Tomgram: Mandy Smithberger, Prioritizing the Pentagon in a Pandemic

[Boats]

Tomgram: Mandy Smithberger, Prioritizing the Pentagon in a Pandemic
By: Mandy Smithberger - Tom Dispatch News - 06-28-20
Re: https://www.tomdispatch.com/

Since it began in 2002, TomDispatch has been following the twenty-first-century rise of the Pentagon and the rest of the U.S. national security state, amid distant wars that simply never seem to end. While much has, in this Covid-19 era of ours, been in the process of going down (billionaires aside), the military-industrial complex (as well as the revolving door that connects its parts) seems always to be on the rise (if lack of success in war-fighting isn’t counted into the formula). As early as 2011, in a moment when a Republican Congress and the Obama administration both had their eyes on cuts to the domestic budget, I wrote about how the Pentagon and war budgets just grew and grew, even if, as one analyst then reported, that institution was “planning ambitious increases, paring them back, and calling this a cut.” There were, for example, the gleaming new headquarters like a nearly Pentagon-sized complex for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency then being built in Virginia at the cost of $1.8 billion (to take just one tiny example). In 2017, at this site, Pentagon expert William Hartung first laid out the then-trillion-dollar national security state budget. By 2020, according to the calculations of TomDispatch regular Mandy Smithberger, it had already topped $1.2 trillion and, as she and Hartung reported in September 2019, military officials were starting to imagine a Pentagon budget alone that might reach nearly a trillion dollars. There’s a phrase for this in our language: highway robbery.

And as it happens, though for so many Americans these pandemic months have been a time of loss, as Smithberger reports today, for the Pentagon and the giant weapons makers, the good times have simply never ended. It should be a scandal, of course, but no such luck. Tom