The Virus That Is the Military-Industrial Complex

A virus is a small infectious agent constructed of genetic material.  It is capable of reproducing itself if it gains entry to the cell of a living entity.  Some viruses are so deadly it can quickly cause the death of its host.  Others cause little damage and are overcome by the host’s immune system responses.  Yet others escape these defenses and their presence causes long-term effects by stealing resources and altering the functionality of body organs.  These may cause tumors and spread cancerous growth.  Andrew Cockburn used the analogy of one of these latter viruses to describe the effect of the military-industrial complex (MIC) on US society.  His work appeared as The Military-Industrial Virus in Harper’s Magazine.

Cockburn’s virus analogy was prompted by a study of long-term military spending trends.  Wars would come and go; political upheavals would occur; yet defense spending kept rising at a more-or-less steady rate.  He quotes work from a persistent Pentagon critic, Chuck Spinny.

“The analysis that Spinney produced…revealed something intriguing: although the U.S. defense budget clearly increased and decreased over the sixty years following the end of the Korean War, the decreases never dipped below where the budget would have been if it had simply grown at 5 percent per year from 1954 on (with one minor exception in the 1960s). ‘Amazingly,’ emphasized Spinney, ‘this behavior even held true for the large budget reductions that occurred after the end of the Vietnam War and, more significantly, after the end of the Cold War. It is as if there is a rising floor of resistance, below which the defense budget does not penetrate’.”

Cockburn provided this example of the resiliency of the MIC.

“In 1960, for example, as President Eisenhower was getting ready to denounce the dangerous power of what he would christen the military-industrial complex, the growth rate was pressing against the 5 percent floor. On cue, there appeared the fraudulent specter of a ‘missile gap’ favoring the Soviets. The incoming Kennedy Administration duly opened the budgetary tap.”

Such examples prompted the virus analogy.

“This entire process, whereby spending growth slows and is then seemingly automatically regenerated, raises an intriguing possibility: that our military-industrial complex has become, in Spinney’s words, a ‘living organic system’ with a built-in self-defense reflex that reacts forcefully whenever a threat to its food supply—our money—­hits a particular trigger point. The implications are profound, suggesting that the MIC is embedded in our society to such a degree that it cannot be dislodged, and also that it could be said to be concerned, exclusively, with self-preservation and expansion, like a giant, malignant virus.”

The virus analogy requires that the military industrial complex is ultimately harmful to the nation.  Cockburn begins his article with this lede.

“How bloated defense budgets gut our armed forces”

For an explanation of how this harm comes about, Cockburn indicates a realization first pointed out by friend Spinny.

“In 1983, Chuck Spinney, a thirty-seven-year-old analyst in the Pentagon’s Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation, testified to Congress that the cost of the ever-more complex weapons that the military insisted on buying always grew many times faster than the overall defense budget. In consequence, planes, ships, and tanks were never replaced on a one-to-one basis, which in turn ensured that the armed forces got smaller and older.”

If one had and needed two thousand planes of a specific type and wished to replace the older model with a newer “better” model, the replacement might be five times more expensive than the original, which meant the budget only supported perhaps a thousand new planes.  That required half a force of the older planes be maintained for many more years.  The dilemma is even more perverse if the newer model is less reliable than the old and does not function exactly as promised—as is often the case.  This realization led Cockburn to the following conclusion.

“…we’ve been left with a very poor fighting force for our money. The evidence for this is depressingly clear, starting with our bulging arsenal of weapons systems incapable of performing as advertised and bought at extraordinary cost. Some examples, such as the F-35 Lightning II fighter planes bought by the Air Force, Navy, and Marines, have achieved a certain muted notoriety and served as the occasional butt of jokes made by comedians on cable TV. Yet there is little public appreciation of the extent of the disaster. The F-35 first saw combat last year, seventeen years after the program began. The Marines sent just six of them on their first deployment to the Middle East, and over several months only managed to fly, on average, one combat sortie per plane every three days. According to the Pentagon’s former chief testing official, had there been opposition, these ‘fighters’ could not have survived without protection from other planes.”

“The beauty of the system lies in its self-­reinforcing nature. Huge cost overruns on these contracts not only secure a handsome profit for the contractor but also guarantee that the number of weapons acquired always falls short of the number originally requested. For example, the Air Force first planned to buy 750 ­F-22s at a projected cost of $139 million apiece, but rising costs compelled the defense secretary at the time, Robert Gates, to cancel the program in 2009, capping the fleet at 187. With reduced numbers, weapons systems are kept in service longer: the Air Force’s planes average twenty-eight years in service, and some still in use were built well over half a century ago. The ­F-35, for example, costs almost six times more than the ­F-16 it is replacing, while the Navy’s Zumwalt-­class destroyer ($7.5 billion each) costs four times more than the Arleigh Burke destroyers it was supposed to replace. (The Zumwalt’s overruns were so enormous that although the original plan called for thirty-two ships, production was cut to just three.) On occasion, the system reaches the ultimate point of absurdity when gigantic sums are expended with no discernible results. Such was the case with Future Combat Systems, a grandiose Army program to field ground forces of manned vehicles, robots, and assorted weaponry, all linked via electronic networks, and with Boeing as the prime contractor. Twenty billion dollars later, the enterprise was shuttered, an extensive exercise in futility.”

A characteristic of a virus is that it spreads as far as it can to ensure its survival.  The societal equivalent is how the MIC has ensured political support by spreading its contagion throughout the body politic.

“Major contractors have turned the distribution of defense contracts across as many congressional districts as possible into a high art. Contracts and subcontracts for Lockheed’s ­F-35, for example, are spread across 307 congressional districts in forty-­five states, thus ensuring the fealty of a commensurate number of congresspeople as well as ninety senators.”

Jobs creating defense programs are an enticement few politicians can resist.

“For example, the F-35 is due to be stationed in Vermont at Burlington International Airport, home of the Vermont Air National Guard. Because the ­F-35 is at least four times noisier than the ­F-16s it will replace, large swaths of the surrounding low-cost neighborhood, by the Air Force’s own criteria, will be rendered unfit for residential use, trapping some seven thousand people in homes that will only be sellable at rock-bottom prices. Nevertheless, the ­F-35 proposal enjoys political support from the state’s otherwise liberal elected leadership, notably Senator Bernie Sanders, who has justified his support on the grounds that, while he is opposed to the ­F-35, he supports its being stationed in Vermont from the perspective of job creation.”

As it turns out, growing jobs by defense spending is the least efficient approach.

“Yet deeper scrutiny indicates that defense contracts are not particularly efficient job generators after all. Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-­Peltier of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have calculated the number of jobs spawned by an investment of $1 billion in various industries, ranging from defense to health care, renewable energy, and education. Education came in first by a wide margin, producing 26,700 jobs, followed by health care at 17,200. Defense, generating 11,200 jobs, ranked last. ‘All economic activity creates some employment,’ Pollin told me. ‘That isn’t at issue. The relevant question is how much employment in the U.S. gets created for a given level of spending in one area of the economy as opposed to others.’ The fact is that defense spending generates fewer jobs than green energy, education, and other critical industries.”

The virus analogy also predicts that the infection will harm the functioning of our society.  Cockburn provides examples where the costly, overly complex, underperforming culture of the defense industry has spread to critical industries and caused damage.

“A generation ago, Seymour Melman, a professor of industrial engineering at Columbia, devoted much of his career to analyzing this very subject. He concluded that defense spending’s impact on the broader economy was wholly harmful, a consequence of the bad habits injected into the bloodstream of American manufacturing management by a defense culture indifferent to cost control and productivity. The U.S. machine-tool industry, for example, had powered postwar U.S. manufacturing dominance thanks to its cost-effective productivity that in turn allowed high wage rates for workers. But, Melman wrote, as more and more of its output shifted to defense contracts, the industry’s relationship with the Pentagon ‘became an invitation to discard the old tradition of cost minimizing. It was an invitation to avoid all the hard work . . . that is needed to offset cost increases. For now it was possible to cater to a new client, for whom cost and price increase was acceptable—­even desirable’.”

“In consequence, as Melman detailed, the U.S. machine-tool industry gradually ceased to compete effectively with nations such as Germany and Japan, where cost control still reigned supreme.”

A more recent example of infection comes from Boeing’s commercial aircraft woes.  It turns out Boeing realized that the consequences of an infection from its Boeing defense arm could be dangerous for its commercial products.  It maintained a barrier between the two internal organizations.  However, when it merged with McDonnell Douglas, a defense outfit, the defense arm gained more influence over the commercial sector.

“The two recent crashes of the Boeing 737 Max, which together killed 346 people, were further indications that running civilian programs along defense-­industry lines may not have been the best course for Boeing. The 737 had been a tried and true money-spinner with an impressive safety record since 1967…the airliner was modified in a rushed program to compete with the Airbus ­A320. These modifications, principally larger engines that altered the plane’s aerodynamic characteristics, rendered it potentially unstable. Without informing customers or pilots, Boeing installed an automated software Band-Aid that fixed the stability problem, at least when the relevant sensors were working. But the sensors were liable to fail, with disastrous consequences. Such mishaps are not uncommon in defense programs, one such instance being Boeing’s V-22 Osprey troop-carrying aircraft…in which a design flaw, long denied, led to multiple crashes that killed thirty-­nine soldiers and Marines. But the impact of such disasters on contractors’ bottom lines tends to be minimal, or even positive, since they may be paid to correct the problem. In the commercial market, the punishment in terms of lost sales and lawsuits are likely to be more severe.”

One attribute of a virus is that it can mutate into a more dangerous form and eventually kill its host.  Consider the fate of the Soviet Union laboring under the infection of its own military-industrial complex.

“In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, before tensions with Russia were reignited, the BDM Corporation, a major defense consulting group, received a Pentagon contract to interview former members of the Soviet defense complex, very senior officials either in the military or in weapons-­production enterprises. Among the interesting revelations that emerged (which included confirmation that U.S. intelligence assessments of Soviet defense policy had been almost entirely wrong throughout the Cold War) was an authoritative account of how disastrous the power of the military-­industrial complex had been for Soviet defense and the economy. BDM learned that ‘the defense-­industrial sector used its clout to deliver more weapons than the armed services asked for and to build new weapons systems that the operational military did not want.’ A huge portion of Soviet industrial capacity was devoted just to missile production. ‘This vast industrial base,’ according to one former high-ranking bureaucrat, ‘destroyed the national economy and pauperized the people.”

Beware the short-term trap of focusing on jobs above all else.

“Calls for cuts in this unnecessary production were dismissed by the Kremlin leadership on grounds of ‘what would happen to the workers.’ The unbearable burden of the Soviet military-industrial complex was undoubtedly a prime cause of the ultimate collapse of the Soviet state—the virus had consumed its host.”

The goal of a virus is survival.  Nothing else matters. 

“The BDM contract had been issued in the belief that it would confirm a cherished Pentagon thesis that the sheer magnitude of U.S. spending, particularly the huge boost initiated in the Reagan years, had brought down the Soviets by forcing them to try to compete—­a welcome endorsement for mammoth defense budgets. But the ongoing BDM project, even before the researchers finished their work, made it clear this was not what had happened; the Soviet burden was entirely self-­generated for internal reasons, such as maintaining employment. When Pentagon officials realized that BDM’s research was leading toward this highly unwelcome conclusion, the contract was abruptly terminated. The system knows how to defend itself.”