Does Draining the Swamp Include the Pentagon’s Unaccountable Spending and Wars?

Not too long ago the Department of the Defense’s Office of Inspector General (DoDIG) found that the U.S. Army had accumulated $6.5 trillion in expenditures which could not be accounted for. This occurred because two government offices-the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army and the DoD’s Defense Finance and Accounting Service “did not provide sufficient guidance for supporting system-generated adjustments.” (1) What this bureaucratic garble really means is the expenditures themselves from taxpayers’ monies that Congress allocated for national defense lacked complete and accurate records or weren’t tracked, recorded or audited. For the $6.5 trillion of unaccounted funds, it went down the “rabbit hole.” No one knows where it ended up.

As Journalists and media outlets allege President Donald Trump is dangerous and mentally unfit, they don’t oppose him on anything that significantly challenges the Pentagon’s power or its corruption. They moreover sing bipartisan praise whenever he embarks on yet another reckless bombing campaign or threatens to “annihilate” a country with nuclear weapons. (2) What they’re doing is inadvertently advertising for the Pentagon and giving more tax dollars to war profiteers. At a time when the world faces cataclysmic environmental catastrophes and communities in America are in disrepair, they’re moreover subsidizing weapons contractors and oil companies.

How Nations Collapse
When a nation collapses it’s because of missed opportunities, not recognizing the urgency of the now, or being too afraid to act. It can also be due to poor listening skills that leads to ineffective decisions and costly mistakes. This happened when President Dwight Eisenhower warned of an informal alliance between a nation’s military and the defense industry that supplies it. Along with the revolving door between defense-minded contractors and government officials, it was met with dead silence. Called the military-industrial complex (MIC), both sides benefitted-one side from obtaining weapons and starting wars, the other being paid to supply them. Even today, the U.S. spends more on its military-and is involved in more wars-than the top 25 nations combined.

This still didn’t stop Trump and Congress’s unprecedented and wasteful approved budget agreement that included $2.7 trillion in military spending over the next two years. Promising to “Drain the Swamp” he instead surpassed the military budgets of previous administrations. It includes billions in slush funds and dark money which will go to more wars and low-intensity conflicts. Nor does it account for the money spent on Veteran’s Affairs or mixed in with other departments like Transportation and Education. One anti-war critic said it demonstrated how thoroughly “broken and captures Washington is by the Pentagon. Another called it, “A continued orgy of unprecedented, wasteful, and obscene spending at the Pentagon. (3)

Expending Blood at Home and Abroad
The Pentagon and MIC also “expends” more in blood. In 2015, total federal discretionary spending, which included everything from education, to housing and community development, to Medicare and other health programs, amounted to just over $1.1 trillion. The $6.5 trillion in unaccountable funds thus represented fifteen years’ worth of military spending. It represented the deaths of millions of Americans as well who, if they had better education, housing, health or Medicare, would’ve lived longer. Meanwhile, Trump and politicians parrot the Pentagon and its largest empire in human history. Never mind the amount of foreign blood they expend, with its one thousand military bases across the globe and military personnel in almost every country.
Don’t expect this to go away with Trump’s latest Secretary of Defense appointee confirmed by the Senate. With Army veteran and former defense industry lobbyist for Raytheon Mark Esper, the Swamp expanded and gotten deeper. It’s also the reason the MIC’s “merchants of death” continue to prosper. In fact, Esper’s first order of business will be to fix the problem of leadership vacancies with more defense-minded corporate military officials linked to Raytheon. He also plans to expand the Pentagon’s combat preparedness of military systems and increase more “security” alliances around the world. Since he didn’t recuse himself from all matters involving the Raytheon Corporation, don’t be surprised if America finds itself in another major war.

The Iron Triangle
Don’t be surprised either if the “iron triangle”-Pentagon, State and MIC-adds to the rise in global income inequality by benefiting even more from a network of contracts and wars where dark money and resources flow back and forth. This, since the Pentagon’s favorite pastime is enforcing America’s rapacious economic system through brutal military might. This goes for countless interventions in other countries to usurp democratic processes and thwart self-determination in the name of Western business-57 times since World War Two. The Pentagon may act as a moral arbitrator of the earth but in truth, it supports more than 70 percent of the world’s dictators. This includes 70 percent of the global arms trade. All at the end of a barrel of a gun or missile.

Indeed, Esper not only served in the Army during the 1991 Persian Gul War but like Trump, he’s no friend of Islam. Neither is he afraid to confront Iran. His hawkish views will moreover fit nicely with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s and National Security Adviser John Bolton’s. Recognized by Raytheon and conservatives as “a top corporate lobbyist,” which doesn’t include a dozen other military-minded industries he represented, some warn he’s gunning to expand the world’s largest producer of guided missiles. This includes special-mission aircraft like drones and commercial electronics such as facial recognition, surveillance, and eaves-dropping devices. Some warn he may even be behind the recent battles between Iranian forces and Kurds in northwest Iran. (4)

Adding to the Swamp’s Fascism
Instead of draining The Swamp it seems Trump expanded it. When one considers how politicians of both political parties demand accountability for every penny spent on welfare but, and as Dave Lindorff noted, “the military doesn’t have to account for any of its trillions of dollars of spending…even though Congress fully a generation ago passed a law requiring such accountability;” it entails the muck of fascism. If this isn’t fascism, or capitalism in decay, it’s clearly the control of government by military corporations. Nor is it ownership of the government by the people or for the people but instead a controlling prevalent power known as the Pentagon-including killing victims not by defining their numbers but by “redefining” the way it kills them.

Daniel Guerin referred to this and the Pentagon’s obscene nexus of power as fascism, or “an informal and changing coalition of groups with vested psychological, moral, and material interests in the continuous development and maintenance of high levels of weaponry, in preservation of neo-colonial markets and in military-strategic conceptions of the internal affairs.” It includes a very narrow political spectrum of debate in which the parameters of “freedom of thought” are highly controlled by and perpetrated by military-minded hierarchies of oppression. Though these conflicts of interest may be blatant to a few, for many the rotating cast of defense contractors and military generals advocating war have become commonplace if not internalized.

A Solution to a Deeper Pathology
Draining the Pentagon’s swamp-like unaccountable spending habits, which includes its wars and military interventions, may consequently be more symptomatic than just the Trump, the State or MIC. It may mean a revolution in thinking and values, of learning how to compose differences not with weapons and war but with intellect and a more humane and decent purpose.

Dallas Darling is the author of Politics 501: An A-Z Reading on Conscientious Political Thought and Action, Some Nations Above God: 52 Weekly Reflections On Modern-Day Imperialism, Militarism, And Consumerism in the Context of John’s Apocalyptic Vision, and The Other Side Of Christianity: Reflections on Faith, Politics, Spirituality, History, and Peace. He is a correspondent for www.WN.com. You can read more of Dallas’ writings at www.beverlydarling.com and www.WN.com/dallasdarling.

(1) Roth, Andy Lee and Mickey Huff. Censored 2018. New York, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2017., p. 45.
(2) Roth, Andy Lee and Mickey Huff. Censored 2019. New York, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2018., p. 13.
(3) www.commondreams.org. “’Unprecedented, Wasteful and Obscene’: House Approves $1.4 Trillion Pentagon Budget,” by Jake Johnston. July 26, 2019.
(4) www.kurdistan24. “Iranian Troops Clash With PKK Affiliated Fighters: Monitor,” by Kosar Nawzad. July 26, 2019.