The Defense Budget's Coming Upward Wealth Redistribution

Here comes a tidal wave of overages in military hardware that will funnel your money into the pockets of defense giants

Edited by Sam Thielman

I'M WRITING THE NEXT IRON MAN SERIES FOR MARVEL COMICS! IF YOU PREORDER IT, I'LL SEND YOU FREE STUFF!

THERE'S A DECEPTIVELY BORING TERM IN DEFENSE-BUDGET CIRCLES called a "bow wave."

A bow wave is massive growth in the cost of a defense system—be it a warplane, or a missile, or a close-to-shore surface ship that crams a million functions into a single platform without excelling at any one thing—in the years after the initial decision by Congress and the military services to purchase it. A bow wave results from those services, their contractors (who actually make the stuff the services want and Congress pays for), and/or legislators lowballing the initial costs of a defense system and/or exaggerating what the system's ambitious capabilities are and/or misforecasting what capabilities the system will need to have in the future. Those capabilities are the reasons for buying the system.

Basically, if you want the plane, missile or ship to do what you bought it to do? Oops, that costs extra—and it still may not meet functional requirements. You want to keep it functional across or, as is likely, beyond its planned life cycle? Extra. You want to add functionality 10 years or so after initial development that now you figure it needs? So much extra. 

In this manner, defense spending gets locked in, on an upward trajectory, for many years beyond the five-year defense budgeting cycle. That's money that won't go to your kid's education or keeping the bridge you drive over from falling down. 

In other words, a defense bow wave represents a flow of money collected from me and you into the pockets of a small number of fantastically wealthy defense contractors. It's wealth redistribution upward. It's systemic, institutional corruption, the normalized and predictable result of allowing (in this case) defense giants to fund the politicians who make the purchasing decisions and to employ general and flag officers after retirement. 

Now get ready for something more like a tidal wave, according to a new report from researchers at the Stimson Center, a respected think tank and not a wild-eyed newsletter like this one. 

LAST WEEK, Stimson's Dan Grazier, Julia Gledhill and Geoff Wilson analyzed several recent big-ticket defense acquisition programs that they found "threaten to send Pentagon budgets to unprecedented levels in the next decade and beyond." Unprecedented. Consider what that means when the defense budget is right now knocking on the door of $900 billion annually. That's the kind of money a generation of War on Terror morphing into imperial struggle Great Power Competition will yield. Stimson's researchers find that defense spending, adjusted for inflation, has increased by 48 percent since 2000. By 2050, they write, "the American people may look back fondly on the 'good old days' when the annual Pentagon budget was still under a trillion dollars."

The weapons systems Stimson identifies include central priorities of the services – often reflecting a conception of their future needs and their future adversaries. The Navy's Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarine, which is the future of sea-launched U.S. nuclear weapons. The Air Force's B-21 Raider, one of its futures for long-range bombing, including with air-dropped nuclear weapons—Air Force brass intend the bomber to replace the B-1 and B-2 but not the B-52, a plane only slightly younger than Joe Biden and Donald Trump—which will now cost "at least $203 billion" for 100 planes over 30 years. (For comparison, that's nearly twice what Russia spends on defense in a year.) The Navy's new Constellation-class frigate, which like the doomed Littoral Combat Ship has had so many modifications added that it's "essentially morphed into a brand-new ship design," in Stimson's words. The Air Force's planned NGAD "Sixth Generation Fighter," intended to replace the much-bow-waved F-22 fifth-generation fighter jet. "The combined costs of the NGAD and its accompanying Collaborative Combat Aircraft programs may dwarf the F-35’s nearly $2 trillion anticipated program cost," Stimson notes.

These are just some of the most high-profile hardware acquisitions Stimson identifies as likely bow-wave culprits. I'm citing those systems because they are directly relevant to the Pentagon's consensus vision of the strategic threat environment, where the primary adversary is China, the country that defense officials routinely call their "pacing challenge." We could go on. If you thought the warzones of the War on Terror have been expensive, recall that those conflicts didn't require submarines, fighter jets (well, for air-to-air combat; fighter jets were used for close air support) and the other expensive hardware necessary against a peer military capable of challenging across all domains.

But focusing on each weapons system, Stimson suggests, is less important than focusing on all of them. "What many fail to mention is that the military is creating an enormous budgetary bow wave by undertaking so many new acquisition programs at the same time," Stimson writes. "Defense spending will drastically increase so the Pentagon can buy these new weapons as they come off the assembly line and move into the production phase in the coming years." 

To mix metaphors away from the wave, Stimson is basically identifying the defense budget achieving escape velocity. It doesn't use terms like normalized graft or institutional corruption, but that's the rocket fuel that enables escape velocity, and I think we shouldn't shy away from those terms. While the material construct enabling escape velocity might be beyond Stimson's focus, Stimson sees the strategic construct behind it clearly: "Expansionist defense policy premised on the goal of global military primacy has resulted in endless wars and human suffering." (My emphasis.) On the other hand, however, it generates huge profits for defense contractor shareholders. 

Stimson's forecast is that decisions made today obligate the future federal budget to massive wealth transfer to the defense industry, which will function as upward wealth redistribution. The platforms generating that obligation are procured for their perceived usefulness in some form of persistent military orientation against China "premised on the goal of global military primacy." I don't know, feels like the intersection of China Cold War/primacy defense and Class War should be more of an issue in our politics? 

Apropos of nothing, did I mention I'm going to be writing Iron Man for Marvel Comics? 

LAST WEEK WE POINTED TO a coalescing U.S.-Israel-United Arab Emirates "day after" plan for Gaza that would place the strip under a foreign military occupation ("peacekeeping") helmed by the UAE. As I probably should have guessed, the UAE has a specific figurehead in mind: the aspiring Palestinian warlord Mohammed Dahlan. 

The Wall Street Journal last week profiled Dahlan in what struck me as a planted story ("...some negotiators are increasingly drawn to Mohammed Dahlan as a temporary solution…") portraying him as a savior, a son of Gaza whom Hamas hates and is acceptable to Israel. Not only them: as Aram Rostom wrote in 2018, Dahlan has "strong ties to the CIA." 

After Hamas ran Dahlan out of Gaza in 2007—the Guardian reported at the time that "hundreds of people swarmed through [Dahlan's] unoccupied house… stripping everything, including windows, doors and flowerpots"—he relocated to the UAE. Along with Blackwater's Erik Prince, Dahlan helped transform the Emirati military and became an architect of its aggressive foreign policy. He was a key component of the UAE's death-squad operations in Yemen, as Rostom reported. 

Dahlan also represents the norm in U.S. strategic thinking toward restive Middle Eastern populations: find a strongman and prop him up to put down the unrest and keep the boot on the peoples' necks. Luckily, this sort of thing never backfires. The Abraham Accords, everyone! 

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! 

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.