July 3, 2025
Whereas weapons contractors will gorge on an enormous new infusion of money, army personnel, previous and current, are clearly going to be uncared for.
A Boeing B52H bomber is pictured flying in August 2020.
(Rob Reedman, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
This text initially appeared at TomDispatch.com. To remain on prime of vital articles like these, signal as much as obtain the newest updates from TomDispatch.com.
The Senate is on the verge of passing the distinctly misnamed “big beautiful bill.” It’s, in reality, one of many ugliest items of laws to come back out of Congress in dwelling reminiscence. The version that handed the Home not too long ago would lower $1.7 trillion, principally in home spending, whereas offering the highest 5% of taxpayers with roughly $1.5 trillion in tax breaks.
Over the following few years, the identical invoice will add one other $150 billion to a Pentagon price range already hovering towards a document $1 trillion. In brief, as of now, within the battle between welfare and warfare, the militarists are carrying the day.
Pentagon Pork and the Individuals It Harms
The invoice, handed by the Home of Representatives and at current into account within the Senate, would allocate tens of billions of {dollars} to pursue President Trump’s cherished however hopeless Golden Dome challenge, which Laura Grego of the Union of Involved Scientists has described as “a fantasy.” She explained precisely why the Golden Dome, which might supposedly shield the USA in opposition to nuclear assault, is a pipe dream:
“During the last 60 years, the USA has spent greater than $350 billion on efforts to develop a protection in opposition to nuclear-armed ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles]. This effort has been tormented by false starts and failures, and none have but been demonstrated to be efficient in opposition to a real-world menace… Missile defenses aren’t a helpful or long-term technique for preserving the U.S. protected from nuclear weapons.”
The invoice additionally consists of billions extra for shipbuilding, heavy new investments in artillery and ammunition, and funding for next-generation fight plane just like the F-47.
Oh, and in spite of everything of these weapons applications get their staggering lower of that future Pentagon price range, someplace approach down on the backside of that record is a line merchandise for bettering the standard of life for active-duty army personnel. However the share aimed on the well-being of troopers, sailors, and airmen (and ladies) is less than 6% of the $150 billion that Congress is now poised so as to add to that division’s already humongous price range. And that’s true regardless of the way in which Pentagon price range hawks invariably declare that the big sums they routinely plan on shoveling into it — and the overflowing coffers of the contractors it funds — are “for the troops.”
A lot of the funding within the invoice will stream into the districts of key members of Congress (to their appreciable political profit). For instance, the Golden Dome challenge will ship billions of {dollars} to companies primarily based in Huntsville, Alabama, which calls itself “Rocket City” due to the dense community of outfits there engaged on each offensive missiles and missile protection techniques. And that, in fact, is music to the ears of Consultant Mike Rogers (R-AL), the present chair of the Home Armed Providers Committee, who simply occurs to come back from Alabama.
Present Difficulty
The shipbuilding funds will assist prop up arms makers like HII Company (previously Huntington Ingalls), which runs a shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, the house state of Senate Armed Providers Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss). The funds can even discover their approach to shipyards in Maine, Connecticut, and Virginia.
These funds will profit the co-chairs of the Home Shipbuilding Caucus, Consultant Joe Courtney (D-CT) and Consultant Rob Wittman (R-VA). Connecticut hosts Common Dynamics’ Electrical Boat plant, which makes submarines that carry ballistic missiles, whereas Virginia is house to HII Company’s Newport Information Shipbuilding facility, which makes each plane carriers and assault submarines.
The Golden Dome missile protection challenge, on which President Trump has promised to spend $175 billion over the following three years, will profit contractors massive and small. These embrace corporations like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon (now RTX) that construct present technology missile protection techniques, in addition to rising army tech companies like Elon Musk’s Area X and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, each of that are rumored to have a shot at enjoying a number one position within the growth of the brand new anti-missile system.
And simply in case you thought this nation was solely planning to spend money on protection in opposition to a nuclear strike, a sharp upsurge in spending on new nuclear warheads below the auspices of the Division of Vitality’s Nationwide Nuclear Safety Company (NNSA) has been proposed for fiscal yr 2026. Thirty billion {dollars}, to be precise, which might signify a 58% hike from the prior yr’s price range. In the meantime, inside that company, nonproliferation, cleanup, and renewable power applications are set to face vital cuts, leaving 80% of NNSA’s proposed funding to be spent on — sure! — nuclear weapons alone. These funds will stream to companies like Honeywell, Bechtel, Jacobs Engineering, and Fluor that assist run nuclear labs and nuclear manufacturing websites, in addition to educational institutions just like the College of Tennessee, Texas A&M, and the College of California at Berkeley, which assist handle nuclear weapons labs or nuclear manufacturing websites.
Weakening the Social Security Web — and America
And whereas weapons contractors will gorge on an enormous new infusion of money, army personnel, previous and current, are clearly going to be uncared for. As a begin, the Veterans Administration is on the block for deep cuts, together with potential layoffs of as much as 80,000 staff — a transfer that may undoubtedly decelerate the processing of advantages for individuals who have served in America’s previous wars. Analysis on illnesses that disproportionately influence veterans can even be lower, which needs to be thought-about an outrage.
In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of veterans from this nation’s disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will proceed to undergo from bodily and psychological wounds, together with traumatic mind accidents (TBI) and post-traumatic stress dysfunction (PTSD). Reducing analysis which may discover more practical options to such issues needs to be thought-about a nationwide shame. Within the meantime, active-duty personnel who’re getting a tiny fraction of the potential Pentagon add-on of $150 billion are equally in want.
Widespread
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Worse but, flip away from the Pentagon for a second, and the cuts in the remainder of that “massive stunning invoice” will possible have an effect on a majority of People — Democrats, independents, and MAGA Republicans alike. Their full results is probably not felt for months till the spending reductions contained in it begin hitting house. Nonetheless, enacting insurance policies that take meals off folks’s tables and deny them medical care is not going to solely trigger pointless struggling however value lives.
As President (and former common) Dwight D. Eisenhower, a really totally different type of Republican, said greater than 70 years in the past, the last word safety of a nation lies not in what number of weapons it could pile up, however within the well being, training, and resilience of its folks. The massive stunning invoice and the divisive politics surrounding it threaten these foundations of our nationwide power.
Conflict of the Contractors?
As price range cuts threaten to make the inhabitants weaker, distorted spending priorities are making arms producers stronger. The Large 5 — Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, Common Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — produce a lot of the present big-ticket weapon techniques, from submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles to tanks, fight plane, and missile-defense techniques. In the meantime, rising tech companies like Palantir, Anduril, and Area X are cashing in on contracts for unpiloted autos, superior communications techniques, new-age goggles for the Military, anti-drone techniques, and a lot extra.
However whilst weapons spending hits near-record or document ranges, there should be a combat between the Large 5 and the rising tech companies over who will get the most important share of that price range. One entrance within the coming battle between the Large 5 and the Silicon Valley militarists may very well be the Military Transformation Initiative (ATI). Based on Secretary of the Military Dan Driscoll, one of many objectives of ATI is to “eliminate obsolete systems.”
Driscoll is a harsh critic of the way in which members of Congress put cash within the price range — a course of often called “pork barrel politics” — for objects the army companies haven’t even requested for (and so they ask for lots), just because these techniques may convey extra jobs and income to their states or districts. He has, in reality, committed himself to an strategy that’s incompatible with the present, parochial means of placing collectively the Pentagon price range. “Lobbyists and bureaucrats have overtaken the military’s capability to prioritize troopers and conflict combating,” he insisted.
Driscoll is speaking a tricky sport with regards to taking up the prevailing massive contractors. He’s evidently able to push for “reform,” even when it implies that a few of them exit of enterprise. Actually, he appears to welcome it: “I’ll measure it as success if, within the subsequent two years, one of many primes is now not in enterprise.” (“Primes” are the large contractors like Lockheed Martin and Common Dynamics that take the lead on main applications and get the majority of the funding, a good portion of which they dole out to subcontractors all around the nation and the world.)
Ending pork-barrel politics in favor of an strategy through which the Pentagon solely buys techniques that align with the nation’s precise protection technique, as Driscoll is suggesting, may look like a major step ahead. However watch out what you would like for. Any funds freed up by stopping congressional representatives from treating the Pentagon price range as a piggy financial institution to purchase loyalty from their constituents will virtually actually go to rising tech companies able to construct next-generation techniques like swarms of drones, weapons that may take out a hypersonic missile, or pilotless land autos, plane, and ships. Driscoll is a major tech enthusiast, as is his buddy and Yale legislation faculty classmate J.D. Vance, who was first employed by Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, who then backed his profitable run for the Senate from Ohio.
For the reason that tech companies don’t have the equal of the Large 5’s in depth manufacturing networks in key congressional districts, they should discover different methods to steer Congress to fund their weapons applications. Thankfully, the Silicon Valley militarists have a significant number of former staff or monetary backers within the Trump administration who can plead their case.
As well as, military-tech-focused enterprise capital companies have hired at the very least 50 former Pentagon and army officers, all of whom may help them exert affect over each the Trump administration and Congress. The most important “catch” was Palantir’s hiring of former Wisconsin Congressman Mike Gallagher, who had run the hawkish Congressional particular committee on Communist China.
Some journalists and coverage analysts have questioned whether or not the feud between Donald Trump and Elon Musk will harm the army tech sector. Effectively, cease fretting. Even when Trump had been to comply with by way of on his menace to cut the government funding of Musk’s companies, the duties they’re finishing up — from launching military satellites to growing more secure Web entry for deployed army personnel — would nonetheless proceed, slightly below the auspices of various corporations. There can be some friction concerned, just because it’s onerous to shift suppliers on a dime with out slowing down manufacturing. And the transition, ought to it happen, would additionally add value to already exceedingly costly applications.
However Trump’s menace to cancel Area X’s contracts could be extra grist for his verbal fight with Musk fairly than something his administration plans to comply with by way of on. Even when Musk and his president by no means reconcile, the DOGE cuts to worldwide diplomacy and home social companies that Musk spearheaded will nonetheless do critical injury for years to come back.
Cash Can’t Purchase Safety
A shift towards rising army tech companies and away from the Large 5 will probably be about greater than cash and know-how. Key figures among the many rising cohort of Silicon Valley militarists like Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, see constructing weapons as more than only a vital pillar of nationwide protection. They see it as a measure of nationwide character.
Karp’s new book, The Technological Republic: Onerous Energy, Mushy Perception, and the Way forward for the West, mixes the Chilly Conflict ideology of the Nineteen Fifties with the rising know-how of the twenty-first century. He decries the dearth of unifying ideas like “the West” and sees too many People as slackers with no sense of nationwide satisfaction or patriotism. His answer, a supposedly unifying nationwide mission, is — await it! — a contemporary Manhattan challenge for the event of the army functions of synthetic intelligence. To say that that is an impoverished model of what this nation’s mission needs to be is placing it mildly. Many different potentialities come to thoughts, from addressing local weather change to stopping pandemics to upgrading our academic system to constructing a society the place everybody’s primary wants are met, leaving room for artistic pursuits of every kind.
The techno-optimists are additionally obsessive about getting ready for a war with China, which Palmer Luckey, the 32-year-old founding father of the army tech agency Anduril, believes will occur by 2027. And plenty of in his circle, together with Marc Andreessen of the enterprise capital agency Andreessen Horowitz, are satisfied that any potential dangers from the event of AI pale in comparison to the necessity to “beat China,” not simply in getting to stylish army functions first, however in profitable a future conflict with Beijing, if it involves that. Speak of diplomacy to go off a conflict over Taiwan or cooperation on international points like local weather change, outbreaks of illness, and constructing a extra inclusive, much less unequal international financial system hardly ever come up in discussions among the many hardcore militarist faction in Silicon Valley. As a substitute, that group is spending inordinate quantities of money and time in search of to affect the way forward for U.S. overseas and army coverage, a harmful growth certainly.
Whether or not the rising tech companies can construct cheaper weapons with superior capabilities will probably be irrelevant if such developments are tied to an aggressive technique that makes a devastating battle with China extra possible. Whereas the combat between the Large 5 and the tech leaders might show attention-grabbing to watch, it’s also ominous when it comes to this nation’s future financial and overseas insurance policies, to not communicate of the form and dimension of our nationwide price range.
The remainder of us, who aren’t billionaires and don’t draw $20 million in annual compensation packages just like the CEOs of the large weapons companies (immediately or not directly funded by our tax {dollars}), ought to play a number one position in rethinking and revising this nation’s international position and our insurance policies at house. If we don’t rise to that problem, this nation might find yourself swapping one type of militarism, led by the Large 5, for an additional, spearheaded by hawkish, self-important tech leaders who care extra about getting cash and spawning devastating new applied sciences than they do about democracy or the standard of lifetime of the typical American.
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