DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Weapons 'R' Us By William J Astore
Perhaps you've
heard of Makin' Thunderbirds, a hard-bitten
rock and roll song by Bob Seger that I listened to
30 years ago while in college. It's about auto
workers back in 1955 who were "young and proud" to
be making Ford Thunderbirds.
But in the
early 1980s, Seger sings, "The plants have changed
and you're lucky if you work." Seger caught the
reality of an American manufacturing
infrastructure that was seriously eroding as
skilled and good-paying union jobs were cut or
sent overseas, rarely to be seen again in these
parts.
If the US auto industry has
recently shown sparks of new life (though we're
not making T-Birds or Mercuries or Oldsmobiles or
Pontiacs or Saturns
anymore), there is one form of manufacturing in
which America is still dominant.
When it
comes to weaponry, to paraphrase Seger, we're
still young and proud and makin' Predators and
Reapers (as in unmanned aerial vehicles, or
drones) and Eagles and Fighting Falcons (as in
F-15 and F-16 combat jets), and outfitting them
with the deadliest of weapons. In this market
niche, we're still the envy of the world.
Yes, we're the world's foremost "merchants
of death", the title of a best-selling expose of
the international arms trade published to acclaim
in the US in 1934. Back then, most Americans saw
themselves as war-avoiders rather than as
war-profiteers. The evil war-profiteers were
mainly European arms makers like Germany's Krupp,
France's Schneider, or Britain's Vickers.
Not that America didn't have its own arms
merchants. As the authors of "Merchants of Death"
noted, early on our country demonstrated a "Yankee
propensity for extracting novel death-dealing
knickknacks from [our] peddler's pack". Amazingly,
the Nye Committee in the US Senate devoted 93
hearings from 1934 to 1936 to exposing America's
own "greedy munitions interests". Even in those
desperate depression days, a desire for profit and
jobs was balanced by a strong sense of unease at
this deadly trade, an unease reinforced by the
horrors and hecatombs of World War I.
We
are uneasy no more. Today we take great pride (or
at least have no shame) in being by far the
world's number one arms-exporting nation. A few
statistics bear this out. From 2006 to 2010, the
US accounted for nearly one-third of the world's
arms exports, easily surpassing a resurgent Russia
in the "Lords of War" race.
Despite a
decline in global arms sales in 2010 due to
recessionary pressures, the US increased its
market share, accounting for a whopping 53% of the
trade that year. Last year saw the US on pace to
deliver more than $46 billion in foreign arms
sales. Who says America isn't number one anymore?
For a shopping list of our arms trades,
try searching the Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute database for arms exports and
imports. It reveals that, in 2010, the US exported
"major conventional weapons" to 62 countries, from
Afghanistan to Yemen, and weapons platforms
ranging from F-15, F-16, and F-18 combat jets to
M1 Abrams main battle tanks to Cobra attack
helicopters (sent to our Pakistani comrades) to
guided missiles in all flavors, colors, and sizes:
AAMs, PGMs, SAMs, TOWs - a veritable alphabet soup
of missile acronyms. Never mind their specific
meaning: they're all designed to blow things up;
they're all designed to kill.
Rarely
debated in congress or in US media outlets is the
wisdom or morality of these arms deals. During the
quiet last days of December 2011, in separate
announcements whose timing could not have been
accidental, the Barack Obama administration
expressed its intent to sell nearly $11 billion in
arms to Iraq, including Abrams tanks and F-16
fighter-bombers, and nearly $30 billion in F-15
fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, part of a larger,
$60 billion arms package for the Saudis.
Few in congress oppose such arms deals
since defense contractors provide jobs in their
districts - and ready donations to congressional
campaigns.
Let's pause to consider what
such a weapons deal implies for Iraq. Firstly,
Iraq only "needs" advanced tanks and fighter jets
because we destroyed their previous generation of
the same, whether in 1991 during Desert
Shield/Storm or in 2003 during Operation Iraqi
Freedom.
Secondly, Iraq "needs" such
powerful conventional weaponry ostensibly to deter
an invasion by Iran, yet the current government in
Baghdad is closely aligned with Iran, courtesy of
our invasion in 2003 and the botched occupation
that followed. Thirdly, despite its "needs", the
Iraqi military is nowhere near ready to field and
maintain such advanced weaponry, at least without
sustained training and logistical support provided
by the US military.
As one US Air Force
officer who served as an advisor to the fledging
Iraqi Air Force, or IqAF, recently worried:
Will the IqAF be able to refuel its
own aircraft? Can the Iraqi military offer
adequate force protection and security for its
bases? Can the IqAF provide airfield management
services at its bases as they return to Iraqi
control after eight years under US direction?
Can the IqAF ensure simple power generation to
keep facilities operating? Will the IqAF be able
to develop and retain its airmen? ... Only time
will tell if we left [Iraq] too early;
nevertheless, even without a renewed security
agreement, the USAF can continue to stand
alongside the IqAF.
Put bluntly: We
doubt the Iraqis are ready to field and fly
American-built F-16s, but we're going to sell them
to them anyway. And if past history is a guide, if
the Iraqis ever turn these planes against us,
we'll blow them up or shoot them down - and then
(hopefully) sell them some more.
Our
best arms customer Let's face it: the
weapons we sell to others pale in comparison to
the weapons we sell to ourselves. In the market
for deadly weapons, we are our own best customer.
Americans have a love affair with them, the more
high-tech and expensive, the better. I should
know. After all, I'm a recovering weapons addict.
Well into my teen years, I was fascinated
by military hardware. I built models of what were
then the latest US warplanes: the A-10, the F-4,
the F-14, -15, and -16, the B-1, and many others.
I read Aviation Week and Space
Technology at my local library to keep track
of the newest developments in military technology.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, I went on to major in
mechanical engineering in college and entered the
air force as a developmental engineer.
Enamored as I was by roaring afterburners
and sleek weaponry, I also began to read books
like James Fallows' National Defense (1981)
among other early critiques of the Jimmy Carter
and Ronald Reagan defense buildup, as well as the
slyly subversive and always insightful
Augustine's Laws (1986) by Norman
Augustine, later the chief executive officer of
Martin Marietta and Lockheed Martin. That and my
own experience in the air force alerted me to the
billions of dollars we were devoting to high-tech
weaponry with ever-ballooning price tags but
questionable utility.
Perhaps the best
example of the persistence of this phenomenon is
the F-35 Lightning II. Produced by Lockheed
Martin, the F-35 was intended to be an
"affordable" fighter-bomber (at roughly $50
million per copy), a perfect complement to the
much more expensive F-22 "air superiority" Raptor.
But the usual delays, cost overruns,
technical glitches, and changes in requirements
have driven the price tag of the F-35 up to $160
million per plane, assuming the US military
persists in its plans to buy 2,400 of them. (If
the Pentagon decides to buy fewer, the
cost-per-plane will soar into the F-22 range.)
By recent estimates the F-35 will now cost
US taxpayers (you and me, that is) at least $382
billion for its development and production run.
Such a sum for a single weapons system is vast
enough to be hard to fathom. It would, for
instance, easily fund all federal government
spending on education for the next five years.
The escalating cost of the F-35 recalls
the most famous of Augustine's irreverent laws:
"In the year 2054," he wrote back in the early
1980s, "the entire defense budget will [suffice
to] purchase just one aircraft." But the deeper
question is whether our military even needs the
F-35, a question that's rarely asked and never
seriously entertained, at least by congress, whose
philosophy on weaponry is much like King Lear's:
"O, reason not the need."
But let's reason
the need in purely military terms. These days, the
air force is turning increasingly to unmanned
drones. Meanwhile, plenty of perfectly good and
serviceable "platforms" remain for attack and
close air support missions, from F-16s and F-18s
in the air force and navy to Apache helicopters in
the army.
And while many of our existing
combat jets may be nearing the limits of airframe
integrity, there's nothing stopping the US
military from producing updated versions of the
same. Heck, this is precisely what we're hawking
to the Saudis - updated versions of the F-15,
developed in the 1970s.
Because of sheer
cost, it's likely we'll buy fewer F-35s than our
military wants but many more than we actually
need. We'll do so because Weapons 'R' Us. Because
building ultra-expensive combat jets is one of the
few high-tech industries we haven't exported (due
to national security and secrecy concerns), and
thus one of the few industries in the US that
still supports high-paying manufacturing jobs with
decent employee benefits. And who can argue with
that?
The ultimate cost of our
merchandise of death Clearly, the US has
grabbed the brass ring of the global arms trade.
When it comes to investing in militaries and
weaponry, no country can match us. We are supreme.
And despite talk of modest cuts to the Pentagon
budget over the next decade, it will, according to
President Barack Obama, continue to grow, which
means that in weapons terms the future remains
bright.
After all, Pentagon spending on
research and development stands at $81.4 billion,
accounting for an astonishing 55% of all federal
spending on research and development and leaving
plenty of opportunity to develop our next
generation of wonder weapons.
But at what
cost to ourselves and the rest of the world? We've
become the suppliers of weaponry to the planet's
hotspots. And those weapons deliveries (and the
training and support missions that go with them)
tend to make those spots hotter still - as in hot
lead.
As a country, we seem to have a
teenager's fascination with military hardware, an
addiction that's driving us to bust our own
national budgetary allowance. At the same time, we
sell weapons the way teenage punks sell fireworks
to younger kids: for profit and with little regard
for how they might be used.
Sixty years
ago, it was said that what's good for General
Motors is good for America. In 1955, as Seger
sang, we were young and strong and makin'
Thunderbirds. But today we're playing a new tune
with new lyrics: what's good for Lockheed Martin
or Boeing or [insert
major-defense-contractor-of-your-choice here] is
good for America.
How far we've come since
the 1950s!
William J Astore, a
retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), is a
TomDispatch regular. He welcomes reader comments
at wjastore@gmail.com.
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