War profiteering

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What emerges from Hartung's analysis is a portrait of an entrenched cadre that has been biding its time since the Cold War, waiting for a sympathizer to make it into the White House so the group can advance its agenda of lasting American global dominance through overwhelming military might. Some are motivated by greed, others by ideology, but this is the goal.

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It appears more to me that the cadre had been cultivating a sympathizer, rather than waiting for one.

Not including the cost of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush's proposed 2005 budget allocates $401.7 billion to defense -- $100 billion more than when he took office -- and a 13 percent increase in funding for missile defense. The main characters in Hartung's book are Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Perle and Frank Gaffney of the right-wing think tank Center for Security Policy, neoconservatives all. Hartung visits their younger selves in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations and traces their careers in the defense industry and at think tanks like CSP and the American Enterprise Institute during the Clinton years. He also chronicles numerous examples of unsavory activity since they reentered the halls of power and the Iraq war began.

  Alternet article

With the Pentagon budget at $400 billion per year and counting, plus a new Department of Homeland Security with a $40 billion per year budget, plus wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have cost $180 billion to date, these are lucrative times to be a military contractor," said Michelle Ciarrocca, a Senior Research Associate at the World Policy Institute and co-author of a new analysis on the Pentagon's top 10 contractors. "The greatest beneficiary thus far from the Bush administration's 'war without end' approach to fighting terrorism has been Vice President Cheney's former company, Halliburton, notes, William D. Hartung, the co-author of the Institute's new analysis and the author of a new book on war profiteering in the Bush era entitled How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy?: A Quick and Dirty Guide to War Profiteering in the Bush Administration (Nation Books/Avalon Group, 2004). Halliburton's prime contracts with the Pentagon jumped from $483 million in Fiscal Year 2002 to $3.9 billion in Fiscal year 2003, and increase of almost 700%. ...Halliburton has also built bases in Uzbekistan and prison camps in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "Anywhere you go where the U.S. Army has to deploy on short notice, Halliburton is there, working on a cost-plus contract," notes Frida Berrigan, Deputy Director of the Institute's Arms Project and a co-author of the new analysis. "The billions they have earned thus far are just the tip of the iceberg." [Says Hartung], "As the government watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense has suggested, we need a concerted effort, comparable to the Truman Commission on war profiteering that operated during World War II, to hold firms like Halliburton accountable. Otherwise, they will continue to overcharge and under-perform. And when they get caught, they'll just fold the costs of any fines into their next cost-plus contract, with little real impact on their bottom line." ...The Pentagon's number ten contractor for FY 2003, Computer Sciences Corporation, more than tripled its prime contracts from FY 2002 to FY 2003, from roughly $800 million to $2.5 billion. ...Lockheed Martin experienced the greatest absolute increase, going from $17 billion to $21.9 billion in contracts between FY 2002 and FY 2003. To put this in some perspective, Lockheed Martin's increase in contracts for 2003 was greater than Halliburton's total Pentagon contract figure for the year. ..."The purse is now open, and any member of Congress who argues that we don't have the resources to defend America . . . won't be there after November of next year." -- then Boeing VP Harry Stonecipher quoted in Anne Marie Squeo and Andy Pasztor, "Pentagon's Budget Becomes Bulletproof," Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2001

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