Posted on 02/07/2010 11:11:00 PM PST by sukhoi-30mki
US arms cartel cranking up its presence in Indian weapons bazaar
7 Feb 2010, 0531 hrs IST, Chidanand Rajghatta, TNN
Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks
Some months before Bob Dylan wrote these lines about the US weapons industry in the song Masters of War, outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower coined the term ‘Military-Industrial Complex’ in his 1961 farewell address.
He cautioned against its “total influence... economic, political, even spiritual...felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government”. As a former general and war hero himself, Eisenhower recognized the imperative need for military muscle powered by domestic industry.
Yet, he warned, “We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
Half a century later, the influence of the now notorious ‘mil-ind complex’ remains not just undiminished, but has expanded enormously. Successive American presidents, including professed pacifists such as Jimmy Carter who took office after the Vietnam War promising to curb arms trade, have been unable to staunch its rampant growth. Contrary to popular perception that this monster grows mostly during Republican administrations, even Democratic dispensations have bowed before its clout.
Galloping to vulgar proportions during the Reagan years, when the so-called toilet seat scandal (in which the Pentagon paid $600 for each toilet seat and $3,000 for a coffee pot in examples of procurement system run amok) erupted, it did not end even after the Cold War. The Clinton administration continued to feed the beast. And then there was 9/11... and Iraq...and Afghanistan... and Pakistan. Today, the beast is casting its shadow on India.
‘PENTAGONIZED SOCIETY’
The idea that there are ‘masters of war’ whose bottomline is benefited by conflict is not really new. Decades ago, in an essay titled ‘El Pentagonismo, Sustituto del Imperialismo’ (Pentagonism, Substitute of Imperialism), Dominican writer-politician Juan Bosch called the US a “Pentagonized society ” where international policy is not controlled by the civil government, but by “Pentagonism” that needs frequent wars anywhere so it can generate wealth by creating industries, and jobs by bagging arms contracts.
In his 2003 novel Scarecrow (also made into a movie), Australian writer Matthew Reilly depicts a group of leaders of a worldwide military-industrial complex , who engineer wars for profits. In 2005, Nicholas Cage played lead role in Lord of War, a movie endorsed by Amnesty International that highlighted arms trafficking by the ‘mil-ind complex’.
The truth may not be as cynical or sinister, but the fact is wars, or at least a constant state of tension and potential conflict, is good for the arms industry and its bottomline. At a time of tremendous economic convulsions and stagnation in the US throughout the decade after 9/11, major players of the so-called mil-ind complex, among the top five, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, Boeing, and General Dynamics, continued to mint money hand over fist, often selling weapons and technology to antagonists: Israel and its Arab/Gulf opponents, Greece and Turkey, China and Japan/Taiwan/South Korea. Pakistan, which for decades has been a loyal client of the US arms industry, and India, a more recent convert, may well be the latest suckers in this double-edged game.
For all the talk of making the world a better place that fetched the US president a Nobel Prize, things don’t look like changing much in the Obama administration. Perhaps a little minor tinkering in the script to humour the self-righteous, but otherwise it is business as usual for the milind folks.
If anything, with increasingly sophisticated weaponry and warfare tactics (think drones, robots, ballistic missile defence etc), unending conflict , and newly instigated match-ups (China vs India, Japan, South Korea etc) the mil-ind monster is set to expand its footprint even more.
GROWTH AMIDST SLUMP
To begin with, despite the natter about the decline, if not demise, of the US, American military muscle remains undiminished. Out of a total projected world military spending of $1.4 trillion in 2010, Washington is expected to account for half, nearly $700 billion. That’s more than the rest of the world combined.
Most of this is spent and consumed internally as the mil-ind giants, in cahoots with lawmakers, milk the system in a Faustian spirit to generate economic activity and jobs, spurred on by wars abroad.
According to one estimate, between May 1999 and May 2009, employment in the US private sector only rose by 1.1%, by far the lowest 10-year increase in the post-Depression period. Take away the health sector and it was negative. The manufacturing sector shrank by nearly 20%. No prizes for guessing where the growth came from. Military production has more than doubled from the year 2000 and added tens of thousands of jobs.
Although exports constitute only around 10% of the US mil-ind complex’s revenues, selling overseas is increasingly coming into play to keep the assembly lines, especially obsolete ones, humming. Nowhere is this more evident than at the Lockheed Martin’s F-16 plant in Fort Worth, Texas, which has lived on meagre orders from Pakistan and Taiwan in the past few years after even the US Air Force moved on to newer toys.
According to a US Congressional Research Service report on ‘Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations’, in 2006, Washington agreed to sell $10.3 billion in weapons to the developing world, or 35.8% of these deals worldwide. Russia was second with $8.1 billion, or 28.1%, and Britain was third with $3.1 billion, or 10.8%. The buyers? Pakistan topped with $5.1 billion in agreements, followed by India with $3.5 billion, and Saudi Arabia with $3.2 billion.
Since then, the script has changed slightly. Broke beyond salvation and eyed with suspicion, Pakistani purchases are tailing off even though it still hankers after crumbs thrown by Washington and manages to rustle up enough borrowed money to cater to its military’s fetish for expensive new weaponry (citing India as a threat).
But the big new market is India In the past few years, US companies and their rivals in Europe have been smacking their lips at the prospect of multi-billion sales to New Delhi. Although India’s defence expenditure, at only around 2% of its GDP, is still among the lowest in the world on a per capita basis, its growing economy has expanded its military budget to $30 billion plus annually. A military that has been run to the ground with obsolete equipment and technology is also seeking newer hardware to keep up with the times and face challenges of the 21st century.
So, 2010 may well be the watershed year in which India is coaxed to leave behind a tattered Pakistan (whose only weapons may well be irregular warfare in the form of terrorism or the ultimate nuclear threat) and cajoled into a matchup with China, whose military budget is more than three times India’s at $100 billion plus.
In course of the year, New Delhi will receive not only US President Barack Obama, but a host of European leaders from Germany, France, Italy and UK, all plying their military wares (among other things). At the root of this sales pitch: fears expressed in some Indian quarters about China’s policy of encirclement and Beijing’s imminent domination of the Indian Ocean and beyond.
That line of thinking pretty much underscores most of India’s recent and upcoming military acquisitions, including the order for 126 multi-role combat aircraft that will be the single largest deal in Indian history.
“What India currently has in terms of planes is sufficient to take care of Pakistan,” says Mohan Guruswamy, director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives, who was in the US last week to promote his book Chasing the Dragon: Will India catch up with China? “It’s China that India is now worrying about.” Indeed, much of US arms sales are now premised on a match-up with China, with Pakistan, looking increasingly fragile, a mere sideshow.
INDIA VS CHINA AGAIN
While some analysts credit hawks in the Bush administration with planting “China-is-a-threatto-India” in New Delhi’s mind, thereby compelling New Delhi to step up its defence acquisition and force level to deter Beijing, the truth is a little more layered.
It was New Delhi which cited China (and by implication, its nuclear transfers to Pakistan) as the prime reason for its 1998 nuclear tests. It was only after the Bush administration’s strategic embrace of India, culminating in the nuclear deal, that China became overtly testy and cranked up its border confrontation with India which was largely on the backburner till then. While India saw China surrounding it with a string of pearls strategy, Beijing viewed New Delhi’s dalliance with US and its allies Japan, South Korea, Vietnam etc, equally suspiciously.
All this suits the great American mil-ind complex perfectly in Republican years or Democratic, although the system is better lubricated when conservatives and Cold War relics are in power in the White House and on the Hill.
At no time was its clout better displayed than during the Bush years, when a coalition of conservative thinktanks (such as the Center for Security Policy), milind backed lawmakers, hardline administration officials and the arms merchants joined hands to push projects like missile defence systems and new fighter jets. By one count, there were 22 alumni of the CSP serving in the Bush administration.
The story goes that at one CSP dinner, then defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld joked that “I was thinking of calling a staff meeting, but I think I’ll wait until tomorrow.” Of the 32 former executives, consultants or major shareholders of weapons manufacturers who were appointed to important positions in the Bush administration, eight had ties to Lockheed Martin, according to a report in the Nation journal.
Key company alumni included undersecretary of the air force Peter Teets, who had authority over the acquisition of military space systems, and Everet Beckner, who was in charge of nuclear weapons activities at the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
“In short, the nuclear weapons industry doesn’t need to lobby the Bush Administration, to a significant degree, they are the Bush Administration,” said William Hartung , author of How Much Are You Making on the War Daddy? A Quick and Dirty Guide to War Profiteering in the Bush Administration, who wrote the Nation article.
It’s not just Cold War warriors and policy wonks who bat for the arms lobby; many lawmakers do too, compelled by the need to keep jobs in their constituencies and states.
When India announced its intention to buy 126 multi-role combat aircraft in a deal that could be worth at least $10 billion to begin with, Missouri’s Republican senator Kit Bond headed off to New Delhi in no time. The prime reason: Boeing manufactures the F-18 Super Hornet jets in St Louis, Missouri, where bagging the 126-plane India order could mean continued employment for 25,000 people, not to speak of profits for Boeing.
Bond met with the Prime Minister, the defence minister, the national security advisor and the external affairs minister, among others, openly lobbying for the F-18 Super Hornet. “Pound for pound and dollar for dollar, the F-15 and F/A-18 are the finest tactical fighters for our nation’s and our allies’ defence,” he said at one point.
“The US is looking to India as more than just a marketplace for our defence products, but as a technology, aerospace and strategic partner for our future endeavours.” That deal is still up in the air (the Russians, Swedes, French and British are also in the race) as New Delhi puts the bidders through user trials etc, but don’t expect the Americans to sit back.
NOT JUST PROFIT
American officials though insist that there is more to American military sales to India than mere mercenary motive of its mil-ind complex. A senior administration official who reviewed US-India military ties with this correspondent recently pointed out that many Washington sales were policy driven, including helping India during the Kargil War.
In fact, Boeing got into the act with its F-18 pitch only after Condoleezza Rice alerted the company to Washington’s decision to offer an even better deal to India after it decided to agree to Pakistan’s pleas for F-16 s. While that example also goes to illustrate how US sells weapons to two antagonistic sides, US officials say the role of the arms lobby, at least insofar as India goes, is vastly overstated.
Last month, this ‘dual-face’ policy came under scrutiny again when US defence secretary Robert Gates was asked in Pakistan why the US was rearming both parties. Gates ducked the question but US officials later said if the US did not sell the weapons the two countries could get them elsewhere.
In Gates-speak: “I think we have to make these decisions judiciously. But we also do not simply want to turn over these military relationships to other countries who don’t have as many scruples as we do in terms of making these decisions.” In other words, Uncle Sam knows best.
Indian experts are divided though on whether the US arms sales to India is merely a mercenary act driven by the mil-ind complex or a strategic investment engineered by Washington. “US military sales to India are miniscule in the overall context, so profit is hardly the motive,” says Manohar Thyagaraj, a defence consultant who founded Paragon International to promote US-India trade.
He estimates that nearly 90% of US defence production is internally consumed. Still, he concedes, as India’s defence budget inches up to 3% of a growing GDP (from its current 2%), even American firms are starting to look up India. The 126-jet deal, he says, is not worth just $10-12 billion initial capital cost, but could also mean an additional $35 billion revenue over the lifecycle of the plane. Small wonder the deal has Kit Bond so excited and involved.
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