The trillion dollar war.., p.13
The Trillion Dollar War Machine, page 13
By early in Obama’s second term, according to The New York Times, the president was intimately involved in decisions about who to kill with drones, presiding over a “nomination” process that included reviewing what one aide described as “baseball cards” showing pictures and brief biographies of potential targets. The meetings at which the president made these decisions were called “Terror Tuesdays” by participants.43 Obama’s direct involvement was limited to strikes outside official war zones, in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. Obama appeared to take pride in his role as “the drone president,” joking to aides in 2011 that “turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”44
Not all of the president’s advisers were sold on drone strikes as the primary tool for reining in terrorism. Former Obama intelligence chief Dennis Blair, who was fired in 2010, argued that “the steady refrain from the White House was ‘This is the only game in town’—reminded me of body counts in Vietnam.”45 Blair was referencing the Johnson administration’s penchant for citing (often inflated) measures of enemy casualties in Vietnam as a sign of progress, when, in fact, it was losing the war.46 By 2013, President Obama announced new limits on drone strikes—limits that were later overturned by President Trump—which included a provision that the target must pose a “continuing, imminent threat” to American lives. But “the problem with this provision,” warned Letta Taylor of Human Rights Watch, “was that his administration never publicly defined how immediate a threat must be to qualify as ‘imminent’… [and that] the Obama administration at times dispensed with that standard. How often it did so was one of the Obama presidency’s many drones-related secrets.”47
A primary argument for relying on drones and other forms of aerial bombing in US counterterrorism efforts was that they were more accurate, holding out the hope of limiting civilian casualties while reducing the risks to US military personnel. But independent analyses suggested that the ability to curb civilian deaths through reliance on drones and aerial bombing has been greatly exaggerated. In April 2016 the Obama administration claimed that US air strikes had killed 25,000 ISIS fighters but only 21 civilians, a performance that Obama described as “the most precise air campaign in history.”48 In contrast to the administration’s optimistic figures, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that there were 563 US drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen during the Obama administration, killing between 384 and 807 civilians.49 The monitoring group Air Wars estimates that total US air strikes in the post-9/11 wars—involving both drones and conventional air strikes—have killed between 22,000 and 48,000 civilians. That’s at least a thousand times more than the 2016 estimate put forth by the Obama administration.50
A detailed review of 1,300 confidential government reports on casualties from US air strikes by Azmat Khan of The New York Times led to the conclusion that “the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.”51
The Biden administration reversed course from the Trump years and set rules that would allegedly prohibit drone strikes unless there was “near certainty” that no civilians would be killed.52 The numbers of reported US drone strikes dropped sharply in the Biden years, hitting a low of 36 in 2022, according to data compiled by Air Wars.
The most visible form of US military action during the Biden term was in the form of stepped-up arms transfers to allies, most notably the provision of tens of billions of dollars worth of military aid to Israel and Ukraine. The results of arms sales to Israel have been devastating, fueling an indiscriminate bombing campaign that as of this writing had killed more than 54,000 people, many of them women and children. An additional 67,000 people died from indirect effects, including 62,000 who died from starvation. Israel’s attacks have sparked a vibrant movement to end US military support for that nation, support that has added up to over $250 billion in the post–World War II era, adjusted for inflation, including a $14 billion “emergency” package that passed Congress in April 2024.53
An important underlying factor driving US military expansion is the economic benefits that accrue to US corporations, consultants, and policymakers. Consider Joseph Yun, who served as chief Biden administration negotiator for the Pacific at the same time he was listed as a senior adviser to the Asia Group. This “ultraconnected Washington consulting firm,” explains investigative journalist Jonathan Guyer, is “composed of former government leaders who advise major corporations and military contractors.”54 More important, however, is that the Asia Group is not subject to conflict-of-interest rules that formal lobbyists have to observe and can thus keep its client list secret. But given its roster of former top-ranking administration officials, the organization has as much or more power and influence than the average lobbying shop. A former Asia Group employee even told Guyer that its operations are “innately corrupt.”55
Given the practices of the Asia Group, then, it is notable that Yun continued his relationship there while serving in the Biden administration. In early 2024, Yun negotiated agreements to extend exclusive US access to facilities in the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau in exchange for a continuation of ample US aid that will amount to billions of dollars over time. Yun summarized the importance of the accords in an interview with the Heritage Foundation: “The most important thing we get out of them is, of course, access to their land, their air, and their water. It’s crucially important.”56 Van Jackson, a progressive analyst and Asia expert who served a stint in the Pentagon during the Obama administration, takes a darker view of the agreements, calling them “a vestige of the musty imperial days. America has full veto control over them.”57
The agreements negotiated by Yun will help fill the coffers of Asia Group client Lockheed Martin, which operates the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site in the Marshall Islands. And another base on the islands is home to what the company calls “the world’s most advanced radar.”58 Lockheed Martin and other major US weapons contractors stand to land additional multibillion-dollar contracts as the Pentagon builds a new network of radar and missile-defense systems in the Pacific. The beneficiaries of the Pacific buildup could also include other arms-industry clients of the Asia Group like Northrop Grumman and RTX.
Yun isn’t the only politically wired member of the Asia Group. It was cofounded by Kurt Campbell, who directed China policy from the White House before moving on to be second in charge at the Biden State Department. The State Department argues that there is nothing wrong with Yun’s dual role as government negotiator and private consultant, but former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter begs to disagree: “If I were the ethics adviser at the State Department… I would tell him he can’t have anything to do with those areas of the world where the firm is doing consulting business. I just don’t like it. I wouldn’t allow it.”59 Jackson suggests that the whole arrangement has a strong whiff of corruption: “You’re advocating for and implementing a foreign policy that generates military requirements that benefit the clients of your firm. The conflict of interest is very in your face.”60
But even as the United States seeks to expand its naval footprint in the western Pacific, there are daunting impediments even to using the existing immense network of bases: widespread corruption; a shortage of trained personnel; the inability of the Navy and its contractors to build ships at reasonable cost, on time, and ready for combat; and even the difficulty of keeping a large proportion of the fleet deployed at any one time thanks to poor maintenance.
Let’s start with corruption. Around the world, the Navy employs contractors to perform various services for its ships—tugging ships into port, refueling, and maintenance, for example. One such contracting company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia (GDMA), prepared ports for the docking of Navy ships and provided services for Navy personnel when they were on land. But to secure these contracts, the company’s owner, Leonard Francis—also known as “Fat Leonard”—built a series of corrupt relationships with Navy personnel. In the first two decades of this century, Francis influenced Navy personnel through straight-up bribes, expensive meals and gifts, and invitations to lavish parties that often included “call girls.”61
Francis’s corrupt activities went on for years before they were detected. Dozens of Navy personnel were affected by Francis’s influence operations, including twenty-four naval officers. Perhaps worst of all, a number of his contacts supplied him with classified information that was useful in his efforts to sustain his firm’s monopoly on shore support for Navy ships deployed to the Pacific, and they kept silent as Francis overcharged the Navy by at least $35 million for his services.62
The federal investigation of the scandal resulted in the indictment of thirty-three officials, the majority of whom were naval officers. The highest-ranking official indicted was Rear Admiral Robert Gilbeau, who ultimately served eighteen months in prison for lying to federal investigators. But Gilbeau was the exception. According to an October 2022 analysis done by Blake Herzinger and published in Foreign Policy, the majority of senior officers involved in the scandal faced no legal consequences but were simply forced to retire from the Navy.63
There was a new wrinkle in the case in 2017, when federal judges threw out the convictions of ten naval officers who had been charged either with bribery or with providing Francis with sensitive information. The bribery cases were dismissed on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct, including the presentation of flawed evidence and withholding information favorable to the defense.64
The story of the ups and downs of Francis is even more outrageous, not to mention more fascinating. Three weeks before he was scheduled to be sentenced for his role in the scandal, Francis tore off the ankle bracelet that was being used to track his movements and fled the country. He ended up taking refuge in Venezuela, but he was returned to prison in the United States in 2024 as part of a deal in which the United States freed a close ally of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and secured the release of ten Americans.65
The Navy implemented a number of anticorruption measures in the wake of the scandal, including suspending or permanently debarring hundreds of vendors who had worked with Francis and changing the way that it monitors its contractors. But experts who track corporate corruption, like Jeffrey Addicott, a professor of law and director of the Warrior Defense Project, have suggested that an underlying problem that makes it easier for things like the Fat Leonard scandal to occur in the first place is that large sums are paid to these firms without adequate safeguards over how that money is spent: “We have to trust the contractors to perform these functions, and often we don’t have time to do the paperwork, or think the paperwork will catch up later, and that has led to a lot of fraud, waste, abuse.”66
The current surge in spending and deployments in the western Pacific will create an environment in which engaging in corrupt activities will be relatively easy, even if not on the scale of the Fat Leonard scandal. The second impediment to reaching the goal of a larger, more effective Navy is a shortfall of personnel that has led to understaffed ships and sailors working long hours without adequate sleep. These accidents included a June 2017 collision between Navy destroyer USS Fitzgerald and a Philippine-flagged container ship. Ultimately, seventeen sailors died in crashes in the western Pacific in 2017. An investigation by ProPublica neatly summarized the problems plaguing the US fleet in the Pacific, problems that contributed to the fatal crashes:
The fleet was short of sailors, and those it had were often poorly trained and worked to exhaustion. Its warships were falling apart, and a bruising, ceaseless pace of operations meant there was little chance to get necessary repairs done. The very top of the Navy was consumed with buying new, more sophisticated ships, even as its sailors struggled to master and hold together those they had. The Pentagon, half a world away, was signing off on requests for ships to carry out more and more missions.67
The third impediment to building a larger, more effective Navy is the inability to build affordable, reliable ships within a reasonable time frame. The poster child for this issue is the littoral combat ship (LCS), known by its critics as the “Little Crappy Ship.” The LCS has two variants, one built in Alabama by Austal and General Dynamics and one built in Wisconsin by Lockheed Martin. The ship was supposed to be cheaper and more nimble than other ships in the fleet at the time of its development and deployment, and it was supposed to carry out multiple missions, from clearing sea mines to ferrying Special Forces units close to shore, where they could get on with their land missions. But the miracle ship ended up being a colossal waste of taxpayer dollars. Not only did it have major cost overruns and long schedule delays, but it was having difficulty in carrying out any of its assigned missions. Even worse, the quest for a light, fast ship resulted in a decision to only lightly arm the LCS, making it virtually defenseless against enemy combat ships. The last straw from the Navy’s point of view was the fact that the LCS would be of little use in a war with China.68
Given all of the above, the Navy decided to retire a significant number of these faulty vessels early, only to face fierce opposition from the companies that make money maintaining and repairing the ships, joined by members of Congress with maintenance facilities in or near their districts. As a result, the Navy was able to retire only half of the number of vessels it had tried to get out of the fleet in its first attempt to do so. The fact that some of the ships that had been slotted for retirement stayed in the force longer than planned, sucking up scarce maintenance funds and using up the time of crews whose services would be better used elsewhere, is a testament to how pork-barrel politics and contractor collaboration with members of Congress undermine the Navy’s ability to prepare for new, emerging challenges.69 (In the next chapter we discuss the lobbying and influence campaign that kept the LCS afloat despite its extraordinary shortcomings.)
The myriad problems exhibited in the case of the LCS are not a feature of all Navy ship programs, but cost overruns, performance problems, and poor fits with emerging missions do characterize many of the Navy’s largest programs, from the building of new destroyers to the effort to replace aging aircraft carriers and destroyers with new models.
Under current conditions, the possibility of implementing the Navy’s plans to build up from its current fleet of 286 ships to a fleet of 350 to 500 seems to hover between slim and none. The wide gap in the Navy’s projected top-line goals for numbers of ships is a product of a confusing strategy, limited capacity in the military shipbuilding industry, and pressure from powerful members of Congress with shipyards in their states—like Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Connecticut Representative Joe Courtney, who is the ranking Democrat on the Seapower Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee.70
The bottom line in terms of the costs of the war machine is that, whether through stationing troops overseas, getting involved in local and regional conflicts, engaging in drone strikes and other forms of bombing, or selling weapons to human-rights abusers and aggressor nations, the US quest for global military dominance has done far more harm than good, both to the people in the targeted nations and to the safety and security of American troops and the American public. It’s long past time to reconsider and revise the costly and counterproductive “cover-the-globe” military strategy.
Part Three
Selling the War Machine
7
HOW THE WAR MACHINE’S LOBBYISTS WIN IN WASHINGTON
In 2023 Houthi rebels began attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea. In response to the US-backed Israeli invasion of Gaza, the Houthi fighters used missiles and drones to bombard targets at sea and employed small boats and helicopters to capture ships close to shore. To repel these attacks and keep this vital shipping lane open, the US Navy sent at least nine different ships: an aircraft carrier, four destroyers, and others. But one ship that should have been there was, instead, noticeably absent: the littoral combat ship (LCS). Commissioned in 2008—and with some two dozen built by 2023—the LCS was specifically designed to fight in close-to-shore (i.e., “littoral”) waters like the Red Sea. Yet the LCS was nowhere near this crucial conflict zone because it was one of the worst military boondoggles in US history.
On nearly every metric imaginable, the LCS has been an abject failure. For more then a decade before the Houthis began attacking ships in the Red Sea, the fatal flaws in the LCS were well-known. These ships cost twice as much as originally planned. They are plagued by cracks and corrosion. Several LCS ships have even lost power at sea and had to be towed back to port. Intended to be a patrol ship, the LCS actually has a quite limited range because, according to its own sailors, it is a “gas hog.”1 It was supposed to accomplish missions like mine hunting and submarine killing, but it simply isn’t fit to do so; instead, both missions have now been foisted on other Navy assets. But more than just a failure, the LCS was also dangerous; indeed, its rampant problems have unnecessarily jeopardized the lives of every Navy sailor who boarded it. Even the Department of Defense’s own testing office has declared that the “LCS is not expected to be survivable in a hostile combat environment,” which is another way of saying that the ship with “combat” in its name wouldn’t survive combat.2
No wonder the LCS was nowhere to be seen in the Red Sea during 2023 and 2024. But that raised a bigger question for military experts. “If the LCSs can’t fight the Houthis, who can they fight?” asks longtime military journalist David Axe. “The likely answer is: no one.”3
