How the Pentagon Operates as the Business Wing of the US Government
One of the pitfalls of capitalism is how profitability can lead to violations in human rights and liberties. Read on to learn about the USA's biggest blunders and how the worst may be yet to come.
The Pentagon, also known as the Department of Defense, is the branch of the United States government responsible for overseeing the military and national security. It has a significant presence in countries around the world, and is often involved in diplomatic negotiations and military interventions. The Pentagon also provides advice and recommendations to the President and other decision-makers on matters related to national security. As we’ll see explore in this newsletter, the Pentagon has been criticized because of how it has shaped national security and foreign policy to focus on private interests over human rights and democracy.
The Pentagon resembles a business, in many ways, from purchasing weapons, equipment, and supplies, as well as paying for the training and salaries of military personnel. It works with private companies to provide such resources, which can be a lucrative source of income for these businesses. The US military is likely to secure around $858 billion for its budget next year. That’s approaching a trillion dollars, funded from the pockets of taxpaying citizens. While this may be goods news in terms of supporting Ukraine and other marginalized countries backed by Western allies, this astonishing figure should raise alarm bells, because of how it raises incentive for armed conflicts from the onset.
Noam Chomsky, renowned political scholar and linguistics professor, has been a leading critic of the Pentagon and the associated military-industrial complex, which has a vested interest in maintaining a high level of military spending. Such interest has lead to costly, unnecessary wars and excessive interventionism. Even active US presidents have admitted something similar. George W. Bush once said that “all of the economic growth of the United States has been encouraged by wars.”
The role of the Pentagon is also that of a source of information to media outlets, engaging in public relations and communication efforts in order to present its actions and policies in order to steer public opinion. This may come in the form selected documents, press releases, and more recently, social media posts. The latter of which is also relevant to the ongoing promotion of military recruitment through the medium of Internet influencers.
In some cases, the Pentagon may be the only source of information about a specific event or conflict, particularly if the event is taking place in a remote or difficult-to-access location. Or if the locations are in nations under-represented by mainstream media. An unbiased source of information will never exist in the presence of profitable conflicts, because those monetary ventures could obstructed by moral concerns from activists and voting citizens.
After establishing the Pentagon here as a tripartite entity, serving as “business wing” of the government, a military organisation and a source of information to media outlets, it’s time to examine the devastations this looming three-headed chimera has unleashed over the world since its inception following World War 2. The most notable one is may be the Vietnam war. The USA and its allies dropped more bombs over Vietnam during the war, than the total amount of bombs dropped over Europe during World War 2. The nation is still recovering from the effects to this day.
To the media outlets, the purpose of the Vietnam war was presented as an attempt to “prevent the spread of communism and to support the government of South Vietnam against the communist-led forces of the North”. This misinformation still drips into modern textbooks and news stories to this day. The USA’s influence in Vietnam resulted in the overthrow of the democratically-elected government in South Vietnam and the installation of a authoritarian regime. This regime, propped up by oligarchs and investors with ties to Western corporatists, was responsible for many atrocities during the war, including catastrophic destruction to the peasant majority living in the Vietnamese countrysides.
Much of the USA’s influence in foreign countries was driven by the memorandum of the National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, as well as the Policy Planning Study 23, which includes the following terror from State Department planning staff George Kennan,
"We should cease to talk about vague and—for the Far East—unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”
Another well-known instance of the Pentagon’s impact in foreign countries is the Iraq War, from 2003 to 2011. This invasion began on the premise that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which was based on information the CIA argued could not be trusted, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In 2004, images of US soldiers engaging in abuse and torture of detainees surfaced to the public, with very similar abuses still occuring in the Guantanamo Bay prison to this day. The role of capitalism in these invasions is salient. Before Dick Cheney became George W Bush’s vice president, he was CEO of Halliburton. This questionable corporation provided a range of services to the US military, including logistics, construction, and support for oil and gas operations. Other private companies such as Blackwater (now known as Academi) and DynCorp also received such contracts. As a result, these companies earned many billions of dollars in revenue from the Pentagon.
There might be solace in thinking that at least with such a large and well-funded military, we can support countries like Ukraine in their time of need. While this is true, the fact remains that the Pentagon’s involvement will continue to drive up the profits of several large-scale arms manufacturing companies. This includes Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine just this year, Lockheed Martin’s stock price shot up over 12%, while Northrop Grumman’s shot up by 20%, while at the same the stock market (S&P 500) had shot down by 4%.
The most troubling thing may be the Pentagon’s unending investment into newer and more powerful weapons. Not only are sales of conventional arms profitable, but so are the sale of nuclear ones too. Soon the biggest concern may be the use of AI (artifical intelligence) by the military. Amnesty International’s Senior Advisor on Military, Security and Policing points out that “Allowing machines to make life-or-death decisions is an assault on human dignity, and will likely result in devastating violations of the laws of war and human rights. It will also intensify the digital dehumanisation of society, reducing people to data points to be processed. We need a robust, legally binding international treaty to stop the proliferation of killer robots.” All the way back in 1965, a science fiction book called Dune made the prescient comment that “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
If there’s one group who can fundraise enough money to make an armada of militarized AI sufficent for the near elimination of life as we know it, it’s the Pentagon. Perhaps if we can reconstruct the economy in such a way that no one can get rich from war, we can avoid this future, but this possiblity remains to be seen.