“Spoils of War” is true to its title as Andrew Cockburn explores the lucrative maze connecting military weapons purchasers and sellers. Cockburn, a Briton who covers Washington, D.C., for Harper’s, where these individual essays originally ran, provides convincing firsthand research from military and government sources. He gives the American military-industrial complex a global context, invoking humankind’s chronic predilection for combat and its justifications.
War “is far from being confined to ancient historians,” Cockburn writes. “… it extends across the spectrum of contemporary foreign and defense policy….”
Mad Money
Reflexive rationalizations by the American establishment terming war necessary to preserving democracy frequently mask selfish motives, starting with power and money. “Spoils” documents how the latter begets the former, sustaining fiefdoms within the military, propelling political careers in Congress and expanding arms industry influence — and profits. The Pentagon’s strategy, a waggish source suggests, could be distilled to read, “Don’t interrupt the money flow.” Military careerists pivot through the revolving door, retiring from uniform into highly paid jobs with the corporations they once bought from. Weapons companies underwrite candidates and boost their influence not necessarily by diversifying their inventory but by building factories in multiple states, the better to polish their pet politicians’ claims to be bringing home the private-sector pork.
Foolish spending abounds. Poorly chosen equipment — sometimes faulty, sometimes simply wrong for the task — gobbles funds. During the Korean War, half of American casualties were from frostbite’s effect on ill-shod G.I. feet, prompting units in the field to “raid enemy trenches to steal warm padded boots.” In Afghanistan, a variation on the same theme, except stupendously more expensive, involved aerial surveillance. An existing aircraft, the inglorious but battle-tested A-10 “Warthog,” was agile, sturdy, and proven at gathering intelligence and providing ground support, plus at $20 million per, a (relative) bargain. Defense Department geniuses swapped in the newer, fancier $300 million B-1 bomber, whose crews had to find out the hard way that, Cockburn writes, “their means for distinguishing friendly troops from enemies did not and could not work.” Using B-1s to do A-10 work in Afghanistan led to numerous erroneous bombings, dead civilians and friendly-fire fatalities among American personnel.
The Forever Wars
The Cold War’s end might have seemed like a natural point at which to dial back military spending, but, as Cockburn explains, while domestic outlays did shrink, cessation of unspoken hostility with the USSR brought American weapons manufacturers a lollapalooza of sales to an expanded NATO client base as former Soviet satellites gained independence.
The book’s compendium status unfortunately means redundancies, inconsistent timelines and awkward transitions, but Cockburn’s unerring eye and hard-edged prose drive a prickly narrative whose central themes are greed, corruption and the wages of state violence.
— Lucia Worthington writes in Vancouver, Washington.
The Spoils of War
Power, Profit and the American War Machine
by Andrew Cockburn, Verso, 2021
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