Surge capacity means maintaining slack – plant standing idle – to enable a near instant stepping up of arms production when needed. Such wastefulness from a profit-centric standpoint requires levels of state oversight which are anathema to the neoliberal mind. Add to this the fact of Raytheon et al having every incentive – costs + 10% – to make eye-wateringly expensive weaponry which can wow arms fairs, and may do lethally well in seven-day wars on the global south, but whose shortcomings – inability to produce at scale, unreliability in the heavy usage of protracted war as opposed to the quick-win conditions of “shock and awe” – stand exposed in Ukraine. Ditto that revolving door between government and the military industrial complex (whose gravy-train influence, by the way, exceeds that of the Israel lobby) which has earned the incumbent Defence Secretary the moniker, Lloyd ‘Raytheon’ Austin.
Five things to know about Kiev’s ATACMS, footnote 1
I volunteered for the army on my birthday. They drafted white trash first, round here anyway.
Steve Earle – Copperhead Road
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As I write this, a nation with an annual arms budget of $1.5tn – paid for by its having become, post Bretton Woods 1944 and the Nixon Shock of the early 70s which decoupled the world’s reserve currency from gold, the first ever to weaponise its own debt – has launched a war of unprovoked aggression it cannot win. Indeed, the most tangible outcome of its criminal war on the Islamic Republic is the latter’s emergence, courtesy its hitherto unleveraged control of the world’s most vital choke point, as a regional superpower.
I’ll be considering specifics of the war on Iran, and those of the increasingly interlinked war on Russia in Ukraine, in forthcoming posts. By contrast, today’s starts with a general observation. Capitalism’s inherent contradictions became clearer with both wars, which have driven home the truth that imperialism and its attendant financialisation informed the profit-led offshoring of industry from imperial hub to global south; extending supply chains across continents and even making arms production dependent, as with China’s monopoly on the rare earths vital to the already troubled F-35 program, on adversaries. Which is to say that profit driven offshoring of wealth creation, a defining feature of modern imperialism, paradoxically undermines empire’s ability to enforce by military might its self granted licence to subjugate and loot the planet.
Here to consider this contradiction and a good many others are one of my most esteemed political economists, Radhika Desai – up there with her likeminded anti imperialist colleagues, Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff – and one of my most esteemed geopolitical analysts, KJ Noh – up there with former US marine intelligence analyst and geopolitical commentator par excellence, Brian Berletic – in a discussion which never falters or runs out of steam.
If I’ve a tiny carp, it’s that their wide ranging but disciplined conversation omits a point highly relevant today when America, caught in a waiting game, can only escalate in Iran by putting boots on the ground in their millions. But ever since the humiliating defeat in Vietnam, US war planners have proceeded on the assumption of mass conscription being off limits. Hence the emphasis on the one hand on technical dominance, aerial in particular …
The message is needlessly anti-America when most Americans have no stake in, and much to lose from, its imperial savagery. All the same, it serves the specific point I’m making here.
… and on the other, since wars of conquest and subjugation cannot be won solely from the air, on proxies – Nazis in Ukraine and Islamist terror across the Middle East, Central Asia’s “stans”, Africa’s Sahel, Xinjiang and Myanmar – on the ground. It’s a mark of US-Israeli failure to exploit such proxies in Iran – Kurdish and Baluchi separatists, Sunni sectarians – as shown by Tehran’s thwarting of CIA/Mossad/MI6 backed insurrection in January, that if KJ Noh is right, some on the Beltway are now flirting for all the dangers with bringing back the draft.
That post Vietnam reliance on proxies is a small omission, given both the depth and range of their discussion, and the fact I know from other sources that neither Radhika nor KJ is unaware of it. Having duly brought it to your attention, let me hand over without further ado to Radhika Desai and K J Noh.
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