Ironies of Overdevelopment

A common explanation for the end of the Cold War was that the Soviet Union was forced into unsustainable competition with the U.S. through the arms race. According to this theory, the USSR’s demise occurred because a “flagging, state-owned economy simply couldn’t match the escalation in defense spending” initiated by Ronald Reagan, especially the hyper-expensive (for the time) Strategic Defense Initiative, a.k.a. Star Wars, that was intended to militarize space.

This explanation is convenient for proponents of ever-greater spending of our national treasure on arms and weapons. After all, if we felled the Soviet adversary by building up a vast arsenal of fear-inducing armaments, what new candidate for seriously rivalry to America could possibly arise as long as we keep up the flow of cash to Raytheon and Northrup Grumman?

As a result, we have enthusiastic backing for fancy new weapons like the trillion-dollar F-35 fighter jet and the B-21 Raider stealth bomber, recently given a Hollywood/TopGun-style unveiling [above]. These big-ticket projects are lucrative sources of contracts certain to warm the hearts of elected officials standing by to welcome the jobs and economic stimulus to their districts, along with the loot needed for their next campaign. Given our system of legalized bribery, this arrangement is the classic self-licking ice cream cone.

For example, the bat-winged B-21 Raider will cost $700 million each, and the plan is to build at least 100 of these babies at an estimated cost of $32 billion, including research and development, over the next 5 years. Earlier this month, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2023 sailed through Congress authorizing $857 billion in “defense” spending, $45 billion more than Biden had requested. The measure included the establishment of a “multiyear, no-bid contract system” for Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and other weapons manufacturers to “expand their industrial base” and assure ongoing production of essential munitions.

That sure makes it sound as though the U.S. has the wherewithal to put machinery and equipment on the battlefield at almost a moment’s notice, reminiscent of the enormous U.S. industrial mobilization that took place in the run-up to World War 2. In fact, the U.S. has rushed $20-some billion worth of weapons to Ukraine in the last nine months.

So why is Ukraine running out of ammo? Ukrainian president Zelensky recently announced his wish list for replenishing his army’s supplies, including 300 new tanks, 600 to 700 new infantry fighting vehicles, and 500 new Howitzers, and, one assumes, the ammunition, spare parts, and technical assistance to make this ordnance usable.

That sounds like a lot of hardware. But when comparing those figures to the amount of weaponry already lost, we get a slightly different view. Ukraine started off the war with 2430 tanks, ranked 13th in the world. Ukraine also had 11,435 armored vehicles and 2040 artillery batteries. Where did it all go?

Without having a clue about military matters, I would hazard a wild guess that it’s mostly been blown up by the Russians, who must have even more, plus total dominance of the skies as the Ukrainian air force was destroyed in the first week of hostilities. Furthermore, despite regular announcements that the Russians are about to “run out” of this or that essential piece of weaponry, they miraculously seem to keep churning the stuff out.

By contrast, NATO has completely depleted its reserves of useful materièl according to multiple reports. What about the back-up supplier, the US of A? Well, turns out the industrial capacity of the American powerhouse, unequaled in history, second to none, etc., etc., can’t crank out the supplies until, in some cases, the middle of next year.

Don’t take my word for it: here are Bradley Bowman and Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery (ret.) writing in Defense News this past October. Year after year, they write,

. . . budgets were proposed and approved that saw crucial munitions purchased at the lowest possible rate companies could sustain, hollowing out the industrial base. Now, Washington can no longer disregard a munitions production shortfall that endangers U.S. military readiness.

What we need to do now, they argue, is to fund “major production increases of key munitions, targeted measures to expand industrial capacity, and the provision of multiyear procurement authorities that incentivize private sector investment.”

In other words, the U.S. has shot itself in the foot through its lean-and-mean (“just-in-time”) industrial policy in which companies were encouraged/permitted to locate production offshore and pocket the nice difference between what American factory workers used to get and the poverty wages they paid to virtual slaves in Honduras, Pakistan, or Cambodia. Turns out that’s actually not too smart when applied to tanks, trucks, and ammo IF you turn out to actually need them in a hurry.

But the big bucks were always in the F-21s, nuclear weapons upgrades, and the like, so everyone in Washington could bask in the bright sunlight of the MICIMATT (the Military-Industrial-Counter-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank complex) and refill their poolside cocktails from the bountiful overflow of U.S. Treasury cash without worrying about actual preparedness. How ironic it will be if financialized late capitalism turns out to be incompetent at sustaining the military machine that made its global domination possible.

Russia, on the other hand, seems to have developed an industrial/military policy that enables it to produce everything it needs for war at a fraction of the cost, perhaps because financiers and rentier capitalists have not been permitted to take over the Russian economy—which incidentally is doing just fine.

Maybe the referee of the great Cold War World Cup has not yet blown his final whistle. Now that would be an own goal for the ages.