Follow the Money-Why the US Defense Budget Soars, Even as the Military Shrinks

[stockholmer]

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NucNews/message/32809

By Andrew Cockburn in Counterpunch Magazine


" Follow the money, the FBI source known as Deep Throat advised the
journalists Woodward and Bernstein, as they investigated the
Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon. Endlessly and
approvingly cited, these words have become a hallowed journalistic
maxim, and quite right too. The problem is that most of the time this
sage advice is ignored, not least by those whose job it is to report
and comment on the activities of our national security system.
Similarly, the venerated Dwight Eisenhower may have put the phrase
military-industrial complex in the language, but it is today deemed
too loaded a term for mainstream media employment anywhere outside
the opinion columns. In fact, even to suggest that U.S. military
organizations exist for the benefit of those who profit from them is
considered unseemly, possibly indicating a dangerous predilection for
conspiracy theories.

Instead, the public brain is more routinely softened with thoughtful
ruminations such as the New York Times writer Elisabeth Bumillers
July 24, 2010, article on the enormous cost of the Iraq and Afghan
wars. Pondering the issue, Bumiller found a partial culprit in
twenty-first century technology, as if that were a sufficient
explanation and also unavoidable. It would have been helpful if the
writer had looked at specific examples of the technology that is
costing us so much, such as Compass Call, a $100 million Lockheed
EC-130H equipped with ground-penetrating radar that searches for $25
homemade bombs buried in an Afghan road one small component of our
$50 billion counter- IED (Improvised Explosive Device) effort.

Readers should also be aware that those responsible for Compass Call
have no excuse for believing that there is anything justifiable about
it at all. An in-depth study of its effectiveness in Iraq, carried by
a strategic analysis cell of military intelligence in Baghdad in
April 2007, examined the results of hundreds of flights from the
previous October through to May 2007. Examining the results, the
analysts summarized them as follows: Conclusion: No Detectable
Effect. (Operational Iraq Data. Study prepared for MultiNational
Force Iraq, April 2008, and made available to author. Estimated cost
per flying hour of Compass Call is roughly $70,000.)

On the other hand, it is, of course, clearly a financially
justifiable activity for the Lockheed Martin Corporation and the
galaxy of subcontractors, whose interests are tied to the program a
fact that should be first and foremost in the mind of anyone looking
into this or any other military initiative. With who profits? as a
schwerpunkt a main objective around which all efforts are organized
analyzing the salient features of the national security state becomes
a much easier and more illuminating task. Such an approach certainly
helps in understanding post-World War II U.S. history. Library
shelves groan under the volumes analyzing the origins of the Cold
War. Recall that following victory in World War II, the U.S.A.
rapidly disarmed, disbanding its huge conscript army and slashing
weapons production. The economies of our allies and enemies in the
recent conflict lay in total ruin..................."

PDF link http://library.constantcontact.com/download/get/file/1103935397483-7/vol+18+no+6.pdf

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CounterPunch Diary
Battling the Beast
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn04012011.html


"Libya has dislodged from the headlines a nuclear catastrophe in Japan, on top of a seismic one, that’s one of the epic dramas of the past half-century and what’s doubly weird is that the actual fighting in Libya is a series of tiny skirmishes. The muscle-bound adjectives and nouns used to describe the military engagements – if they even deserve that word – in press reports remind me of a Chihuahua trying to mount a Newfoundland. Ambition far outstrips reality, which is in this case is a nervous rabble motley insurgents – maybe 1,500 or so at most, posing for television crews and then fleeing back down the road to the next village (“strategic stronghold”) at the first whiff of trouble.

By my count, the mighty armies contending along the highway west of Benghazi would melt into the bleachers at a college baseball game. News stories suggest mobile warfare on the scale of the epic dramas of the Kursk salient in World War Two. But most of the action revolves around one tank. I’ve seen it in hundreds of video feeds. Like the tooth passed from witch to witch in Greek myththis tank performs many functions and to judge from the graffiti on its turret, it’s always the same vehicle. Maybe that’s why there’s endless bickering about whether the U.N. resolution covers the supply of arms and heavy equipment. The war’s PR men want to freshen up the visuals......................."

[Hannah Bell]

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