U.S. military budget (in constant dollars) remains near the peacetime cold war average that prevailed during the prime period of U.S.-Soviet rivalry, from roughly 1950 to 1989. This is astonishing considering that Russia has slashed its weapons procurement budget by 77% since 1991, and that Russian forces could barely prevail over a rebel army in Chechnya (inside its own borders), much less project force against neighboring countries.
Shaping Policy, or How to Write Your Own Ticket Beyond joining with key legislators to insert specific items into the Pentagon budget--such as in the last-minute maneuvering between the White House and Capitol Hill on the FY 1999 federal budget, the congressional leadership added an astounding $9 billion to the Pentagon's funding, including an extra $1 billion for Star Wars research--companies like Lockheed Martin are also actively engaged in the business of shaping U.S. foreign and military policies to meet their needs. This more sinister form of lobbying can involve changing the terms under which major contractors are reimbursed, such as the "payoffs for layoffs" subsidies for defense industry mergers that Norman Augustine engineered prior to the Lockheed/Martin Marietta merger; or eliminating royalty fees that foreign arms customers had been paying to reimburse the U.S. Treasury for the cost of weapons systems that were developed at taxpayer expense (a move that is costing the Treasury roughly $500 million per year); or creating billions of dollars of new grants and government-guaranteed loans to support the export of U.S. weaponry; or lifting longstanding arms control curbs like the ban on the sale of advanced combat aircraft to Latin America. In other instances, contractors have weighed in heavily in favor of controversial programs or policies that stand to benefit them. The most immediate examples of this kind of lobbying are the Star Wars missile defense program, which has received on average an extra $1 billion per year as a result of lobbying by Pentagon contractors and conservative research and advocacy groups.
Pushing Weapons at Home: The Star Wars Lobby One of the most amazing lobbying stories of recent times involves the work done by the Pentagon, contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Center for Security Policy (founded by former Reagan Pentagon official Frank Gaffney) to keep Ronald Reagan's Star Wars program alive--despite radical changes in the world security environment, which have rendered its original mission obsolete, and a string of uninterrupted technical failures. Fifteen years and $55 billion have gone down the drain since Ronald Reagan first gave his Star Wars speech in March 1983, and the Soviet Union, whose nuclear missiles were supposed to be the main target of Reagan's cherished missile defense system, no longer exists. Undaunted, the Star Warriors have devised a new mission for missile defenses: to protect us against attacks by "rogue states" like Iraq and North Korea, which don't even have missiles that can reach American territory. And every time a major component of Star Wars fails--such as Lockheed Martin's troubled Theater High Altitude Area Defense system (THAAD), which is zero for five in tests conducted during this decade--the Star Wars lobby in Congress shouts for more money. The nerve center of the Star Wars lobby is Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy (CSP), a think tank and advocacy organization that puts out roughly 200 press releases per year (under the more authoritative name of "national security decision briefs") touting missile defenses, increases in the military budget, and other stock right-wing themes. Since its inception in 1988, Gaffney's group has received over $2 million in corporate donations, mostly from companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which are major Star Wars contractors. Gaffney's CSP also has no fewer than five Lockheed Martin executives on its board, not to mention vintage Star Warriors such as weapons physicist Edward Teller and his protégé, George Keyworth, who served as Ronald Reagan's science advisor when the Star Wars scheme was first being hatched. The Center for Security Policy also has close links to other conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Empower America, both of which have representatives on the CSP board. During the fall of 1998, the Star Wars lobby made a concerted effort to win over one more senator to Sen. Thad Cochran's Defend America Act, which would require deployment of a National Missile Defense system. Toward that end, Empower America ran misleading radio ads in the state of Nevada in an effort to convince residents that the reluctance of their two Democratic senators, Harry Reid and Richard Bryan, to vote for a largely useless and massively expensive missile defense system meant that they were against "defending our families" from nuclear attack. In the short term, these prodigious efforts on the part of the Star Wars lobby were in vain. Due in part to a public backlash against the tactics used by special prosecutor Kenneth Starr and the Republican congressional leadership in the Lewinsky scandal, the Republicans failed to pick up a seat in the Senate in the 1998 elections, and Democratic incumbents like Harry Reid of Nevada and Barbara Boxer of California, who had been specifically criticized for opposing Star Wars, were reelected. Despite these apparent setbacks in the 1998 elections, the Star Wars lobby didn't give up; by the spring of 1999, both the Senate and the House had been persuaded to pass legislation modeled on the Cochran bill which stated that it is the policy of the United States government to deploy a National Missile Defense as soon as it is "technologically feasible." While arms control advocates like Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) tried to soften the blow by sponsoring amendments calling for the United States to continue to pursue nuclear weapons reductions with Russia, the passage of the two Star Wars resolutions were clearly a major propaganda victory for conservative missile defense boosters and their corporate sponsors. William Hartung is a Senior Research Fellow at the World
Policy Institute. His publications include Welfare for Weapons
Dealers and Peddling Arms, Peddling Influence.
Return to Global Beat Home Page Nuclear Watch | Balkan Conflicts | East Asian Security | EU Integration & Enlargement | Middle East | NATO Expansion | Nuclear Weapons and Proliferation | South Asian Security | U.S. Defense Policy | Publications | Events | |