Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Mercenaries at work
By Chalmers Johnson
Most Americans have a rough idea what the term "military-industrial complex"
means when they come across it in a newspaper or hear a politician mention it.
President Dwight D Eisenhower introduced the idea to the public in his farewell
address of January 17, 1961. "Our military organization today bears little
relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime," he said, "or
indeed by the fighting men of World War II and Korea ... We have been compelled
to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions ... We must not
fail to comprehend its grave implications ... We must guard against the
acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex."
Although Eisenhower's reference to the military-industrial complex
is, by now, well-known, his warning against its "unwarranted influence" has, I
believe, largely been ignored. Since 1961, there has been too little serious
study of, or discussion of, the origins of the military-industrial complex, how
it has changed over time, how governmental secrecy has hidden it from oversight
by members of Congress or attentive citizens, and how it degrades our
Constitutional structure of checks and balances.
From its origins in the early 1940s, when president Franklin Delano Roosevelt
was building up his "arsenal of democracy," down to the present moment, public
opinion has usually assumed that it involved more or less equitable relations -
often termed a "partnership" - between the high command and civilian overlords
of the United States military and privately-owned, for-profit manufacturing and
service enterprises. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that, from the
time they first emerged, these relations were never equitable.
In the formative years of the military-industrial complex, the public still
deeply distrusted privately owned industrial firms because of the way they had
contributed to the Great Depression. Thus, the leading role in the newly
emerging relationship was played by the official governmental sector. A deeply
popular, charismatic president, FDR sponsored these public-private
relationships. They gained further legitimacy because their purpose was to
rearm the country, as well as allied nations around the world, against the
gathering forces of fascism. The private sector was eager to go along with this
largely as a way to regain public trust and disguise its wartime profit-making.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Roosevelt's use of public-private
"partnerships" to build up the munitions industry, and thereby finally overcome
the Great Depression, did not go entirely unchallenged. Although he was himself
an implacable enemy of fascism, a few people thought that the president
nonetheless was coming close to copying some of its key institutions. The
leading Italian philosopher of fascism, the neo-Hegelian Giovanni Gentile, once
argued that it should more appropriately be called "corporatism" because it was
a merger of state and corporate power. (See Eugene Jarecki's The American Way of
War, p. 69.)
Some critics were alarmed early on by the growing symbiotic relationship
between government and corporate officials because each simultaneously
sheltered and empowered the other, while greatly confusing the separation of
powers. Since the activities of a corporation are less amenable to public or
congressional scrutiny than those of a public institution, public-private
collaborative relationships afford the private sector an added measure of
security from such scrutiny. These concerns were ultimately swamped by
enthusiasm for the war effort and the postwar era of prosperity that the war
produced.
Beneath the surface, however, was a less well recognized movement by big
business to replace democratic institutions with those representing the
interests of capital. This movement is today ascendant. (See Thomas Frank's new
book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, for a superb analysis
of Ronald Reagan's slogan "government is not a solution to our problem,
government is the problem.") Its objectives have long been to discredit what it
called "big government", while capturing for private interests the tremendous
sums invested by the public sector in national defense. It may be understood as
a slow-burning reaction to what American conservatives believed to be the
socialism of the New Deal.
Perhaps the country's leading theorist of democracy, Sheldon S Wolin, has
written a new book, Democracy Incorporated, on what he calls "inverted
totalitarianism" - the rise in the US of totalitarian institutions of
conformity and regimentation shorn of the police repression of the earlier
German, Italian, and Soviet forms. He warns of "the expansion of private (ie,
mainly corporate) power and the selective abdication of governmental
responsibility for the well-being of the citizenry." He also decries the degree
to which the so-called privatization of governmental activities has insidiously
undercut our democracy, leaving us with the widespread belief that government
is no longer needed and that, in any case, it is not capable of performing the
functions we have entrusted to it.
Wolin writes:
The privatization of public services and functions
manifests the steady evolution of corporate power into a political form, into
an integral, even dominant partner with the state. It marks the transformation
of American politics and its political culture, from a system in which
democratic practices and values were, if not defining, at least major
contributory elements, to one where the remaining democratic elements of the
state and its populist programs are being systematically dismantled. (p. 284)
Mercenaries at work
The military-industrial complex has changed radically since World War II or
even the height of the Cold War. The private sector is now fully ascendant. The
uniformed air, land, and naval forces of the country as well as its
intelligence agencies, including the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), the NSA
(National Security Agency), the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), and even
clandestine networks entrusted with the dangerous work of penetrating and
spying on terrorist organizations are all dependent on hordes of "private
contractors". In the context of governmental national security functions, a
better term for these might be "mercenaries" working in private for
profit-making companies.
Tim Shorrock, an investigative journalist and the leading authority on this
subject, sums up this situation devastatingly in his new book, Spies for Hire:
The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. The following quotes are
a precis of some of his key findings:
In 2006 ... the cost of America's
spying and surveillance activities outsourced to contractors reached $42
billion, or about 70% of the estimated $60 billion the government spends each
year on foreign and domestic intelligence ... [The] number of contract
employees now exceeds [the CIA's] full-time workforce of 17,500 ... Contractors
make up more than half the workforce of the CIA's National Clandestine Service
(formerly the Directorate of Operations), which conducts covert operations and
recruits spies abroad ...
To feed the NSA's insatiable demand for data and information technology, the
industrial base of contractors seeking to do business with the agency grew from
144 companies in 2001 to more than 5,400 in 2006 ... At the National
Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the agency in charge of launching and maintaining
the nation's photo-reconnaissance and eavesdropping satellites, almost the
entire workforce is composed of contract employees working for [private]
companies ... With an estimated $8 billion annual budget, the largest in the IC
[intelligence community], contractors control about $7 billion worth of
business at the NRO, giving the spy satellite industry the distinction of being
the most privatized part of the intelligence community ...
If there's one generalization to be made about the NSA's outsourced IT
[information technology] programs, it is this: they haven't worked very well,
and some have been spectacular failures ... In 2006, the NSA was unable to
analyze much of the information it was collecting ... As a result, more than
90% of the information it was gathering was being discarded without being
translated into a coherent and understandable format; only about 5% was
translated from its digital form into text and then routed to the right
division for analysis.
The key phrase in the new counterterrorism lexicon is 'public-private
partnerships' ... In reality, 'partnerships' are a convenient cover for the
perpetuation of corporate interests. (pp 6, 13-14, 16, 214-15, 365)
Several inferences can be drawn from Shorrock's shocking expose. One is that if
a foreign espionage service wanted to penetrate American military and
governmental secrets, its easiest path would not be to gain access to any
official US agencies, but simply to get its agents jobs at any of the large
intelligence-oriented private companies on which the government has become
remarkably dependent. These include Science Applications International
Corporation (SAIC), with headquarters in San Diego, California, which typically
pays its 42,000 employees higher salaries than if they worked at similar jobs
in the government; Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the nation's oldest intelligence
and clandestine-operations contractors, which, until January 2007, was the
employer of Mike McConnell, the current director of national intelligence and
the first private contractor to be named to lead the entire intelligence
community; and CACI International, which, under two contracts for "information
technology services," ended up supplying some two dozen interrogators to the
Army at Iraq's already infamous Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. According to Major
General Anthony Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib torture and abuse
scandal, four of CACI's interrogators were "either directly or indirectly
responsible" for torturing prisoners. (Shorrock, p. 281)
Remarkably enough, SAIC has virtually replaced the National Security Agency as
the primary collector of signals intelligence for the government. It is the
NSA's largest contractor, and that agency is today the company's single largest
customer.
There are literally thousands of other profit-making enterprises that work to
supply the government with so-called intelligence needs, sometimes even bribing
Congressmen to fund projects that no one in the executive branch actually
wants. This was the case with Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Republican
of California's 50th District, who, in 2006, was sentenced to eight-and-a-half
years in federal prison for soliciting bribes from defense contractors. One of
the bribers, Brent Wilkes, snagged a $9.7 million contract for his company,
ADCS Inc. ("Automated Document Conversion Systems") to computerize the
century-old records of the Panama Canal dig!
A country drowning in euphemisms
The United States has long had a sorry record when it comes to protecting its
intelligence from foreign infiltration, but the situation today seems
particularly perilous. One is reminded of the case described in the 1979 book
by Robert Lindsey, The Falcon and the Snowman (made into a 1985 film of
the same name). It tells the true story of two young Southern Californians, one
with a high security clearance working for the defense contractor TRW (dubbed
"RTX" in the film), and the other a drug addict and minor smuggler. The TRW
employee is motivated to act by his discovery of a misrouted CIA document
describing plans to overthrow the prime minister of Australia, and the other by
a need for money to pay for his addiction.
They decide to get even with the government by selling secrets to the Soviet
Union and are exposed by their own bungling. Both are sentenced to prison for
espionage. The message of the book (and film) lies in the ease with which they
betrayed their country - and how long it took before they were exposed and
apprehended. Today, thanks to the staggering over-privatization of the
collection and analysis of foreign intelligence, the opportunities for such
breaches of security are widespread.
I applaud Shorrock for his extraordinary research into an almost impenetrable
subject using only openly available sources. There is, however, one aspect of
his analysis with which I differ. This is his contention that the wholesale
takeover of official intelligence collection and analysis by private companies
is a form of "outsourcing". This term is usually restricted to a business
enterprise buying goods and services that it does not want to manufacture or
supply in-house. When it is applied to a governmental agency that turns over
many, if not all, of its key functions to a risk-averse company trying to make
a return on its investment, "outsourcing" simply becomes a euphemism for
mercenary activities.
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