US military complex to benefit from Russia-Ukraine war
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A FORMER Pentagon analyst said the US military complex stands to benefit from the conflict between Russia and Ukraine as it ramps up defense spending for what could be a protracted affair in Europe.
“The American Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC) will benefit from this war (the Russia-Ukraine conflict) because it is setting the stage for a second Cold War that will increase tensions over the long term,” said Franklin C. Spinney, a former Pentagon analyst.
An increase in tensions over the long term “is needed to fund the bow wave of future defense spending that is already programmed in the Pentagon’s computers ...” Spinney told the Xinhua news agency, warning that militarization bodes ill for the US economy.
The MICC refers to the network of multisectoral individuals and institutions promoting militarization, arms sales and political power. US President Dwight Eisenhower made its creeping influence public in his 1961 farewell speech.
The MICC is partly responsible for and actively benefiting from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, according to Spinney, who served for nearly 30 years as an analyst at the US Department of Defense’s Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation. He faulted the MICC’s post-Cold War business strategy and its supporting lobbying activities for expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization after the end of the Cold War.
For Spinney, thanks to the lobbying activities by special interest groups toward expansion, NATO has not only outlived its purpose to contain the Soviet Union but enjoyed five expansions since the demise of the latter. Spinney believed that the conflict and the ensuing fear would be permanently politicized to justify more weapon sales.
The Pentagon has been rushing new weapon programs and their engineering and manufacturing, said Spinney. Since contracts will spread to hundreds of congressional districts, weapon production becomes virtually unstoppable. Moreover, because manufacturers routinely over-promise performance and understate costs, the demands for more military spending beget further demands for even greater spending.
According to Spinney, the peculiar characteristics of the MICC reduce the US foreign policy elite into an endless search for new enemies abroad, which is why the United States violated its promise not to expand NATO and has no empathy for the legitimate security concerns of others, especially Russia.
“The way we have handled the end of the Cold War with NATO expansion conducted by a succession of US presidents, establishing the Committee to Expand NATO headed by a Lockheed vice president, encouraging the color revolutions, particularly in Georgia and Ukraine, demonizing our adversaries, have combined to inflame tensions,” he said.
Spinney referred to the humiliation the United States inflicted on Russia since the demise of the Soviet Union, amplified by the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, and the US withdrawals from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, all of which are perceived as critical threats by Russia.
The author is a Xinhua writer.
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