The Trillion Dollar Silencer: WWhy There is So Little Anti-War Protest in the United States. Joan Roelofs. Clarity Prss January 2023 218 pages
I
n a moment of candour, three-times Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas Friedman, a poster boy for globalisation, wrote that:
The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.[1]
Friedman, an avid supporter of the United States’ foreign wars, was writing in 1999 as the US air force was pulverising Yugoslavia with aerial bombing to end the ‘humanitarian crisis’ in Kosovo. Friedman concludes his long and meandering article by beseeching his countrymen to bear the expense of the noble burden which history had thrust upon ‘America’: “America truly is the ultimate benign superpower and reluctant enforcer”.[2]
The world outside the US is aware of how the monstrously large US military is utilised to shove all sorts of “McDonald’s”, i.e., US imperialist economic interests, down the throats of countries and peoples around the globe, often in the name of lofty ideals like ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’, keeping the world safe from ‘weapons of mass destruction’, and so on. This has been going on for decades, but has intensified over the last three decades, starting with the Gulf War of 1991, continuing through the subsequent wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, and finally the ongoing war in the East European theatre. Thus, the rest of the world is forced to accept US hegemony at the point of a gun.
But how is the ruling dispensation of US able to justify a trillion-dollar annual military budget to its own people? A new book by American political scientist Joan Roelofs, provocatively titled THE TRILLION DOLLAR SILENCER: Why There Is So Little Anti-War Protest in the United States (Clarity Press, 2023), provides a panoramic picture of the extent of penetration and entanglement of the US domestic economy and civil society by the military establishment.
How the ruling classes manufacture consent without the use or threat of force seems to be an ongoing theme of enquiry by the author. In an earlier book titled Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism, Roelofs argued that foundations (such as the Ford, Rockefeller or Gates Foundations) play an important role in maintaining the social-political hegemony of the ruling classes. In this new book Roelofs has set an even more ambitious agenda: to unravel the convoluted and intricate penetration of the military-industrial complex in all aspects of US civilian life and domestic economy, including education, health, employment, environment, protests, human rights, literature, art, NGOs, academia, etc.
The author acknowledges and cites several works of scholarship which focus on the conventional measures used by the rulers to suppress dissent among the people, including massive propaganda, spreading fear of harsh retaliations by the State and society, and through overwhelming disruptions like the present pandemic. The present work, however, restricts itself to strategies and tactics employed by the ruling dispensation which induce the people to believe that they have a significant stake in the system and its policies. In the author’s own words, “While much is due to propaganda, fear, and distractions, this book will focus on the interests created by the military penetration of civilian society and the domestic economy.”[3]
Spread over seven short chapters, the book is a work of meticulous description “of the labyrinthine array of organizations, departments, agencies, boards, and partnerships involving government, industry, universities, and nonprofits”.[4]
This rather slim and straightforwardly written volume is a testimony to the enormous work that has been put in by the author to compile vast quantities of information and data on the issue. What is even more impressive is that it is apparently based entirely on open-source data and publicly available information. This is especially heartening for researchers, activists and concerned citizens who aspire to critically understand the system, as it confirms the fact that, despite the confidentiality barriers put up by the ruling dispensation, and lack of access to important data sources, much can still be done.
The primary argument of the book
Military expenses are a drain on the domestic economy, as they divert public funds, collected from taxpayers, away from essential sectors such as education, health, employment, culture, art, and infrastructure. This drain would be particularly large in the case of the US, as its definition of its own ‘national security’ extends not only up to its borders, but over the entire globe, with 4800 sites spread over 160 countries.[5] Another plausible source of popular opposition to the soaring Department of Defence (DoD) budget is moral repugnance towards war, destruction and killing.
And yet, among the people of the US, across different classes, opposition to the ever-growing war economy appears to be muted.
Roelofs argues that opposition to so-called ‘wasteful’ expenses on the military has been practically obliterated because of the enormous economic impact of the military-industrial complex. This behemoth is ever-growing, recession-proof and immune to the vagaries of the market. It not only provides direct well-paying employment to millions of people, but the economic ‘multiplier effect’ of military expenditure is enormous. It runs through military bases and installations, through corporations, contractors, and sub-contractors, to the national and local economies. Military contractor philanthropy extends to many organisations and institutions supporting the arts, environment, human rights, healthcare, care of persons with disability, educational institutions and policy organizations. It is especially attentive to youth and minorities. Local governments benefit through enhanced tax receipts, which support social services, education, infrastructure, and culture. Military spending is about 10 per cent of all government disbursements in the US, but it accounts for over half of the federal government’s discretionary budget.
Or in other words, a vast area of responsibility of the State has been practically taken over by the military-industrial complex. It is unencumbered with having to be answerable to citizens or to cope with the uncertainties of the market. This arrangement is further legitimised by the drastic decline of government funding for the social sector. As the author succinctly puts it
Thus, our defunded and privatized social services, arts, and education systems are benefitting from the federal budget in a backhanded way, with strings and logos attached.[6]
Given this massive economic impetus, argues Roelofs, any moral compunction against military expenditure and war is easily placated. There is anyway a widespread belief amongst Americans that, as the sole global superpower, the US is ordained to contain ‘terrorism’ and provide ‘security’ and install ‘democracy all over the world. Further, as the author points out, the narrative around wars has shifted from the inevitable killing and destruction to ‘comradeship’, ‘heroism’ and ‘idealism’.
The book’s Introduction is followed by six chapters covering the military-industrial-corporate complex’s penetration of, and inter-dependence with, various aspects of the domestic economy and society, providing illustrations and cases. The last chapter, titled “What Can be Done”, is a series of suggestions and policy measures by the author to “break the silence” and disentangle the complex alliance. In the next few paragraphs, I attempt to capture the flavour of the descriptions made by the author in the Chapters 1 through 6, keeping to the sequence of the book and also the titles of the chapters. In conclusion, I attempt to engage with the crucial last chapter and my overall thoughts on this important work.
Chapter 1: The Military Establishment
According to the book there were 2.91 million service members and civilians in the DoD, operating at 4,800 sites in over 160 countries around the world. The services include the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Space Force. The world is divided into “commands” for the US military. The US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) includes about 70,000 members from active duty (from all the services), National Guard, and reserve personnel, and Department of defense civilians. The Guard is frequently deployed in climate and other disasters, health emergencies, and vaccination programmes[7].
The DoD has about 950,000 civilian employees, engaged in 675 different occupations, and serving worldwide[8]. The biggest set of civilians is involved in acquisitions, intelligence and cyberspace programmes. Significantly, in a programme started in 2009, civilians can be deployed by DoD to war zones too “to meet future global challenges.”[9] Civilian workers are recruited with internship opportunities over 750 career areas.[10]
Significantly, the bulk of the work of the DoD is not done by the service members or civilian employees, but is contracted out. The number of contract personnel serving the DoD is three times its direct civilian employees, in the entire gamut of functions including food, clothing, transportation, construction, intelligence analysis, cybersecurity, recruiting and training foreign armies.
The military mission extends much beyond American citizens, including programmes of foreign military training and the foreign military financing programme, to purchase weapons and support training. A 2019 report states that “approximately 71,450 students from 157 countries participated in training, the total cost of which was approximately $904.7 million.”[11] The funding for these foreign outreach programmes in 2021 was $3.8 billion.
Chapter 2: Bases and Installations
There are in all 4,160 sites and bases of the US military in the US territory itself, besides bases all over the world. Many of these sites are the size of cities, and their reach through aerial bombing practice and training ranges is even wider. These bases are the economic hubs of their regions, and decisively impact not only the economy but also the natural environment of the region.
U.S. military sites, which total more than 50 million acres, are among the most insidious and dangerous Pentagon legacies. They are strewn with toxic bomb fragments, unexploded munitions, buried hazardous waste, fuel dumps, open pits filled with debris, burn piles and yes, rocket fuel.[12]
In a completely inverted logic, the US military has identified two threats of ‘civilian encroachment’ impinging on the operations of their bases – 1. incompatible land uses, which include lights from residential and commercial units, and restrictions imposed on the military’s production of smoke, noise, and dust; and 2. land environmental laws protecting endangered species.
The DoD has set up the Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration (REPI) programme to resolve these conflicts. The REPI project at Fort Benning, where the live-fire and other training exercises were hampered by the existence of threatened species and their habitats, captures the convoluted arrangement. Apparently the US military and its partners, including some of the biggest environmental conservation organisations such as The Nature Conservancy (TNC), are restoring habitats and offering contiguous land for buyers who would use the land for recreation. TNC has been the recipient of the largest amount of DoD funding, including two grants from Fort Benning alone worth over $66 million. Another grant to TNC for $20 million was awarded by Fort Sam Houston, Texas.
The point is that, although some conservation does take place through such funding, this arrangement silences civilian organisations with such economic and reputational entanglements, while projecting a public image that the military is not only conscious of the environment, but is also proactive in conserving it.
The environmental impact on land, water, air and outer space of the mammoth and ever-expanding US military bases is so immense that it is probably past redemption, however sincere be the clean-up effort. Through convincing examples the author establishes the point that “destruction has become a distraction, and remediation has emerged as a vast and lucrative industry in itself”[13]. In other words, the environmental devastation caused by the military establishment is treated almost as a natural calamity, and its remediation becomes the focus; and the same military establishment responsible for the devastation in the first place is lauded for its its efforts at remediation. And of course, this industry provides big money and employment too.
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This review essay appeared May 24 2023 in Research Unit for Political Econmy: rupeindia
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