Other than the 2 global wars (WWI-WWII) in which we
actually waged war in self-defense, those in recent history were
"offensive" wars waged because they are "cash cows" a
big money maker for those who invest in, and manage (not fight) them.
Wars waged for profit are immoral, if not downright evil.
If we dared to be honest about it, making money off slaughtering human beings;
some of whom we regard as our "national treasure", is unpatriotic and
possibly treasonous.
True Patriots willingly give to protect our nation
when threatened without expecting anything in return. An example of
this is WWII during which every American (rich and poor) contributed whatever
they had to support our troops putting their lives on the line to defend our
country from a real (not imagined) threat. The majority of Americans
were not in that war to make a buck; looking to make a hefty profit from the
loss of life and destruction left in its wake.
Times have changed and what rose from the wreckage of
WWII is what we commonly refer to as the "military industrial
complex" (MIC) a giant consortium of business enterprises that
produce the stuff that wars are made of. And they do it at the expense of the
American taxpayer from which they extract enormous profits.
Comprehending why the United States went to war in Iraq
or Afghanistan is mind boggling. Those who sold us the war said it was because
of 9/11, yet the terrorists that attacked us, and their leader, Osama Bin
Laden were Saudis , not Afghans, or Iraqis, and operated from bases out of
Pakistan (both US allies by the way) after Bush/Cheney failed to
capture Bin Laden in Tora Bora in 2001.
How did invading Iraq and Afghanistan fit into the
equation? We need to only look at who would stand to gain monetarily far making
war to find a logical explanation. Any other explanation defies logic. Why?
Watching the movie, "Zero Dark
Thirty"reminded me of why I believe we lost the war against Islamist
terrorists before it even started. Simply put you can't win by killing people
who glorify dying. They welcome death with open arms because of what they
believe lies beyond the grave. Being a "martyr" is even more
gratifying because it guarantees a "first class" ticket to paradise.
Wars in Afghanistan raged long before the US ever
existed. Their people have a very long history of defending themselves against
outsiders that go back as far as 330BCE. We only need to go back in
history as far as 1839 with the first British attempt
to conquer these people to realize that we are in a
losing battle, a la David and Goliath.
We also need to take into account that
"blood is thicker than water" as they say, and that no matter
how terrible the Taliban might be to us they are still much better to the
Afghans than an occupying force of foreigners.
Here is a look at
the price, in both lives and dollars, that Americans and Afghans have paid over
12 years of war.
$1.2 Trillion
The war in Afghanistan has cost the United
States nearly $1.2 trillion -- or $1.172 trillion, to be exact -- since its
inception in 2001 through July 31, 2012, according to the U.S. Defense
Department.
4,012 Days
The United States has been at war in
Afghanistan for 4,012 days, six days short of 12 years. Troops arrived on Oct.
7, 2001, less than a month after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
2,000 Americans Killed
In the 12 years that American troops have
been fighting in Afghanistan, 2,000 have been killed. The 2,000th death was
reported in eastern Afghanistan Saturday and was suspected to be an insider
attack by Afghan forces.
17,644 Americans Wounded
More than 17,000 U.S. troops have been
wounded in action since the Afghanistan war began in 2001.
68,000 Troops
There are currently 68,000 U.S. troops
stationed in Afghanistan. That's down from the peak troop level of about
100,000 who were stationed there in March 2011. By the end of 2014, most U.S.
troops are expected to be out of the country.
13,009 Civilians Killed
According to the United Nations, more than
13,000 Afghan citizens have been killed between 2007 -- when the U.N. began
reporting such statistics -- and June 2012.
Read the full article here: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/2000-dead-cost-war-afghanistan/story?id=17367728#.UOpp-W9hR8F
Offensive wars like those in Korea, Vietnam,
Iraq, and Afghanistan are many things to different people. To some they are
called a strategic blunders and a monstrous injustice and sometimes even a
patriotic mission, much to the chagrin of rational human beings. For neo-cons
and many big corporations, however, war is something far different: a lucrative
cash-cow.
The last ten years have seen massive
growth in defense industry profits. In 2002, the combined profits of the five
largest U.S.-based defense contractors were $2.4 billion (adjusted for
inflation); by 2011, that figure had increased by a whopping 450 percent to
$13.4 billion (according to net Income TTM data from ycharts.com for
five largest U.S.-based defense contractors). This success applied both to
companies with large civilian sections of their businesses and to those almost
wholly dependent on defense funding. In short, the largest defense contractors
have prospered to a degree that would have looked very unlikely just eleven or
twelve years ago.
You can read the full article at;
How about the people that run these companies? How much of the taxpayer’s pie are they eating
up?
These
five CEOs weren’t even the highest paid heads of Pentagon contractors. That
honor goes to David Cote, the CEO of Honeywell, whose $35.7 million
compensation package made him the sixth highest paid CEO in the U.S. last year,
according to the Associated Press study.
Read the full article here;
http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2012/08/pentagon-contractor-ceo-compensation-is-second-to-none.html
To get a detailed rundown of the 25 companies squeezing
the most profit from this controversial conflict.
Read all about here;
Another major change in how we conduct our wars is the man
(woman) power. Since the end of the draft in the 1970's the military has had a
much harder time recruiting people. Even after adding more females
and loosening the standards of who to enlist there are not enough who
are attracted to the military even among the ideologues and those who
are unemployed, desperate, or destitute.
The neo-cons quickly found the solution to the manpower
shortage by creating a whole new branch of the MIC,
private military contractors, (PMC for short) that used to be known
as mercenaries in previous times.
Peter Singer, the author
of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry.
"And since then, it's grown in size, in monetary terms to about $100
billion worth of revenue a year. In geographic terms, it operates in over 50
different countries. It's operated on every single continent but
Antarctica."
Singer says three trends coalesced
during this time that drove the industry's growth: the end of the Cold War,
which led to military downsizing not only in the U.S., but around the world; a
global increase in smaller conflicts; and the ideological shift towards
privatizing government functions in general. The Pentagon's use of private
contractors has increased dramatically between the two Gulf wars: During the
first Gulf War in 1991, there were 50 military personnel for every one
contractor; in the 2003 conflict the ratio was 10 to 1.
As one report points out;
“In 2007, private security guards working for companies
such as Blackwater and DynCorp were earning up to $1,222 a day,” wrote Nobel
Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University,
and Linda Bilmes, a Harvard University lecturer on budget and public
administration. “By contrast, an Army sergeant was earning $140 to $190 a day
in pay and benefits.”
Read the full report here; http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre2012071300&PHPSESSID=8g4k3980sj6gboplmn110vkgp2
Here then is the price we have paid so far in
our Quixotic campaign chasing windmills in far off places like
Afghanistan and Iraq;
According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report published in October 2007, the U.S.
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost taxpayers a total of $2.4 trillion
dollars by 2017 when counting the huge interest costs because combat is being
financed with borrowed money by the Bush/Cheney gang. The CBO estimated that of
the $2.4 trillion long-term price tag for the war, about $1.9 trillion of that
would be spent on Iraq, or $6,300 per U.S. citizen.
The United States spends 58 percent of
the total defense dollars paid out by the world's top 10 military powers, which
combined for $1.19 trillion in military funding in 2011. With its unparalleled
global reach, the US outspends China, the next-biggest military power, by
nearly 6-to-1.
You can read the full article
here;
As with other "privatized" profit-driven
entities as in the Military Industrial Complex there is absolutely no incentive
to end wars or find ways to cut costs. Whereas much greater global conflicts,
(WWI & WWII) using my less technology and lasting 4 and 6 years
consecutively these present day regional conflicts; much smaller and less
lethal in comparison, will go on for decades with no end in sight. There isn't
even a definition for what "winning" means in these conflicts. The
Taliban, for example, are a small group of tribes holed up in a desolate part
of the world and we fear them more than Hitler. How many years and millions of
dollars did it take for us to capture one Saudi terrorist which was
"Global enemy #1"?
Winning is NOT an option to those invested in the MIC, or
enlisted in the PMC. There's not profit in that outcome. And, as long as
American taxpayers are naive and gullible enough to buy
into the "boogeyman" they will continue to passively stand by and allow
their hard earned tax dollars to be squandered in enriching a few slick scam
artists like the Bush/Cheney team to steal and hoard resources that could
better used in caring for our country and its inhabitants; especially the
children, the poor, the homeless and all those less fortunate that make up the
America we live in.
Johann Wagener 1-7-2013
Other than the 2 global wars (WWI-WWII) in which we
actually waged war in self-defense, those in recent history were
"offensive" wars waged because they are "cash cows" a
big money maker for those who invest in, and manage (not fight) them.
Wars waged for profit are immoral, if not downright evil.
If we dared to be honest about it, making money off slaughtering human beings;
some of whom we regard as our "national treasure", is unpatriotic and
possibly treasonous.
True Patriots willingly give to protect our nation
when threatened without expecting anything in return. An example of
this is WWII during which every American (rich and poor) contributed whatever
they had to support our troops putting their lives on the line to defend our
country from a real (not imagined) threat. The majority of Americans
were not in that war to make a buck; looking to make a hefty profit from the
loss of life and destruction left in its wake.
Times have changed and what rose from the wreckage of
WWII is what we commonly refer to as the "military industrial
complex" (MIC) a giant consortium of business enterprises that
produce the stuff that wars are made of. And they do it at the expense of the
American taxpayer from which they extract enormous profits.
Comprehending why the United States went to war in Iraq
or Afghanistan is mind boggling. Those who sold us the war said it was because
of 9/11, yet the terrorists that attacked us, and their leader, Osama Bin
Laden were Saudis , not Afghans, or Iraqis, and operated from bases out of
Pakistan (both US allies by the way) after Bush/Cheney failed to
capture Bin Laden in Tora Bora in 2001.
How did invading Iraq and Afghanistan fit into the
equation? We need to only look at who would stand to gain monetarily far making
war to find a logical explanation. Any other explanation defies logic. Why?
Watching the movie, "Zero Dark
Thirty"reminded me of why I believe we lost the war against Islamist
terrorists before it even started. Simply put you can't win by killing people
who glorify dying. They welcome death with open arms because of what they
believe lies beyond the grave. Being a "martyr" is even more
gratifying because it guarantees a "first class" ticket to paradise.
Wars in Afghanistan raged long before the US ever
existed. Their people have a very long history of defending themselves against
outsiders that go back as far as 330BCE. We only need to go back in
history as far as 1839 with the first British attempt
to conquer these people to realize that we are in a
losing battle, a la David and Goliath.
We also need to take into account that
"blood is thicker than water" as they say, and that no matter
how terrible the Taliban might be to us they are still much better to the
Afghans than an occupying force of foreigners.
Here is a look at
the price, in both lives and dollars, that Americans and Afghans have paid over
12 years of war.
$1.2 Trillion
|
The war in Afghanistan has cost the United
States nearly $1.2 trillion -- or $1.172 trillion, to be exact -- since its
inception in 2001 through July 31, 2012, according to the U.S. Defense
Department.
According to a Pew Trusts report, the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan have contributed more to growth in U.S. debt than any
other policy since 2001 except the Bush-era tax cuts and the increased interest
from legislative changes.
4,012 Days
|
The United States has been at war in
Afghanistan for 4,012 days, six days short of 12 years. Troops arrived on Oct.
7, 2001, less than a month after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
2,000 Americans Killed
|
In the 12 years that American troops have
been fighting in Afghanistan, 2,000 have been killed. The 2,000th death was
reported in eastern Afghanistan Saturday and was suspected to be an insider
attack by Afghan forces.
There has been an alarming uptick in these
insider attacks on U.S. and NATO troops this year, with Afghan soldiers and
police, who have been trained and armed by coalition forces, killing 52 U.S.
and other NATO troops since January.
The most deadly year of the war to date was
2010, when 492 Americans died.
During the first nine months of 2012, 254
members of the U.S. military lost their lives in Afghanistan. A total of 549
Americans have died in the war-torn country in the year since Osama bin Laden
was killed in May 2011.
17,644 Americans Wounded
|
More than 17,000 U.S. troops have been
wounded in action since the Afghanistan war began in 2001.
As a point of comparison, nearly 30,000 U.S.
military members have been wounded in the Iraq conflict since it
began in 2002.
About 4,500 Americans were killed in Iraq during
the nine-year war that formally ended in December 2011.
68,000 Troops
|
There are currently 68,000 U.S. troops
stationed in Afghanistan. That's down from the peak troop level of about
100,000 who were stationed there in March 2011. By the end of 2014, most U.S.
troops are expected to be out of the country.
About 40,000 additional troops from America's
allies, such as Great Britain, are also stationed in Afghanistan.
13,009 Civilians Killed
|
According to the United Nations, more than
13,000 Afghan citizens have been killed between 2007 -- when the U.N. began
reporting such statistics -- and June 2012.
Nearly 2,000 civilians were wounded in
war-related incidents during the first six months of 2012. About 1,145
civilians were killed in that same time period, according to U.N. totals.
Read the full article here: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/2000-dead-cost-war-afghanistan/story?id=17367728#.UOpp-W9hR8F
Offensive wars like those in Korea, Vietnam,
Iraq, and Afghanistan are many things to different people. To some they are
called a strategic blunders and a monstrous injustice and sometimes even a
patriotic mission, much to the chagrin of rational human beings. For neo-cons
and many big corporations, however, war is something far different: a lucrative
cash-cow.
These decades -long, ongoing military efforts has
resurrected fears of the so-called “military-industrial complex.” Media pundits
are outraged at private companies scooping up huge, no-questions-asked
contracts to manufacture weapons, rebuild infrastructure, or anything else the
government deems necessary to win (or plant our flag on their soil). No matter
what your stance on the war, it pays to know where your tax dollars are being spent.
The last ten years have seen massive
growth in defense industry profits. In 2002, the combined profits of the five
largest U.S.-based defense contractors were $2.4 billion (adjusted for
inflation); by 2011, that figure had increased by a whopping 450 percent to
$13.4 billion (according to net Income TTM data from ycharts.com for
five largest U.S.-based defense contractors). This success applied both to
companies with large civilian sections of their businesses and to those almost
wholly dependent on defense funding. In short, the largest defense contractors
have prospered to a degree that would have looked very unlikely just eleven or
twelve years ago.
You can read the full article at;
How about the people that run these companies? How much of the taxpayer’s pie are they eating
up?
A Project On Government Oversight analysis of
executive compensation at the top five Pentagon contractors – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon – found that
the average compensation package of a CEO at one of these firms was
approximately $21.5 million last year, according to the firms’ Securities and
Exchange Commission filings. Total compensation is the sum of base
salary, bonuses, stock awards, option awards, incentive compensation, deferred
compensation (including changes in pension value), and all other compensation.
·
The average worker in the U.S. earned $45,230 last year.
These CEOs were paid more in an average day than the average American worker
was paid all of last year.
·
According to a 2011 Congressional Budget
Office analysis, the median
compensation (including basic pay, allowances for food and housing, and tax
advantages) for enlisted U.S. military personnel with ten years of experience
was about $64,000. Thus, the Pentagon could afford to pay the salary of 335
soldiers with the money from just one top defense contractor’s compensation
package.
·
The CEOs of these top Pentagon contractors
are also making significantly more than their own workers. According to a Deloitte study, the average
wage (just salary, not benefits) for the entire aerospace and defense industry
in 2010 was $80,175. For the price of one CEO then, these firms could pay the
salary of 268 defense and aerospace industry workers.
·
Even compared to other CEOs these Pentagon
executives are making an enormous amount of money. An Associated Press study of S&P 500
CEO’s (i.e. the largest publicly traded companies) found that the
typical CEO received $9.6 million in total compensation last year. Thus, the
top Pentagon contractors could afford two CEOs with the compensation they’re
using to pay their current CEOs.
·
These
five CEOs weren’t even the highest paid heads of Pentagon contractors. That
honor goes to David Cote, the CEO of Honeywell, whose $35.7 million
compensation package made him the sixth highest paid CEO in the U.S. last year,
according to the Associated Press study.
Read the full article here;
http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2012/08/pentagon-contractor-ceo-compensation-is-second-to-none.html
To get a detailed rundown of the 25 companies squeezing
the most profit from this controversial conflict.
Read all about here;
Another major change in how we conduct our wars is the man
(woman) power. Since the end of the draft in the 1970's the military has had a
much harder time recruiting people. Even after adding more females
and loosening the standards of who to enlist there are not enough who
are attracted to the military even among the ideologues and those who
are unemployed, desperate, or destitute.
The neo-cons quickly found the solution to the manpower
shortage by creating a whole new branch of the MIC,
private military contractors, (PMC for short) that used to be known
as mercenaries in previous times.
This "shadow"
or privatized army is a war monger’s dream come true. Not only
are these armies exempt from many of our laws regarding military conduct,
but they can also turn a "profit". In short, American taxpayers are
now not only supporting our wars but spending their hard earned dollars on
those who are profiting from these wars. The greater moral travesty is
that those men and women who serve in our armed forces are valued less (at
least in monetary terms) than the CEO's and those employed in these
private armies.
Peter Singer, the author
of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry.
"And since then, it's grown in size, in monetary terms to about $100
billion worth of revenue a year. In geographic terms, it operates in over 50
different countries. It's operated on every single continent but
Antarctica."
Singer says three trends coalesced
during this time that drove the industry's growth: the end of the Cold War,
which led to military downsizing not only in the U.S., but around the world; a
global increase in smaller conflicts; and the ideological shift towards
privatizing government functions in general. The Pentagon's use of private
contractors has increased dramatically between the two Gulf wars: During the
first Gulf War in 1991, there were 50 military personnel for every one
contractor; in the 2003 conflict the ratio was 10 to 1.
As one report points out;
“In 2007, private security guards working for companies
such as Blackwater and DynCorp were earning up to $1,222 a day,” wrote Nobel
Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University,
and Linda Bilmes, a Harvard University lecturer on budget and public
administration. “By contrast, an Army sergeant was earning $140 to $190 a day
in pay and benefits.”
Such comparisons are flawed, however, according to the
nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which provides economic analysis
to Congress. The $1,222 a day that Bilmes and Stiglitz cite as a salary is
actually a salary plus additional money that goes not to the individual workers
but to the company they work for, to cover costs such as overhead, the CBO
said."
Read the full report here; http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre2012071300&PHPSESSID=8g4k3980sj6gboplmn110vkgp2
Here then is the price we have paid so far in
our Quixotic campaign chasing windmills in far off places like
Afghanistan and Iraq;
According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report published in October 2007, the U.S.
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost taxpayers a total of $2.4 trillion
dollars by 2017 when counting the huge interest costs because combat is being
financed with borrowed money by the Bush/Cheney gang. The CBO estimated that of
the $2.4 trillion long-term price tag for the war, about $1.9 trillion of that
would be spent on Iraq, or $6,300 per U.S. citizen.
The United States spends 58 percent of
the total defense dollars paid out by the world's top 10 military powers, which
combined for $1.19 trillion in military funding in 2011. With its unparalleled
global reach, the US outspends China, the next-biggest military power, by
nearly 6-to-1.
You can read the full article
here;
As with other "privatized" profit-driven
entities as in the Military Industrial Complex there is absolutely no incentive
to end wars or find ways to cut costs. Whereas much greater global conflicts,
(WWI & WWII) using my less technology and lasting 4 and 6 years
consecutively these present day regional conflicts; much smaller and less
lethal in comparison, will go on for decades with no end in sight. There isn't
even a definition for what "winning" means in these conflicts. The
Taliban, for example, are a small group of tribes holed up in a desolate part
of the world and we fear them more than Hitler. How many years and millions of
dollars did it take for us to capture one Saudi terrorist which was
"Global enemy #1"?
Winning is NOT an option to those invested in the MIC, or
enlisted in the PMC. There's not profit in that outcome. And, as long as
American taxpayers are naive and gullible enough to buy
into the "boogeyman" they will continue to passively stand by and allow
their hard earned tax dollars to be squandered in enriching a few slick scam
artists like the Bush/Cheney team to steal and hoard resources that could
better used in caring for our country and its inhabitants; especially the
children, the poor, the homeless and all those less fortunate that make up the
America we live in.
Johann Wagener 1-7-2013
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