Against Religion, Wars, and States by Fiala Andrew;

Author:Fiala, Andrew;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Defense Contractor Profits

Global military spending in 2011 was 2.6 percent of global GDP, which is equivalent to $1.6 trillion, with the United States spending about $700 billion annually (about 5 percent of U.S. GDP), which puts U.S. spending at about 40 percent of global defense spending.[36] The vast sums of money spent on warfare are truly astounding. Adding up the dollars spent on all of the wars fought by the United States from World War I to the present gives us a total of nearly $7 trillion dollars—and the war on terrorism is not over yet.[37]

Whether the causes are just or not, whether the wars are fought justly or not, the reality is that all of this money goes into someone’s pocket—and not just the pocket of the average soldier. The basic pay for a U.S. army sergeant (E5) with six years’ experience in 2013 is $32,490.[38] It is true that there are extra benefits—combat pay, separation pay, and tax exemptions. But the average soldier’s pay is minuscule in comparison with the money earned by the big defense contractors. The top five American defense contractors include the following: Lockheed Martin (with arms sales in 2010 worth $36 billion, with profits of $2.9 billion); Boeing ($31 billion, $3.3 billion); Northrop Grumman ($28 billion, $2 billion); General Dynamics ($24 billion, $2.6 billion); and Raytheon ($23 billion, $1.9 billion).[39] Some of this money is reinvested in political lobbying in order to buy influence. According to the Sunlight Foundation’s Influence Explorer website, in the past two decades Lockheed Martin has spent $125 million on lobbying and $23 million on campaign donations.[40] Meanwhile the CEOs of these corporations earn unbelievable sums of money. In 2010, Lockheed Martin’s CEO, Robert Stevens, earned $19 million; Boeing’s CEO, James McNerney, earned $20 million; Northrop Grumman’s CEO, Wesley Bush, earned $22 million; General Dynamics’ CEO, Jay Johnson, earned $14 million; and Raytheon’s CEO, William Swanson, earned $19 million.[41] This puts the combined compensation of the top five defense contractor CEOs at about $100 million per year. These five CEOs earn more than two thousand army sergeants combined. As Robert Greenwald has indicated, these CEOs are among the top 0.01 percent of income earners in the United States, earning more than the CEOs of top financial firms and big banks.[42] The corporations they work for top the list of firms in terms of money spent on lobbying.

Unfortunately, defense budgets—especially in the United States—will remain bloated for a long time to come. The economic model for these industries is to continue to find ways to build more advanced and expensive weapons systems in an upward spiral of spending and military development. Some may argue that this produces benefits for society—not only in terms of defensive systems and “just wars” through smart weapons, but also in terms of economic growth and technological development.[43] This argument maintains, for example, that it was war and military spending that produced the development of the airplane and made air travel available for commercial purposes. A similar

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