The Ugly Reason GOP clamors for war with Iran: "Why Private Defense Contractors Need War to Keep Profits High"
Private Defense Contractors Need War to Keep Profits High
Friday, 17 July 2015 05:46 * Buzzflash/Truthout * by MARK KARLIN
The National Priorities Project, an organization that analyzes the US budget, projects that "in fiscal year 2015, military spending is projected to account for 54 percent of all federal discretionary spending, a total of $598.5 billion."
That does not include funding for the National Intelligence Programs - including the Central Intelligence Agency - which will separately receive $45.6 billion dollars in congressional discretionary funding in 2015, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
In addition, no one can accurately track all the military and intelligence discretionary spending buried in other line item allocations. This is because many projects related to military spending are intentionally concealed in unlikely funding areas.
That money is disproportionately going into the bank accounts of private defense contractors. AllGov.com reported in 2013:
Take the case of the Defense Department (DOD), the largest federal bureaucracy, with 2.48 million federal employees and 700,000 contractor employees who generally work alongside civilian and uniformed employees. When [then] Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that Pentagon budget cuts would include contractors, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) pressed him on the issue of contractor inefficiency.
Durbin pointed out that a recent DOD report “emphasized that the average contract employee costs two to three times as much as the average DOD civilian employee for performing similar work, [and that] contract employees comprised 22% of [DOD's] workforce but accounted for 50% of its cost,” figures confirmed on the spot by Defense Comptroller Robert Hale.
Even though the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are now less intensive, for-profit contractors are still making a killing. ThinkProgress noted in 2013: "Defense contractors have managed to not only stay afloat but also thrive in a climate of government closure and massive cuts [although, the 2016 fiscal year defense allocation indicates that the military budget is inching up again] to the Pentagon’s budget, continuing to rake in billions upon billions of dollars in profits."
The National Priorities Project recently listed the top ten defense contractors (again, this list does not include the intelligence agency private contractors, which may consume up to 70 percent of the intelligence budget). Coming in at number one for Defense Department contractors is Lockheed Martin:
http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/for-profit-defense-contractors-need-war-to-keep-defense-spending-high