THE TRILLION DOLLAR WAR MACHINE

A resounding denunciation of a military-industrial complex gone metastatic.

Hartung and Freeman, fellows at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, open with some surprising numbers: for one, that “more than half of the Pentagon budget goes to private firms, not military personnel,” and for another, that there are nearly two defense lobbyists for every member of Congress. Meanwhile, they note, although Trump promised in his campaign to scale back on foreign intervention in favor of a neo-isolationist policy, he has pledged to raise the budget of the Department of Defense—now the Department of War—to $1 trillion, part and parcel of a well-established pattern of presidents “talking peace but waging war.” A substantial portion of the $100 billion raise that getting to that trillion entails is slated for new technologies, such as the AI engines of “new-age militarists” Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, to say nothing of the whiz-bang technologies of Elon Musk. This, the authors write, exposes a growing rift between the new kids and the old guard, the legacy companies such as Boeing and General Dynamics, although all the promises of the newcomers have yet to be tested. As the authors note, President Trump’s vaunted Golden Dome missile system “is more of a marketing tool for spending more on the Pentagon than it is a well-thought-out defense project.” Besides purchasing arms, the U.S. also leads the world in exporting them, with three times more market share than Russia and six times more than China. In this clearly written exposé, the authors add academia to the military-industrial dyad: By their account, Johns Hopkins University alone receives more than $1 billion in military R&D funds annually. Hartung and Freeman close by advocating a smaller military that can do its job for less, allowing funds to go to “other needed public investments.”

A convincing argument for a leaner military and a constrained approach to arms sales.