By Gareth
Porter
ecember 03, 202:
Information Clearing House
-What
President Dwight D. Eisenhower dubbed the
“military-industrial complex” has been constantly
evolving over the decades, adjusting to shifts in
the economic and political system as well as
international events. The result today is a
“permanent-war complex,” which is now engaged in
conflicts in at least eight countries across the
globe, none of which are intended to be temporary.
This new complex
has justified its enhanced power and control over
the country’s resources primarily by citing threats
to U.S. security posed by Islamic terrorists. But
like the old military-industrial complex, it is
really rooted in the evolving relationship between
the national security institutions themselves and
the private arms contractors allied with them.
The first phase of
this transformation was a far-reaching privatization
of U.S. military and intelligence institutions in
the two decades after the Cold War, which hollowed
out the military’s expertise and made it dependent
on big contractors (think Halliburton, Booz Allen
Hamilton, CACI). The second phase began with the
global “war on terrorism,” which quickly turned into
a permanent war, much of which revolves around the
use of drone strikes.
The drone wars are
uniquely a public-private military endeavor, in
which major arms contractors are directly involved
in the most strategic aspect of the war. And so the
drone contractors—especially the dominant General
Atomics—have both a powerful motive and the
political power, exercised through its clients in
Congress, to ensure that the wars continue for the
indefinite future.
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♦♦♦
The privatization
of military and intelligence institutions began even
before the end of the Cold War. But during the
1990s, both Congress and the Bush and Clinton
administrations opened the floodgates to arms and
intelligence contractors and their political allies.
The contracts soon became bigger and more
concentrated in a handful of dominant companies.
Between 1998 and 2003, private contractors were
getting roughly half of the entire defense budget
each year. The 50 biggest companies were getting
more than half of the approximately $900 billion
paid out in contracts during that time, and most
were no-bid contracts, sole sourced, according to
the Center for Public Integrity.
The contracts that
had the biggest impact on the complex were for
specialists working right in the Pentagon. The
number of these contractors grew so rapidly and
chaotically in the two decades after the Cold War
that senior Pentagon officials did not even know the
full extent of their numbers and reach. In 2010,
then-secretary of defense Robert M. Gates even
confessed to
Washington Post
reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin that he
was unable to determine how many contractors worked
in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which
includes the entire civilian side of the Pentagon.
Although legally
forbidden from assuming tasks that were “inherent
government functions,” in practice these contractors
steadily encroached on what had always been regarded
as government functions. Contractors could pay much
higher salaries and consulting fees than government
agencies, so experienced Pentagon and CIA officers
soon left their civil service jobs by the tens of
thousands for plum positions with firms that often
paid twice as much as the government for the same
work.
That was
especially true in the intelligence agencies, which
experienced a rapid 50 percent workforce increase
after 9/11. It was almost entirely done with former
skilled officers brought back as contractor
personnel. Even President Barack Obama’s CIA
director Leon Panetta admitted to Priest and Arkin
that the intelligence community had for too long
“depended on contractors to do the operational work”
that had always been done by CIA employees,
including intelligence analysis, and that the CIA
needed to rebuild its own expertise “over time.”
By 2010, “core
contractors”—those who perform such functions as
collection and analysis—comprised at least 28
percent of professional civilian and military
intelligence staff, according to a fact sheet from
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The dependence on
the private sector in the Pentagon and the
intelligence community had reached such a point that
it raised a serious question about whether the
workforce was now “obligated to shareholders rather
than to the public interest,” as Priest and Arkin
reported. And both Gates and Panetta acknowledged to
them their concerns about that issue.
Powerfully
reinforcing that privatization effect was the
familiar revolving door between the Pentagon and
arms contractors, which had begun turning with
greater rapidity. A 2010
Boston Globe
investigation showed that the percentage of three-
and four-star generals who left the Pentagon to take
jobs as consultants or executives with defense
contractors, which was already at 45 percent in
1993, had climbed to 80 percent by 2005—an 83
percent increase in 12 years.
The incoming
George W. Bush administration gave the revolving
door a strong push, bringing in eight officials from
Lockheed Martin—then the largest defense
contractor—to fill senior policymaking positions in
the Pentagon. The CEO of Lockheed Martin, Peter
Teets, was brought in to become undersecretary of
the Air Force and director of the National
Reconnaissance Office (where he had responsibility
for acquisition decisions directly benefiting his
former company). James Roche, the former vice
president of Northrop Grumman, was named secretary
of the Air Force, and a former vice president of
General Dynamics, Gordon R. England, was named the
secretary of the Navy.
In 2007, Bush
named rear admiral J. Michael McConnell as director
of national intelligence. McConnell had been
director of the National Security Agency from 1992
to 1996, then became head of the national security
branch of intelligence contractor Booz Allen
Hamilton. Not surprisingly McConnell energetically
promoted even greater reliance on the private
sector, on the grounds that it was supposedly more
efficient and innovative than the government. In
2009 he returned once again to Booz Allen Hamilton
as vice chairman.
The Pentagon and
the intelligence agencies thus morphed into a new
form of mixed public-private institutions, in which
contractor power was greatly magnified. To some in
the military it appeared that the privateers had
taken over the Pentagon. As a senior U.S. military
officer who had served in Afghanistan commented to
Priest and Arkin, “It just hits you like a ton of
bricks when you think about it. The Department of
Defense is no longer a war-fighting organization,
it’s a business enterprise.”
♦♦♦
The years after
9/11 saw the national security organs acquire new
missions, power, and resources—all in the name of a
“War on Terror,” aka “the long war.” The operations
in Afghanistan and Iraq were sold on that premise,
even though virtually no al Qaeda remained in
Afghanistan and none were in Iraq until long after
the initial U.S. invasion.
The military and
the CIA got new orders to pursue al Qaeda and
affiliated groups in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and
several other African countries, parlaying what the
Bush administration called a “generational war” into
a guarantee that there would be no return to the
relative austerity of the post-Cold War decade.
Drone strikes
against targets associated with al Qaeda or
affiliated groups became the common feature of these
wars and a source of power for military and
intelligence officials. The Air Force owned the
drones and conducted strikes in Afghanistan, but the
CIA carried them out covertly in Pakistan, and the
CIA and the military competed for control over the
strikes in Yemen.
The early
experience with drone strikes against “high-value
targets” was an unmitigated disaster. From 2004
through 2007, the CIA carried out 12 strikes in
Pakistan, aimed at high-value targets of al Qaeda
and its affiliates. But they killed only three
identifiable al Qaeda or Pakistani Taliban figures,
along with 121 civilians, based on analysis of news
reports of the strikes.
But on the urging
of CIA Director Michael Hayden, in mid-2008
President Bush agreed to allow “signature strikes”
based merely on analysts’ judgment that a “pattern
of life” on the ground indicated an al Qaeda or
affiliated target. Eventually it became a tool for
killing mostly suspected rank-and-file Afghan
Taliban fighters in both Pakistan and Afghanistan,
particularly during the Obama administration, which
had less stomach and political capital for outright
war and came to depend on the covert drone campaign.
This war was largely secret and less accountable
publicly. And it allowed him the preferable optics
of withdrawing troops and ending official ground
operations in places like Iraq.
Altogether in its
eight years in office, the Obama administration
carried out a total of nearly 5,000 drone
strikes—mostly in Afghanistan—according to figures
collected by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
But between 2009
and 2013, the best informed officials in the U.S.
government raised alarms about the pace and
lethality of this new warfare on the grounds that it
systematically undermined the U.S. effort to quell
terrorism by creating more support for al Qaeda
rather than weakening it. Some mid-level CIA
officers opposed the strikes in Pakistan as early as
2009, because of what they had learned from
intelligence gathered from intercepts of electronic
communications in areas where the strikes were
taking place: they were infuriating Muslim males and
making them more willing to join al Qaeda.
In a secret May
2009 assessment leaked to the
Washington Post,
General David Petraeus, then commander of the
Central Command, wrote, “Anti-U.S. sentiment has
already been increasing in Pakistan…especially in
regard to cross-border and reported drone strikes,
which Pakistanis perceive to cause unacceptable
civilian casualties.”
More evidence of
that effect came from Yemen. A 2013 report on drone
war policy for the Council on Foreign Relations
found that membership in al Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula in Yemen grew from several hundred in 2010
to a few thousand members in 2012, just as the
number of drone strikes in the country was
increasing dramatically—along with popular anger
toward the United States.
Drone strikes are
easy for a president to support. They demonstrate to
the public that he is doing something concrete about
terrorism, thus providing political cover in case of
another successful terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
Donald Trump has shown no interest in scaling back
the drone wars, despite openly questioning the
stationing of troops across the Middle East and
Africa. In 2017 he approved a 100 percent increase
in drone strikes in Yemen and a 30 percent increase
in Somalia above the totals of the final year of the
Obama administration. And Trump has approved a major
increase in drone strikes in Afghanistan, and has
eliminated rules aimed at reducing civilian
casualties from such strikes.
Even if Obama and
Trump had listened to dissenting voices on the
serious risks of drone wars to U.S. interests,
however, another political reality would have
prevented the United States from ending the drone
wars: the role of the private defense contractors
and their friends on Capitol Hill in maintaining the
status quo.
♦♦♦
Unlike
conventional bombing missions, drone strikes require
a team to watch the video feeds, interpret them, and
pass on their conclusions to their mission
coordinators and pilots. By 2007 that required more
specialists than the Air Force had available. Since
then, the Air Force has been working with military
and intelligence contractors to analyze full-motion
videos transmitted by drones to guide targeting
decisions. BAE, the third-ranking Pentagon
contractor according to defense revenues, claims
that it is the “leading provider” of analysis of
drone video intelligence, but in the early years the
list of major companies with contracts for such work
also included Booz Allen Hamilton, L-3
Communications, and SAIC (now Leidos).
These analysts
were fully integrated into the “kill chain” that
resulted, in many cases, in civilian casualties. In
the now-famous case of the strike in February 2010
that killed at least 15 Afghan civilians, including
children, the “primary screener” for the team of six
video analysts in Florida communicating via a chat
system with the drone pilot in Nevada was a contract
employee with SAIC. That company had a $49 million
multi-year contract with the Air Force to analyze
drone video feeds and other intelligence from
Afghanistan.
The pace of drone
strikes in Afghanistan accelerated sharply after
U.S. combat ended formally in 2014. And that same
year, the air war against ISIS began in Iraq and
Syria. The Air Force then began running armed drones
around the clock in those countries as well. The Air
Force needed 1,281 drone pilots to handle as many
“combat air patrols” per day in multiple countries.
But it was several hundred pilots short of that
objective.
To fulfill that
requirement the Air Force turned to General
Atomics—maker of the first armed drone, the
Predator, and a larger follow-on, the MQ-9
Reaper—which had already been hired to provide
support services for drone operations on a two-year
contract worth $700 million. But in April 2015 the
Air Force signed a contract with the company to
lease one of its Reapers with its own ground control
station for a year. In addition, the contractor was
to provide the pilots, sensor operators, and other
crew members to fly it and maintain it.
The pilots, who
still worked directly for General Atomics, did
everything Air Force drone pilots did except
actually fire the missiles. The result of that
contract was a complete blurring of the lines
between the official military and the contractors
hired to work alongside them. The Air Force denied
any such blurring, arguing that the planning and
execution of each mission would still be in the
hands of an Air Force officer. But the Air Force
Judge Advocate General’s Office had published an
article in its law review in 2010 warning that even
the analysis of video feeds risked violating
international law prohibiting civilian participation
in direct hostilities.
A second contract
with a smaller company, Aviation Unlimited, was for
the provision of pilots and sensor operators and
referred to “recent increased terrorist activities,”
suggesting that it was for anti-ISIS operations.
The process of
integrating drone contractors into the kill chain in
multiple countries thus marked a new stage in the
process of privatizing war in what had become a
permanent war complex. After 9/11, the military
became dependent on the private sector for
everything from food, water, and housing to security
and refueling in Iraq and Afghanistan. By 2009
contractors began outnumbering U.S. troops in
Afghanistan and eventually became critical for
continuing the war as well.
In June 2018, the
DoD announced a $40 million contract with General
Atomics to operate its own MQ-9 Reapers in
Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. The Reapers are
normally armed for independent missile strikes, but
in this case, the contractor-operated Reapers were
to be unarmed, meaning that the drones would be used
to identify targets for Air Force manned aircraft
bombing missions.
♦♦♦
There appears to
be no braking mechanism for this accelerating new
reality. U.S. government spending on the military
drone market, which includes not only procurement
and research and development for the drones
themselves, but the sensors, modifications, control
systems, and other support contracts, stood at $4.5
billion in 2016, and was expected to increase to $13
billion by 2027. General Atomics is now the dominant
player in the arena.
This kind of
income translates into political power, and the
industry has shown its muscle and more than once
prevented the Pentagon from canceling big-ticket
programs, no matter how unwanted or wasteful. They
have the one-two punch of strategically focused
campaign contributions and intensive lobbying of
members with whom they have influence.
This was most
evident between 2011 and 2013, after congressionally
mandated budget reductions cut into drone
procurement. The biggest loser appeared to be
Northrop Grumman’s “Global Hawk” drone, designed for
unarmed high-altitude intelligence surveillance
flights of up to 32 hours.
By 2011 the Global
Hawk was already 25 percent over budget, and the
Pentagon had delayed the purchase of the remaining
planes for a year to resolve earlier failures to
deliver adequate “near real time” video
intelligence.
After a subsequent
test, however, the Defense Department’s top weapons
tester official reported in May 2011 that the Global
Hawk was “not operationally effective” three fourths
of the time, because of “low vehicle reliability.”
He cited the “failure” of “mission central
components” at “high rates.” In addition, the
Pentagon still believed the venerable U-2 Spy
plane—which could operate in all weather conditions,
unlike the Global Hawk—could carry out comparable
high-altitude intelligence missions.
As a result, the
DoD announced in 2012 that it would mothball the
aircraft it had already purchased and save $2.5
billion over five years by foregoing the purchase of
the remaining three drones. But that was before
Northrop Grumman mounted a classic successful
lobbying campaign to reverse the decision.
That lobbying
drive produced a fiscal year 2013 defense
appropriations law that added $360 million for the
purchase of the final three Global Hawks. In Spring
2013, top Pentagon officials indicated that they
were petitioning for “relief” from congressional
intent. Then the powerful chairman of the House
Armed Services Committee, California Republican Buck
McKeon, and a member of the House Appropriations
Defense Subcommittee, Democrat Jim Moran of
Virginia, wrote a letter to incoming Defense
Secretary Chuck Hagel on May 13, 2013, pressing him
to fund the acquisition of the Global Hawks.
The Pentagon
finally caved. The Air Force issued a statement
pledging to acquire the last three Northrop Grumman
spy planes, and in early 2014, Hagel and Dempsey
announced that they would mothball the U-2 and
replace it with the Global Hawk.
Northrop spent
nearly $18 million on lobbying in 2012 and $21
million in 2013, fielding a phalanx of lobbyists
determined to help save Global Hawk. It got what it
wanted.
Meanwhile,
Northrop’s political action committee had already
made contributions of at least $113,000 to the
campaign committee of House Armed Services Committee
Chairman McKeon, who also happened to represent the
Southern California district where Northrop’s
assembly plant for the Global Hawk is located.
Representative Moran, the co-author of the letter
with McKeon, who represented the northern Virginia
district where Northrop has its headquarters, had
gotten $22,000 in contributions.
Of course Northrop
didn’t ignore the rest of the House Armed Services
Committee: they were recipients of at least $243,000
in campaign contributions during the first half of
2012.
♦♦♦
The Northrop
Grumman triumph dramatically illustrates the power
relationships underlying the new permanent-war
complex. In the first half of 2013 alone, four major
drone contractors—General Atomics, Northrop Grumman,
Lockheed Martin, and Boeing—spent $26.2 million
lobbying Congress to pressure the executive branch
to keep the pipeline of funding for their respective
drone systems flowing freely. The Center for the
Study of the Drone observed, “Defense contractors
are pressuring the government to maintain the same
levels of investment in unmanned systems even as the
demand from the traditional theatres such as
Afghanistan dies down.”
Instead of dying
down, the demand from drones in Afghanistan has
exploded in subsequent years. By 2016, the General
Atomics Reapers had already become so tightly
integrated into U.S. military operations in
Afghanistan that the whole U.S. war plan was
dependent on them. In the first quarter of 2016 Air
Force data showed that 61 percent of the weapons
dropped in Afghanistan were from the drones.
In the new
permanent-war complex the interests of the arms
contractors have increasingly dominated over the
interests of the civilian Pentagon and the military
services, and dominance has became a new driving
force for continued war. Even though those
bureaucracies, along with the CIA, seized the
opportunity to openly conduct military operations in
one country after another, the drone war has
introduced a new political dynamic into the war
system: the drone makers who have powerful clout in
Congress can use their influence to block or
discourage an end to the permanent war—especially in
Afghanistan—which would sharply curtail the demand
for drones.
Eisenhower was
prophetic in his warning about the threat of the
original complex (which he had planned to call the
military-industrial-congressional complex) to
American democracy. But that original complex,
organized merely to maximize the production of arms
to enhance the power and resources of both the
Pentagon and their contractor allies, has become a
much more serious menace to the security of the
American people than even Eisenhower could have
anticipated. Now it is a system of war that powerful
arms contractors and their bureaucratic allies may
have the ability to maintain indefinitely.
Gareth Porter
is an investigative reporter and regular contributor
to
The American Conservative.
He is also the author of
Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran
Nuclear Scare.
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