How Did the Bloating Military Become a Cancer on the US? (w/ Andrew Cockburn)

Current Affairs

Comedy, Government, News, Culture, Politics

4.4 • 645 Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2021

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Andrew Cockburn is a veteran journalist who serves as the Washington Editor of Harper's magazine. His new book, The Spoils of War: Power, Profit, and the American War Machine, available from Verso collects his reporting on the military-industrial complex and the way the public coffers are looted by profiteers. He joined Nathan to discuss why he thinks the ever-bloating military has become an out-of-control "virus," as well as: - The bureaucratic waste that means the US military isn't even good at defense - Why profit, rather than war, is what the military is built for - The defense companies that depend on constantly manufacturing new threats, which conveniently pop up just when it looks like the military budget might be scaled back - Why the new stories about Chinese hypersonic missiles are exactly this kind of self-interested threat inflation - The alarming situation with nuclear weapons, which are far too close to being used for anyone's comfort - Why defense spending isn't even a good way to "create jobs" - Why progressives should not just focus on critiquing "militarism" and disastrous wars but on scaling back the giant institution that channels so many of our social resources into manufacturing "weapons that don't work for threats that don't exist"

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor in Chief of Current Affairs Magazine.
0:19.2	My guest today is Andrew Cobur. He is the Washington editor of Harper's
0:24.5	magazine and the author of the new book, The Spoils of War, Power, Profit, and the American War Machine.
0:32.9	Andrew, nice to be with you. Hey, very good to be with you. Thank you. So the new book is a collection of reportage on the, well, various aspects of the military
0:43.5	industrial complex and the role of money in American politics, specifically the defense
0:50.3	establishment.
0:51.1	I think Americans generally are fairly aware that there is a sprawling thing
0:56.6	called the military industrial complex. And I think they are aware of the fact vaguely that
1:03.1	the Pentagon budgets seem to go up and up every year. But one of the useful things about
1:08.8	your book is that it sort of dives more into what we are actually
1:12.9	talking about when we're talking about this system, this institution, where the money is
1:19.4	going, what the sort of underlying factors that are driving the growth and maintenance of
1:27.4	US defense are.
1:28.5	And I think there are a couple of sort of counterintuitive findings that come out of your reporting.
1:35.6	One of which that I sort of hadn't crossed my mind up until reading you is that war is almost
1:43.5	ancillary or incidental.
1:46.3	I mean, you put kind of one of the central themes that comes up over and over is that the
1:50.9	drive for increased budgets and the financial incentives of players in this system
1:58.3	really have to be put at the center of our analysis.
2:02.5	Is that, is that right?
2:03.7	That's absolutely right.
2:05.2	It's, you know, it is the basic fact.
	...

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