U.S. Economic Planning in the Second World War and the Planetary Crisis

The February 2023 issue of Monthly Review includes an article of mine, “U.S. Economic Planning in the Second World War and the Planetary Crisis,” which is a revised version of a past blog post.  

The following is from the article’s introduction:

Not surprisingly, the consensus from those studying the wartime conversion experience is that a rapid and successful transformation requires aggressive state planning and direction of economic activity. This is indeed an important lesson for our movement to learn. But there is another lesson to be learned from that period, one that deserves more attention than it currently receives. It is that in a capitalist economy, capital’s ownership position greatly enhances its ability to mold state structures and their policies in ways favorable to its interests and to the detriment of workers. In other words, the planning process is a contested terrain, and one not usually favorable to working people.

I will show that, during the war years, corporate leaders were able to rebuff Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) planning proposals and successfully marginalize the participation of unions in the mobilization agencies that were formed, ensuring that labor would be forced into a defensive and ever weaker position relative to capital as the war progressed. Thus, if our aim is not simply a transformation to a somewhat less carbon consuming economy, but a complete and just transformation, we must prepare ourselves, and the movement that we hope to build, for an ongoing and complex struggle to overcome capital’s structural advantages. It is my hope that this article, which focuses on the class dynamics shaping the Second World War mobilization process, can help that preparation. The history it describes offers a useful primer on how the other side conducts its class war.

System change, class war, and the WW2 economic conversion experience

The climate crisis has driven our planet into uncharted territory. We are close to breaching critical environmental thresholds, setting in motion destabilizing changes to our global climate system that could well make the earth unlivable for humans and countless other species.  We must decrease carbon emissions as rapidly as possible and there is no way to do that without significantly changing the operation and aims of our economy.  But not just any change will do.  It must be one that also promotes worker empowerment and solidarity, community well-being and security, and democracy.

Learning from history: community-run child-care centers during World War II

We face many big challenges.  And we will need strong, bold policies to meaningfully address them.  Solving our child-care crisis is one of those challenges, and a study of World War II government efforts to ensure accessible and affordable high-quality child care points the way to the kind of bold action we need. 

The child care crisis

A number of studies have established that high-quality early childhood programs provide significant community and individual benefits.  One found that “per dollar invested, early childhood programs increase present value of state per capita earnings by $5 to $9.”  Universal preschool programs have also been shown to offer significant benefits to all children, even producing better outcomes for the most disadvantaged children than means-tested programs.  Yet, even before the pandemic, most families struggled with a lack of desirable child-care options.    

Realizing a Green New Deal: Lessons from World War II

Many activists in the United States support a Green New Deal transformation of the economy in order to tackle the escalating global climate crisis and the country’s worsening economic and social problems.  At present, the Green New Deal remains a big tent idea, with advocates continuing to debate what it should include and even its ultimate aims.[1]  Although perhaps understandable given this lack of agreement, far too little attention has been paid to the process of transformation.  That is concerning, because it will be far from easy.

One productive way for us to sharpen our thinking about the transformation is to study the World War II-era mobilization process. Then, the U.S. government, facing remarkably similar challenges to the ones we are likely to confront, successfully converted the U.S. economy from civilian to military production in a period of only three years.

Seeking Peace on the Korean Peninsula

Although the date drew little notice in the U.S. media, July 27, 2020 marked the 67^th anniversary of the Korean War Armistice Agreement, an agreement that ended the fighting but not the war between the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea).

The government of North Korea continues to seek a peace treaty with the United States, with the support of the current president of the Republic of Korea (South Korea), to finally bring an end to the Korean War.  The leadership of the United States remains opposed.  The costs of maintaining this state of war are immense.  Tragically, the media has done little to educate Americans about the actual history and consequences of U.S. policy towards Korea 

Founded in 2005, the Korea Policy Institute (KPI) is an independent research and educational institute that works to increase popular awareness and understanding of developments on the Korean peninsula and to promote a U.S. policy towards Korea that respects the Korean peoples’ desire for peace, sovereignty, reconciliation, and the reunification of Korea—I am a member of its board of directors.  In line with its mission, KPI has just published its second reader—this one titled Seeking Peace on the Korean Peninsula.

This 93-page reader, which features articles from leading analysts, journalists, and scholars in the United States, Asia, and the Pacific, offers critical context to developments on the Korean Peninsula. The reader is divided into four sections:

1. The Continuing Korean War
2. The Costs of U.S. Sanctions on North Korea
3. Trump’s North Korea Legacy: Failed U.S.-DPRK Summits
4. Time for a People’s Policy Toward Korea.

 

It can be viewed and downloaded for free here. 

There is great need for a new U.S. policy towards Korea, one that promotes peace on the Korean Peninsula:

• The ongoing state of war between the United States and North Korea helps to fuel an ever-growing U.S. military budget, an expanding U.S. military presence in Asia, the militarization of Japan, and an East Asian arms race, all at the expense of needed spending on social programs.
• U.S. hostility towards North Korea strengthens conservative political forces in South Korea, restricting the ability of labor and other social movements to freely pursue progressive political changes.
• U.S. policy towards Korea continues to undermine attempts by the leaders of South Korea and North Korea to end the division of Korea, keeping millions of families separated, including some 100,000 Korean Americans.
• U.S. sanctions on North Korea, which deny the country access to international aid, loans, and investment, and severely limit the country’s ability to engage in international trade, are causing wide-spread human suffering in North Korea, especially among women and children.
• U.S. militarism encourages the militarization of South Korea by pressuring the country to engage in joint military exercises that involve training for invasion and occupation of North Korea; purchase and deploy new U.S. missile defense systems aimed at both China and North Korea; construct new naval facilities for use by U.S. warships; and boost its military spending to, among other things, pay a large share of the costs of hosting U.S. bases and obtain increasingly expensive U.S. military weaponry.
• And then there is the real threat of a new, nuclear Korean War, with human and environmental costs that cannot be calculated.

To learn more about these and related issues, check out the new KPI reader, Seeking Peace on the Korean Peninsula.  And if you have the time, you might  want to check out the 130-page, 2018 KPI reader, U.S. Policy and Korea, which can also be viewed and downloaded for free.

Defunding police and challenging militarism, a necessary response to their “battle space”

The excessive use of force and killings of unarmed Black Americans by police has fueled a popular movement for slashing police budgets, reimagining policing, and directing freed funds to community-based programs that provide medical and mental health care, housing, and employment support to those in need.  This is a long overdue development.

Police are not the answer

Police budgets rose steadily from the 1990s to the Great Recession and, despite the economic stagnation that followed, have remained largely unchanged.  This trend is highlighted in the figure below, which shows real median per capita spending on police in the 150 largest U.S. cities.  That spending grew, adjusted for inflation, from $359 in 2007 to $374 in 2017.  The contrast with state and local government spending on social programs is dramatic.  From 2007 to 2017, median per capita spending on housing and community development fell from $217 to $173, while spending on public welfare programs fell from $70 to $47.

Thus, as economic developments over the last three decades left working people confronting weak job growth, growing inequality, stagnant wages, declining real wealth, and rising rates of mortality, funding priorities meant that the resulting social consequences would increasingly be treated as policing problems.  And, in line with other powerful trends that shaped this period–especially globalization, privatization, and militarization–police departments were encouraged to meet their new responsibilities by transforming themselves into small, heavily equipped armies whose purpose was to wage war against those they were supposed to protect and serve. 

The military-to-police pipeline

The massive, unchecked militarization of the country and its associated military-to-police pipeline was one of the more powerful factors promoting this transformation.  The Pentagon, overflowing with military hardware and eager to justify a further modernization of its weaponry, initiated a program in the early 1990s that allowed it to provide surplus military equipment free to law enforcement agencies, allegedly to support their “war on drugs.”  As a Forbes article explains:

Since the early 1990s, more than $7 billion worth of excess U.S. military equipment has been transferred from the Department of Defense to federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, free of charge, as part of its so-called 1033 program. As of June [2020], there are some 8,200 law enforcement agencies from 49 states and four U.S. territories participating. 

The program grew dramatically after September 11, 2001, justified by government claims that the police needed to strengthen their ability to combat domestic terrorism.  As an example of the resulting excesses, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2014 that the Los Angeles Unified School District and its police officers were in possession of three grenade launchers, 61 automatic military rifles and a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicle. Finally, in 2015, President Obama took steps to place limits on the items that could be transferred; tracked armored vehicles, grenade launchers, and bayonets were among the items that were to be returned to the military.

President Trump removed those limits in 2017, and the supplies are again flowing freely, including armored vehicles, riot gear, explosives, battering rams, and yes, once again bayonets.  According to the New York Times, “Trump administration officials said that the police believed bayonets were handy, for instance, in cutting seatbelts in an emergency.”

Outfitting police departments for war also encouraged different criteria for recruiting and training. For example, as Forbes notes, “The average police department spends 168 hours training new recruits on firearms, self-defense, and use of force tactics. It spends just nine hours on conflict management and mediation.”  Arming and training police for military action leads naturally to the militarization of police relations with community members, especially Black, Indigeous and other people of color, who come to play the role of the enemy that needs to be controlled or, if conditions warrant, destroyed.

In fact, the military has become a major cheerleader for domestic military action.  President Trump, on a call with governors after the start of demonstrations protesting the May 25, 2020 killing of George Floyd while in police custody, exhorted them to “dominate” the street protests.

As the Washington Examiner reports:

“You’ve got a big National Guard out there that’s ready to come and fight like hell,” Trump told governors on the Monday call, which was leaked to the press.

[Secretary of Defense] Esper lamented that only two states called up more than 1,000 Guard members of the 23 states that have called up the Guard in response to street protests. The National Guard said Monday that 17,015 Guard members have been activated for civil unrest.

“I agree, we need to dominate the battle space,” Esper said after Trump’s initial remarks. “We have deep resources in the Guard. I stand ready, the chairman stands ready, the head of the National Guard stands ready to fully support you in terms of helping mobilize the Guard and doing what they need to do.”

The militarization of the federal budget

The same squeeze of social spending and support for militarization is being played out at the federal level.  As the National Priorities Project highlights in the following figure, the United States has a military budget greater than the next ten countries combined.

Yet, this dominance has done little to slow the military’s growing hold over federal discretionary spending.  At $730 billion, military spending accounts for more than 53 percent of the federal discretionary budget.  A slightly broader notion, what the National Priorities Project calls the militarized budget, actually accounts for almost two-thirds of the discretionary budget.  The militarized budget:

includes discretionary spending on the traditional military budget, as well as veterans’ affairs, homeland security, and law enforcement and incarceration. In 2019, the militarized budget totaled $887.8 billion – amounting to 64.5 percent of discretionary spending. . . . This count does not include forms of militarized spending allocated outside the discretionary budget, include mandatory spending related to veterans’ benefits, intelligence agencies, and interest on militarized spending.

The militarized budget has been larger than the non-militarized budget every year since 1976.  But the gap between the two has grown dramatically over the last two decades. 

In sum, the critical ongoing struggle to slash police budgets and reimagine policing needs to be joined to a larger movement against militarism more generally if we are to make meaningful improvements in majority living and working conditions.

Flying Above the Clouds: the US Military and Climate Change

Climate change is occurring, highlighted by dramatically shifting weather patterns and ever more deadly storms, floods, droughts, and wildfires.  And the evidence is overwhelming that it is driven by the steady increase in greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide and methane, produced by our fossil fuel-based economic system.

Aware of global warming’s deadly human consequences, millions of people have taken to the streets to demand that governments take action to end our use of fossil fuels as part of a massive system-wide economic transformation that would also be designed to ensure a just transition for all communities and workers.

As movements here in the US take aim at the fossil fuel industry and government leaders that continue to resist efforts to promote more sustainable and egalitarian forms of energy generation and distribution, transportation, agriculture, and housing, the largest generator of greenhouse gas emissions continues to fly above the clouds and largely out of public view.  As Neta Crawford, Co-Director of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, states in her recently published study of Pentagon fuel use and climate change, “the Department of Defense is the world’s largest institutional user of petroleum and correspondingly, the single largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world.”

Flying above the clouds

We know that we have an enormous military budget.  US military spending is greater than the total military spending of the next seven countries combined: China, Saudi Arabia, India, France, Russia, United Kingdom, and Germany.  The budget of the Department of Defense alone commands more than half of all US federal discretionary spending each year.  Add in spending on national security activities and weapons included in other departmental budgets, like that of the Department of Energy, and the military’s budget share approaches two-thirds of all discretionary spending.

This kind of information is readily available.  The US military’s contribution to global warming is not.  One reason is that because of US government pressure, the governments negotiating the Kyoto Protocol agreed that emissions generated by military activity would not count as national emissions and would not have to be reported.  That exemption remained in the agreement even though the US government never signed-on to the Kyoto Protocol.  Perhaps as a consequence, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also does not include national military emissions in its calculations.  Although the Paris Accord removed the exemption, the US government is committed to withdrawing from the agreement in 2020.

Uncovering the carbon costs of the US military

Although the US military does not publicly disclose its fuel use, four researchers—Oliver Belcher, Benjamin Neimark, Patrick Bigger, and Cara Kennelly—using  multiple Freedom of Information Act requests to the US Defense Logistics Agency, have recently published an article that provides a good estimate.

The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) is charged with overseeing the supply chain that supports all military activities, including its warfighting, peacekeeping, and base operations.  The Defense Logistics Agency–Energy (DLA-E), a unit within the DLA, has responsibility for managing the military’s energy requirements.  In the words of Belcher, Neimark, Bigger, and Kennelly, “the DLA-E is the one-stop shop for fueling purchases and contracts within the US military both domestically and internationally, and acts as the US military’s internal market for all consumables, including fuel.”

In simple terms, the military needs fuel—to fly its jets and bombers on surveillance or attack missions, to deliver troops and weapons to bases and areas of conflict, to power ships on maneuvers, to run the vehicles used by patrols and fighting forces, and to maintain base operations here and around the world. And because it is the DLA-E that secures and distributes the required fuel, the four researchers used “Freedom of Information Act requests to compile a database of DLA-E records for all known land, sea, and aircraft fuel purchases, as well as fuel contracts made with US operators in military posts, camps, stations, and ship bunkers abroad from FY 2013 to 2017.”  The resulting calculation of total fuel purchases and use served as the basis for the authors’ estimate of the military’s production of greenhouse gas emissions.

The US military runs on fuel

The fuel dependence of the US military has dramatically grown over time, largely as a consequence of the nature of its continually evolving weapons systems and warfighting strategies.  For example, average fuel use, by soldier, grew from one gallon a day during World War II, to nine gallons a day by the end of the Vietnam War, to 22 gallons a day in the wars currently being fought in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One reason for this upward trajectory is that the US military has come to depend ever more on airpower to directly threaten or attack its enemies as well as support its heavily armored ground forces operating in foreign countries. As Crawford explains, the US military consumes so much energy because “its fighting ‘tooth’ employs equipment that guzzles fuel at an incredible rate . . . [and its] logistical ‘tail’ and the installations that support operations are also extremely fuel intensive.”

For example, Crawford reports that the fuel consumption of a B-2 Bomber is 4.28 gallons to the mile.  Read that carefully–that is gallons to the mile, not the more common miles to the gallon.  The fuel consumption of a F-35A Fighter bomber is 2.37 gallons to the mile, while it is 4.9 miles to the gallon for a KC-135R Refueling Tanker (loaded with transfer fuel).  “Even the military’s non-armored vehicles are notoriously inefficient. For instance, the approximately 60,000 HUMVEEs remaining in the US Army fleet get between four to eight miles per gallon of diesel fuel.”

Needless to say, an active military will burn through a lot of fuel.  And as Belcher, Neimark, Bigger, and Kennelly point out, the US military has indeed been busy: “Between 2015 and 2017, the US military was active in 76 countries, including seven countries on the receiving end of air/drone strikes, 15 countries with ‘boots on the ground,’ 44 overseas military bases, and 56 countries receiving counter-terrorism training.”

The carbon footprint of the US military

Belcher, Neimark, Bigger, and Kennelly determined that “the US military consumes more liquid fuels and emits more CO2e (carbon-Dioxide equivalent) than many medium-sized countries.”  Comparing 2014 country liquid fuel consumption with US military liquid fuel consumption revealed that the US military, if treated as a country, would rank between Peru and Portugal.  The US military’s 2014 greenhouse gas emissions, just from its use of fuel, was roughly equal “to total–not just fuel-–emissions from Romania.”  That year, the US military, again just from its fuel use, was the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, and not far behind a host of other countries.

The US military’s ranking would be higher if its other emissions were included, such as from the electricity and food the military consumes, or the land use changes from military operations.  And of course, none of this includes the emissions from the many corporations engaged in producing weapons for the military. In 2017, the US military purchased about 269,230 barrels of oil a day and emitted 25,375.8 kt-CO2e by burning those fuels.

One reason that the US military is such a large greenhouse gas emitter is that most of its fuel is jet fuel procured for use by the Air Force or Navy.  Their planes burn the fuel at extremely high altitudes, which “produces different kinds of chemical reactions, resulting in warming 2–4 times greater than on the ground.”

The military’s response to climate change

The military is well aware of the dangers of climate change—in contrast to many of our leading politicians.  One reason is that it threatens its operational readiness. As Crawford explains:

In early 2018, the DOD reported that about half of their installations had already experienced climate change related effects. A year later, the DOD reported that the US military is already experiencing the effects of global warming at dozens of installations. These include recurrent flooding (53 installations), drought (43 installations), wildfires (36 installations) and desertification (6 installations).

But most importantly, the military sees climate change as a threat to US national security.  For years, the military has considered the impact of climate change in its defense planning because, as a recent report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence puts it, “global environmental and ecological degradation, as well as climate change, are likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond.”  Of course, in planning responses to possible climate-generated threats to US interests, the military remains committed to strengthening its capacity for action, even though doing so adds to the likelihood of greater climate chaos.

In short, people are right to demand that governments take meaningful and immediate steps to stop global warning.  And those steps need to include significant reductions in military spending as well as overseas bases and interventions.  Since the US military is the single largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world, the fight to reign in militarism in this country is especially important.  As an added benefit, the money freed could be put to good use helping to finance the broader system-wide transformation required to create an ecologically responsive economy.

US Militarism Marches On

Republicans and Democrats like to claim that they are on opposite sides of important issues.  Of course, depending on which way the wind blows, they sometimes change sides, like over support for free trade and federal deficits.  Tragically, however, there is no division when it comes to militarism.

For example, the federal budget for fiscal year 2018 (which ends on September 30, 2018), included more money for the military than even President Trump requested.  Trump had asked for a military budget of $603 billion, a sizeable $25 billion increase over fiscal year 2017 levels; Congress approved $629 billion.  Trump had also asked for $65 billion to finance current war fighting, a bump of $5 billion; Congress approved $71 billion.  The National Defense Authorization Act of 2018, which set the target budget for the Department of Defense at this high level, was approved by the Senate in a September 2017 vote of 89-9.

In the words of the New York Times: “In a rare act of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill, the Senate passed a $700 billion defense policy bill . . . that sets forth a muscular vision of America as a global power, with a Pentagon budget that far exceeds what President Trump has asked for.”

That Act also called for a further increase in military spending of $16 billion for fiscal year 2019 (which begins October 1, 2018).  And, in June 2018, the Senate voted 85 to 10 to authorize that increase, boosting the Defense Department’s fiscal year 2019 total to $716 billion.

This bipartisan embrace of militarism comes at enormous cost for working people.  This cost includes cuts in funding for public housing, health care and education; the rebuilding of our infrastructure; basic research and development; and efforts to mitigate climate change.  It also includes the militarization of our police, since the military happily transfers its excess or outdated equipment to willing local police departments.

And it also includes a belligerent foreign policy.  A case in point: Congress has made clear its opposition to the Trump administration decision to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and halt war games directed against North Korea, apparently preferring the possibility of a new Korean War.  Congress is also trying to pass a law that will restrict the ability of the President to reduce the number of US troops stationed in South Korea.

In brief, the US military industrial complex, including the bipartisan consensus which helps to promote militarism’s popular legitimacy, is one of the most important and powerful foes we must overcome if we are to seriously tackle our ever-growing social, economic, and ecological problems.

The military is everywhere

The US has approximately 800 formal military bases in 80 countries, with 135,000 soldiers stationed around the globe.  Putting this in perspective, Alice Slater reports that:

only 11 other countries have bases in foreign countries, some 70 altogether. Russia has an estimated 26 to 40 in nine countries, mostly former Soviet Republics, as well as in Syria and Vietnam; the UK, France, and Turkey have four to 10 bases each; and an estimated one to three foreign bases are occupied by India, China, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.

US special forces are deployed in even more countries.  According to Nick Turse, as of 2015, these forces were operating in 135 countries, an 80 percent increase over the previous five years.  “That’s roughly 70 percent of the countries on the planet. Every day, in fact, America’s most elite troops are carrying out missions in 80 to 90 nations practicing night raids or sometimes conducting them for real, engaging in sniper training or sometimes actually gunning down enemies from afar.”

This widespread geographic deployment represents not only an aggressive projection of US elite interests, it also provides a convenient rationale for those that want to keep the money flowing.  The military, and those that support its funding, always complain that the military needs more funds to carry out its mission.  Of course, the additional funds enable the military to expand the reach of its operations, thereby justifying another demand for yet more money.

The US military is well funded 

It is no simple matter to estimate of how much we spend on military related activities.  The base military budget is the starting point.  It represents the amount of the discretionary federal budget that is allocated to the Department of Defense.  Then there is the overseas contingency operations fund, which is a separate pool of money sitting outside any budgetary restrictions, that the military receives yearly from the Congress to cover the costs of its ongoing warfare.

It is the combination of the two that most analysts cite when talking about the size of the military budget. Using this combined measure, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute finds that the United States spends more on its military than the next seven largest military spenders combined, which are China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, the UK, and Japan.

As the following chart shows, US military spending (base budget plus overseas contingency operations fund), adjusted for inflation, has been on the rise for some time, and is now higher than at any time other than during the height of the Iraq war.  Jeff Stein, writing in the Washington Post, reports that the military’s base budget will likely be “the biggest in recent American history since at least the 1970s, adjusting for inflation.”

As big as it is, the above measure of military spending grossly understates the total.  As JP Sottile explains:

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) tabulated all “defense-related spending” for both 2017 and 2018, and it hit nearly $1.1 trillion for each of the two years. The “defense-related” part is important because the annual National Defense Authorization Act, a.k.a. the defense budget, doesn’t fully account for all the various forms of national security spending that gets peppered around a half-dozen agencies.

William Hartung, an expert on military spending, went agency by agency to expose all the various military-related expenses that are hidden in different parts of the budget.  As he points out:

You might think that the most powerful weapons in the U.S. arsenal — nuclear warheads — would be paid for out of the Pentagon budget.   And you would, of course, be wrong.  The cost of researching, developing, maintaining, and “modernizing” the American arsenal of 6,800 nuclear warheads falls to an obscure agency located inside the Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA. It also works on naval nuclear reactors, pays for the environmental cleanup of nuclear weapons facilities, and funds the nation’s three nuclear weapons laboratories, at a total annual cost of more than $20 billion per year.

Hartung’s grand total, which includes, among other things, the costs of Homeland Security, foreign military aid, intelligence services, the Veterans Administration, and the interest on the debt generated by past spending on the military, is $1.09 trillion, roughly the same as the POGO total cited above.  In short, our political leaders are far from forthcoming about the true size of our military spending.

Adding insult to injury, the military cannot account for how it spends a significant share of the funds it is given.  A Reuters’ article by Scott Paltrow tells the story:

The United States Army’s finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced.

The Defense Department’s Inspector General, in a June [2016] report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up.

As a result, the Army’s financial statements for 2015 were “materially misstated,” the report concluded. The “forced” adjustments rendered the statements useless because “DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions.” . . .

The report affirms a 2013 Reuters series revealing how the Defense Department falsified accounting on a large scale as it scrambled to close its books. As a result, there has been no way to know how the Defense Department – far and away the biggest chunk of Congress’ annual budget – spends the public’s money.

The new report focused on the Army’s General Fund, the bigger of its two main accounts, with assets of $282.6 billion in 2015. The Army lost or didn’t keep required data, and much of the data it had was inaccurate, the IG said.

“Where is the money going? Nobody knows,” said Franklin Spinney, a retired military analyst for the Pentagon and critic of Defense Department planning. . . .

For years, the Inspector General – the Defense Department’s official auditor – has inserted a disclaimer on all military annual reports. The accounting is so unreliable that “the basic financial statements may have undetected misstatements that are both material and pervasive.”

Military spending is big for business

Almost half of the US military budget goes to private military contractors.  These military contracts are the lifeblood for many of the largest corporations in America.  Lockheed Martin and Boeing rank one and two on the list of companies that get the most money from the government.  In 2017 Lockheed Martin reported $51 billion in sales, with $35.2 billion coming from the government.  Boeing got $26.5 billion. The next three in line are Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman.  These top five firms captured some $100 billion in Pentagon contracts in 2016.

And, as Hartung describes,

The Pentagon buys more than just weapons. Health care companies like Humana ($3.6 billion), United Health Group ($2.9 billion), and Health Net ($2.6 billion) cash in as well, and they’re joined by, among others, pharmaceutical companies like McKesson ($2.7 billion) and universities deeply involved in military-industrial complex research like MIT ($1 billion) and Johns Hopkins ($902 million).

Not surprisingly, given how lucrative these contracts are, private contractors work hard to ensure the generosity of Congress. In 2017, for example, 208 defense companies spent almost $100 million to deploy 728 reported lobbyists.  Lobbying is made far easier by the fact that more than 80 percent of top Pentagon officials have worked for the defense industry at some point in their careers, and many will go back to work in the defense industry.

Then there are arms sales to foreign governments. Lawrence Wittner cites a study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute that found that sales of weapons and military services by the world’s largest 100 corporate military suppliers totaled $375 billion in 2016. “U.S. corporations increased their share of that total to almost 58 percent, supplying weapons to at least 100 nations around the world.”

Eager to promote the arms industry, government officials work hard on their behalf.  As Hartung explains: From the president on his trips abroad to visit allied world leaders to the secretaries of state and defense to the staffs of U.S. embassies, American officials regularly act as salespeople for the arms firms.”

More for the military and less for everything else

The federal budget is divided into three categories: mandatory spending (primarily social security and medicare), discretionary spending, and interest on the debt. Two trends in discretionary spending, the component of the budget set each year at the discretion of Congress, offer a window on how militarism is squeezing out funding for programs that serve majority needs.

The first noteworthy trend is the growing Congressional support for defense (base military budget) over non-defense programs. In 2001, the majority of discretionary funds went to non-defense programs,  However, that soon changed, as we see in the chart below, thanks to the “war on terror.”  In the decade following September 11, 2001, military spending increased by 50 percent, while spending on every other government program increased by only 13.5 percent.

In the 2018 federal budget, 54 percent of discretionary funds are allocated to the military (narrowly defined), $700 billion to the military and $591 billion to non-military programs. The chart below shows President Trump’s discretionary budgetary request for fiscal year 2019. As we can see, the share of funds for the military would rise to 61 percent of the total.

According to the National Priorities Project, “President Trump’s proposals for future spending, if accepted by Congress, would ensure that, by 2023, the proportion of military spending [in the discretionary budget] would soar to 65 percent.”  Of course, militarism’s actual share is much greater, since the military is being defined quite narrowly.  For example, Veterans’ Benefits is included in the non-defense category.

The second revealing trend is the decline in non-defense discretionary spending relative to GDP.  Thus, not only is the military base budget growing more rapidly than the budget for nondefense programs, spending on discretionary non-defense programs is not even keeping up with the growth in the economy.  This trend translates into a declining public capacity to support research and development and infrastructure modernization, as well as meet growing needs for housing, education, health and safety, disaster response . . . the list is long.

The 2018 bipartisan budget deal increased discretionary spending for both defense and non-defense programs, but the deal did little to reverse this long run decline in non-defense discretionary spending relative to the size of the economy.  A Progressive Policy Institute blog post by Ben Ritz explains:

The Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA) capped both categories of discretionary spending as part of a broader effort to reduce future deficits. When Congress failed to reach a bipartisan agreement on taxes and other categories of federal spending, the BCA automatically triggered an even deeper, across-the-board cut to discretionary spending known as sequestration. While the sequester has been lifted several times since it first took effect, discretionary spending consistently remained far below the original BCA caps.

That trend ended with the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 (BBA). This budget deal not only lifted discretionary spending above sequester levels – it also went above and beyond the original BCA caps for two years. Nevertheless, projected domestic discretionary spending for Fiscal Year 2019 is significantly below the historical average as a percentage of gross domestic product. Moreover, even if policymakers extended these policy changes beyond the two years covered by the BBA, we project that domestic discretionary spending could fall to just 3 percent of GDP within the next decade – the lowest level in modern history [see dashed black line in chart below].

The story is similar for defense spending. Thanks to the pressure put on by the sequester, defense discretionary spending fell to just under 3.1 percent of GDP in FY2017. Under the BBA, defense spending would increase to 3.4 percent of GDP in FY2019 before falling again [see dashed black line in following chart]. Unlike domestic discretionary spending, however, defense would remain above the all-time low it reached before the 2001 terrorist attacks throughout the next decade.

In sum, Congress appears determined to squeeze non-defense programs, increasingly privileging defense over non-defense spending in the discretionary budget and allowing non-defense spending as a share of GDP to fall to record lows.  The ratio of discretionary defense spending relative to GDP appears to be stabilizing, although at levels below its long-term average.  However, discretionary defense spending refers only to the base budget of the Department of Defense and as such is a seriously understated measure of the costs of US militarism.  Including the growing costs of Homeland Security, foreign military aid, intelligence services, the Veterans Administration, the interest on the debt generated by past spending on the military, and the overseas contingency operations fund, would result in a far different picture, one that would leave no doubt about the government’s bipartisan commitment to militarism.

The challenge ahead

Fighting militarism is not easy.  Powerful political and business forces have made great strides in converting the United States into a society that celebrates violence, guns, and the military. The chart below highlights one measure of this success.  Sadly, 39 percent of Americans polled support increasing our national defense while 46 percent think it is just about right. Only 13 percent think it is stronger than it needs to be.

Polls, of course, just reveal individual responses at a moment in time to questions that, in isolation, often provide respondents with no meaningful context or alternatives and thus reveal little about people’s true thoughts.  At the same time, results like this show just how important it is for us to work to create space for community conversations that are informed by accurate information on the extent and aims of US militarism and its enormous political, social, economic, and ecological costs for the great majority of working people.

The US-DPRK Singapore Summit Was A Meaningful Step Towards Peace On The Korean Peninsula

The June 12^th Singapore Summit between the US and the DPRK was an important, positive step towards the achievement of peace on the Korean Peninsula, normalized relations between the US and North Korea, and the reunification of Korea.

In the words of the Korean Public Service and Transport Workers’ Union, one of South Korea’s largest unions:

The very fact that the top leaders of North Korea and the U.S., two countries whose relationship has been laced with hostility and mutual threats for the last seventy years, sat together in one place and shared dialogue is historic and signals a new era in which peace on the Korean Peninsula is possible. We therefore welcome the North Korea-U.S. Summit and joint statement.

At the same time, it is important not to lose perspective.  The Summit was a step, but only step, towards improved relations.  Many challenges remain on the road ahead, and it is going to require popular pressure to keep us moving forward.

The summit was a real movement away from war

On the North Korean side, Kim Jong Un, even before the Summit, announced an end to his country’s missile and nuclear weapons testing.  At the Summit, he once again committed his country to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, which is a commitment to end the county’s nuclear weapons program if matched by a US commitment to refrain from threatening a nuclear attack on North Korea or introducing nuclear weapons on or around the Korean Peninsula.  He also agreed to destroy his country’s main missile engine testing facility, having already destroyed the country’s nuclear bomb testing facility. He also agreed to allow a return of US military personal to search for and repatriate the remains of US soldiers killed during the Korean War.

On the US side, Donald Trump pledged to end the war games which are held several times a year in and around the Korean Peninsula and which include simulated nuclear attacks on North Korea and planning for the “decapitation” of North Korea’s leadership.

And both sides agreed to more meetings to work on structuring a process designed to achieve the denuclearization of the Peninsula and the normalization of relations between the US and North Korea, which would mean among other things, an end to the Korean War and US sanctions against North Korea.

And thanks to the positive momentum generated by the Singapore Summit, North and South Korea continue to build on the success of their own recent summit.  For example, the militaries of the two countries recently held their first general level talks in ten years and agreed to fully restore their military communication lines, as well as began talks to demilitarize the DMZ area.

These are incredibly positive developments, especially in light of the fact that only months ago we faced the very real threat of a new Korean War.

There is strong support in South Korea for improved North Korean relations

These developments are extremely popular in South Korea.   More than 80 percent of South Koreans support South Korean President Moon’s policies, including his own summit meeting with Kim.  And in elections held the day after the US-North Korean summit, his Democratic Party won 14 of the 17 mayoral and gubernatorial races and 11 of 12 parliament by-elections.  Opposition parties that criticized Moon’s approach to North Korea were thoroughly defeated.

If this response has surprised people in the United States, it is only because many have little understanding of the costs paid by people in South Korea from the state of war between the US and North Korea.  For example, the state of war has allowed conservative governments in South Korea to use national security laws to outlaw a progressive political party, dissolve militant trade unions, arrest trade union leaders, break strikes, and restrict freedom of speech.  It has also enabled conservative forces to win massive increases in military spending at the expense of social programs and legitimated the growth of US military bases throughout the country, with their immense environmental and social costs.  And then there is the real and constant threat of war.

Of course, the people in North Korea have suffered the most—the threat of war and the need for greater military spending as well as the economic embargo and sanctions have taken a real social and economic toll; political and human rights have also suffered.  At the same time, it is worth pointing out that despite claims that the North Korean government cares little for the well being of its people,

several reports and academic studies show that North Korea’s food situation is stable and on par with – or even better than – some other nations in Asia.

Professor Hazel Smith, Director of the International Institute of Korean Studies at Cranfield University in the UK, concluded in a new research paper that levels of severe wasting – people being underweight for their height because of acute malnutrition – is lower in North Korea than in a number of other low-income countries [including India, Pakistan, and Indonesia] and equal to those in other developing countries in Asia.

Troubling criticisms of the Summit 

Tragically, many liberal voices have been raised in opposition to the Summit and the possibilities for peace it has encouraged.  Progressive commentators, as well as Democratic Party politicians and established journalists, have expressed outrage and worry over the fact that Trump met with Kim.  In broad brush, they say that the US gave Kim all he wanted, which was legitimacy on the world stage, and got nothing in return.  Or that by agreeing to halt war games, the US gave away its most important bargaining chip.  Or that the US flag and NK flag should never have flown side by side—given the dictatorial nature of the North Korean regime.  Or that the US is undermining the ROK-US alliance.

As Korea analyst Tim Shorrock noted:

Even as the first images flashed across the world of Trump and Kim shaking hands against the unusual background of US and DPRK flags flapping together, social media and op-ed sections of media sites were filled with denunciations of Trump. Democratic leaders in the House and Senate led the attack.

“In his haste to reach an agreement, President Trump elevated North Korea to the level of the United States while preserving the regime’s status quo,” charged House minority leader Nancy Pelosi. Senate minority leader Charles Schumer, who last week warned that the Democrats might oppose any agreement that didn’t include the now-famous CVID commitment, said on the Senate floor that Trump had “legitimized a brutal dictator.”

Conservative columnists had a field day. “The spectacle of the murderous dictator Kim Jong Un on equal footing with the president of the United States—each country’s flag represented, a supposedly ‘normal’ diplomatic exchange between two nuclear powers—was enough to turn democracy lovers’ stomachs,” Jennifer Rubin wrote in the Post. Similar analyses were posted all day on Twitter.

Progressive media commentators also joined in.  For example, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow warned that Trump was being played by both Russia and North Korea:

Russia has just this tiny little border, 11 mile long border, with North Korea, with one crossing on a train. And they’ve got a troubled and varied history over the decades with that country. But Russia is also increasingly straining at its borders right now, and shoving back U.S. and Western influence. Especially U.S. and Western military presence anywhere near what it considers to be its own geopolitical interests. And one of the things that they have started to loudly insist on is that the U.S. drop those joint military exercises with South Korea. The U.S. has kept those going as a pillar of U.S. national security strategy for 70 years, now. Until last night, when Trump casually announced that that’s over now. He’s doing away with those. Blindsided everybody involved. And gave North Korea something they desperately want and would do almost anything for. Except he gave it to them for free. How come?

This is puzzling and disturbing.  We were on the verge of a new Korean War, and now we are engaged in serious peace talks.  That is a positive step.  Underlying these criticisms seems to be the assumption that the US always pursues a democratic foreign policy and thus should be allowed to have nuclear weapons, test new ones, and threaten to use them against other countries as it sees fit.  And other countries should refrain from objecting to or actively resisting US actions, especially developing their own weapons in response to US threats.  This is a very problematic assumption.

The importance of history

Most Americans do not know the history that got us here, starting with the fact that the Korean War ended with a cease fire, not a peace treaty. For many years, neither the US or North Korea showed much interest in ending the state of war.  That changed in the early 1990s with the end of the Soviet Union.  This event left North Korea without a powerful military protector and its major trading partner.  At the same time, the country was also hit by major floods in the mid-1990s, further adding to its security and economic problems.  These developments led North Korea to seek an accommodation with the US, which it hoped would lead to an end to the state of hostilities between the two countries.  North Korean overtures were generally rejected by the United States.

The US threatened to drop nuclear bombs on North Korea during the Korean war.  The US introduced nuclear weapons into South Korea in the late 1950s, against the terms of the armistice agreement that ended the fighting in Korea.  In the 1970s the US began war games that soon included simulated nuclear attacks against North Korea.  Without the Soviet Union’s protection, the North felt it had no choice but to take steps to protect itself, and that led it to pursue its own nuclear weapons program while simultaneously seeking peace talks with the United States.  North Korea repeatedly said, as it said again in Singapore, that it would abandon its nuclear program if the US ended its hostile policies.

While North Korea is always presented as an aggressive military power, the fact is that South Korea has outspent North Korea on defense every single year since 1976.  According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, South Korea currently spends roughly $40 billion a year on defense–and this does not include US military spending in the region.  By contrast, North Korea spends only $4 billion.

Trump’s willingness to cancel war games is a positive first step in showing that the US is seriousness about creating a peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.  These war games, which happen at least twice a year, include B-52 bombers that are nuclear capable, stealth fighters, submarines with nuclear missiles, hundreds of thousand troops, and are organized to practice attacking North Korea.

North Koreans still remember the Korean War, which included, as historian Bruce Cumings describes,

three years of “rain and ruin” by the US air force. Pyongyang had been razed to the ground, with the Air Force stating in official documents that the North’s cities suffered greater damage than German and Japanese cities firebombed during World War II.

Just as the Japan scholar Richard Minear termed Truman’s atomic attacks “exterminationist”, the great French writer and film-maker Chris Marker wrote after a visit to the North in 1957: “Extermination crossed this land.” It was an indelible experience still drilled into the heads of every North Korean.

In light of this history, one can easily understand why North Korean leaders find current US war games threatening.

Agreeing to halt these massive exercises is not giving North Korea something undeserved.  It is an important way for the United States to demonstrate that it is serious about achieving peace.  And, as noted above, North Korea is taking its own actions to demonstrate its seriousness, halting all missile and nuclear tests and destroying its test sites.  In this context, it is worth pointing out that North Korea has not demanded that the US stop all its missile and bomb testing, which continue.  It asks only that the US agree to normalize relations and commit not to threaten to attack the North or introduce nuclear weapons onto the Korean Peninsula—thus producing a nuclear free Korean Peninsula.

Agreeing to end the state of war is not giving North Korea some special benefit.  It is helping the Korean people gain the space they need to deal with their own division. Supporting such a process is also the best way to generate the kinds of interactions needed to promote real democratic change in both Koreas.  It also helps us in the United States, making it easier to confront our own militarism and the huge costs that we pay for it.

Real change is possible.  This is the moment to do what we can to build a strong popular movement on both sides of the Pacific for peace and reconciliation.

 

I recently discussed the Singapore Summit on KBOO radio.  You can hear the interview here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

North Korea in the Age of Trump

On January 23, Hyun Lee, the managing editor of ZoominKorea, and I spoke at a UCLA Center for Korean Studies sponsored event titled “North Korea in the Age of Trump.”  I went first, offering a critical perspective on US foreign policy towards Korea, North and South.  Hyun Lee then talked about the importance of Science and Technology in North Korea.

Both presentations can be viewed here:

Tragically the US media and government appear more eager for war than peace on the Korean Peninsula.  This reality was underscored by their negative reactions to Kim Jong-un’s New Year’s declaration, which included a call for talks between North Korea and South Korea and acceptance of South Korea’s invitation to participate in the Winter Olympics being held in South Korea.

Here are some examples:

Choe Sang-Hun and David Sanger, writing in the New York Times, quickly declared that Kim Jong-un’s welcoming of renewed contacts with South Korea represented little more than “a canny new strategy” designed to divide South Korea from the US and weaken the alliance.  They raised the “fear that if dialogue on the Korean Peninsula creates a temporary reprieve from tensions, the enforcement of sanctions could also be relaxed.”

Scott Snyder, senior fellow for Korea studies and director of the program on U.S.-Korea policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, struck a similar tone in an article published in the Atlantic magazine.  Considering the possibility of talks to be a trap for South Korea, he ended his article expressing fear that South Korean President Moon could be forced into concessions that “might weaken South Korea’s alliance with the US.”

A few days later, Robert Litwak, a senior vice president at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, wrote in a New York Times op-ed that “Washington and Seoul should not take Mr. Kim’s bait.  Instead, the North Korean offer should be put to the diplomatic test through a united Washington-Seoul front.”

A New York Times article quoted Daniel R. Russel, a former assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the Obama administration, as saying: “It is fine for the South Koreans to take the lead, but if they don’t have the U.S. behind them, they won’t get far with North Korea. And if the South Koreans are viewed as running off the leash, it will exacerbate tensions within the alliance.”

Heather Nauert, the US State Department’s spokesperson, made clear that the US is carefully watching South Korea.  “Our understanding,” she said, is that these talks…will be limited to conversations about the Olympics and perhaps some other domestic matters.”  South Korea isn’t “going to go off freelancing” she told the press.

The US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, told journalists at the UN that “We won’t take any of the talks seriously if they don’t do something to ban all nuclear weapons in North Korea.”

And then, just as the talks were getting ready to begin on January 9, US officials let it be known to The Wall Street Journal that they were “quietly debating” the possibility of what they called a “bloody nose” tactic that would involve a “limited military strike” against North Korea’s nuclear and missiles sites without somehow setting off “an all-out war on the Korean Peninsula.”

And as a measure of just how seriously the US is considering such an action, President Trump recently withdrew his support for Victor Cha’s nomination to be the US ambassador to South Korea.  Although Cha advocates the strongest possible sanctions on North Korea, he lost his position because he expressed reservations about the wisdom of such a military strike.

The fact that North Koreans and South Koreans walked together under one flag in the opening ceremony of the Olympics does not mean that the danger of war has passed.  But it is a good sign.  We in the US need to do what we can to ensure that US government actions, including a new round of war games, do not throw up roadblocks to a process that needs to be encouraged.