Militarism and government policy

here is an ad for recruiting British Aerospace employees from The Australian newspaper that says a thousand words!

It is within the domain of military that the parameters of foreign policy debates are defined. You can see this working by comparing different policymaking institutions in the US. The US congress is underfunded. It only has around 600 employees, who deliberate on policy. The place where the bulk of policy deliberation takes place is the Pentagon, with tens of thousands (i think 30 000 employees).

BAE (British Aerospace) is one of the largest military companies in the world. It influences global geopolitics through providing military capability that supposedly stimulates economies, in a way that is beneficial to the broader big business corporate sector.

The ad depicted above implies an even more concerning dimension of the above situation of underfunded policy development: that policy innovation in 'determining the future' is in several ways 'outsourced' to military companies themselves.

US government representatives often make it clear to companies that their operation is on their behalf. For example, the Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen was quoted in the magazine Covert Action as saying "The prosperity that some companies such as Microsoft enjoy could not occur without having the strong military that we have". (see Anup Shah's article).

Noam Chomsky has a lot to say about this kind of thing, explaining the relative benefit of social spending and military spending to corporate and political elites: here in the interview on morality and humanism, Chomsky talks about war as the preferred means of stimulating economies, rather than public spending:

Social spending vs. military spending. 1998 (you can see that it's dated by the hypothetical talk of war!!!!!!!!!)

TOR WENNERBERG: Given the risk that the world economy might spin out of control completely now, and considering that last time, in the 1930s, it took a world war to overcome the depression, how worried do you think we ought to be about the prospect of war?

NOAM CHOMSKY: "The prospect of war is much less, but for other reasons. Europe is, in modern history at least, the most violent part of the world. One of the reasons why Europe conquered the world is that it created a culture of war, based on centuries of mutual massacre and slaughter -- both a culture of war and a technology of war. But that largely came to an end in 1945, and for a very simple reason. Everybody could understand that the next time we play this game, we're all dead. The techniques of destruction had reached such a point that war is simply not an option for rich and powerful countries. If they try it once more, that's the end. Now, somebody may be irrational enough to do it anyway, but within anything remotely like the domain of rationality, where you can at least begin to talk about prediction, there isn't going to be war among the powerful countries. And this is understood.
"For example, right in the middle of the Gulf War, somebody at the Pentagon leaked to the press -- which buried it -- an interesting document. When any new administration comes in, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency and so on give them a kind of intelligence assessment of the world, a strategic analysis of the world. Someone leaked part of the Bush administration strategic analysis (this would have been from early 1989), and one part of it dealt with war. Here is approximately what it said:
"In case of a conflict with "much weaker enemies" (implication: that's the only kind of conflict we're ever going to get into), we must defeat them "decisively and rapidly," because anything else will "undercut political support."
So no more bombing of South Vietnam for fifteen years, and certainly we don't go to war with any major power.
This was well before the Gulf War. In fact at that time Saddam Hussein was a great friend, so he wasn't contemplated as a target -- but that's what you can do. You can invade Panama, kidnap Noriega and get out in a couple of weeks, bomb the Sudan, bomb Libya, bomb Iraq from a distance, very fast, and don't get involved in more than a few days of fighting. That kind of thing you can do with a much weaker enemy, rapidly and decisively, but nothing else. So as long as you're within the domain of rationality, the chances of war involving major powers I think, are extremely slight, unless they're fighting a much weaker enemy. And even that's not so simple anymore.

"But to return to your other point, what actually overcame the depression was not so much the war as the semi-command economies. The British economy started to pick up in the late 1930s, when it semi-deliberalized and became a kind of semi-command economy. The U.S. was barely at war. But the wartime economy not only overcame the depression, it flourished as industrial production tripled, and so on. But that was a semi-command economy, highly coordinated from Washington, run by corporate executives, with wage and price controls, industrial policy deciding what would be produced, and so on. And that worked like a charm. Just like it worked in England -- England in fact out-produced Germany and came close to the United States.

"So the mobilization of the economy did overcome the depression. The war was taking place and that was the justification for it, but the war was not what overcame the depression in itself. This was pretty well understood. The consensus among American economists and businessmen and others in the mid-forties was that with the government-coordinated economy declining, after the war, they were going to go right back to the depression due to market failures. And so there was an interesting discussion in the late forties, quite open. It's on record in the business press, and I've quoted from it at times. There was recognition that we've got to do something to get the government to stimulate the economy again or else we'll go back to the depression.

"It was understood -- you didn't have to read Keynes to figure it out -- that you could stimulate the economy in a lot of different ways. You could stimulate it with social spending, or you could stimulate it with military spending. There was a perfectly sane discussion, in Business Week actually, of which to do. And the conclusion was: social spending is not a good idea, and military spending is a great idea. The reason is that social spending has a downside. Yes, it can pump the economy. But it also has a democratizing effect, because people are interested in social spending; they want to know where you're going to build a hospital or a road or something, and they become involved. They have no opinions about what jet plane to build. Social spending also gives people more security and better conditions, better education, more means of communicating, more ability to withstand threats of unemployment. It makes people, workers, more powerful, that is, and thereby better able to win higher wages and better conditions.

"So social spending has a democratizing, redistributive effect, and it's not a direct gift to corporations. Military spending, however, has none of those defects; it's non-democratizing -- on the contrary, people are frightened and they shelter under the umbrella of power. And while it aids corporations it doesn't directly improve the lot of workers; it rather tends to reinforce workplace discipline. So it's a direct gift to corporations. It redistributes upward. And it's easy to sell if you terrify the public. So what emerges is a Pentagon-based industrial policy program, one which is now buckling a bit, due to the excessive liberalizing of capital movements, and thus, one which has to be repaired a bit, so that it once again benefits the rich, as intended."