America’s Military-Industrial Complex Too Corrupt to Win

Eric Zuesse

On July 31st, Drago Bosnic headlined “Pentagon trying to hide latest hypersonic test failure, says results ‘unclear’” and opened: “The Pentagon just tested a hypersonic weapon, but refuses to disclose whether it was successful or not. It doesn't even want to specify which system was involved or if there was an actual launch, as the US military often runs ground tests and presents them as ‘successful weapon launches’.” He reported that:

In a previous test, the US Army's "Dark Eagle", a ground-based hypersonic weapon, failed miserably, forcing the Pentagon to go back to the drawing board. The initial plan was to have the weapon ready in the next two months, a year later than originally planned. The US Army and Navy are running a joint Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) program which aims to save costs by using the Common-Hypersonic Glide Body (C-HGB). However, the US military simply cannot master the technologies needed to make an operational weapon. Apart from dozens of failures, there are also regular cancelations of tests (just last year, there were three scrubbed test launches). …

The US Army insists that the weapon will reach speeds of at least Mach 17 [12,937 mph = 20,820 kph] and a range of around 2,800 km [so that a Mach 17 U.S. missile fired in Germany 1,000 miles away from The Kremlin could then hit The Kremlin in 1/13th of an hour, or just 7 minutes — that’s what the few people who control the U.S. Government are intending to do]. This falls within the previously banned intermediate-range missiles that the US is now deploying in Germany, sparking another Cold War-style missile crisis in Europe. However, apart from regular systems such as the "Typhon", the US is unable to field advanced 21st-century hypersonic weapons, in part because it's using outdated techniques, as reported by some analysts. Both the US Army and Navy are now uncertain about when (or whether) the LRHW or IRCPS could enter operational service. The previous three test failures were blamed on the launcher rather than the missile itself. However, as previously mentioned, this is a common practice, as the US military is now regularly reporting about either "successful booster tests" (which is not a hypersonic weapon), or simply lying about a "successful launch" which is then followed by several consecutive failures.

The mainstream propaganda machine is trying its best to hide the embarrassment with pompous articles about "Putin fearing US weapons". The latest such text was published just days before the failed launch of July 25. Earlier this year, US media talked about "unprecedented launches", only for these chest-thumping titles to be replaced by complete silence to avoid having to give humiliating explanations as to what went wrong. In the meantime, Russian hypersonic weapons keep obliterating illegally deployed NATO personnel across Ukraine. The US military has been having issues with fielding advanced weapons for decades, particularly when it comes to missiles. The long-running problems with its Military Industrial Complex have resulted in its inability to design even basic ICBMs. Approximately half a decade ago, I argued that the Pentagon is approximately 15-20 years behind Moscow in hypersonic technologies and that it won't field a weapon before 2030.

Back on 24 February 2024, Brian Berletic had explained the reasons for America’s enormously overpriced and underperforming military equipment. He headlined “Fatal Flaws Undermine America’s Defense Industrial Base”, and he opened:

The first-ever US Department of Defense National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS) confirms what many analysts have concluded in regard to the unsustainable nature of Washington’s global-spanning foreign policy objectives and its defense industrial base’s (DIB) inability to achieve them.

The report lays out a multitude of problems plaguing the US DIB including a lack of surge capacity, inadequate workforce, off-shore downstream suppliers, as well as insufficient “demand signals” to motivate private industry partners to produce what’s needed, in the quantities needed, when it is needed.

In fact, the majority of the problems identified by the report involved private industry and its unwillingness to meet national security requirements because they were not profitable.

For example, the report attempts to explain why many companies across the US DIB lack advanced manufacturing capabilities, claiming:

“Many elements of the traditional DIB have yet to adopt advanced manufacturing technologies, as they struggle to develop business cases for needed capital investment.”

In other words, while adopting advanced manufacturing technologies would fulfill the purpose of the US Department of Defense, it is not profitable for private industry to do so.

Despite virtually all the problems the report identifies stemming from private industry’s disproportionate influence over the US DIB, the report never identifies private industry itself as a problem.

If private industry and its prioritization of profits is the central problem inhibiting the DIB from fulfilling its purpose, the obvious solution is nationalizing the DIB by replacing private industry with state-owned enterprises. [In both Russia and China, the weapons-manufacturers remain under majority control by the Government, so that the top motivation for each one of those firms is to fulfill the Government’s national-security needs — NOT the desires of any private investor.] This allows the government to prioritize [Government] purpose over [private] profits. Yet in the United States and across Europe, the so-called “military industrial complex” has grown to such proportions that it is no longer subordinated to the government and national interests, but rather the government and national interests are subordinated to it.

On 21 April 2024, I headlined “How America’s Military-Industrial Complex Wins All of Its Wars Against America’s Taxpayers”, and reported:

As has been documented by such authorities on U.S. military spending as Winslow T. Wheeler, Robert Higgs, and others, America spends each year around $1.5 trillion for its military but hides at least around $800 billion of it (so as for the U.S. not to be publicly recognized as spending half of this entire planet’s military expenses) by spending it from other federal Departments than the Defense Department; or, “The US National Security Budget for 2023/24 is approximately $1.5 Trillion”, as Wheeler headlined a year ago, on 1 May 2023. He detailed there how approximately $800 billion of that $1.5T was budgeted as being from the Veterans Affairs Department ($320.8 billion, all of that for the military), Homeland Security Department ($103.2B for the military), Treasury Department ($78.2B+$13.1B=$88.3B for the military), State Department ($46.4B for the military), Energy Department ($35.7B for the military), Justice Department & others ($12,1B for the military), plus $146.0B national security share of interest on the federal debt. All of that non-‘Defense’ Department U.S. Government military spending totaled to $752.5B. He also mentioned “Supplementals” as then being “To come”; and, now, as-of the 19 April 2024 House passage (“Roll Call 142 | Bill Number: H. Res. 1160”) of the procedural motion “On agreeing to the resolution Agreed to by the Yeas and Nays: 316 - 94 (Roll no. 142)” so innocuously titled as to hide the dirty deed that they had just done, it added $26.38B to support Israel’s annihilation and/or expulsion of the 2.3 million Gazans, plus $60.84B to extend Ukraine’s war at least until President Biden becomes re-elected, plus $8.12 billion to encourage and support the leaders of Taiwan to declare Taiwan’s independence from China (of which it currently is a Province) so that the U.S. Government will have won Taiwan and would then need to invade China in order to defend from China that new U.S. colony (‘ally’). The “Supplemental” this year (Ukraine+Gaza+Taiwan) totals to $95.3B, which causes the original $886B ‘Defense’ (or Aggression) budget for this fiscal year to be: $886B+752.5B+95.3B=$1,733,800 billion, or $1.734T. However, even that is incomplete, because the entire U.S. intelligence community, CIA, DIA, and the many others, is classified, its budgets are secret, hidden from the public, and, of course, these are also important parts of the U.S. military; so, perhaps annual U.S. military spending is now around $2T. On 12 March 2024, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence headlined “DNI RELEASES FY 2025 BUDGET REQUEST FIGURE FOR THE NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE PROGRAM” and publicly revealed (in accord with a 2007 law) “the aggregate amount of $73.4 billion in requested appropriations for the Fiscal Year 2025 National Intelligence Program (NIP),” and on 20 April 2024 I shall request from the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community the IC’s latest Audit Report in order to determine how complete that $73.4B figure is. I start with the assumption that it is the bare minimum of what the complete number is, and that what the maximum might be, and what the reality is, have remained top secret in this dictatorship. A number of leading investigative historians have documented that ever since the first CIA coup, which was against Thailand in 1948 and which started the CIA’s heavy financial dependence upon skimming from the international narcotics cartels via protection money laundered into funding CIA operations, not all of at least that Agency’s funding is on the books. However, in any case: if current annual U.S. military spending isn’t above $2T, it is at least near $2T. And virtually all of it is wasted because America has no border disputes with either of its two bordering nations and is protected by over 3,000 miles of ocean from both Europe to its east and Japan to its west and has won both Japan and Europe as its colonies, and so for this country to have annual military expenses of over $100 billion is obscenely to be controlled by its armaments manufacturers (i.e., by the billionaires who control those), which it so obviously is (and which leaves virtually nothing except Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid to actually serve the non-billionaire U.S. public). And, of course, America’s hundreds of invasions and 900 foreign military bases, and perhaps around a hundred coups, ever since the end of WW2, have destroyed many countries; so, this military is a terror and a curse to virtually the entire world and needs to be enormously reduced.

The billionaires who fund America’s successful (winning) politicians with enough campaign money so as to defeat any decent person who might be contesting, control both political Parties, the DNC and the RNC, and are also at the receiving end of the enormous profits from Lockheed Martin and their other armaments manufacturers, whose main market is the U.S. Government itself. Furthermore, they also control the news-media and the corporations that advertise in them; so, they can easily fool the public to vote for the candidates whom their Parties — the two Parties that they fund —have nominated. This is why, in foreign affairs, neoconservatism or further expansion of the American empire, and ever-increasing military budgets, is the main, if not the only, bipartisan policy in Washington DC, and it doesn’t change, regardless of which Republican or Democrat is in the White House. Because they’re all doing their job for their employers, who are their Party’s megadonors — NOT the voters. It’s a con-game; and this is the reason why, despite America spending as much on its military as do all of the world’s other 200 countries put together, America’s military is inferior to Russia's, and maybe already inferior also to China’s, too.

Ever since at least 1991, the purpose of America’s military is to produce even more profits for the billionaires, and no longer to win wars (as was the case prior to President Truman). Wars are needed by it only as being the necessary excuse so as to keep the voters fooled in the ways that the billionaires need them to be fooled, so as to keep this siphon of wealth, from the masses to the classes, to continue, ad nauseum.

All of America’s successful politicians for national offices, in Congress and in the White House, are enemies of the public, and friends to at least some of the approximately 1,000 billionaires in America. The most profitable investment that any one of those billionaires makes is that person’s politicians. And the one thing that all of America’s billionaires agree politically on, is that each and every one of them is a neocon — a supporter of expanding the U.S. empire even further.

Consequently: America’s billionaires require this enormous corruption; and, so, as long as they will remain in power here, America will get further and further behind, militarily. Trying to expand their empire while declining internationally in their means of even sustaining their existing empire, will soon force them to choose between halting their further-expansion goal, or else going immediately all-out for ‘victory’. The longer they wait, the less will be the likelihood of even their survival. If they’re determined to ‘win’ a nuclear war, they will need to launch it as soon as possible, though the consequences of it would kill off half of the planet’s human population within just the first two years. 

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.