[R-G] The Military-Industrial Complex: It's Much Later Than You Think

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174959/chalmers_johnson_warning_mercenaries_at_work

    The Military-Industrial Complex
     It's Much Later Than You Think
     By Chalmers Johnson

     Most Americans have a rough idea what the term "military- 
industrial complex" means when they come across it in a newspaper or  
hear a politician mention it. President Dwight D. Eisenhower  
introduced the idea to the public in his farewell address of January  
17, 1961. "Our military organization today bears little relation to  
that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime," he said, "or  
indeed by the fighting men of World War II and Korea… We have been  
compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast  
proportions… We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications… We  
must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether  
sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."

     Although Eisenhower's reference to the military-industrial  
complex is, by now, well-known, his warning against its "unwarranted  
influence" has, I believe, largely been ignored. Since 1961, there has  
been too little serious study of, or discussion of, the origins of the  
military-industrial complex, how it has changed over time, how  
governmental secrecy has hidden it from oversight by members of  
Congress or attentive citizens, and how it degrades our Constitutional  
structure of checks and balances.

     From its origins in the early 1940s, when President Franklin  
Delano Roosevelt was building up his "arsenal of democracy," down to  
the present moment, public opinion has usually assumed that it  
involved more or less equitable relations -- often termed a  
"partnership" -- between the high command and civilian overlords of  
the United States military and privately-owned, for-profit  
manufacturing and service enterprises. Unfortunately, the truth of the  
matter is that, from the time they first emerged, these relations were  
never equitable.

     In the formative years of the military-industrial complex, the  
public still deeply distrusted privately owned industrial firms  
because of the way they had contributed to the Great Depression. Thus,  
the leading role in the newly emerging relationship was played by the  
official governmental sector. A deeply popular, charismatic president,  
FDR sponsored these public-private relationships. They gained further  
legitimacy because their purpose was to rearm the country, as well as  
allied nations around the world, against the gathering forces of  
fascism. The private sector was eager to go along with this largely as  
a way to regain public trust and disguise its wartime profit-making.

     In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Roosevelt's use of public- 
private "partnerships" to build up the munitions industry, and thereby  
finally overcome the Great Depression, did not go entirely  
unchallenged. Although he was himself an implacable enemy of fascism,  
a few people thought that the president nonetheless was coming close  
to copying some of its key institutions. The leading Italian  
philosopher of fascism, the neo-Hegelian Giovanni Gentile, once argued  
that it should more appropriately be called "corporatism" because it  
was a merger of state and corporate power. (See Eugene Jarecki's The  
American Way of War, p. 69.)

     Some critics were alarmed early on by the growing symbiotic  
relationship between government and corporate officials because each  
simultaneously sheltered and empowered the other, while greatly  
confusing the separation of powers. Since the activities of a  
corporation are less amenable to public or congressional scrutiny than  
those of a public institution, public-private collaborative  
relationships afford the private sector an added measure of security  
from such scrutiny. These concerns were ultimately swamped by  
enthusiasm for the war effort and the postwar era of prosperity that  
the war produced.

     Beneath the surface, however, was a less well recognized movement  
by big business to replace democratic institutions with those  
representing the interests of capital. This movement is today  
ascendant. (See Thomas Frank's new book, The Wrecking Crew: How  
Conservatives Rule, for a superb analysis of Ronald Reagan's slogan  
"government is not a solution to our problem, government is the  
problem.") Its objectives have long been to discredit what it called  
"big government," while capturing for private interests the tremendous  
sums invested by the public sector in national defense. It may be  
understood as a slow-burning reaction to what American conservatives  
believed to be the socialism of the New Deal.

     Perhaps the country's leading theorist of democracy, Sheldon S.  
Wolin, has written a new book, Democracy Incorporated, on what he  
calls "inverted totalitarianism" -- the rise in the U.S. of  
totalitarian institutions of conformity and regimentation shorn of the  
police repression of the earlier German, Italian, and Soviet forms. He  
warns of "the expansion of private (i.e., mainly corporate) power and  
the selective abdication of governmental responsibility for the well- 
being of the citizenry." He also decries the degree to which the so- 
called privatization of governmental activities has insidiously  
undercut our democracy, leaving us with the widespread belief that  
government is no longer needed and that, in any case, it is not  
capable of performing the functions we have entrusted to it.

     Wolin writes:

         "The privatization of public services and functions manifests  
the steady evolution of corporate power into a political form, into an  
integral, even dominant partner with the state. It marks the  
transformation of American politics and its political culture, from a  
system in which democratic practices and values were, if not defining,  
at least major contributory elements, to one where the remaining  
democratic elements of the state and its populist programs are being  
systematically dismantled." (p. 284)

     Mercenaries at Work

     The military-industrial complex has changed radically since World  
War II or even the height of the Cold War. The private sector is now  
fully ascendant. The uniformed air, land, and naval forces of the  
country as well as its intelligence agencies, including the CIA  
(Central Intelligence Agency), the NSA (National Security Agency), the  
DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), and even clandestine networks  
entrusted with the dangerous work of penetrating and spying on  
terrorist organizations are all dependent on hordes of "private  
contractors." In the context of governmental national security  
functions, a better term for these might be "mercenaries" working in  
private for profit-making companies.

     Tim Shorrock, an investigative journalist and the leading  
authority on this subject, sums up this situation devastatingly in his  
new book, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence  
Outsourcing. The following quotes are a précis of some of his key  
findings:

         "In 2006… the cost of America's spying and surveillance  
activities outsourced to contractors reached $42 billion, or about 70  
percent of the estimated $60 billion the government spends each year  
on foreign and domestic intelligence… [The] number of contract  
employees now exceeds [the CIA's] full-time workforce of 17,500…  
Contractors make up more than half the workforce of the CIA's National  
Clandestine Service (formerly the Directorate of Operations), which  
conducts covert operations and recruits spies abroad…

         "To feed the NSA's insatiable demand for data and information  
technology, the industrial base of contractors seeking to do business  
with the agency grew from 144 companies in 2001 to more than 5,400 in  
2006… At the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the agency in  
charge of launching and maintaining the nation's photoreconnaissance  
and eavesdropping satellites, almost the entire workforce is composed  
of contract employees working for [private] companies… With an  
estimated $8 billion annual budget, the largest in the IC  
[intelligence community], contractors control about $7 billion worth  
of business at the NRO, giving the spy satellite industry the  
distinction of being the most privatized part of the intelligence  
community…

         "If there's one generalization to be made about the NSA's  
outsourced IT [information technology] programs, it is this: they  
haven't worked very well, and some have been spectacular failures… In  
2006, the NSA was unable to analyze much of the information it was  
collecting… As a result, more than 90 percent of the information it  
was gathering was being discarded without being translated into a  
coherent and understandable format; only about 5 percent was  
translated from its digital form into text and then routed to the  
right division for analysis.

         "The key phrase in the new counterterrorism lexicon is  
'public-private partnerships'… In reality, 'partnerships' are a  
convenient cover for the perpetuation of corporate interests." (pp. 6,  
13-14, 16, 214-15, 365)

     Several inferences can be drawn from Shorrock's shocking exposé.  
One is that if a foreign espionage service wanted to penetrate  
American military and governmental secrets, its easiest path would not  
be to gain access to any official U.S. agencies, but simply to get its  
agents jobs at any of the large intelligence-oriented private  
companies on which the government has become remarkably dependent.  
These include Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC),  
with headquarters in San Diego, California, which typically pays its  
42,000 employees higher salaries than if they worked at similar jobs  
in the government; Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the nation's oldest  
intelligence and clandestine-operations contractors, which, until  
January 2007, was the employer of Mike McConnell, the current director  
of national intelligence and the first private contractor to be named  
to lead the entire intelligence community; and CACI International,  
which, under two contracts for "information technology services,"  
ended up supplying some two dozen interrogators to the Army at Iraq's  
already infamous Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. According to Major General  
Anthony Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib torture and abuse  
scandal, four of CACI's interrogators were "either directly or  
indirectly responsible" for torturing prisoners. (Shorrock, p. 281)

     Remarkably enough, SAIC has virtually replaced the National  
Security Agency as the primary collector of signals intelligence for  
the government. It is the NSA's largest contractor, and that agency is  
today the company's single largest customer.

     There are literally thousands of other profit-making enterprises  
that work to supply the government with so-called intelligence needs,  
sometimes even bribing Congressmen to fund projects that no one in the  
executive branch actually wants. This was the case with Congressman  
Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Republican of California's 50th District,  
who, in 2006, was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in federal  
prison for soliciting bribes from defense contractors. One of the  
bribers, Brent Wilkes, snagged a $9.7 million contract for his  
company, ADCS Inc. ("Automated Document Conversion Systems") to  
computerize the century-old records of the Panama Canal dig!

     A Country Drowning in Euphemisms

     The United States has long had a sorry record when it comes to  
protecting its intelligence from foreign infiltration, but the  
situation today seems particularly perilous. One is reminded of the  
case described in the 1979 book by Robert Lindsey, The Falcon and the  
Snowman (made into a 1985 film of the same name). It tells the true  
story of two young Southern Californians, one with a high security  
clearance working for the defense contractor TRW (dubbed "RTX" in the  
film), and the other a drug addict and minor smuggler. The TRW  
employee is motivated to act by his discovery of a misrouted CIA  
document describing plans to overthrow the prime minister of  
Australia, and the other by a need for money to pay for his addiction.

     They decide to get even with the government by selling secrets to  
the Soviet Union and are exposed by their own bungling. Both are  
sentenced to prison for espionage. The message of the book (and film)  
lies in the ease with which they betrayed their country -- and how  
long it took before they were exposed and apprehended. Today, thanks  
to the staggering over-privatization of the collection and analysis of  
foreign intelligence, the opportunities for such breaches of security  
are widespread.

     I applaud Shorrock for his extraordinary research into an almost  
impenetrable subject using only openly available sources. There is,  
however, one aspect of his analysis with which I differ. This is his  
contention that the wholesale takeover of official intelligence  
collection and analysis by private companies is a form of  
"outsourcing." This term is usually restricted to a business  
enterprise buying goods and services that it does not want to  
manufacture or supply in-house. When it is applied to a governmental  
agency that turns over many, if not all, of its key functions to a  
risk-averse company trying to make a return on its investment,  
"outsourcing" simply becomes a euphemism for mercenary activities.

     As David Bromwich, a political critic and Yale professor of  
literature, observed in the New York Review of Books:

         "The separate bookkeeping and accountability devised for  
Blackwater, DynCorp, Triple Canopy, and similar outfits was part of a  
careful displacement of oversight from Congress to the vice-president  
and the stewards of his policies in various departments and agencies.  
To have much of the work parceled out to private companies who are  
unaccountable to army rules or military justice, meant, among its  
other advantages, that the cost of the war could be concealed beyond  
all detection."

     Euphemisms are words intended to deceive. The United States is  
already close to drowning in them, particularly new words and terms  
devised, or brought to bear, to justify the American invasion of Iraq  
-- coinages Bromwich highlights like "regime change," "enhanced  
interrogation techniques," "the global war on terrorism," "the birth  
pangs of a new Middle East," a "slight uptick in violence," "bringing  
torture within the law," "simulated drowning," and, of course,  
"collateral damage," meaning the slaughter of unarmed civilians by  
American troops and aircraft followed -- rarely -- by perfunctory  
apologies. It is important that the intrusion of unelected corporate  
officials with hidden profit motives into what are ostensibly public  
political activities not be confused with private businesses buying  
Scotch tape, paper clips, or hubcaps.

     The wholesale transfer of military and intelligence functions to  
private, often anonymous, operatives took off under Ronald Reagan's  
presidency, and accelerated greatly after 9/11 under George W. Bush  
and Dick Cheney. Often not well understood, however, is this: The  
biggest private expansion into intelligence and other areas of  
government occurred under the presidency of Bill Clinton. He seems not  
to have had the same anti-governmental and neoconservative motives as  
the privatizers of both the Reagan and Bush II eras. His policies  
typically involved an indifference to -- perhaps even an ignorance of  
-- what was actually being done to democratic, accountable government  
in the name of cost-cutting and allegedly greater efficiency. It is  
one of the strengths of Shorrock's study that he goes into detail on  
Clinton's contributions to the wholesale privatization of our  
government, and of the intelligence agencies in particular.

     Reagan launched his campaign to shrink the size of government and  
offer a large share of public expenditures to the private sector with  
the creation in 1982 of the "Private Sector Survey on Cost Control."  
In charge of the survey, which became known as the "Grace Commission,"  
he named the conservative businessman, J. Peter Grace, Jr., chairman  
of the W.R. Grace Corporation, one of the world's largest chemical  
companies -- notorious for its production of asbestos and its  
involvement in numerous anti-pollution suits. The Grace Company also  
had a long history of investment in Latin America, and Peter Grace was  
deeply committed to undercutting what he saw as leftist unions,  
particularly because they often favored state-led economic development.

     The Grace Commission's actual achievements were modest. Its  
biggest was undoubtedly the 1987 privatization of Conrail, the freight  
railroad for the northeastern states. Nothing much else happened on  
this front during the first Bush's administration, but Bill Clinton  
returned to privatization with a vengeance.

     According to Shorrock:

         "Bill Clinton… picked up the cudgel where the conservative  
Ronald Reagan left off and… took it deep into services once considered  
inherently governmental, including high-risk military operations and  
intelligence functions once reserved only for government agencies. By  
the end of [Clinton's first] term, more than 100,000 Pentagon jobs had  
been transferred to companies in the private sector -- among them  
thousands of jobs in intelligence… By the end of [his second] term in  
2001, the administration had cut 360,000 jobs from the federal payroll  
and the government was spending 44 percent more on contractors than it  
had in 1993." (pp. 73, 86)

     These activities were greatly abetted by the fact that the  
Republicans had gained control of the House of Representatives in 1994  
for the first time in 43 years. One liberal journalist described  
"outsourcing as a virtual joint venture between [House Majority Leader  
Newt] Gingrich and Clinton." The right-wing Heritage Foundation aptly  
labeled Clinton's 1996 budget as the "boldest privatization agenda put  
forth by any president to date." (p. 87)

     After 2001, Bush and Cheney added an ideological rationale to the  
process Clinton had already launched so efficiently. They were  
enthusiastic supporters of "a neoconservative drive to siphon U.S.  
spending on defense, national security, and social programs to large  
corporations friendly to the Bush administration." (pp. 72-3)

     The Privatization -- and Loss -- of Institutional Memory

     The end result is what we see today: a government hollowed out in  
terms of military and intelligence functions. The KBR Corporation, for  
example, supplies food, laundry, and other personal services to our  
troops in Iraq based on extremely lucrative no-bid contracts, while  
Blackwater Worldwide supplies security and analytical services to the  
CIA and the State Department in Baghdad. (Among other things, its  
armed mercenaries opened fire on, and killed, 17 unarmed civilians in  
Nisour Square, Baghdad, on September 16, 2007, without any  
provocation, according to U.S. military reports.) The costs -- both  
financial and personal -- of privatization in the armed services and  
the intelligence community far exceed any alleged savings, and some of  
the consequences for democratic governance may prove irreparable.

     These consequences include: the sacrifice of professionalism  
within our intelligence services; the readiness of private contractors  
to engage in illegal activities without compunction and with impunity;  
the inability of Congress or citizens to carry out effective oversight  
of privately-managed intelligence activities because of the wall of  
secrecy that surrounds them; and, perhaps most serious of all, the  
loss of the most valuable asset any intelligence organization  
possesses -- its institutional memory.

     Most of these consequences are obvious, even if almost never  
commented on by our politicians or paid much attention in the  
mainstream media. After all, the standards of a career CIA officer are  
very different from those of a corporate executive who must keep his  
eye on the contract he is fulfilling and future contracts that will  
determine the viability of his firm. The essence of professionalism  
for a career intelligence analyst is his integrity in laying out what  
the U.S. government should know about a foreign policy issue,  
regardless of the political interests of, or the costs to, the major  
players.

     The loss of such professionalism within the CIA was starkly  
revealed in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's  
possession of weapons of mass destruction. It still seems astonishing  
that no senior official, beginning with Secretary of State Colin  
Powell, saw fit to resign when the true dimensions of our intelligence  
failure became clear, least of all Director of Central Intelligence  
George Tenet.

     A willingness to engage in activities ranging from the dubious to  
the outright felonious seems even more prevalent among our  
intelligence contractors than among the agencies themselves, and much  
harder for an outsider to detect. For example, following 9/11, Rear  
Admiral John Poindexter, then working for the Defense Advanced  
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the Department of Defense, got the  
bright idea that DARPA should start compiling dossiers on as many  
American citizens as possible in order to see whether "data-mining"  
procedures might reveal patterns of behavior associated with terrorist  
activities.

     On November 14, 2002, the New York Times published a column by  
William Safire entitled "You Are a Suspect" in which he revealed that  
DARPA had been given a $200 million budget to compile dossiers on 300  
million Americans. He wrote, "Every purchase you make with a credit  
card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you  
fill, every web site you visit and every e-mail you send or receive,  
every bank deposit you make, every trip you book, and every event you  
attend -- all these transactions and communications will go into what  
the Defense Department describes as a ‘virtual centralized grand  
database.'" This struck many members of Congress as too close to the  
practices of the Gestapo and the Stasi under German totalitarianism,  
and so, the following year, they voted to defund the project.

     However, Congress's action did not end the "total information  
awareness" program. The National Security Agency secretly decided to  
continue it through its private contractors. The NSA easily persuaded  
SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton to carry on with what Congress had  
declared to be a violation of the privacy rights of the American  
public -- for a price. As far as we know, Admiral Poindexter's "Total  
Information Awareness Program" is still going strong today.

     The most serious immediate consequence of the privatization of  
official governmental activities is the loss of institutional memory  
by our government's most sensitive organizations and agencies.  
Shorrock concludes, "So many former intelligence officers joined the  
private sector [during the 1990s] that, by the turn of the century,  
the institutional memory of the United States intelligence community  
now resides in the private sector. That's pretty much where things  
stood on September 11, 2001." (p. 112)

     This means that the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, and the other 13  
agencies in the U.S. intelligence community cannot easily be reformed  
because their staffs have largely forgotten what they are supposed to  
do, or how to go about it. They have not been drilled and disciplined  
in the techniques, unexpected outcomes, and know-how of previous  
projects, successful and failed.

     As numerous studies have, by now, made clear, the abject failure  
of the American occupation of Iraq came about in significant measure  
because the Department of Defense sent a remarkably privatized  
military filled with incompetent amateurs to Baghdad to administer the  
running of a defeated country. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates (a  
former director of the CIA) has repeatedly warned that the United  
States is turning over far too many functions to the military because  
of its hollowing out of the Department of State and the Agency for  
International Development since the end of the Cold War. Gates  
believes that we are witnessing a "creeping militarization" of foreign  
policy -- and, though this generally goes unsaid, both the military  
and the intelligence services have turned over far too many of their  
tasks to private companies and mercenaries.

     When even Robert Gates begins to sound like President Eisenhower,  
it is time for ordinary citizens to pay attention. In my 2006 book  
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, with an eye to  
bringing the imperial presidency under some modest control, I  
advocated that we Americans abolish the CIA altogether, along with  
other dangerous and redundant agencies in our alphabet soup of sixteen  
secret intelligence agencies, and replace them with the State  
Department's professional staff devoted to collecting and analyzing  
foreign intelligence. I still hold that position.

     Nonetheless, the current situation represents the worst of all  
possible worlds. Successive administrations and Congresses have made  
no effort to alter the CIA's role as the president's private army,  
even as we have increased its incompetence by turning over many of its  
functions to the private sector. We have thereby heightened the risks  
of war by accident, or by presidential whim, as well as of surprise  
attack because our government is no longer capable of accurately  
assessing what is going on in the world and because its intelligence  
agencies are so open to pressure, penetration, and manipulation of  
every kind.

     [Note to Readers: This essay focuses on the new book by Tim  
Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence  
Outsourcing, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.

     Other books noted: Eugene Jarecki's The American Way of War:  
Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril, New York:  
Free Press, 2008; Thomas Frank, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives  
Rule, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008; Sheldon Wolin, Democracy  
Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted  
Totalitarianism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.]

     Chalmers Johnson is the author of three linked books on the  
crises of American imperialism and militarism. They are Blowback  
(2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of  
the American Republic (2006). All are available in paperback from  
Metropolitan Books.

Copyright 2008 Chalmers Johnson