Are We Arming Ukraine to Enrich the US Military-Industrial Complex?

What most people believe about the workings of the world is not based on actual experience. Most people have never worked for the Federal Government. Most people have never worked for a non-profit. Most people have never worked for a large corporation. Most people have never lived and worked in a foreign country.

Most people are dependent on others and come to believe what they are told. They are told, too, for the most part, by people who have no direct experience. These influencers build on and pass along the opinions of others who think as they do. What passes for knowledge in modern society is the summary of a long chain of opinion that often has its origin in speculation, in theories about the way things work. 

Few people in this daisy chain of opinion stop to do even the most basic research. Even fewer take time to reason about how things work. To believe what you are told, even by sincere people with impressive credentials, is likely only to confirm your biases. Humans avoid listening to contrary views and readily discount anything that challenges their beliefs. Confirmation bias assures that we will continue to firmly believe what we believed to begin with.

Still, I offer this to those willing to learn.

There are more than 4,000 US companies large enough to be listed on a stock exchange and owned directly or indirectly by millions of people.

The largest companies? Walmart, Amazon, Exxon Mobil, Apple, United Healthcare, CVS, Berkshire Hathaway, Alphabet (Google), McKesson, Chevron — the next ten are health, computer, oil, and retailing companies. You will find more than 50 companies larger than any corporation supplying the military.

In 2020 the defense industry contributed about $50 million to elect Democrats and Republicans — roughly half to each party. That year $14.4 billion was spent by all candidates. So the defense industry provided about 1/300th of the money spent to win a typical office. Is this enough to control any of the people actually elected?

The defense industry spends about $125 million a year on lobbying. Once people are in office, you want to do what you can to influence them. More than 800 lobbyists represent more than 300 different defense corporations. While they might conceivably work together to get a paragraph into a 2,000-page tax bill, that is usually the limit of their power.

What of companies like Walmart and Exxon. If they were to elect Biden and the Congress, would they direct them to go to war in Ukraine with the goal of increasing their wealth.

As a corporation executive I sat on the strategic planning committee for the largest defense division of a Fortune 100 company. Our strategy was to figure out what the military would be looking for and to determine how we might best supply it. 

Division executives donated a small amount of money to candidates for Congress, but this was little more than a courtesy. The local congressman would meet with us because we employed 5,000 people in his district. Our parent corporation had a Washington representative, but he was useless and everyone knew it. When I attempted to recruit a close friend of Bob Dole (and a former NASA head of legislative affairs) to help us in dealing with Congress, the company was unwilling to spend even an amount equal to 1/4th of my salary for this purpose.

The idea that (1) a single corporation might influence anyone in Washington to go to war is silly, and (2) while a large and powerful group of defense corporations might, in theory, conspire to foment military action, companies are competitive and have no ready mechanism to work together in any way that would be likely to directly benefit the entire industry, much less one company’s bottom line. The military-industrial complex benefits by constant saber-rattling, not by the letting of blood. Fear provides profit. War is unnecessary.

A good example to show how things actually work? Sperry Univac sold a computer system to the USSR. Unfortunately for the corporation, Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzeziński, his Polish National Security Advisor who hated the Russians and wanted to play the Great Game (he later wrote The Grand Chessboard), had decided to destabilize Afghanistan, which had a pro-Russian government. When the USSR came to the aid of the Afghan Government, Carter & Co. called it an invasion and  canceled US participation in the 1980 Olympics. The Carter Administration then raised a trial balloon suggesting it would cancel Univac’s computer sale — worth about $40 million in today’s currency. I proposed we speak up before the sale was actually blocked. The corporation was unwilling to stand up to the Government and the sale was denied on specious “national security” grounds.

That is the reality. While you may wish to believe that candidates are the servants of the rich, once elected, they are loose cannons and thousands of contributors rush to pacify them for fear that a cannon will be aimed at them. When I asked about our local congressman, the division president said that business leaders on Long Island couldn’t find anyone willing to run — and that the candidate who finally took on the task was an idiot member of a local city council. When I was later recruited to work for the House Science Committee, I found that its chairman was dim-witted and turned the offer down. 

That, sad to say, is the reality. No one hires these bozos and no one would trust them to do as they were told. Give them power and it will go to their heads. While the influencers in the public square — media pundits, intellectuals, professors, ex-officials, authors — may affect what politicians do, money alone would never suffice.