“THE PROJECT ON GOVERNMENT OVERSIGHT” By DAN GRAZIER
“President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us to guard ourselves “against the acquisition of unwarranted influence” by the military-industrial complex during his 1961 farewell address. The military-industrial-congressional complex is the political economy created by the tightly integrated web of defense contractors, military service bureaucracies, and politicians.
Afghanistan and the other post-9/11 wars prove that winning or losing isn’t terribly relevant to the military-industrial-congressional complex as long as the various actors find a way to reap enormous financial benefits.”
“The Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex Failed Us After 9/11.
Americans watched in horror as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in a matter of days, despite the lives and treasure spent there over twenty years. Most of the criticism of the disastrous end to the Afghanistan War and the rest of the post-9/11 wars has focused on the four presidents who helmed them. There is plenty of blame to lay at their feet because each contributed to those winless wars.
President George W. Bush decided to keep American forces in Afghanistan after achieving the mission’s primary security objective of disrupting al Qaeda. President Barack Obama doubled down on the war by surging troops into the country and expanding the nation-building effort. President Donald Trump’s peace deal set the stage for the August defeat by providing the Taliban with a timeline for its eventual takeover.
And while an end to the Afghanistan War was long overdue, President Joe Biden’s mishandling of the withdrawal completed the debacle, leaving many Americans and Afghans who helped us little time or security to flee the county.
History will judge all of them, but the inquiry should not stop with them. Almost as soon as the terrorists attacked the United States in September 2001, the military-industrial-congressional complex flew into action to get a piece of the lucrative wartime pie. In just one egregious example less than a month after the attacks, then-Representative Norm Dicks (D-WA) cited the attacks as a reason to move forward with a deeply flawed aerial tanker leasing scheme with Boeing. The defense contractors, the military leaders who wanted to work for them, and the members of Congress who took campaign contributions from them were all just as much responsible for creating the conditions that led to our defeat as any occupant of the Oval Office.
Another American president would have seen this coming. President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us to guard ourselves “against the acquisition of unwarranted influence” by the military-industrial complex during his 1961 farewell address.
It evolved and came into its own over the 40-year span of the first Cold War by consolidating influence and always striving to capture a larger slice of the treasury’s tax revenues. The complex suddenly found itself at loose ends when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, but the attacks of 9/11 threw it a timely lifeline — one it seized with gusto.
Had the complex actually produced useful results, this evolution might be a little more palatable. Unfortunately, the post-9/11 wars, and especially the war in Afghanistan, showed us how the complex’s self-serving nature worked to prolong the conflicts and contributed to our defeats. Afghanistan and the other post-9/11 wars prove that winning or losing isn’t terribly relevant to the military-industrial-congressional complex as long as the various actors find a way to reap enormous financial benefits.”
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