US arms makers to benefit from Ukraine crisis, ex-Pentagon analyst says

GENEVA－A former Pentagon analyst said the US military-industrial complex stands to benefit from the conflict between Russia and Ukraine as it ramps up defense spending for what could be a protracted affair in Europe.

The Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex, or MICC, will benefit from this conflict because it is setting the stage for a second Cold War that will increase tensions over the long term, said Franklin C. Spinney, a former Pentagon analyst.

An increase in tensions over the long term "is needed to fund the bow wave of future defense spending that is already programmed in the Pentagon's computers …" Spinney said in a recent interview with Xinhua News Agency, warning that militarization bodes ill for the US economy.

MICC refers to the network of multisectoral individuals and institutions promoting militarization, arms sales and political power. Former US president Dwight Eisenhower made its creeping influence public in his 1961 farewell speech.

The MICC is partly responsible for and actively benefiting from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, said Spinney, who served as an analyst for nearly 30 years at the US Department of Defense's Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation.

He faulted the MICC's post-Cold War business strategy and its lobbying activities for expanding NATO after the end of the Cold War.

Spinney said NATO has not only outlived its purpose to contain the Soviet Union, but also enjoyed five expansions since the demise of the latter due to lobbying activities by special interest groups toward expansion.

He believed that the conflict and the ensuing fear would be permanently politicized to justify more weapon sales.

The Pentagon has been rushing new weapon programs and their engineering and manufacturing, Spinney said. As contracts will spread to hundreds of congressional districts, weapon production becomes virtually unstoppable.

Further demands

Moreover, because manufacturers routinely overpromise performance and understate costs, the demands for more military spending beget further demands for even greater spending.

The peculiar characteristics of the MICC reduce the US foreign policy elite into an endless search for new enemies abroad, which is why the US violated its promise not to expand NATO and has no empathy for the legitimate security concerns of others, especially Russia.

"The way we have handled the end of the Cold War with NATO expansion conducted by a succession of US presidents, establishing the Committee to Expand NATO headed by a Lockheed vice-president, encouraging the color revolutions, particularly in Georgia and Ukraine, demonizing our adversaries, have combined to inflame tensions," he said.

Spinney referred to the humiliation that the US inflicted on Russia since the demise of the Soviet Union, amplified by NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia, and the US' withdrawals from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019－all of which are perceived as critical threats by Russia.

Spinney believed the domestic politics shaped by the MICC commands the US foreign policy. The MICC shapes domestic political agendas by engineering electoral district dependency on the arms industry.

He is convinced that the political-economic addiction to defense spending makes the US economy less competitive through anti-competitive contracting that incentivizes parasitic rent-seeking behaviors and corruption, as well as poor engineering.

Spinney also said he sees the MICC as the result of processes that reward dysfunctional practices like lying, cheating, bureaucratic gamesmanship, unfair appraisal practices and corrupt personnel practices, including the infamous "revolving doors", as well as an utter absence of congressional oversight and sound accounting practices in accordance with the US Constitution.

He summed up the political problem in US defense addiction by quoting US writer and social crusader Upton Sinclair: "It's difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Xinhua