- “The forerunners of today’s corporate arms manufacturers (Krupp of Germany, Armstrong and Vickers of England, and others) were originally rejected by their governments and had to depend upon foreign sales for survival. They often furnished arms to both sides in conflicts and even to their own country’s potential enemies. Their practice of warning different countries of the aggressive intentions of their neighbors, who were supposedly arming themselves through purchases of the latest sophisticated weapons, yields a glimpse of the origins of today’s mythical missile gaps.” W. Smith, World’s Wasted Wealth II, (Institute for Economic Democracy, 1994), pp. 223–224
It’s a brilliant business model, refined in the US where weapons exports and new weapons procurement drive each other. After new weapons roll off the assembly line, they are offered to foreign customers, which produces an incremental decrease in US military superiority, which spurs politicians, the military and defense industry to lobby for more spending for more sophisticated weapons than the ones shipped overseas. Then the cycle repeats.
The top five arms-exporting countries from 2010 to 2014 are all permanent members of the UN Security Council; USA, Russia, UK, France and China and are responsible for eighty eight per cent of reported conventional arms exports with the US at the top.
Annual arms sales exceed 1.5 Trillion dollars.
Fifteen thousand million dollars spent every year on weapons. From 1998 to 2001, the USA, the UK, and France earned more income from arms sales to developing countries than they gave in aid.
Six of the 10 largest arms suppliers in the world in 2015 are US firms; Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and United Technological Corporation. And they are generous in their contributions to politicians.
The Russians too have embraced the Systeme Zarharoff, concluding this year a $10 billion deal selling a surface-to-air anti-ballistic missile system to India after last year selling India’s rival Pakistan four Mi-35M attack helicopters.
Nothing personal; it’s just business.
In George Bernard Shaw’s 1905 play Major Barbara, arms manufacturer Andrew Undershaft explains his business philosophy to his son Stephen (who wants to go into politics), "I am the government of your country ... When I want anything to keep my dividends up, you will discover that my want is a national need. When other people want something to keep my dividends down, you will call out the police and military. And in return you shall have the support and applause of my newspapers, and the delight of imagining that you are a great statesman."
In a presentation at the Hague Appeal for Peace in 1999, Stephen Staples pointed out that, “Industrialized countries negotiate free trade and investment agreements with other countries, but exempt military spending from the liberalizing demands of the agreement. Since only the wealthy countries can afford to devote billions on military spending, they will always be able to give their corporations hidden subsidies through defense contracts, and maintain a technologically advanced industrial capacity.
“And so, in every international trade and investment agreement one will find a clause which exempts government programs and policies deemed vital for national security. Here is the loophole that allows the maintenance of corporate subsidies through virtually unlimited military spending.”
Which means “The arms industry is unlike any other. It operates without regulation. It suffers from widespread corruption and bribes. And it makes its profits on the back of machines designed to kill and maim human beings. “ The Arms Industry, Control Arms Campaign, October 2003
Dwight Eisenhower understood the trade-offs between guns and butter. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he warned in 1953, early in his presidency.
As Jimmy Carter said in his 1976 presidential campaign, ““We can’t have it both ways. We can’t be both the world’s leading champion of peace and the world’s leading supplier of arms.”
Marine reserve officer Ron B. O’Connell, assistant professor of history at the United States Naval Academy, in a Nov. 4, 2012 New York Times opinion piece wrote, “Uncritical support of all things martial is quickly becoming the new normal for our youth. Hardly any of my students at the Naval Academy remember a time when their nation wasn’t at war… few Americans today are giving sufficient consideration to the full range of violent activities the government undertakes in their names.”
“Were Eisenhower alive, he’d be aghast at our debt, deficits and still expanding military-industrial complex. And he would certainly be critical of the “insidious penetration of our minds” by video game companies and television networks, the news media and the partisan pundits. With so little knowledge of what Eisenhower called the “lingering sadness of war” and the “certain agony of the battlefield,” they have done as much as anyone to turn the hard work of national security into the crass business of politics and entertainment.”
Zarharoff would be proud, but We, the People should be appalled.
Couched in terms patriotic, enshrined in nationalistic jingoism, the military-industrial complex has sold the world as a whole a self-serving bill of goods.
Hiding beneath the lie of man’s warlike nature, they serve only one god; profit.
Pretending to peaceful aspirations they breed war from corporate boardrooms insulated by thick barricades of cash from the misery they so wantonly spread.
War is not man’s nature any more than is peace.
We decide.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”