The Trillion Dollar War Machine
How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
A hard-hitting investigation into how the Pentagon’s runaway spending embroils America in foreign wars, squanders its wealth, and enriches a privileged elite
“A damning indictment of the conflicts of interest running rampant in the defense establishment.”―Publishers Weekly
America spends nearly a trillion dollars a year on its military. This extraordinary spending not only detracts from our ability to address pressing social problems but compels us into foreign wars to justify our vast arsenal. Sold to us in the name of “security,” our military industrial complex actually makes us far less safe.
Top policy experts William D. Hartung and Ben Freeman follow the profits of militarism from traditional Pentagon contractors, which receive more than half of the Pentagon’s budget, to the upstart high-tech firms that shamelessly promote unproven and destabilizing technologies. They unmask the enablers of the war machine—politicians, lobbyists, the media, Hollywood, think tanks, and so many more—whose work enriches a wealthy elite at the expense of everybody else, spreading conflict around the world and embroiling America in endless wars.
A damning tour de force, The Trillion Dollar War Machine shows who is pulling the strings and pushing for war, and offers a blueprint for how we can shut down the war machine and restore American security and prosperity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A corrupt military-industrial complex peddles shoddy weapons that can't win wars but still wreak havoc around the world, according to this coruscating exposé. Political scientists Hartung (Prophets of War) and Freeman explore the symbiosis of the Pentagon with the handful of defense contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin that gobble up much of the Defense Department's $1 trillion budget to build weapons. Along the way, the authors spotlight industry lobbyists who ply congressmen with campaign donations in exchange for approval of weapons contracts; think tanks that extol new weapons with undisclosed funding from the contractors who produce them; and even Hollywood, which gets warplanes as props in exchange for Pentagon script approval. The result of all this enmeshment, the authors contend, is weaponry that's overpriced and underwhelming, like the Navy's rickety littoral combat ship and the $2 trillion F-35 fighter-bomber, widely considered a boondoggle. Such poor performing armaments, the authors assert, end up sold to authoritarian regimes or in the hands of overly militarized American police forces; meanwhile, the U.S. defense budget swells out of proportion to domestic spending. Especially incisive is the authors' close look at the "revolving door" that whisks generals, congressmen, and Pentagon procurement officials who approve lavish contracts into cushy jobs with those same contractors. It's a damning indictment of the conflicts of interest running rampant in the defense establishment.
