The Trillion Dollar War Machine
by Ben Freeman and William D. Hartung
336 pages, $30.00
In recent weeks, prompted by a series of fraud investigations in Minnesota, Conservatism Inc. has pushed a narrative portraying Somali immigrants as uniquely prone to abusing government programs.
A new book by William Hartung and Ben Freeman should remind us why that argument is unserious. There exists a far larger and vastly better documented class of American hucksters: U.S. defense contractors, who are responsible not for millions but billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse.
Through close reporting and rigorous research, Hartung and Freeman document how Pentagon contractors over the past 40 years have captured the entire foreign policy–making process, from the House committees chaired by top recipients of defense contractor contributions where defense industry pork is packaged, to the cable news studios where the wasteful and often criminal behavior of defense companies is ignored or laundered in puff pieces that border on infomercials, all designed to ensure that five companies receive their annual welfare checks from the U.S. government.
Most troubling, as The Trillion Dollar War Machine makes clear, much of this corruption is perfectly legal, even banal; it is institutionalized through the defense-industry revolving door, ensnaring the bipartisan political class and the military brass alike. Roughly two-thirds of defense lobbyists now come from the Pentagon itself—often former acquisition officials who once wrote, audited, or managed the very contracts they later lobby to expand—while campaign contributions are routinely delivered to members of Congress on the same days those lobbyists meet with them to press for increased weapons spending.
Readers will come away with a sturdier framework for decoding the war industry’s most durable propaganda, above all, the fiction that the military–industrial complex is simply a collection of public-spirited actors seeking ever larger defense budgets out of some patriotic concern for the national interest. Many of the same lobbyists pressing Congress on behalf of U.S. arms manufacturers simultaneously represent foreign governments such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.
Tracing the history of our military’s nuclear buildup, The Trillion Dollar War Machine proves how for decades, the American war lobby has hijacked American foreign policy to pursue its own corporate interests over those of the United States while insisting the two are identical. Nowhere has the contrast between the interests of the MIC and the interests of the United States been more obvious than in our nuclear weapons policy, which since the Cold War has been governed by the logic of profit rather than deterrence theory. Policy experts who study nuclear war such as Daniel Ellsberg, Norman Solomon, and the former Secretary of Defense William Perry have long considered our intercontinental ballistic missile program (ICBM) to be, in their words, “some of the most dangerous weapons we have,” “a world-ending accident waiting to happen,” and “completely superfluous to a reliable deterrent.”
Yet despite decades of warnings from those nuclear policy experts, the Pentagon is calling for a $2 trillion “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear program and has already authorized a new ICBM program from Northrop Grumman called “Sentinel,” originally projected to cost $77 billion but now pricetagged at over $140 billion to develop and purchase. To explain why the U.S. government approves the budget for such a dangerous and unreliable weapons program, Hartung and Freeman convincingly point to lobbying in Congress, led by representatives like Liz Cheney, as well as regulators on the Strategic Posture Commission—nine of whose 12 members had direct ties to military contractors.
Perhaps the most damning revelations of the book concern our corporate media and think tank class, who often serve the role as spokesman for defense companies rather than journalists and academics engaged in neutral and serious analysis of our foreign policy. Hartung and Freeman show how major news outlets routinely grant arms executives soft, uncritical cable hits—such as CBS’s Face the Nation interview with Lockheed Martin CEO James Taiclet, in which he was not asked a single substantive question about the F-35 program, a plane that costs $12–13 billion annually but may never actually be fully ready for combat due to its myriad of flaws.
Meanwhile, Washington’s think tanks, which present themselves as neutral arbiters of foreign policy, increasingly operate off a funding structure sustained by Pentagon contractors and the foreign governments they lobby arms for. Drawing on disclosures compiled by the Quincy Institute’s Think Tank Funders Tracker, the authors note that more than $110 million has flowed to U.S. think tanks from foreign governments, roughly two-thirds of think tanks that publish donor lists receive foreign government funding, and between 2019 and 2023 defense contractors provided at least $24.8 million to these institutions. Unsurprisingly, the firms receiving the largest Pentagon contracts were also among the largest donors to the think tanks most frequently cited in media and congressional debates.
Readers unfamiliar with the corruption of the military industrial complex can learn a great deal from this book while policymakers who may already be well versed in the scams of our nation’s best-funded corporate welfare queens will receive a precise blueprint on how to rein in defense spending and reassert our national interests over corporate ones. For any American concerned with government waste, The Trillion Dollar War Machine is a must-read.
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