[Fresh Ink] The US Imperial Triangle and Military Spending

[Richard Menec]

<http://www.monthlyreview.org/081001foster-holleman-mcchesney.php>

The US Imperial Triangle and Military Spending

by John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Robert W McChesney

Monthly Review (October 2008)

The United States is unique today among major states in the degree of its
reliance on military spending, and its determination to stand astride the
world, militarily as well as economically. No other country in the
post-Second World War world has been so globally destructive or inflicted so
many war fatalities. Since 2001, acknowledged US national defense spending
has increased by almost sixty percent in real dollar terms to a level in
2007 of $553 billion. This is higher than at any point since the Second
World War (though lower than previous decades as a percentage of GDP). Based
on such official figures, the United States is reported by the Stockholm
International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) as accounting for 45 percent
of world military expenditures. Yet, so gargantuan and labyrinthine are US
military expenditures that the above grossly understates their true
magnitude, which, as we shall see below, reached $1 trillion in 2007. {1}

Externally, these are necessary expenditures of world empire. Internally,
they represent, as Michal Kalecki was the first to suggest, an imperial
triangle of state-financed military production, media propaganda, and
real/imagined economic-employment effects that has become a deeply
entrenched, and self-perpetuating feature of the US social order. {2}

Many analysts today view the present growth of US militarism and imperialism
as largely divorced from the earlier Cold War history of the United States,
which was commonly seen as a response to the threat represented by the
Soviet Union. Placed against this backdrop the current turn to war and war
preparation appears to numerous commentators to lack a distinct target,
despite concerns about global terrorism, and to be mainly the product of
irrational hubris on the part of US leaders. Even as insightful a left
historian as Eric Hobsbawm has recently adopted this general perspective.
Thus in his 2008 book On Empire Hobsbawm writes:

Frankly, I can't make sense of what has happened in the United States since
9/11 that enabled a group of political crazies to realize long-held plans
for an unaccompanied solo performance of world supremacy ... Today a radical
right-wing regime seeks to mobilize "true Americans" against some evil
outside force and against a world that does not recognize the uniqueness,
the superiority, the manifest destiny of America ... In effect, the most
obvious danger of war today arises from the global ambitions of an
uncontrollable and apparently irrational government in Washington ... To
give America the best chance of learning to return from megalomania to
rational foreign policy is the most immediate and urgent task of
international politics. {3}

Such a view, which sees the United States as under the influence of a new
irrationalism introduced by George W Bush and a cabal of neoconservative
"political crazies", and consequently calls for a return from "megalomania
to rational foreign policy", downplays the larger historical and structural
forces at work that connect the Cold War and post-Cold War imperial eras. In
contrast, a more realistic perspective, we believe, can be obtained by
looking at the origins of the US "military ascendancy" (as C Wright Mills
termed it) in the early Cold War years and the centrality this has assumed
in the constitution of the US empire and economy up to the present. {4}


The Permanent War Economy and Military Keynesianism

In January 1944 Charles E Wilson, president of General Electric and
executive vice chairman of the War Production Board, delivered a speech to
the Army Ordnance Association advocating a permanent war economy. According
to the plan Wilson proposed on that occasion, every major corporation should
have a "liaison" representative with the military, who would be given a
commission as a colonel in the Reserve. This would form the basis of a
program, to be initiated by the president as commander in chief in
cooperation with the War and Navy departments, designed to bind corporations
and military together into a single unified armed forces-industrial complex.
"What is more natural and logical", he asked, "than that we should
henceforth mount our national policy upon the solid fact of an industrial
capacity for war, and a research capacity for war that is already 'in
being'? It seems to me anything less is foolhardy". Wilson went on to
indicate that in this plan the part to be played by Congress was restricted
to voting for the needed funds. Further, it was essential that industry be
allowed to play its central role in this new warfare state without being
hindered politically "or thrown to the fanatical isolationist fringe [and]
tagged with a 'merchants-of-death' label".

In calling, even before the Second World War had come to a close, for a
"continuing program of industrial preparedness", for war, Charles E Wilson
(sometimes referred to as "General Electric Wilson" to distinguish him from
"General Motors Wilson" - Charles Erwin Wilson, president of General Motors
and Eisenhower's secretary of defense) was articulating a view that was to
characterize the US oligarchy as a whole during the years immediately
following the Second World War. In earlier eras it had been assumed that
there was an economic "guns and butter" trade-off, and that military
spending had to occur at the expense of other sectors of the economy.
However, one of the lessons of the economic expansion in Nazi Germany,
followed by the experience of the United States itself in arming for the
Second World War, was that big increases in military spending could act as
huge stimulants to the economy. In just six years under the influence of the
Second World War the US economy expanded by seventy percent, finally
recovering from the Great Depression. The early Cold War era thus saw the
emergence of what later came to be known as "military Keynesianism": the
view that by promoting effective demand and supporting monopoly profits
military spending could help place a floor under US capitalism. {5}

John Maynard Keynes, in his landmark General Theory of Employment, Interest
and Money, published in 1936, in the midst of the Depression, argued that
the answer to economic stagnation was to promote effective demand through
government spending. The bastardized Keynesianism that came to be known as
"military Keynesianism" was the view that this was best effected with the
least negative consequences for big business by focusing on military
spending. As Joan Robinson, one of Keynes's younger colleagues, critically
explained in her iconoclastic lecture, "The Second Crisis of Economic
Theory", before the American Economic Association on December 27, 1971:

The most convenient thing for a government to spend on is armaments. The
military-industrial complex [thus] took charge. I do not think it plausible
to suppose that the cold war and several hot wars were invented just to
solve the employment problem. But certainly they have had that effect. The
system had the support not only of the corporations who make profits under
it and the workers who got jobs, but also of the economists who advocated
government loan-expenditure as a prophylactic against stagnation. Whatever
were the deeper forces leading to the hypertrophy of military power after
the world war was over, certainly they could not have had such free play if
the doctrine of sound finance had still been respected. It was the so-called
Keynesians who persuaded successive Presidents that there is no harm in a
budget deficit and left the military-industrial complex to take advantage of
it. So it has come about that Keynes' pleasant daydream was turned into a
nightmare of terror. {6}

The first to theorize this tendency toward military Keynesianism under
monopoly capitalism, was the Polish economist Michal Kalecki (most famous,
as Robinson pointed out in the above-mentioned lecture, for having
discovered the essentials of Keynes's General Theory before Keynes himself).
In a 1943 essay on "The Political Aspects of Full Employment" and in
subsequent essays, Kalecki argued that monopoly capital had a deep aversion
to increased civilian government spending due to its intrusion on the
commodity market and the sphere of private profit, but that this did not
apply in the same way to military spending, which was seen by the vested
interests as adding to rather than crowding out profits. If absorption of
the massive economic surplus of large corporate capital through increased
government spending was the key to accumulation in post-Second World War US
capitalism, this was dependent principally on military expenditures, or what
Kalecki in 1956 labeled "the armament-imperialist complex". This resulted in
a "high degree of utilization" of productive capacity and "counteracted the
disrupting influence of the increase in the relative share of accumulation
of big business in the national product". {7}

For Kalecki this new military-supported regime of accumulation that came to
characterize US monopoly capital by the mid-1950s established a strong
political-economic foundation for its own rule "based on the following
[imperial] triangle":

1. Imperialism contributes to a relatively high level of employment through
expenditures on armaments and ancillary purposes and through the maintenance
of a large body of armed forces and government employees.

2. The mass communications media, working under the auspices of the ruling
class, emits propaganda aimed at securing the support of the population for
this armament-imperialist set-up.

3. The high level of employment and the standard of living increased
considerably as compared with before the war (as a result of the rise in the
productivity of labor), and this facilitated the absorption of this
propaganda to the broad masses of the population.

Mass communication occupied a central place in this imperial triangle. An
essential part of Kalecki's argument was that "the mass communication media,
such as the daily press, radio, and television in the United States are
largely under the control of the ruling class". As none other than Charles E
(General Electric) Wilson, then defense mobilization director, put it in a
speech to the American Newspaper Publishers Association on April 26 1951,
the job of the media was to bring "public opinion, as marshaled by the
press" to the support of the permanent war effort (italics added). {8}

The result by the mid-1950s was a fairly stable militarized economy, in
which intertwined imperial, political-economic, and communication factors
all served to reinforce the new military-imperial order. Kalecki observed
that US trade unions were "part and parcel of the armament-imperialist
set-up. Workers in the United States are not duller and trade union leaders
are not more reactionary 'by nature' than in other capitalist countries.
Rather, the political situation in the United States, is simply, in
accordance with the precepts of historical materialism, the unavoidable
consequence of economic developments and of characteristics of the
superstructure of monopoly capitalism in its advanced stage." All of this
pointed to what Harry Magdoff was to call the essential "one-ness of
national security and business interests" that came to characterize the US
political economy and empire. {9}

Many of Kalecki's ideas were developed further by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy
in 1966 in Monopoly Capital. Baran and Sweezy argued there were at least
five political-economic-imperial ends propelling the US oligarchy in the
1950s and 1960s toward the creation of a massive military establishment: (1)
defending US global hegemony and the empire of capital against external
threats in the form of a wave of revolutions erupting throughout the world,
simplistically viewed in terms of a monolithic Communist threat centered in
the Soviet Union; (2) creating an internationally "secure" platform for US
corporations to expand and monopolize economic opportunities abroad; (3)
forming a government-sponsored research and development sector that would be
dominated by big business; (4) generating a more complacent population at
home, made less recalcitrant under the nationalistic influence of perpetual
war and war preparation; and (5) soaking up the nation's vast surplus
productive capacity, thus helping to stave off economic stagnation, through
the promotion of high-profit, low-risk (to business) military spending. The
combined result of such political-economic-imperial factors was the creation
of the largest, most deeply-entrenched and persistent, "peacetime" war
machine that the world had ever seen. {10}

Like Kalecki, Baran and Sweezy argued that the US oligarchy kept a "tight
rein on civilian [government] spending", which, they suggested, "had about
reached its outer limits" as a percentage of national income "by 1939", but
was nonetheless "open-handed with the military". Government-pump priming
operations therefore occurred largely through spending on wars and war
preparations in the service of empire. The Pentagon naturally made sure that
bases and armaments industries were spread around the United States and that
numerous corporations profited from military spending, thus maximizing
congressional support due to the effects on states and districts. {11}

For members of the US oligarchy and their hangers-on, the virtuous circle of
mutually reinforcing military spending and economic growth represented by
military Keynesianism was something to be celebrated rather than held up to
criticism. Harvard economist Sumner Slichter explained to a banker's
convention in October 1949, that as long as Cold War spending persisted a
severe economic depression was "difficult to conceive". The Cold War
"increases the demand for goods, helps sustain a high level of employment,
accelerates technological progress and thus helps the country to raise its
standard of living ... So we may thank the Russians for helping make
capitalism in the United States work better than ever".

Similarly, US News and World Report told its readers on May 14 1950 (a month
before the outbreak of the Korean War):

Government planners figure they have found the magic formula for almost
endless good times. They are now beginning to wonder if there may not be
something to perpetual motion after all. Cold war is the catalyst. Cold war
is an automatic pump primer. Turn a spigot, and the public clamors for more
arms spending. Turn another, the clamor ceases. Truman confidence,
cockiness, is based on this "Truman formula". Truman era of good times,
President is told, can run much beyond 1952. Cold war demands, if fully
exploited, are almost limitless.

In the same vein, US News and World Report was to declare in 1954: "What
H-bomb means to business. A long period ... of big orders. In the years
ahead, the effects of the new bomb will keep on increasing. As one appraiser
puts it: 'The H-bomb has blown depression-thinking out the window'." In 1959
David Lawrence, editor of US News and World Report, indicated that he viewed
with equanimity the suggestion that the United States "might conceivably
strike first in what has become known as 'preemptive' rather than
'preventive' war".

Henry Luce, the media mogul at the head of the Time-Life empire, who coined
the term "the American Century", observed in November 1957 in Fortune that
the United States "can stand the load of any defense effort required to hold
the power of Soviet Russia in check. It cannot, however, indefinitely stand
the erosion of creeping socialism and the ceaseless extension of government
activities into additional economic fields" beyond the military. This was
directly in line with Kalecki's and Baran and Sweezy's contention that the
system was tight-fisted where civilian spending was concerned and
open-handed with the military.

Remarking on the success of military Keynesianism in promoting economic
prosperity, the influential Harvard economist Seymour Harris wrote in the
The New York Times Magazine in 1959: "If we treat the years from 1941 to the
present as a whole, we find again that a period of record prosperity
coincided with a period of heavy military outlay ... About one dollar out of
seven went for war and preparation for war, and this expenditure was
undoubtedly a stimulus to the economy". {12}

A military Keynesian view was close to the heart of the major US planning
document of the Cold War, NSC-68, issued in April 1950 shortly before the
Korean War by the US National Security Council  and signed by President
Truman in September 1950, but not declassified until 1975. Drafted by Paul
Nitze, then head of the policy review group in the state department, the
main intent of NSC-68 was to construct a rollback strategy against the
Soviet Union. It called for a vast increase in military spending above its
already high levels, and considered the possibility that "in an emergency
the United States could devote upward of fifty percent of its gross national
product" to the military effort as in the Second World War. "From the point
of view of the economy as a whole", NSC-68 declared,

the program [of military expansion] might not result in a real decrease in
the standard of living, for the economic effects of the program might be to
increase the gross national product by more than the amount being absorbed
for additional military and foreign assistance purposes. One of the most
significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the American
economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency [full
capacity], can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian
consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of living. After
allowing for price changes, personal consumption expenditures rose by almost
one-fifth between 1939 and 1944, even though the economy had in the meantime
increased the amount of resources going into Government use by $60[-]$65
billion (in 1939 prices). {13}

US militarism was therefore motivated first and foremost by a global
geopolitical struggle, but was at the same time seen as essentially costless
(even beneficial) to the US economy, which could have more guns and more
butter too. It was thus viewed as a win-win solution for the US empire and
economy.

By the time that President Eisenhower (who played a role in this military
expansion) raised concerns about what he dubbed the "military-industrial
complex" in his farewell address of January 17 1961, it was already so
firmly established as to constitute the permanent war economy envisioned by
Charles E (General Electric) Wilson. As Eisenhower's secretary of defense,
Charles Erwin (General Motors) Wilson (best known for having created a major
flap by saying that "what is good for General Motors is good for the
country"), observed in 1957, the military set-up was then so built into the
economy as to make it virtually irreversible: "so many Americans are getting
a vested interest in it: Properties, business, jobs, employment, votes,
opportunities for promotion and advancement, bigger salaries for scientists
and all that ... If you try to change suddenly you get into trouble ... If
you shut the whole business off now, you will have the state of California
in trouble because such a big percentage of the aircraft industry is in
California". {14}

Hence, the concern that Eisenhower voiced in his farewell address about a
"permanent armaments industry of vast proportions" and the fact that "we
annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all
United States corporations" {15} was a belated recognition of what had
already become an established fact. The need for the gargantuan
military-industrial complex that the United States developed in these years
was not so much for purposes of economic expansion directly (though military
Keynesianism pointed to its stimulating effects) but due to the reality, as
Baran and Sweezy emphasized, that the capitalist world order and US hegemony
could only be maintained "a while longer", in the face of rising
insurgencies throughout the world, through "increasingly direct and massive
intervention by American armed forces". {16} This entire built-in military
system could not be relinquished without relinquishing empire. Indeed, the
chief importance of US military power from the early Cold War years to today
has been that it is used - either directly, resulting in millions of deaths
(counting those who died in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War,
the Kosovo War, the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, as well as dozens of lesser
conflicts), or indirectly, as a means to intimidate. {17}

The most important left analysts of these developments in the 1950s and
1960s, Kalecki, Baran, Sweezy, and Magdoff, insisted - going against the
dominant US Cold War ideology - that the cause of US military spending was
capitalist empire, rather than the need to contain the Soviet threat. The
benefits of military spending to monopoly capital, moreover, guaranteed its
continuation, barring a major social upheaval. The decade and a half since
the fall of the Soviet Union has confirmed the accuracy of this assessment.
The euphoria of the "peace dividend" following the end of the Cold War
evaporated almost immediately in the face of new imperial requirements. This
was a moment of truth for US capitalism, demonstrating how deeply entrenched
were its military-imperial interests. By the end of the 1990s US military
spending, which had been falling, was on its way up again.

Today, in what has been called a "unipolar world", US military spending for
purposes of empire is rapidly expanding - to the point that it rivals that
of the entire rest of the world put together. When it is recognized that
most of the other top ten military-spending nations are US allies or junior
partners, it makes the US military ascendancy even more imposing. Only the
reality of global empire (and the effects of this on the internal body
politic) can explain such an overwhelming destructive power. As Atlantic
Monthly correspondent Robert Kaplan proudly proclaimed in 2005: "By the turn
of the twenty-first century the United States military had already
appropriated the entire earth, and was ready to flood the most obscure areas
of it with troops at a moment's notice". {18}


The Labyrinth of US Military Spending

The most direct way of measuring the extent of the US commitment to the
military-imperialist complex over the post-Second World War period is
through an examination of US military spending itself. This is not, however,
easily accomplished. US military expenditure is a labyrinth presenting
numerous dead ends. What is treated by almost all analysts as a reliable
data source for such expenditures is the Office of Management and Budget
(OMB) Historical Tables, generated along with the federal budget. In the
Historical Tables for Fiscal Year 2009, Department of Defense spending (OMB
Table 3.2, line 051) is listed as $529.8 billion for 2007; while adding in
atomic energy defense activities and defense-related activities brings total
national defense (line 050) to $552.6 billion. This number can be considered
acknowledged military spending, since it is what is usually reported as US
national defense spending and used (with only small differences) by NATO and
SIPRI. {19}

However, there is another, fuller accounting of US national defense spending
included in the US National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA), a source
which constitutes the final word on the totals for the US economy as a whole
(see Table 1). The National Income and Product Accounts give $662 billion as
the total for national defense spending for 2007, or over $100 billion more
than the OMB figures. Much of the difference is explained by the fact that
the NIPA numbers for national defense, as opposed to the US budget figures,
take account of the following: government consumption of fixed capital, cash
payments to amortize the underfunded liability for military and civilian
retirement benefits (which in the budget accounting are included elsewhere
as "intergovernmental transactions"), and expenditures recorded on a
delivery (accrual) rather than cash basis (as in the budget). {21}

Table 1. US Military spending, 2007 (in billions of dollars)
(See http://www.monthlyreview.org/081001foster-holleman-mcchesney.php )

The NIPA figures thus capture far more accurately than the OMB data the
economic resources directed to the military, emphasizing "full cost
budgeting". As economist and peace researcher Jurgen Brauer observes: "For
the United States, the NIPA numbers are the most comprehensive and
conceptually complete national defense outlays data we have, since they are
expressly based on economists' national income accounting framework rather
than on politicians' need to review and pass budget requests". {22}

Adopting the NIPA figures for national defense spending, however, only
partly solves the problem of developing an accurate assessment of US
military spending. It still remains to add to this the military spending
concealed in other economic categories, and not captured by total NIPA
national defense spending. Drawing on other lines in the National Income and
Product Accounts, it is necessary to add to the NIPA national defense
figures all or part of: economic grants to foreign governments; space;
medical payments to military retirees and dependents at non-military
facilities; veterans' benefits; and the net interest payments on the
national debt attributable to military spending.

All of the above items are recognized in NATO and SIPRI definitions of
military spending, except veterans' benefits and net interest payments,
which are excluded as "legacy costs". Yet, since legacy costs are an
important part of military expenditures (and some other legacy costs are
included in the basic data) we incorporate veterans' benefits and the net
interest payments attributable to past wars and military expansions here, in
line with estimates of military spending provided by other analysts. This
makes more sense as we are concerned with the social, economic, and imperial
legacy of the rise of a US military establishment over more than half a
century. {23}

Our figures, provided in Table 1 show that actual US military spending in
2007 came to $1 trillion. This contrasts with SIPRI's clearly understated
estimate (in relation to countries other than the United States as well) for
all the world's nations in 2007 of $1.3 trillion. {24}

The above estimate of total US military spending in 2007 is in the same
ballpark as those that have been derived by some other critics of US
military spending - through the alternative, very arduous process of adding
up the many different components of military spending hidden in the budget.
In a June 2007 article for Monthly Review, economist James Cypher, adopting
a budget-based approach, arrived at an estimate of US military expenditures
for 2006 amounting to $929.8 billion. More recently Chalmers Johnson, author
of the anti-empire trilogy Blowback (2000), Sorrows of Empire (2004), and
Nemesis (2007), has contended that when all military spending elements of
the US 2008 fiscal year budget are added up the total comes to "at least
$1.1 trillion". {25}

Our method above has also been used to develop estimates of actual military
spending levels as a percentage of GDP for the post-Second World War era as
a whole. {26} According to these figures, total military spending as a share
of GDP in 2007 was 7.3 percent, the highest level since 1997. In contrast,
acknowledged national defense spending as presented by the Office of
Management and Budget, misleadingly shows military spending as a percentage
of GDP at four percent in 2007. (See Table 1.)

It is crucial to track military spending as a proportion of total federal
government expenditures. In doing so, we follow the accepted practice of
excluding social security, medicare, and other transfer payments from our
measure of federal expenditures, since transfer payments are self-financing,
hence do not draw on the income-tax based general fund or contribute to the
national debt. Actual military spending as a percentage of federal spending
minus transfer payments (see Chart 1) declined every year from the end of
the Reagan era in 1988, when it stood at 68 percent, to 2003, when it
reached a half-century low of 49 percent. Since then it has changed
direction and has risen again to 52 percent. This naturally closely
parallels, although at a higher level, the path for acknowledged national
defense spending as a percentage of federal spending (also depicted in Chart
1). Acknowledged national defense spending in 2007 was only 29 percent of
federal expenditures (minus transfer payments), grossly misrepresenting the
share of military spending in federal outlays.

Chart 1. Actual and acknowledged military spending as percentage of federal
expenditures (minus transfer payments):  See
http://www.monthlyreview.org/081001foster-holleman-mcchesney.php


The US Imperial Triangle Today

What does the foregoing tell us in relation to our original question? Is it
reasonable to argue, as Hobsbawm and others have, that the expansion of US
militarism and imperialism in the present period is the result of "a group
of political crazies", who have come to power in Washington and constructed
a "radical right-wing regime" abounding in "megalomania"? As an explanation
of the current phase of US empire this is clearly inadequate. Despite the
often neoconservative nature of the Bush administration's top operatives,
they have had the broad backing of the greater part of the establishment in
the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, the War on Terrorism as a whole, the huge
military buildup, et cetera.

To be sure, if a Democratic administration under Al Gore had come into power
in 2000 it is not at all certain that the United States would have gone to
war with Iraq, in addition to Afghanistan, though an attempt would have been
made to uphold US imperial interests. The Bush administration from the first
was distinguished by the particularly bellicose group of neoconservatives at
its helm. But in pursuing their belligerent ends they hardly lacked solid
backing within the circles of power. Strong support was extended by both
political parties, Congress, the judiciary, the media, and the corporations
generally. Disagreements were largely about troop levels, the amount of
force to be applied, relations to allies, dates of withdrawal (partial or
whole), distribution of forces between the major "theaters", et cetera. More
fundamental questions, even the use of torture, were avoided. Major dissent
has mainly come from the bottom of the society.

All of this suggests that expanded militarism and imperialism is deeply
entrenched at present, at least within the top echelons of US society. It
reflects a general concern to expand US hegemony as part of an imperial
grand strategy, including rolling back insurgent forces and "rogue states"
around the world, and keeping junior partners in line. The war in Iraq is
best viewed as an attempt to assert US geopolitical control over the entire
Persian Gulf and its oil - an objective that both political wings of the
establishment support, and which is part of the larger aim of the
restoration of a grand US hegemony. {27} The vast scale of US military
spending - encompassing more than fifty percent of the federal budget
(excluding social security, medicare, and other transfer payments) and
constituting seven percent of the entire GDP - is thus externally rooted in
the needs of the US imperial grand strategy, which continually strains the
US system to its limits (as measured by the budget and trade deficits).

US imperialism has been transformed in recent decades by the absence of the
Soviet Union, giving the United States more immediate power (particularly in
the military realm), coupled, paradoxically, with signs of a secular decline
in US economic hegemony. It is this dual reality of a temporary increase in
US power along with indications of its long-term decline that has led to
urgent calls throughout the power elite for a "New American Century", and to
attempts by Washington to leverage its enormous military power to regain
economic and geopolitical strength, for example, in the Persian Gulf oil
region. In recent years, the United States has enormously expanded its
military bases and operations around the world with bases now in around
seventy countries and US troops present in various capacities (including
joint exercises) in perhaps twice that number. Washington is thus not just
spending money on the military and producing destructive weapons, or
engaging in wars and interventions. It is also building a lasting physical
presence around the world that allows for control/subversion/rapid
deployment. {28}

As a further reason not to dismiss the new surge in US militarism and
imperialism as merely the "megalomania" of a few, our argument points back
to Kalecki's imperial triangle, as constituting the principal dilemma facing
opponents of imperialism. The creation of a huge military establishment to
serve the US empire was also understood, in military-Keynesian terms, as a
quasi-full-employment strategy aimed at combating economic stagnation. With
the help of the media (which, as General Electric Wilson insisted, had the
task of "marshalling" public opinion in support of the permanent war
economy), the distinctive foundations of post-Second World War US capitalism
were laid. The growth of the antiwar movement in response to the Vietnam
War, and the end of the Cold War, represented setbacks for the imperial
triangle, which showed up in terms of temporary drops in military spending
as a percentage of GDP. Each time, in the late 1970s/early 1980s and again
in the late 1990s/early 2000s, such temporary lulls in military spending
have been followed by a military resurgence. {29}

For Kalecki the weak link in the imperial triangle was clearly the mass
media propaganda system, which had the job of selling the permanent war
economy to a population that could conceivably opt for other more rational,
just, and egalitarian courses. Unlike the Korean War or the Vietnam War, the
Iraq War (like the Gulf War before it) was preceded by a massive antiwar
movement in the United States, demonstrating the willingness of perhaps a
majority of the population to seek another way, opposed to militarism and
imperialism. It was the monopoly media, far more concentrated than in Luce's
day and now virtually indistinguishable from monopoly-finance capital
(becoming simply its public voice), that came to the rescue of US war
capitalism in its moment of need, giving credence to its obvious lies. "The
press", as one of us has written, "was [soon] eating out of the Bush
administration's bowl". {30}

In a period of economic stagnation, financial crisis, declining hegemony,
impending environmental collapse, and new populist insurgencies, Washington,
representing the US oligarchy as a whole, was once again able to enlist the
media monopoly in the marshaling of public opinion in support of the
imperial project through the promotion of war hysteria. What made this
possible was the prior existence of a well-oiled, privatized propaganda
system designed to limit the range of legitimate debate in the mainstream
media. In this system even the outer reaches of the quite timid liberal
punditocracy were strictly walled-in to fit within the proscribed boundaries
of elite debate. Today fundamental dissent toward the existence of the
military-imperial system, no matter how thoughtful or well-informed, is
decidedly off-limits, except for periodic ridicule. Ours is decidedly a
"military-industrial-media complex". {31}

Nevertheless, the imperial triangle is now increasingly confronted with its
own contradictions. As Baran and Sweezy foresaw more than four decades ago
in Monopoly Capital, the US military system faced two major internal
obstacles. First, military spending tended to be technologically intensive
and hence its employment stimulating effect was decreasing. "Ironically",
they observed, "the huge military outlays of today may even be contributing
substantially to an increase of unemployment: many of the new technologies
which are byproducts of military research and development are also
applicable to civilian production, where they are quite likely to have the
effect of raising productivity and reducing the demand for labor". Second,
expansion of "weapons of total destruction" and the devastating effects of
the use of more powerful weapons, could be expected to generate a growing
rebellion against the permanent war economy at all levels of society, as
people perceived the dangers of global barbarism (or worse, annihilation).
{32}

Today the enormous weight of Washington's war machine has not prevented it
from being stretched to its limits while becoming bogged down in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Although still capable of great destruction, the United States
is significantly limited in its ability to deploy massive force to achieve
its ends whenever and wherever it wishes. The dream of Pax Americana, first
presented by John F Kennedy at the height of the Cold War, has turned into
the nightmare of Pox Americana in the years of waning US dominance. The role
the media monopoly has assumed in recent years in the promotion of war
propaganda has contributed to the rapid growth of a media reform movement,
which is now challenging the concentration of communications in the United
States. {33}

There is no doubt that a society that supports its global position and
social order through $1 trillion a year in military spending, most likely
far exceeding that of all the other countries in the world put together,
unleashing untold destruction on the world, while faced with intractable
problems of inequality, economic stagnation, financial crisis, poverty,
waste, and environmental decline at home, is a society that is ripe for
change. It is our task to change it.

Notes

1.   Office of Management and Budget, Budget for Fiscal Year, 2009,
Historical Tables, Table 3.2; Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute, SIPRI Yearbook 2008: Summary,
http://yearbook2008.sipri.org/files/SIPRIYB08summary.pdf, 10-11; SIPRI,
Military Expenditure Database (United States),
http://milexdata.sipri.org/result.php4. SIPRI data on US military
expenditures (drawn on here for estimates of increases in real military
spending and for international comparison) are only marginally (about 5
percent) higher than the acknowledged national defense figures contained in
the Office of Management and Budget Historical Tables, and are clearly based
on these. While the Office of Management and Budget lists $552.6 billion in
total national defense for the United States spending in 2007, SIPRI
provides a figure of $578.3 billion. It should be noted that SIPRI data,
athough based on the same or similar nominal figures as the acknowledged US
national defense spending, registers a higher rate of increase in US
military expenditures than "reported in official US data because of the
method of conversion into constant dollars. While SIPRI uses the consumer
price index (CPI) for price conversion for all countries, the US official
figures are converted using military-specific deflators. Thus, the SIPRI
data show the trend in the purchasing power of the military budget had it
instead been spent on typical consumer goods and services, while the US
official data show the trend in its purchasing power for military goods and
services. The nominal change is the same for the two series". SIPRI
Yearbook, 2007, 275.
2.   Michal Kalecki, The Last Phase in the Transformation of Capitalism (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 96.
3.   Eric Hobsbawm, On Empire: America, War, and Global Supremacy (New York:
Pantheon, 2008), 57-59.
4.   C Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press,
1956), 198. It should be noted that Hobsbawm is not alone in promoting what
can be called the "cabal theory". See the discussion of this in John Bellamy
Foster, Naked Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2006), 13, 18, 107-08, 117-20.
5.   "WPB Aide Urges US to Keep War Set-Up", New York Times; January 20,
1944; Charles E Wilson, "For the Common Defense", Army Ordnance 26, no 143
(March-April 1944): 285-88; Fred J Cook, "Juggernaut: The Warfare State",
special issue, The Nation, October 28 1961, 285; Johnathan Feldman,
Universities in the Business of Repression (Boston: South End Press, 1989),
149-50. Charles E (General Electric) Wilson did not literally use the term
"permanent war economy", widely attributed to his January 19 1944, speech.
Rather, he spoke, of a "program of industrial preparedness" for war that
would be "permanent and continuing". On the end of the Second World War and
military spending see Robert L Heilbroner, The Making of Economic Society
(Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980), 160.
6.   Joan Robinson, Contributions to Modern Economics (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1978), 8-9. For an account of the role of military Keynesianism
in successive US administrations see Lynn Turgeon, Bastard Keynesianism
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996).
7.   Kalecki, Last Phase, 75-83, 95-97; Kalecki's analysis of military
spending derived originally from his analysis of the importance of armament
expenditures in Nazi Germany's economy and then the basic argument was
extended to the role military spending was to play in post-Second World War
capitalist economies.
8.   Ibid.; Cook, "Juggernaut", 292.
9.   Kalecki, Last Phase, 97; Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 185.
10. These five reasons, presented in essentially this order, were provided
by Baran and Sweezy to account for the growth of militarism in their classic
chapter on "Militarism and Imperialism" in Monopoly Capital (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1966), 178-217. It is worth noting that their argument
was geared primarily to military spending for empire and turned to its
macroeconomic benefits in absorbing surplus and staving off long-run
stagnation only at the end. The same structure to the argument on military
spending (empire first, economy second) can be seen in Harry Magdoff,
Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1978), 198-212. Hence, critics, such as Larry Griffin, Joel Devine,
and Michael Wallace, who later attempted empirically to test the Monopoly
Capital argument, which they characterized as a "'naive' model ... which
suggests that the degree to which national output is absorbed by military
spending should be dependent on aggregate economic conditions such as
unemployment", were clearly attacking a "naïve model" of their own devising.
Ironically, after rejecting this naive model, these same authors ended up
concluding that in the face of declining monopoly profits the US state
intervenes to absorb surplus through increases in military expenditures - a
view much closer to Baran and Sweezy's own argument, but lacking its
emphasis on empire over macroeconomics. See Larry J Griffin, Joel A Devine,
and Michael Wallace, "Monopoly Capital, Organized Labor, and Military
Expenditures in the United States, 1949-1976", American Journal of Sociology
88 supplement (1982): S113-S153.
11. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 159, 161, 177, 208-11. Baran and
Sweezy's contention more than four decades ago that civilian government
purchases had about reached their outer limit as a percentage of GDP by 1939
was to be borne out in subsequent developments. In 1939 civilian government
purchases were 13 percent of GDP; from 1960 to the present they have
averaged 14 percent of  GDP (and were also 14 percent in
2006). Economic Report of the President, 2008, 224, 250.
12. The foregoing quotes from Slichter, Luce, US News and World Report,
Lawrence, and Harris are all taken from Cook, "Juggernaut", 285, 300-01. See
also Fred H Cook, The Warfare State (New York: Collier Books, 1962); Baran
and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 207-13
13. US National Security Council, NSC-68, April 1950, "Section D: The
Remaining Course of Action"; James M Cypher, "The Basic Economics of
'Rearming America'", Monthly Review 33, no 6 (November 1981): 12-13; Noam
Chomsky, "The Cold War and the Superpowers", Monthly Review 33, no 5
(November 1981): 4-5.
14. Charles Erwin Wilson quoted in Cook, "Juggernaut", 277, 299.
15. Eisenhower, quoted in Cook, "Juggernaut", 276-79.
16. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 205.
17. The classic argument on how nuclear weapons were continually used by the
United States as direct threats to achieve its ends was made by Daniel
Ellsberg, "Call to Mutiny", in E P Thompson and Dan Smith, ed, Protest and
Survive (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), i-xxviii.
18. Robert Kaplan, Imperial Grunts (New York: Random House, 2005), 3.
19. Jurgen Brauer, "United States Military Expenditure", in Wolfram Elsner,
ed, Arms, War, and Terrorism in the Global Economy Today (Hamburg: LIT
Verlag, 2007), 61-66.
20. The design format of this table was adapted from Cypher, "Basic
Economics of 'Rearming America'".
21. Benjamin A Mandel and Mary L Roy, "Federal Budget Estimates for Fiscal
Year 2007", Survey of Current Business (Bureau of Economic Analysis), March
2006, 13.
22. Jurgen Brauer, "Data, Models, Coefficients: The Case of United States
Military Expenditure", Conflict Management and Peace Science 24 (2007), 58;
also Brauer, "United States Military Expenditures", 67.
23. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Yearbook, 2003
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 365; Brauer, "United States
Military Expenditure", 66, and "Data, Models, Coefficients", 56. Note: We
have not included Homeland Security in our figures, in line with SIPRI and
NATO's exclusion of civil defense programs.
24. SIPRI Yearbook 2008: Summary, 10-11.
25. James Cypher, "From Military Keynesianism to Global Neoliberal
Militarism", Monthly Review 59, no 2 (June 2007): 45-48; Chalmers Johnson,
"Why the US Has Really Gone Broke", Le Monde Diplomatique, February 2008.
26. The complete set of data is not provided in this article, but follows
the above method throughout.
27. For this general argument see Foster, Naked Imperialism (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2006), especially 107-20.
28. Foster, Naked Imperialism, 55-66; Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of
Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 151-85.
29. The military resurgence after periods of relative decline arose in both
cases at the tail end of Democratic administrations: Carter in the late
1970s and Clinton in the late 1990s, and gathered momentum in the Republican
administrations that followed: Reagan in the 1980s and George W Bush at the
beginning of the 2000s.
30. Robert W McChesney, The Political Economy of the Media (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2008), 105, 108.
31. Norman Soloman, "The Military-Industrial-Media Complex", Extra,
July-August 2005, http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2627.
32. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 213-17.
33. See John Bellamy Foster and Robert W McChesney, "Preface", in Foster and
McChesney, ed, Pox Americana: Exposing the American Empire (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2004), 7-10; McChesney, Political Economy of the
Media, 491-500.

_____

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology
at the University of Oregon. Hannah Holleman is a doctoral student at the
University of Oregon. Robert W McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor
in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. His books include The Political Economy of Media (Monthly
Review Press, 2008), Communication Revolution (New Press, 2007), The Problem
of the Media (Monthly Review Press, 2004), and Rich Media, Poor Democracy
(University of Illinois, 1999). The authors would like to thank Fred Magdoff
and R Jonna for their help.

All material (c) copyright 1949-2008 Monthly Review

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