Friends, after reading a report on Al Jazeera this morning I had a quick look at Wiki under Defense Contractors. It revealed some interesting information. The following is a ranked list of the world’s major Defense Contractors (these are private companies which supply armaments, warships, fighter planes, tanks, munitions, logistic support, etc, to Governments).
Numbers 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, and 10 come from the U.S. and include names like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Gruman, General Dynamics, Raytheon, L-3 Communications and United Technologies. That’s 7 out of 10 and only BAE of Britain (which ranks third) and Eads E.U. (which ranks seventh) provide any competition!
Now these industries do make non-military products as well (Boeing for example produces civilian aircraft) but for many, the bulk of them are mainly engaged in making goods which are designed to be used for war, gazillions of trillions of dollars worth. For example Lockheed spends 92% of its production to this end, Boeing 48%, Norththrop 77%, General Dynamics, 79%, Raytheon 93%, etc. BAE Systems of Britain tops the list with 95% of its production used for producing weapons of war!
Now it is no coincidence that the U.S. and Britain are partners in many wars and it should come as no surprise that both these countries, America in particular, have a vested interest in endless war because such a huge amount of their manufacturing industry is involved in preparing for, or being engaged in, war.
Also, America, with its huge military (which is spread all over the world), has a huge number of uniformed people who also need war because it provides them with salaries and opportunities for promotion.
Al Jazeera’s report talked about the difficulty that Obama faces if he tries to cut defense spending which totaled 700 billion dollars in 2008. In it, John Pike, an American defense expert, made some startling observations among which were:
- “The military industrial complex has become embedded in American life,”
- “Big defense contractors such as Lockheed, Boeing, and Raytheon have shrewdly spread their activities all over the country, providing jobs to voters and financial support for US politicians’ election campaigns.”
- “So by the time congress votes on a system, out of 435 members of the house, you’re guaranteed to have 200 to 250 who are going to make money on that programme.”
Given these facts and considering that the U.S., if memory serves me correctly, sells most of the world’s arms (many other countries are also involved) it’s no wonder that war exists and it is likely to do so for the foreseeable future.
Peace hasn’t got a chance while amoral people profit from killing (and that includes the shareholders in these companies)!
Don’t you run out of money? No profit. Want a used B47?
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Ken, that people get out of bed each day, kiss their kids, go off to work where they design, manufacture then deliver death-dealing products to people who get out of bed, kiss their kids, then go off to a war zone where they kill and destroy other people and their kids seems far-fetched, improbable.
Yet it’s happening each day! It’s been happening for thousands of years.
It must be part of our nature.
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David, I just love your site, articles and pictures. I don’t always have time to leave a comment, but I make sure to read the articles and enjoy them immensely. Keep up the excellent work.
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Kristen, at times I wonder why I bother to run this site then people like you come along and I know why.
Thanks and take care.
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The , then 1920-45, great German orator/hero , democratically elected, Hitler(der fyhrer), could have done nothing without weaponry and / but not less important, willing manpower.- and that he had in abundance. Was it for the money or was it because people were bored.? – maybe both.
I endorse those words:
“David, I just love your site, articles and pictures. I don’t always have time to leave a comment, but I make sure to read the articles and enjoy them immensely. Keep up the excellent work.”
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It is terrible that so much is being spent to kill when there is so much need for all the things necessary for a quality life. If only some way could be found to have that money spent on affordable housing (no MacMansions), weatherizing existing homes, upgrading poor schools, fixing our falling apart roads and bridges, and a real big one medical care for everyone. That is just here in the US. So much good could be done for people in poor countries with just a fraction of that money.
There would be plenty of good jobs to had and the world would be a much better place for people to live in with less war and a higher quality of life.
How much of the strife in the world has been caused by the intervention of the US in the affairs of foreign countries? I would guess a lot.
I have no doubt that a majority of people in the US and people world wide would support this.
The more we spend on war and killing the worse everything seems to get. I am afraid it will eventually destroy us all.
As hard as a lot of good people try to make things better conditions, at best, seem to change very little. The average person has so little power over what is happening to themselves and to their world.
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I may be very wrong about people supporting peace as oppossed to war. I just read on another site that 2/3 of americans support send another 17,000 troops to Afganistan. A country that we invaded and which we are in the process of destroying while killing thousands of innocent people.
You would think that after the mess in Iraq that we would have had enough of war and death and endless, senseless killing!
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Ken Reply:
February 28th, 2009 at 4:30 am
Jeannie, 1/3 are against it. Is the glass half full or half empty? Seems like a big improvement. No miracles expected.
Wonder what the 2/3 believes are the benefits to them? How is this sold? Doubles their tax bill.
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John, thanks. I do my best.
Jeannie and Ken, if capitalism goes down the gurgler then things might change. We can’t have a world driven by a profit motive. How ignoble! How despicable.
It should be driven by a desire for peace, for equality, for sharing.
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Today some other peaceniks and I went to visit our congressman. He voted against the war, against the Patriot Act, against torture and he’s for rail and alternative energy.
BUT- We have a General Dynamics plant which makes depleted uranium bullets and we told him we wanted it changed to a wind turbine plant and that deplete uranium is bad for the people we spread it on. He just said he was proud of bringing jobs to his district.
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You’re on it David. It’s sick, it’s disgusting, but it’s what we do best. WE ARE the most efficent killing machine the world has ever seen, and ever will. We butter our bread with blood, the blood of foreigners, the blood of our young betrayed patriots. Thank you for exposing our sickness to the world. With any luck at all, they will find a way to exterminate us, and any nation complicet.
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Wagelaborer, your failed venture to see your congressman confirms that the Al Jazeera article is correct. That these companies who deal in death integrate themselves into communities to guarantee their continual survival is sickening and reprehensible.
VR2, it brings no joy to me to have you confirm the worst. So many Americans are such nice people that it’s hard to believe they are largely complicit in this warmongering. I guess the facts suggest that they are!
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Hi David,
Many years ago, I was at a lecture given by a man who was an oral-maxillofacial surgeon in USA, who’d gone to Afghanistan during the Russian phase of the slaughter of the Afghani people. This doctor had gone for a few weeks as part of an emergency medical team. He showed graphic and gruesome photos of kids, women and men who had been the victims of “anti-personnel” bombs in the shape of sweets (candy), toys, dolls, even food, that they had picked up from the ground, or wherever these these disguised bomblets had landed.
People alive with half their faces blown away. Alive, without noses, or cheeks, or mouths, and with teeth impacted throughout their skulls.
Then heard how these victims, often kids, were carried on shoulders, or donkeys, across miles and miles of the mountainess terrain and isolation of Afghanistan for DAYS on end, sometimes in bitterly cold weather, until they reached a “hospital”, if they were “fortunate”.
The Americans had anti-personnel weapons in the shape of leaves, and toys in their assaults on the people in SE Asia.
I won’t bother expanding on my revulsion for the scientists, politicians and media reps.
You have to be a special kind of sick human being to believe there is ever any justification for war, weaponry and targetting of civilian and soldier alike. Just put all these blights on humanity in a fenced-off arena, arm them all with pointed spears, and we can watch them kill and maim each other for the “causes” they believe in and feel fit to doom others.
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After reading Sally’s post I was wondering if part of the reason americans are so easy to con into supporting more war is their lack of knowledge of what that war does to real people just like themselves.
Here, war in the media is squeaky clean; at most a bit of blood on the pavement. We never see anything like what Sally described. We never see the real horror of war.
The only soldiers that make the media are ones that fully support the war and the fight for “freedom and democracy”. If they are injured they only show those who are successful in their recovery.
We never hear about the very large number of homeless vets who can’t fit in normal society after returning from the insanity of war.
No one talks about all those who have killed themselves due to PTSD or how many returning soldiers are given drugs so that they can function.
We, of course, hear very little about civilian deaths, just pictures of soldiers giving kids candy. Never of soldier shooting a kid.
We are living in a bubble here in the US in which the reality of how much of the world must live is never shown. The economic meltdown is putting a few small holes in that bubble, but it is still keeping us from seeing reality.
I just wonder if we, the many decent average citizens, knew the reality of what our government was doing to other nations and other innocent people would we still be so ready to support more war.
If the pictures Sally saw and the talk she heard were all over the media as much as the mom with 8 babies.
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from the wagelaborer comment. Their acts ring hallow. The voting against the war is window dressing, and that is all congress is about. So 30 percent vote against something where the position has zero chance of winning and that is calibrated and calculated.
It is pre-arranged. 49 percent are allowed to appease. Next time, another group. Please everyone but no one.
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David, your observations are spot on, based on my lifetime of gathering information, as well as recent experience with one of my formerly dearest old friends. The industrial-military complex, despite Eisenhower’s admonitions and Pike’s observations, has always been embedded in American culture. For whatever reason, even as a kid, I wasn’t much interested in war stuff, or guns, or bombers, despite doses of Combat! and 12 O’Clock High on the propaganda box.
When I learned what was really being done in my name (mostly from Vietnam, but later the totality of America’s blood-letting history, starting no later than Columbus and extending to Pakistan-Afghanistan-Iraq-Colombia-Palestine/Gaza-Congo today), starting about age 18, I became increasingly alarmed and angry. Yet most of my friend’s dads worked for military contractors, and I never really made the connection between friendships and personal morality or politics. Even now, in many ways, I ask – how much choice do people have about having a life (tainted as it is from birth with capitalism and its trappings) when all around you are the makings of war? Yet, as many of my former friends work for defense contractors now, like their parents did before them, I’ve finally gotten over my reluctance to say what I think. Yes, I’m judgmental, but then, I make a living that contributes to saving other organisms and to promoting human knowledge of the earth, not by taking tax money to build weapons to kill other people and to control public dissent domestically.
For years, I’ve been aware of a long-time friend’s (I’ll call him Fraud) working for a defense contractor – I’ll call it Deathray – yet I’ve remained quiet; it helps we now live 3000 miles apart. I recognize my own denial and cowardice in not resolving the nagging discomfort I’ve felt, especially so over the last decade, and I’m still not resolved. I wrote a long letter to Fraud last year, obliquely questioning ours and our culture’s morals (especially in light of the 10 commandments and other mythologies and distortions with which we were well imbued growing up together as Roman Catholics) about killing, about greed, about “coveting thy neighbor’s property” or whatever that commandment said. I asked, in my letter, if he didn’t ever question the glaring inconsistencies between our religious education and our government’s actions?
The response, several months later, was shattering to my fragile hold on denial – good for my awareness, but hurtful and discouraging as well. He relegated my concerns to foolishness and misguided thinking, while defending his right to live in comfort – no regard whatsoever to the rights of other human beings – and asserting his faith in the First Church of Perversion (Roman Catholic). A friendship of almost 50 years is gone — I don’t even want to have further discussion with Fraud, as he sounds completely convinced of his righteousness, and was himself judgmental of my oblique questioning and criticism of government and religion. He defends our government, his job, and his faith, which has gotten him “through difficult times” (from his letter). Yet I wonder if he ever considers – as I do every day, many times – the fact that his labor and our income support companies and a government that render unavailable to others any reason for faith, for hope of happiness, for freedom from violence and hatred. He is college-educated (another topic) and has at his disposal all the information I’ve had, yet his reactions to my questions and points were shocking to me —
Dear David and sensitive readers, is it normal for me to feel like I’m crazy? What have I
done wrong in my long-term relationship? Why am I not a better American? Do you think
I’ll ever regain his trust and respect? Why can’t I just be normal?
So I’m a foolish and misinformed, un-American, bleeding heart sympathizer (and a godless one, to boot), and I live in a nation that is so much in denial about violence and hatred and militarism and corporate imperialism that even my former good friend can’t hear me. If only he were the problem, peace might have a chance.
Life in America: What’s normal is insanity.
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VR2LNNNTT Reply:
March 1st, 2009 at 6:43 am
Relax Peter, your mind is starting to clear. Your neo-humanism is showing. Can’t wait to see David’s response. I also spend a considerable amount of time trying to make sense and trying to make cents. I think you’ll be fine, just don’t wast much time trying to regain your friends trust and respect. Let sleeping dogs lie!
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Ken Reply:
March 1st, 2009 at 7:43 am
The age of revelation, aided by the internet. Is it better to have a friend under false pretenses or not to have the friend? Surely the latter. But how many exist today on the basis of the former, as neither side can wake up.
“defends our government, his job, and” thus of course, his faith.
You don’t defend even the best sort of government (limited as it may be). That is totally inconsistent. Just which is the slave?
Unless you are still stuck in the forth grade and I pledge allegiance, followed by the Hitler salute (some of us go back).
Is ignorance bliss?
Why do they put 15 flags on the stage at US affairs? Is it not symbolic. There is this huge billboard that says “keep ‘em flying”. It should be, if anything, keep it flying.
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