I’m cautiously pessimistic about the near-term survival of this institution, even as its coffers have surged. As it actively seeks war in the Pacific, the Caribbean, the Arctic, the North Atlantic, with an energized expansion in the Middle East, the Pentagon brings to mind not American security, but rapid metastasis.
The tasks of the Pentagon are threefold: To expand and maintain markets for the dollar; to subsidize risk and eliminate competition for favored US industries; and to serve as a mechanism for government payment transfers to the citizens in all 435 congressional districts.
Despite its new moniker, the Pentagon isn’t about winning wars. From 1939 to 1941 the US ginned up and aided the British war effort, as it scaled back similar assistance to Germany. The end of the war – and those gratuitous nukes – signaled the United States as sole superpower, materially unwounded, in permanent search of new war markets. The Pentagon effectively was established to maintain and grow these markets – and not a single war has been won since.
A vast bureaucracy developed around this institution for redistribution of what is now a trillion dollars a year. The MIC is a matrix of taxpayer supported industries that use their cut to enhance their stock value and the health of the matrix. Like state-supported and heavily subsidized industries everywhere, corruption, monopoly and propaganda become the three legs of the stool, and these must remain in balance.
Pete Hegseth is right. Only eight months after a convincing call to “burn it down”, quick-draw Pete is doing just that. Not as quick as he gutted the fraud, waste and abuse reporting system, nor as fast as he had Pentagon media swear loyalty oaths, but still pretty fast and it all seems to support the cause of mo’ money, mo’ stuff, mo’ war, in less time.
In reality, our bright boy is actually weakening all three legs of the Pentagon stool. The Pentagon has long been a swamp of corruption and graft, some driven by bureaucratic regulation and habit, and some driven by the sheer amount of waste in the system that is created, tolerated and ignored. “If I don’t steal it, someone else will” explains well how it works inside the military matrix. The recent $100 million fraud in federal contracting, discovered by independent media, is an example of how this can work. The most recent Ukrainian corruption scandal is another $100 million example of how this can work. We are inured to examples from the 1980s Packard Commission findings, as we find in Part Three of that 1986 report, “Problems with the Present Acquisition System.” Later sections contain comprehensive reform recommendations, one of which was to “substantially reduce the number of acquisition personnel.” In any case, my review of that 40 year old study tells me that little has changed, little has been corrected, and meanwhile, the Pentagon budget has risen steadily far above the rate of inflation since 1986 – despite the conclusion of the Cold War only a few years later. Just last year, a decade after he was first arrested, Fat Leonard and his costly schemes had yet to be punished, in part because he was serving as an informant (for years) to identify the rest of the scoundrels, in part because he escaped custody for 16 months and had to be recaptured. Your Pentagon at its finest!
Just as Hegseth is reducing the Inspector General function, presumably so it doesn’t get in the way of war fighting progress, he is also aiming to improve the quality of Pentagon propaganda in a similar way. He seeks to eliminate actual investigatory news functions from access to the Pentagon. Pete may not realize that access to government and government officials is how DC maintains and shapes that very propaganda. Defense industry-owned media, massive defense advertising and Hollywood promotions do their part – but Pete’s Pentagon now rejects the cultivation of major mainstream outlets through access, expecting that now only friendly loyal media will be reporting on defense. Hegseth is doing a Dick Cheney-style quail hunt, shooting his friend in the face. Mainstream media inside the Pentagon was already helping promote Pentagon positivity, and without that access, many will choose to investigate and cultivate sources with professional chips on collective shoulders. Further, those media loyal to the Pentagon are now outed, and in the competition for solid information and truth, they may be at a distinct disadvantage. Like Harry Whittington, they’ll live to ask forgiveness.
The third leg is monopoly. While pugnacious Pete seems interested in more competition, 70 years of evolving concentration among defense contractors may be too difficult to overcome. Even as technology has changed, with cloud and AI services moving to the top, again we have few players, each of whom insist on winning or else an army of lawyers will show up. Amazon seamlessly shifts places with Microsoft, with billions of dollars in commitments for what? And for whom? The US Defense Establishment seems to be established to enrich certain companies, and certain people, and little else. The problem for Pete is not accidental monopoly, but monopoly by design. The problems the defense monopoly faces are those it has always faced: how to grow and profit. We don’t have actual defense or national security in the US because that’s not what benefits the MIC.
Hence, the long overdue withdrawal from Afghanistan, planned by Trump, executed badly by Biden, was in preparation for the new war against Russia, this time in Ukraine. As Ukraine comes to an end, we find new war markets in the Pacific, in the Caribbean, and seek to build new military bases, not just in Romania and Poland (in support of the Ukraine operation years before the fuse was lit) but in Syria, in Gaza, perhaps in Central Asia.
The breakup of monopolies is done via political will, or through financial collapse, usually brought on by technology or paradigm shifts. For defense monopolies, financial collapse could come from the ongoing collapse of the dollar, from global military technology competition led by Russia and China, or from a changing American paradigm that refuses to fund or participate in wars and bases overseas, a population that requires of its government peace, and little else.
The wonderful Bill Astore shares what ChatGPT and DeepSeek had to say about the MIC, and the machine generated critiques are on target. Only a year ago, 77 million America First voters thought they were voting for peace. Trump’s opposition, another 75 million in the Libertarian, Green and Democratic parties, were equally unenthusiastic about more US instigated and funded war around the world. Why has no one told us this? AI knows.
Pete’s new plans for the Pentagon are inadvertently taking aim at all three legs of the Pentagon stool, and we may safely predict unintended cracks and crumbles in the corruption and propaganda legs.
Perhaps all that is left for us to do, with our good man Pete kickstarting the process, is to remember the words of Etienne De La Boetie:
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.
