Trump is pouring fuel on the toxic burn pit that is the military-industrial complex.
This photo of a U.S. military burn pit in Afghanistan is in the public domain.
Reality is apparently sicker than fiction, as the U.S. president is killing foreign leaders and bombing elementary schools as a distraction from the ongoing revelations of his deep ties to the world’s most notorious pedophile.
Even before we had Trump as Commander in Chief committing unconstitutional strikes on the leaders of foreign nations, and Pete Hegseth as Secretary of War ordering apparent war crimes in the Caribbean, we wrote about the military-industrial complex as a “disaster multiplier” in our era of climate change and interlocking crises.
The rot at the heart of this system long predates our current leadership. But that should not obscure the fact that the Trump administration is using it to sow unprecedented chaos and destruction, and that ordinary people around the world will bear its heavy price.
Early estimates show that the increase in military activities before the strike cost something like $630 million, and that the U.S. spent an additional $779 million in the first 24 hours of its assault on Iran. Kent Smetters, director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, estimated that the total cost of the strikes for U.S. taxpayers could be in the tens to hundreds of billions. And that’s ignoring every other unnecessary cost of this unjustifiable war, for which some warmongers in Congress seem ready to rush supplemental funding. (There’s an urgent opportunity here for congressional oversight investigations of spiraling costs as well as the legality of the president’s actions.)
Who benefits from the U.S.-Israel joint strikes on Iran, whose casualties include at least 165 elementary school girls?
U.S. corporations who export oil and liquefied natural gas, for one. LNG companies like Venture Global, which continues to poison Louisianans with toxic air pollution from its Gulf coast LNG facility, make windfall profits from the global instability now spiking gas prices and constraining supply. The U.S. fossil fuel industry continues to benefit from the Trump administration destabilizing regimes in oil-rich foreign countries like Venezuela and Iran, while military activity itself uses tremendous amounts of oil, accelerating environmental and climate havoc alongside lasting societal trauma.
If oil and gas conglomerates are some of the primary beneficiaries of Trump’s aggressions, the other corporations pushing the frontier of war-profiteering today are tech companies like Palantir and OpenAI. As Silicon Valley steadily grows its slice of the Pentagon budget, Pete Hegseth is determined to hasten dystopia by using artificial intelligence tools to massively expand military surveillance, including of U.S. citizens, and to automate weapons systems.
As Gizmodo summarized: “Within the span of a few hours on Friday, the Pentagon dropped its deal with Anthropic after the latter refused to budge on safety guardrails regarding the use of its AI in surveillance or fully autonomous weapons without human oversight, then designated the company as a supply chain risk, before signing an agreement with OpenAI instead. All of this also took place just hours before U.S. military strikes started raining down on Tehran.”
As the Trump administration increases its violent activities at home and abroad, tech companies are increasingly central to enabling the surveillance and targeting of U.S. and foreign citizens. Elite impunity has long allowed corporations to make windfall profits from instability and violence; this cycle grows all the more dangerous as our planetary systems grow more unstable.
In 2022, we wrote about the gross corruption of the defense contracting system and the cascading harms of warmaking in a warming world. Below is an adapted excerpt from that series of climate-focused corporate crackdown reports.
Military Activity as Disaster Multiplier
“A resurgent nationalism, concerns about competitiveness and security, and regional conflicts push countries to increasingly focus on domestic or, at most, regional issues. Policies shift over time to become increasingly oriented toward national and regional security issues. Countries focus on achieving energy and food security goals within their own regions at the expense of broader-based development. Investments in education and technological development decline. Economic development is slow, consumption is material-intensive, and inequalities persist or worsen over time. Population growth is low in industrialized and high in developing countries. A low international priority for addressing environmental concerns leads to strong environmental degradation in some regions.”
“There are many reasons why one of the worst potential climate scenarios, outlined above by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as its third Shared Socioeconomic Pathway, involves increasing militarization and regional conflict. Not only is the threat of war easier to understand, and easier to sell, than the threat of climate change—it is also easy to spend all the nation’s budget waging war, and then claim there’s nothing left for addressing climate change, and that war is the more pressing threat, anyway.
It is easy to convince scared people that weapons will make them safe. And then, because war causes environmental devastation, accelerating climate change, which in turn creates food scarcity and weather disasters and mass migration, governments can sell people on the military once again as protection against the social instability that military activity helped create.
These are the stakes of armed conflict today; as we teeter on the edge of climate catastrophe, military activity is a disaster-multiplier.
Waste All the Way Down: The Broken Defense Contracting System
The Pentagon has created a system in which its near-trillion dollar budget is the playground of corporate war profiteers, benefiting private executives while harming communities around the world. Our public dollars could be oriented towards alleviating harms at home, mitigating climate damage and protecting people from its consequences. But the Pentagon continues to funnel a significant portion of taxpayer dollars to those with a vested interest in continued violence and environmental devastation.
Defense contractors are rarely held accountable for the long-lasting toxic legacies of war, or really for any violations they commit. This lack of oversight has empowered contractors to engage in environmental crimes, commit human trafficking at bases abroad, and otherwise prey upon local communities without consequence.
The structure of the Defense Department’s contracting system encourages waste as a business strategy, something that industry has exploited to the full extent. Upfront costs to the taxpayer for fraud from the defense-industrial complex include an estimated $60 billion in wasted funds from the war in Iraq alone. The DoD’s Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction could not account for billions of $100 billion spent in Afghanistan. In Iraq, military contractors like Anham LLC fraudulently inflated prices for goods provided by 5,574% in some cases and 12,666% in others. An internal study from 2015 exposed $125 billion in administrative waste; a study which senior DoD officials promptly tried to bury.
In 2011, the DoD’s Inspector General found that Boeing, for its part, overcharged the Army up to 177,000% on spare parts for its helicopters. Rampant fraud has characterized military contracting for decades, illustrated by the fact that Harry Truman became president in part because of his work cracking down on the defense contractors profiteering off of World War II.
Truman’s efforts could not eliminate the rot at the heart of the defense contracting industry. The seventy years following his investigation have been repeatedly pierced by waste scandals. In the 1980s, the public was outraged to learn that military contractors were charging the Defense Department $640 for toilet seats and $7,600 for coffee makers, among other clear abuses of public money. But while that episode did spur action among legislators to curb this abuse, the institutional apathy that enabled this culture remains firmly in place, and has arguably worsened, with military tech still functionally amounting to a collection of “overpriced spare parts flying in formation.” In addition to Boeing and Anham, defense contractors like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, AM General, and TransDigm have all profited from price-gouging U.S. taxpayers.
Even in these cases of gross profiteering, the contractors at least provided goods and services, which is not always guaranteed.
In Afghanistan, for example, Anham FZCO, LLC sought to defraud the U.S. government out of an $8 billion contract in which they lied about the construction of storage warehouses in Afghanistan while using DoD funds to conduct illegal trade activity in and through Iran. In another case, DoD contractor Parsons Corporation raked in millions to construct a police academy that was so poorly built there were feces dripping from the ceilings. The repairs to the building which Parsons promised were never actually completed. Neither was the Khan Bani Saad Correctional Facility, a $40 million prison that Parsons was also hired to construct.
Contractors’ vested interest in overproduction and inefficiency has resulted in an “excess of usable military equipment relative to any possible need,” leaving American taxpayers footing not just the initial costs of their construction, and the equally massive costs of their operation, but also the immense financial burden of this equipment’s destruction and disposal. The U.S. military, for example, paid $16 billion for ammunition that was subsequently declared “obsolete, unusable, or [was] banned by international treaty while sitting in storage.” The disposal of these munitions then cost American taxpayers an additional $1 billion.
Given the built-in incentives for contractors to be wasteful and inefficient, and the systemic lack of oversight and enforcement against their misconduct, the “dual-use” argument in favor of lavish defense contracts for Research & Development—or that the resulting scientific and technological developments have commercial as well as military application—rings hollow. If the goal is spurring competition or technological development through public-private partnerships, directing that funding instead to federal agencies whose mandate is not waging war, which operate with proper oversight mechanisms and adhere to regulation instead of being exempt from it, would avoid these long-exploited ethical traps.
A Toxic Legacy
Functionally all military contracts are lucrative, but waste disposal contracts have proven themselves particularly easy to exploit because of how difficult it is to measure project efficiency, completion status, and other objective standards of service. Despite the massive health and environmental costs of improperly executed waste disposal practices, these contracts are regularly fraudulently completed with no real repercussions. A 2015 SIGAR report documented how multiple contractors were paid in full for waste disposal work not completed, not completed satisfactorily, fraudulently completed, or otherwise embellished in Afghanistan.
The American government also regularly leaves billions of dollars worth of equipment rotting around the world, as it did in Afghanistan. This decaying equipment is often extraordinarily toxic and leaches chemicals into surrounding environments, poisoning local communities.
Decaying military goods are associated with the contamination of soil and groundwater through the release of toxic and radioactive chemicals such as depleted uranium, lead, mercury, chromium, and compounds like nitroglycerin and perchlorate. Many of these chemicals, like depleted uranium, have documented negative impacts on kidney function, brain chemistry and development, and behavior alteration. Others of them, like chromium, are devastating for local ecosystems, plant and crop growth, human health, and animal life. Exposure to decaying uranium, while deliberately understudied by the U.S. and its allies, has also been tied to increases in congenital and renal diseases in Iraq. Meanwhile, military installations at home and abroad are widely contaminated with forever chemicals linked to cancer, liver damage, gynecological issues, and other health defects.
The business of war, while wildly profitable for certain companies, is a moral outrage incompatible with the health of people and the planet. Until the American people are willing to reconsider what “defense” and “security” mean for our country and the world, we’ll remain caught in our own dragnet, sowing destruction in the name of stability, and worsening the challenges we collectively face.
Want more? Check out some of the pieces that we published or contributed research or thoughts to in the last week:
Map: Trump Has Often Delayed or Denied Disaster Aid
Abundance and Accountability: Are Communities, Democracy, and the Environment at Risk?