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Pentagon Paid the
Arms Industry at Least $4.4 Trillion Since 9/11
The top five profiteers were Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General
Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman
By Dave DeCamp
September 14, 2021 -- "Information
Clearing House
- "Anti
War" -
Brown University’s Costs of War Project
released a new report Monday
detailing post-9/11 spending by the Pentagon. The study found
that of the over $14 trillion spent by the Pentagon since the
start of the war in Afghanistan, one-third to one-half went to
private military contractors.
The report, authored by
William Hartung of the Center for International Policy, said
$4.4 trillion of the total spending went towards weapons
procurement and research and development, a category that
directly benefits corporate military contractors. Private
contractors are also paid through other funds, like operations
and maintenance, but those numbers are harder to determine.
Out of the $4.4
trillion, the top five US weapons makers — Lockheed Martin,
Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman —
received $2.2 trillion, almost half. To put these huge numbers
into perspective, the report pointed out that in the 2020 fiscal
year, Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in Pentagon
contracts, compared to the combined $44 billion budget for the
State Department and USAID that same year.
Besides getting paid
for weapons and research, US corporations profit from private
contractors that are deployed to warzones. The most notorious
private security contractor previously employed by the Pentagon
is Blackwater, the mercenary group whose employees massacred 17
people in Iraq’s Nisour Square back in 2007.
Besides armed
mercenaries, the Pentagon employed private contractors for just
about every task in US warzones. Demonstrating the Pentagon’s
reliance on contractors, at the end of the Trump administration,
only 2,500 US troops were left in Afghanistan,
but over 18,000 Pentagon contractors were still
in the country.
The report explained
how China is the new justification for military spending. “The
most likely impact of the shift towards China will be to further
tighten the grip of major weapons makers like Northrop Grumman,
Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Raytheon Technologies on
the Pentagon budget,” the report reads.
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