I lifted five short paragraphs from today’s ‘Defense One’ newsletter and will propose a question; where is the rest of the story in this narrative that should be about the immense profits and skyrocketing stock values of the arms suppliers, as much as it is about the sales.
The U.S. Air Force is burning through its Hellfires, “depleting its stocks of munitions and prompting the service to scour depots around the world for more weapons and to find money to buy them,” USA Today reports.
“We’re in the business of killing terrorists and business is good,” U.S. Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said channeling a memorable movie line from the descendant of mountain man Jim Bridger. “We need to replenish our munitions stock,” she said. “Weapons take years to produce from the day the contract is assigned until they roll off the production line.”
More broadly, the U.S.-led effort to defeat ISIS is re-shaping American arms exports to its allies, Defense One Global Business Reporter Marcus Weisgerber writes. And the kinds of weapons going to those countries — Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and others — have shifted dramatically.
“Earlier deals focused largely on longer-term investments, maintaining existing equipment, and building up weapons stocks,” he writes. “The more recent ones have been largely for tactical equipment: bombs, missiles, tanks, armored trucks and antitank weapons needed on the battlefield today, according to documents and U.S. government officials.”
Beyond arms sales, the State Department is looking more broadly at how it aligns assistance funding for foreign militaries through regional funding as opposed to a specific country.
Now, this last [immediate, preceding] line is most interesting. Restated, it could read: ‘How does the Department of State become more creative in assisting sales out of the pocket of American taxpayers?
And then we have this related reporting:
The report found that 76 out of 108 top generals took such jobs from 2009 to 2011, and a few continued to advise the Department of Defense while on the payroll of contractors. The report cited Gen. James Cartwright, who was elected to a paid position on Raytheon’s board of directors while serving on the Defense Policy Board. Adm. Gary Roughead also served on the board while joining the board of Northrop Grumman, earning $115,000 per year.
Eighty percent of generals retiring from 2004 to 2008 took such jobs, according to a 2010 Boston Globe investigation.
The report didn’t find a causal link between the revolving door and specific contracts. However, the report cites statistics showing 2011 spending at the five largest defense contractors — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman — at $100 billion, with at least nine retiring top generals and admirals taking positions at the firms
Now, this graphic is certainly underestimated as it only relates to ‘domestic consumption’ (expenditures on American military.)
Can’t have layoffs at Boeing, Ratheon, Lockheed-Marten, General Dynamics, DuPont, Northrop-Grumman and ‘friends’, now, can we? Meanwhile, terror has never been so good for business:
^ armaments stocks post Friday the 13th in Paris
As things stand, this won’t stop until something breaks and breaks in a big way, because:
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it” -Albert Einstein
And that is what we have; the mentality which began our problems with geopolitical engineering (‘Saddam must go’ regime change), giving us more of the same (‘Assad must go’ regime change.) If you’d not read it before, perhaps now’s a good time to have a look at the dynamic behind a circumstance where if the weapons sales associated with regime change or other destabilizing activities were stopped, the western democracies economic engines would collapse:
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones” -Albert Einstein
In case you missed that one certain, salient fact about the current iteration of ‘regime change’ to remove the ‘murderous Assad’, definitive proof is emerging it was actually Turkey’s intelligence service (NATO’s Erdogan) gassed the more than 1,300 Syrians who died of Sarin poisoning outside of Damascus that Obama blamed on ‘Assad’s regime’ (a false flag attack previously attested to by Seymour Hersh.) It really seems like anything goes to make money, you think?
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