American Empire: Trapped In The Defense Death Spiral

This is American Empire, Splinter’s rolling series of articles exploring the power of the United States and the different ways it is unleashed upon the world. Read our other entries here.

It is a fine time to be in the business of war. As the bodies have piled up in Ukraine, Gaza, and Lebanon, arms manufacturers across the United States and Europe have done exceedingly well. Business, and profits, are booming.

As he was leaving office in January 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered his famous farewell speech, warning the American people of what he saw as an emerging “military-industrial complex” that threatened the country’s democracy. It feels almost trite to bring it up now, in 2024, but it seems Ike, the five-star army general, knew what he was talking about.

The United States is by far the biggest defense spender in the world. Ever greater sums of taxpayer money are diverted away from essential public services and infrastructure and handed over to private companies to endlessly produce tools of death. Some of that money is then reinvested back into the political system, be it as campaign donations, payments to lobbyists, or funding of think tanks and media outlets which set the terms of political discourse. The interests of the war industry are represented handsomely, defense budgets are expanded, and more and more weapons programs are given the green light. All the while, ordinary people suffer.

The American war industry, quite aside from powering the deaths of millions of people in faraway places, is a redistribution of wealth from ordinary citizens into the pockets of profiteers. Programs to respond to existential threats like climate change and pandemics are starved of funding. Scientific innovation more broadly is hampered, as the development of complex weapons systems is incentivized over the development of technologies that would actually benefit humanity, like, say, new medicines. Food insecurity across America grows in tandem with the profits of arms manufacturers.

Yet, for all the sacrifices made by American society at the altar of “national security,” there have been diminishing returns. When new weapons systems are developed, they tend to cost a lot more than the ones they’re replacing. This leads to a situation in which more and more government money is funneled into weapons development, but fewer weapons are actually produced. This phenomenon has been called the “Defense Death Spiral,” and it has been observable for a long time. In 1983 — 40 years ago! — the former U.S. Under Secretary of the Army and eventual Lockheed Martin CEO, Norman Augustine, glibly suggested, “In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy three-and-a-half days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.”

Writing in Responsible Statecraft last month, Dan Grazier, a former Marine Corps captain and a senior fellow and program director at the foreign affairs think tank Stimson Center, pointed out that the Air Force, in 1975, had 10,387 aircraft at its disposal, compared to 5,288 today. The Navy had 559 active ships in 1975, compared to 296 today. Those declines have cascaded down from a Pentagon whose base budget has, since 1975, risen by about 60% when adjusted for inflation.

“The American people,” Grazier concludes, “simply spend more and receive much less in return for their defense dollars.”

The money that isn’t weighing down the pockets of military contractors is, in large part, wasted. Billions of dollars are spent by the government on weapons systems that just don’t work properly. The most egregious case of this, perhaps, is Lockheed Martin’s F-35 program, which, when it is eventually retired, will have cost the taxpayer an estimated $1.7 trillion, apparently making it the most expensive U.S. defense project ever. The fleet is believed to only be fully operational about a third of the time today, essentially rendering it ineffective. That’s more than a trillion dollars pissed away for nothing, and that’s only one example.

The U.S. is addicted to blowing budgets on the very latest war gizmos, but the compulsion does not amount to effective defense policy. For the past year, the United States has been bombing the Houthis of Yemen, who, in response to Israel’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza, started attacking cargo ships sailing through the Red Sea. The Houthis, who have long indicated they will cease their attacks when Israeli aggression is rolled back, use drones worth about $2,000 in the Red Sea. The United States, on the other hand, fires missiles worth about $2 million each. The U.S. spends huge sums to counter the cheap, technologically lo-fi attacks of the Houthis, and, for all that, the strategy has failed. The Houthi attacks continue.

In January, President Biden was asked whether or not the airstrikes in Yemen were working. “Well,” the president replied, “when you say ‘working,’ are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.”

There it was: a microcosm of U.S. defense strategy, shakily uttered by a president with an increasingly weak grip on reality. We will incessantly, compulsively, pursue this expensive strategy that demonstrably doesn’t work, just… because.

The United States, as Eisenhower feared, has been thoroughly twisted and corrupted by the military-industrial complex. Instead of contemplating challenges to national security in a sober manner, seeking the most appropriate course of action rather than the most bombastic, it reflexively throws money at every problem, lining the pockets of war profiteers, increasing tensions with perceived enemies, and otherwise making the world a more dangerous place. The bodies of the war-dead pile higher, potentially useful areas of government wither, defense budgets swell, and private weapons manufacturers make a killing.