PRESS ROOM

Thinning out bloated government agencies and reallocating this funding to programs like education, business security, and housing could improve many of the issues that McClintock is concerned about, without having an impact on taxation of individuals. The Center for International Policy’s Sustainable Defense Task Force even came up with a plan that could shave off $1.2 trillion while keeping all necessary defense intact.

Laura Flanders cited ASP's "Profits of War" study on NPR's "The Takeaway" and the interview ran on 24 NPR stations.

Hartung describes the current setup of America’s ICBMs. The missiles are spread across the country, sitting on hair-trigger alert. It’s a setup that many experts admit is dangerous, and unnecessary.

According to a report this September from the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Pentagon spending totaled over $14 trillion over the course of the war of Afghanistan—with one-third to half going to for-profit contractors.

As William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Policy, pointed out: most disturbingly, a congressional investigation found that a significant portion of $2 billion worth of transportation contracts issued to US and Afghan firms ended up as kickbacks to warlords and police officials or as payments to the Taliban to allow large convoys of trucks to pass through areas they controlled, sometimes as much as $1,500 per truck, or up to half a million dollars for each 300-truck convoy. In 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that “one of the major sources of funding for the Taliban is the protection money” paid from just such transportation contracts.

In a report issued this year by the Center for International Policy, nuclear weapons expert William Hartung gives readers a detailed look “Inside the ICBM Lobby,” showing how ICBM contractors get their way while throwing millions of dollars at politicians and deploying battalions of lobbyists on Capitol Hill.

William Hartung at the Center for International Policy recently reported that just the top five U.S. Pentagon contractors — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman — received more than $2.1 trillion worth of contracts during the post-9/11 spending surge.

William Hartung, author of the Brown study, found that the American military’s “dependence on contractors for war-zone duties as contributing to mission failure in Afghanistan.”

Last week the Heritage Foundation released its annual “Index of Military Strength,” an exercise in threat inflation that argues for increases in the Pentagon’s already massive budget. If this is true at a time when the United States is spending over $750 billion on the Pentagon and related work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy — the problem is not money. It is mismanagement and misguided strategy.

Contrary to what many have been led to believe, China is not a military challenge to the United States. “The true challenges from China are political and economic, not military,” Pentagon expert William Hartung has rightly explained.

With nearly $2 trillion for nuclear modernization on the table over the next three decades, it’s no surprise major nuclear weapons contractors are doing everything in their power to capture these coveted, costly projects. Capitol Hill is no stranger to the revolving door of lobbyists that funnel in and out of its hallowed halls.

“Exaggerated estimates of the military challenges posed by China have become the new rationale of choice in arguments for keeping the Pentagon budget at historically high levels,” arms expert William Hartung wrote in a September report.