Weapons ‘R’ Us: Making Warbirds Instead of Thunderbirds
Perhaps you’ve heard of
“Makin’ Thunderbirds,”
a hard-bitten rock & 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 U.S. 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.
Tomgram: William Astore, Confessions of a Recovering Weapons Addict
The twenty-first century hasn’t exactly been America’s
greatest moment. Still, there remain winners, along with all the
losers you might care to mention. If, in fact, you were to sum up the
first decade-plus of the next “American Century” in manufacturing
terms, you might say that -- Steve Jobs aside -- this country has
mainly been successful at making things that go boom in the night.
Start with Hollywood. Its action and superhero films -- the very definition of what goes boom in the night -- continue to capture eyeballs and dominate global markets
in ways that should impress and that have left national movie
industries elsewhere in the proverbial dust. And then, of course,
there’s that other group of winners, the arms-makers of the
military-industrial-homeland-security complex. They’ve had the time of their lives these last boom years (so to speak), with national security budgets soaring annually beyond all imagination.
Even now, in the toughest of tough times and despite the headlines about gigantic Defense Department spending cuts, President Obama recently reassured arms-makers (and the rest of us) that the Pentagon budget would, in his words,
“still grow, because we have global responsibilities that demand our
leadership. In fact, the defense budget will still be larger than it
was toward the end of the Bush administration.” In response, his
Republican opponents lambasted him as weak
on defense for promising so little. Which tells you just who the
winners of the last decade were and who the winners of the next one are
likely to be.
Of course, in any situation there are always winners and losers, but
it is striking that our losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have proven
a gold mine for a small set of crony corporations and weapon-makers,
producing a group of real winners at home with names like Lockheed
Martin, KBR, and General Dynamics.
TomDispatch regular
and retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore points, for
instance, to the end results of our debacle in Iraq: the new Iraqi
government is planning to purchase $11 billion in American weapons (and training), including F-16
fighter jets. A little history of American dreams for the Iraqi Air
Force might be in order. When the Bush administration launched its
invasion in 2003, it imagined an American-garrisoned Iraq for decades to come and a reconstituted Iraqi military “lite,” a force of perhaps 40,000 lightly armed troops “without an air force,” who would patrol the borders of their part of an American-dominated Middle East. In those halcyon days, there were no plans
to recreate an Iraqi Air Force (though Saddam Hussein’s had once been
one of the biggest in the world). Or rather, U.S. planners saw no need
to do so because the “Iraqi Air Force” already existed and was settling
into Balad Air Base north of Baghdad. It was, of course, the U.S. Air
Force.
Consider it now a sign of defeat that almost the last military link
between Iraq and the U.S. military will be the delivery of those new
weapons and the years of training and support that will go with them.
We didn’t win in Iraq, but someone here did! Let Astore tell you all
about it. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in
which Astore discusses the thrill of weaponry in pop culture and how it
faded for him, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
Weapons ‘R’ Us: Making Warbirds Instead of Thunderbirds
Yes, we’re the world’s foremost “merchants of death,” the title of a
best-selling exposé of the international arms trade published to acclaim
in the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 of and hecatombs of dead from the First World War.
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 U.S. 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 U.S. increased its market share,
accounting for a whopping 53% of the trade that year. Last year saw the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 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 U.S. military.
As one U.S. 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 U.S. 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’s National Defense
(1981) among other early critiques of the Carter and Reagan defense
buildup, as well as the slyly subversive and always insightful Augustine’s Laws (1986) by Norman Augustine,
later the CEO 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 Norman
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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 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 R&D 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
Bob 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.
To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which
Astore discusses the thrill of weaponry in pop culture and how it faded
for him, click here, or download it to your iPod here. He welcomes reader comments at wjastore@gmail.com.
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