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Off the keyboard of Steve from Virginia

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Published on Economic Undertow on October 3, 2014

Discuss this article at the Geopolitics Table inside the Diner

Good news from the (perpetual) battle front in the (battered) Middle East! The Pentagon has finally found a purpose for its latest exercise in corrupt squander, the Lockheed-Martin F-22 ‘Raptor’ (Julian Barnes, WSJ):

WASHINGTON—The Pentagon’s most advanced fighter plane made its combat debut in the U.S.-led strikes on Syria, serving a crucial purpose for a sensitive mission that depended on stealth … (blowing up a pickup truck … )Pilots flying the F-22 Raptor flew bombing runs over Syria to target the militant Islamic State group, U.S. officials said.Officials didn’t say what targets the F-22 struck, but said it was used later in the series of strikes, which lasted several hours …

Targets = schools, clinics, day care centers … pickup trucks. “It became necessary to destroy the pickup truck to save it … “ That F-22s are blowing up F-150s is ironic because the presumed beneficiaries of US bombing in the (oil producing) Middle East are pickup trucks, which require (relatively) larger amounts of inexpensive fuel to operate. If US fuel was plentiful — due to burgeoning ‘fracking revolution’ — there would be no need for the world’s militaries to impose themselves upon the region. Then again … America and its Western Allies might just be ‘Bombing for Dollars’.

“The airstrikes – which employed U.S. Tomahawk missiles, B1 bombers, F16, F18 and F22 strike fighters and drones – was backed by support from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan and the UAE – a coalition of nations that has agreed to assist with the destruction of ISIS.

Ironically, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Kuwait provide funding for the Islamic State … Saudi Arabia provides funds … The US indirectly and directly has provided materiel aid for ‘moderate’ Syrians who are actually fighters who make up the Islamic State … The US provides materiel … Militants are citizens from Western countries such as France and UK. Syrian ‘rebels’ are reported to have been trained by the CIA in Jordanian bases. “Can’t anyone here play this game?”

‘I can tell you that last night’s strikes were only the beginning,’ Rear Admiral John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters. He said the strikes had been ‘very successful’ and would continue, without going into further detail on future operational plans.

“Last night’s strikes were only the beginning … very successful,”; how demoralizing. One would think that World War Three would shamble from the pit with a better introductory. The coda for our last great conflagration was Chamberlain’s ironic, “Peace for our time!” This followed Edward Grey’s elegaic intro to the previous slaughter; “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life-time … “ Sadly, no one has seen the lamps a hundred years hence, only the ruin remaining from unconstrained progress, our war of ‘everything’ against ‘everything else’ … including literacy.

Genocide Inc.

Industrial warfare is a business like asphalt paving or payday lending. Modernistic war is murder for money and not one thing more … ‘bombing for dollars’. Clausewitz’ notion that ‘War is the continuation of politics by other means” has been turned inside out; it is now simply one self-perpetuating scam among many others. National security issues are irrelevancies/rationalizations, politics has been separated and become the means to the financial end. What matters is the continuing ‘growth’ of the human killing enterprise along with the flows of funds that support it. In its own way the military is a cynically self-destructive an institution as slavery was in the 19th century. Just as a hat store must sell hats to stay in business, the murder business requires continuous conflict, otherwise it fails.

‘Genocide Inc.’ thrives by eschewing old-school Prussian mannerisms, taking instead the outward forms associated with ordinary business firms, albeit very large ones. Military ‘management’ offers fashionable abstract services such as ‘safety’, ‘order’ and ‘security’; ‘honor’, ‘service’, ‘heroism’ … ‘patriotism’ along with high-tech toys. The military markets atrocity by carefully avoiding the subject; the murder of thousands or millions is an externality.

Nobody within Genocide Inc. is held accountable for their actions no matter how reprehensible, dishonorable, corrupt or destructive.

Genocide Inc. is a form of ‘conduit scheme’: these are sophisticated, large scale frauds where contributors and the promoters/final recipients work together to take advantage of the conduits — the persons in the middle who are the promoters’ unwitting stooges.

Where Ponzi schemes involve the transfer of savings from entitled ‘capitalists’ (speculators) to unscrupulous promoters, Conduits are debt transfer machines. Repayment obligations are assigned to the conduit — taxpayers — while the benefits flow from the lender to third-party recipients, in this case military contractors. The taxpayer is responsible for servicing and retiring the debt: it’s his debt, the military business owners’ benefit.

Here is the ‘warfare business’ scam:



Figure 1: Within the scheme, the citizen is offered abstractions of negligible worth: ‘security’ from self-created boogeymen along with vicarious ‘virtues’ which themselves are little more than scams or empty ‘Internet memes’. The taxpayer is the conduit by which vast sums are transferred from the one group to the other. The murder of others at an unaccountable distance is the function of the process. What is different between this scam and similar versions run by New York’s Tammany Hall and William Magear ‘Boss’ Tweed is the conduits in Tweed’s rackets were always in on the take.

Note how all three primary components are in the private sector: finance, citizens and the contractors. This is not accidental; US warfare is being privatized; with unscrupulous Americans robbing Americans who are patriotic useful idiots.

Conduit schemes have certain characteristics:

– The payments from a contributor to a final recipient are loans directed through a conduit, who is identified as the ‘beneficiary’ of the scheme. Unlike Ponzi schemes, which require voluntary participation, conduits are coercive, gate-keeping regimes. Whether the citizen is a direct participant or not, the costs of the scheme are set by the scheme itself, the conduit has no ‘bargaining power’.

– The benefit promised to the conduit are cost-free abstractions, ‘common goods’ such as ‘security’, ‘education’ or ‘medical insurance’ which are unrelated to the actual funds-transfer.

– The transfer from the contributor to the recipient is always money, often in staggeringly large amounts: $800+ billion per year spent by the US for ‘defense’.

– The contributors are banks/finance sector by way of the government borrowing.

– Both lender-contributors and final recipients are aware of the scheme at hand and both actively promote it: falsely to the public-conduit, accurately to each other.

– The final recipients who are part of the scam have no investment ‘method’, they simply accept the free money offered in the conduit’s name.

The conduit is necessary but is incapable of acting in any interest other than those of the contributor/recipient. Taking on loans and accompanying repayment obligations are conditions of … being an American! Unlike other conduit schemes, participants cannot exclude themselves; costs of the scheme are distributed widely falling upon individuals who find themselves unable to ‘opt out’. The recipients’ gains are enormous; the conduits receive little outside of what they bring to the scam in the first place. Like the rest of the economy, the product of the military factories is waste.



Lockheed-Martin F-22 Raptor interceptor; photo: Sgt. Michael Amons, USAF/Wikipedia Commons.

The F-22 is a study in corruption and institutionalized fraud:

The F-22 is the single most expensive fighter jet in history at a total acquisition cost of an estimated $79 billion for 187 planes, meaning each plane costs approximately $420 million. Estimates for the Eurofighter Typhoon – the premier fighter for several allied countries including the U.K., Germany and Italy – put that plane at just under $200 million each, according to an April 2011 report by England’s Public Accounts Committee.

The F-22 cost is why there are only a relative handful of available aircraft. Maintenance and readiness expense leaves the Air Force dependent upon aging F-15 and F-16 fighters that the new aircraft was intended to replace.



Lockheed-Martin F-35 in flight: photo, US Navy/Wikipedia Commons

The Lockheed-Martin F-35 is a proposed multi-role, multi-national single-engine air platform intended to replace a number of older aircraft including the Boeing F/A-18E Hornet, McDonnell-Douglas’AV-8B Harrier II as well as the venerable General Dynamics F-16. The overall (estimated) expense of the program to produce a measly 2,400 aircraft is suggested at $323 billion. Put another way, Rather than (not)buying (non)airplanes, Genocide Inc. could bombard the Middle East with 7.5 million fully-loaded F-150 Ford pickups!

Because of costs only a small fraction of the planned 2,400 aircraft are likely to be built. The minuscule number currently available makes it difficult to parse from background noise what each plane costs (100 built as of 2013). The development program from which this aircraft emerged was set in motion in 1996, eighteen years later the aircraft are far from operational, Winslow Wheeler, Pogo Blog:

The cost estimates in the (National Defense Authorization Act) NDAA for the cheapest version of the F-35, the Air Force’s F-35A, are the following. (Note these costs as just for production and do not include R&D.)The 2014 procurement cost for 19 F-35As will be $2.989 billion. However, we need to add to that the “long lead” money for the 2014 buy that was appropriated in 2013; that was $293 million, making a total of $3.282 billion for 19 aircraft in 2014. The math for unit cost comes to $172.7 million for each aircraft.To be fully accurate, however, we should add the additional procurement money authorized for “modification of aircraft” for F-35As for 2014; that means $158 million more, bringing the total unit production cost to $181 million per copy.None of that includes the 2014 R&D bill for the F-35A; that was $816 million; calculate that in if you want; I choose not to.The Marine Corps and Navy versions are a little pricier. For the Marines B, or (Short Take Off and Vertical Landing) STOVL, model, the authorized 2014 buy is six (6) aircraft for $1.267 billion in 2014 procurement, $106 million in 2013 long lead money, and $147 million in 2014 aircraft procurement modifications. That calculates to $252.3 million for each one. For the Navy’s C, carrier-capable (but not yet), model, we get four (4) aircraft for $1.135 billion, plus $32 million in long lead, plus $31 million in modifications. That means $299.5 million for each one.

The high-cost luxury fighter jets are not as capable as existing jet aircraft given the same roles, Pierre M. Spey by way of Defense Industry Daily:

“Even without new problems, the F-35 is a ‘dog.’ If one accepts every performance promise the DoD (Department of Defense) currently makes for the aircraft, the F-35 will be: “Overweight and underpowered: at 49,500 lb (22,450kg) air-to-air take-off weight with an engine rated at 42,000 lb of thrust, it will be a significant step backward in thrust-to-weight ratio for a new fighter… [F-35A and F-35B variants] will have a ‘wing-loading’ of 108 lb per square foot… less maneuverable than the appallingly vulnerable F-105 ‘Lead Sled’ that got wiped out over North Vietnam… payload of only two 2,000 lb bombs in its bomb bay … With more bombs carried under its wings, the F-35 instantly becomes ‘non-stealthy’ and the DoD does not plan to seriously test it in this configuration for years. As a ‘close air support’ … too fast to see the tactical targets it is shooting at; too delicate and flammable to withstand ground fire; and it lacks the payload and especially the endurance to loiter usefully over US forces for sustained periods… What the USAF will not tell you is that ‘stealthy’ aircraft are quite detectable by radar; it is simply a question of the type of radar and its angle relative to the aircraft… As for the highly complex electronics to attack targets in the air, the F-35, like the F-22 before it, has mortgaged its success on a hypothetical vision of ultra-long range, radar-based air-to-air combat that has fallen on its face many times in real air war. The F-35′s air-to-ground electronics promise little more than slicker command and control for the use of existing munitions.”

Waste and theft are components of Gross Domestic Product … there is the perverse incentive to continually waste and steal more = ‘growth’. Besides the aircraft are aircraft carriers, littoral ships, submarines, nuclear weapons and delivery systems, also; the cost of supporting forces in inconsequential wars, the ordinary implements of the soldier … rifles, ammunition, medical supplies, food, artillery pieces, tanks and other vehicles … which find their way into the hands of our adversaries = growth.

No matter how you cut it, the National Security State (NSS) is a Ripley’s Believe It or Not of staggering numbers that, once you step outside its thought system, don’t add up. The U.S. national defense budget is estimated to be larger than those of the next 13 countries combined — that is, simply off-the-charts more expensive. The U.S. Navy has 11 aircraft carrier strike groups when no other country has more than two. No other national security outfit can claim to sweep up “nearly five billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world”; nor, like the National Security Agency’s Special Source Operations group in 2006, boast about being capable of ingesting the equivalent of “one Library of Congress every 14.4 seconds”; nor does it have any competitors when it comes to constructing “building complexes for top-secret intelligence work” … 33 in the Washington area alone between 2001 and 2010. And its building programs around the U.S. and globally are never-ending.… Its weapons makers controlled 78% of the global arms market in 2012. When its military departed Iraq after eight years of invasion and occupation, it left with three million objects ranging from armored vehicles to laptop computers and porta-potties (and destroyed or handed over to the Iraqis countless more). In a world where other countries have, at best, a handful of military bases outside their territory, it has countless hundreds. In 2011 alone, it managed to classify 92,064,862 of the documents it generated, giving secrecy a new order of magnitude. And that’s just to dip a toe in the ocean of a national security state that dwarfs the one which fought the Cold War against an actual imperial superpower..”— Tom Engelhardt

Viewed as a self-perpetuating racket, it does not matter whether wars are won or lost, whether the planes, ships, rockets, etc. are effective as long as the targets are restricted to the occasional pickup truck, orphanage or hospital. What matters is that the money flows, that nobody important is charged with war-crimes and that the citizens remain able/willing to pay …

It’s Always the Bad Guys Who Commit Crimes.

Much is made of ISIS’ media presence which is a sub-component of Genocide Inc.’s propaganda machine. Mexican drug bandits are as clownishly violent as ISIS and as effective — they have gained control of much of northern Mexico from the Mexican government. They aren’t part of the narrative because Mexico is too close to the US, there is the risk- or danger of accountability. ‘Extreme violence’, like ‘pleasure’ or ‘education’, is a cultural good that can be emptied out then hawked on television, sold in dollar stores alongside ‘religion’, ‘celebrities’ or ‘capitalism’ … down the aisle from batteries, toilet paper and Diet Coke™.

Genocide Inc. adheres to the role that culture assigns to it. Fashion does not allow any change in doctrine which would reduce its waste of either lives or material. Fashion grants the military moral supremacy, a free pass for institutionalized murder. The killing of thousands is ‘the price of freedom’, only the bad guys commit crimes. Genocide Inc. does not recognize that creativity, generosity and restraint are the foundations of American greatness; it sees the goodwill that the country has accumulated over time as capital to strip mine. The murderers insist that America = barbarism: more killing = more greatness.

After three-quarters of a century, the business of perpetual war has become the business of perpetual lies. Murder to gain money has been shaped into something other than what it is. Professional killers and war criminals are now our neighbors: their rationalizations have become our politics. Decades of ‘bombing for dollars’ has enabled the ascendency of psychopaths who anoint themselves as judges of what is virtuous and patriotic. Society has become saturated with violence and death: those whom the psychopaths deem to be insufficiently warlike are excluded from the civil conversation. By these means our society is hollowed out, within the vacuum emerges a mutagenic ‘murder constituency’; a culture of aggressive war; a hammer to which every problem becomes a nail to be yanked for cash.

Because bombing for dollars offers the thieves’ return, the acceptance of violence as the means to no particular end propagates under the surface across every sphere of American life. Genocide Inc. becomes the model for all other businesses. Murder constituency becomes a tribe where killing is an unremarked yet commonplace component of everyday life. The tribe is the organic support for every other sort of (fashionable) outrage because all are of a piece with the deterministic whole: religious fundamentalism, fetishism of authority, torture and punishment, non-stop surveillance, misogyny, race hatred; also wasteful consumption and capital destruction. Within our ‘New Bosnia’ there is nothing to distinguish the jihadist from the Congressman only clothing. When madmen are fashioned into heroes then all things are possible …

… nothing is possible: gangrenous America has completed its makeover into The Empire of Death. A handful of gangsters enrich themselves while our country falls into the pit … we have fake war but real murder stretching endlessly into the future … overhead, the shadows multiply and circle silently but we dare not look upon them because they are too terrible; our children inherit a wasted world and we have nothing to say about it but lies.

© Steve Ludlum, 2014 All Rights Reserved.