Michale T. Klare outlines how the U.S. Defense Department will seek a growing share of the country’s scientific and technological resources for military-oriented work.
A common hypersonic glide body (C-HGB) launches from Pacific Missile Range Facility, Kauai, Hawaii, on the night of March 19, 2020, during a U.S. Defense Department flight experiment. (U.S. Navy)
By Michael T. Klare
TomDispatch.com
Why is the Pentagon budget so high?
On March 13, the Biden administration unveiled its $842 billion military budget request for 2024, the largest ask (in today’s dollars) since the peaks of the Afghan and Iraq wars. And mind you, that’s before the hawks in Congress get their hands on it.
Last year, they added $35 billion to the administration’s request and, this year, their add-on is likely to prove at least that big. Given that American forces aren’t even officially at war right now (if you don’t count those engaged in counter-terror operations in Africa and elsewhere), what explains so much military spending?
The answer offered by senior Pentagon officials and echoed in mainstream Washington media coverage is that this country faces a growing risk of war with Russia or China (or both of them at once) and that the lesson of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is the need to stockpile vast numbers of bombs, missiles, and other munitions.
“Pentagon, Juggling Russia, China, Seeks Billions for Long-Range Weapons” was a typical headline in The Washington Post about that 2024 budget request. Military leaders are overwhelmingly focused on a potential future conflict with either or both of those powers and are convinced that a lot more money should be spent now to prepare for such an outcome, which means buying extra tanks, ships, and planes, along with all the bombs, shells, and missiles they carry.
Even a quick look at the briefing materials for that future budget confirms such an assessment. Many of the billions of dollars being tacked onto it are intended to procure exactly the items you would expect to use in a war with those powers in the late 2020s or 2030s.
Aside from personnel costs and operating expenses, the largest share of the proposed budget — $170 billion or 20 percent — is allocated for purchasing just such hardware.
But while preparations for such wars in the near future drive a significant part of that increase, a surprising share of it — $145 billion, or 17 percent — is aimed at possible conflicts in the 2040s and 2050s.
Believing that the U.S.’s “strategic competition” with China is likely to persist for decades to come and that a conflict with that country could erupt at any moment along that future trajectory, the Pentagon is requesting its largest allocation ever for what’s called “research, development, test, and evaluation” (RDT&E), or the process of converting the latest scientific discoveries into weapons of war.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff U.S. Navy Adm. Christopher Grady meet with members of the Senate about China strategy at the Pentagon on March 21. (DoD/Jack Sanders)
To put this in perspective, that $145 billion is more than any other country minus what China spends on defense in toto and constitutes approximately half of China’s full military budget. So what’s that staggering sum of money, itself only a modest part of the U.S. military budget, intended for?
Some of it, especially the “T&E” part, is designed for futuristic upgrades of existing weapons systems. But much of that sum, especially the “R&D” part, is aimed at developing weapons that may not see battlefield use until decades in the future, if ever.
Spending on such systems is still only in the millions or low billions, but it will certainly balloon into the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in the years to come, ensuring that future Pentagon budgets soar into the trillions.
Weaponizing Emerging Technologies
U.S. Defense Department officials visit artificial intelligence company Shield AI in San Diego in September 2020. (DoD/Lisa Ferdinando)
Driving the Pentagon’s increased focus on future weapons development is the assumption that China and Russia will remain major adversaries for decades to come and that future wars with those, or other major powers, could largely be decided by the mastery of artificial intelligence (AI) along with other emerging technologies. Those would include robotics, hypersonics (projectiles that fly at more than five times the speed of sound), and quantum computing. As the Pentagon’s 2024 budget request put it:
“An increasing array of fast-evolving technologies and innovative applications of existing technology complicates the [Defense] Department’s ability to maintain an edge in combat credibility and deterrence. Newer capabilities such as counterspace weapons, hypersonic weapons, new and emerging payload and delivery systems… all create a heightened potential… for shifts in perceived deterrence of U.S. military power.”
To ensure that the U.S. can overpower Chinese and/or Russian forces in any conceivable encounter, top officials insist, Washington must focus on investing in a major way in the advanced technologies likely to dominate future battlefields.
Accordingly, $17.8 billion of that $145 billion RDT&E budget will be directly dedicated to military-related science and technology development. Those funds, the Pentagon explains, will be used to accelerate the weaponization of artificial intelligence and speed the growth of other emerging technologies, especially robotics, autonomous (or “unmanned”) weapons systems, and hypersonic missiles.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is of particular interest to the Department of Defense, given its wide range of potential military uses, including target identification and assessment, enhanced weapons navigation and targeting systems, and computer-assisted battlefield decision-making. Although there’s no total figure for AI research and development offered in the unclassified version of the 2024 budget, certain individual programs are highlighted.
U.S Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin observes the capabilities of Task Force 59, Commander Unmanned & Artificial Intelligence Integration in Bahrain, November 2021. (DoD/Chad J. McNeeley)
One of these is the Joint All-Domain Command-and-Control system (JADC2), an AI-enabled matrix of sensors, computers, and communications devices intended to collect and process data on enemy movements and convey that information at lightning speed to combat forces in every “domain” (air, sea, ground, and space).
At $1.3 billion, JADC2 may not be “the biggest number in the budget,” said Under Secretary of Defense Michael J. McCord, but it constitutes “a very central organizing concept of how we’re trying to link information together.”
AI is also essential for the development of — and yes, nothing seems to lack an acronym in Pentagon documents — autonomous weapons systems, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), and unmanned surface vessels (USVs).
Such devices — far more bluntly called “killer robots” by their critics — typically combine a mobile platform of some sort (plane, tank, or ship), an onboard “kill mechanism” (gun or missile), and an ability to identify and attack targets with minimal human oversight.
Believing that the future battlefield will become ever more lethal, Pentagon officials aim to replace as many of its crewed platforms as possible — think ships, planes, and artillery — with advanced UAVs, UGVs, and USVs.
The 2024 budget request doesn’t include a total dollar figure for research on future unmanned weapons systems but count on one thing: it will come to many billions of dollars. The budget does indicate that $2.2 billion is being sought for the early procurement of MQ-4 and MQ-25 unmanned aerial vehicles, and such figures are guaranteed to swell as experimental robotic systems move into large-scale production.
Another $200 million was requested to design a large USV, essentially a crewless frigate or destroyer. Once prototype vessels of this type have been built and tested, the Navy plans to order dozens, perhaps hundreds of them, instantly creating a $100 billion-plus market for a naval force lacking the usual human crew.
From left: Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) Michael J. McCord, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a Senate Armed Services Committee budget hearing on March 28. (DoD/Chad J. McNeeley)
Another area receiving extensive Pentagon attention is hypersonics, because such projectiles will fly so fast and maneuver with such skill (while skimming atop the atmosphere’s outer layer) that they should be essentially impossible to track and intercept. Both China and Russia already possess rudimentary weapons of this type, with Russia reportedly firing some of its hypersonic Kinzhal missiles into Ukraine in recent months.
As the Pentagon put it in its budget request:
“Hypersonic systems expand our ability to hold distant targets at risk, dramatically shorten the timeline to strike a target, and their maneuverability increases survivability and unpredictability. The Department will accelerate fielding of transformational capability enabled by air, land, and sea-based hypersonic strike weapon systems to overcome the challenges to our future battlefield domain dominance.”
Another 14 percent of the RDT&E request, or about $2.5 billion, is earmarked for research in even more experimental fields like quantum computing and advanced microelectronics.
“The Department’s science and technology investments are underpinned by early-stage basic research,” the Pentagon explains. “Payoff for this research may not be evident for years, but it is critical to ensuring our enduring technological advantage in the decades ahead.”
As in the case of AI, autonomous weapons, and hypersonics, these relatively small amounts (by Pentagon standards) will balloon in the years ahead as initial discoveries are applied to functioning weapons systems and procured in ever larger quantities.
Harnessing Tech Talent
AT&T Technicians and civilian contractors assemble a “Cell on Wings” drone in order to provide 5G connectivity to individuals participating in the Advanced Battle Management Systems (ABMS) Onramp 2 at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico on Aug. 27, 2020. (U.S. Air Force/Charlye Alonso)
There’s one consequence of such an investment in RDT&E that’s almost too obvious to mention. If you think the Pentagon budget is sky high now, just wait. Future spending, as today’s laboratory concepts are converted into actual combat systems, is likely to stagger the imagination. And that’s just one of the significant consequences of such a path to permanent military superiority.
To ensure that the United States continues to dominate research in the emerging technologies most applicable to future weaponry, the Pentagon will seek to harness an ever-increasing share of the country’s scientific and technological resources for military-oriented work.
This, in turn, will mean capturing an ever-larger part of the government’s net R&D budget at the expense of other national priorities. In 2022, for example, federal funding for non-military R&D (including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) represented only about 33 percent of R&D spending.
If the 2024 military budget goes through at the level requested (or higher), that figure for non-military spending will drop to 31 percent, a trend only likely to strengthen in the future as more and more resources are devoted to war preparation, leaving an ever-diminishing share of taxpayer funding for research on vital concerns like cancer prevention and treatment, pandemic response, and climate change adaptation.
No less worrisome, ever more scientists and engineers will undoubtedly be encouraged— not to say, prodded — to devote their careers to military research rather than work in more peaceable fields.
While many scientists struggle for grants to support their work, the Department of Defense (DoD) offers bundles of money to those who choose to study military-related topics. Typically enough, the 2024 request includes $347 million for what the military is now calling the University Research Initiative, most of which will be used to finance the formation of “teams of researchers across disciplines and across geographic boundaries to focus on DoD-specific hard science problems.”
Another $200 million is being allocated to the Joint University Microelectronics Program by the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, the Pentagon’s R&D outfit, while $100 million is being provided to the University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics by the Pentagon’s Joint Hypersonics Transition Office.
With so much money flowing into such programs and the share devoted to other fields of study shrinking, it’s hardly surprising that scientists and graduate students at major universities are being drawn into the Pentagon’s research networks.
In fact, it’s also seeking to expand its talent pool by providing additional funding to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). In January, for example, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced that Howard University in Washington, D.C., had been chosen as the first such school to serve as a university-affiliated research center by the Department of Defense, in which capacity it will soon be involved in work on autonomous weapons systems.
This will, of course, provide badly needed money to scientists and engineers at that school and other HBCUs that may have been starved of such funding in the past. But it also begs the question: Why shouldn’t Howard receive similar amounts to study problems of greater relevance to the Black community like sickle-cell anemia and endemic poverty?
Endless Arms Races vs. Genuine Security
In devoting all those billions of dollars to research on next-generation weaponry, the Pentagon’s rationale is straightforward: spend now to ensure U.S. military superiority in the 2040s, 2050s, and beyond. But however persuasive this conceit may seem — even with all those mammoth sums of money pouring in — things rarely work out so neatly.
Any major investment of this sort by one country is bound to trigger countermoves from its rivals, ensuring that any early technological advantage will soon be overcome in some fashion, even as the planet is turned into ever more of an armed camp.
The Pentagon’s development of precision-guided munitions, for example, provided American forces with an enormous military advantage during the Persian Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003, but also prompted China, Iran, Russia, and other countries to begin developing similar weaponry, quickly diminishing that advantage.
Likewise, China and Russia were the first to deploy combat-ready hypersonic weapons, but in response, the U.S. will be fielding a far greater array of them in a few years’ time.
Chinese and Russian advances in deploying hypersonics also led the U.S. to invest in developing — yes, you guessed it! — anti-hypersonic hypersonics, launching yet one more arms race on planet Earth, while boosting the Pentagon budget by additional billions.
Given all this, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the 2024 Pentagon budget request includes $209 million for the development of a hypersonic interceptor, only the first installment in costly development and procurement programs in the years to come in Washington, Beijing, and Moscow.
If you want to bet on anything, then here’s a surefire way to go: the Pentagon’s drive to achieve dominance in the development and deployment of advanced weaponry will lead not to supremacy but to another endless cycle of high-tech arms races that, in turn, will consume an ever-increasing share of the country’s wealth and scientific talent, while providing negligible improvements in national security.
Rather than spending so much on future weaponry, we should all be thinking about enhanced arms control measures, global climate cooperation, and greater investment in non-military R&D.
If only…
Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change. He is a founder of the Committee for a Sane U.S.-China Policy.
This article is from TomDispatch.com.
In May of 2001 James Bamford, author of best seller THE PUZZLE PALACE, released his latest book, BODY OF SECRETS.
Sort of an ‘everything you ever wanted to know about the NSA, but were afraid to ask’ tutorial. As Whitney Webb might say every chapter is “thick”. Facts we all need to understand what happened in D.C. with government defense spending. A topic I will remind everyone that got completely discarded after the shock of 911.
Bamford did his best trying to warn us but too many of us “missed the boat”!
Government spending went through the roof as Bin Laden was well on his way implementing his plan to destroy the great demon, America.
Reading this book is required by anyone who decides to learn what happened to this country with respect to government spending.
Clue: Found in the book, P435, “In 1975, NSA was an agency that had never before had an oversight relationship with Congress. This is an agency that was created November 4, 1952. Let that sink in!
Remember Bamford’s name “Body of Secrets”, Chapter 13, dissects the NSA. Starting page 528 and has fifty pages of “thick” revelations.
Clue: Starting on page 573 to page 577 the end of the chapter, all about obtaining employment with NSA. See especially p575, 8 lines down, NSA’s Employee Assistance Service.
This stuff is pivotal if we are to understand how to stop the hemorrhage of cash by the Pentagon.
If you never read anything else but these 50 pages you have learned the reasons why we have ended up in the current mess we find ourselves in.
You cannot make this stuff up!
Michael T. Klare has nailed this one. Great job.
Thanks CN
NATO countries have ended up paying almost $4,000 for each 155mm shell going to Ukraine, unbelievable, meanwhile they are due to start ‘training’ Ukrainians on how to drive Abrams tanks in a few months after they’ve removed the armour that is. And maybe they’re hoping it’ll be all over by the time they ever embarrass themselves by sending the Patriot AD system.
Spend any time in present-day China and it’s obvious that the government spends it’s money on infrastructure: new highways, railways, airports, seaports, etc. US infrastructure is falling to pieces.
Re Pentagon research, a LARGE share of US engineers are immigrants from China! The US has always imported it’s Einsteins and Teslas. If Chinese engineers are excluded, the Pentagon will have to re-train a lot of people raised on Creation Science, Flood Geology, Flat Earth geography, White’s Only history, etc. More seriously, Chinese grade schools and high schools are very academic, far more so that US equivalents.
Too bad we can’t spend half this money on countering global climate change before it’s too late! “Positive Thinking” magic will not work!
We are following the Soviet Union of the 80’s. What we say today eerily resembles what the Soviet Generals said, that we have to project power on all fronts for ‘defense’. In the 80’s the Russians just had to have a 5M man army, occupation of eastern Europe, Afghanistan, and subsidize Cuba. Today, the U.S. insists that it has to have basis all over the world, defend Chinese speaking Taiwan from China and Russian speaking Ukraine from Russia. Oh, and dominate the Middle East.
It will work out just as well for us (sarcasm).
Mr. Michael T. Klare is talking out of both sides of his mouth. I hear him repeatedly, perhaps once a week it seems on the KPFA Pacifist Radio show The Talkies hosted by Kris Welch, spewing the same anti-Russia and anti-China propaganda we would hear on any of the major ‘news’ networks. Why Mr. Klare, do you do this when you know better? And the way Kris Welch quickly cuts off myself and other callers to her show trying to provide necessary context is disgusting.
The criticism goes to Amy Goodman, also broadcast on KPFA, for spouting the same anti-Russia propaganda on her show Democracy Now, The War and Peace Report. It just breaks my heart to see that she has been bought after all her great previous work.
The US no longer has the industrial base to catch up to Russia and China . Simply put, it lacks brainpower, The Russians and Chinese devote perhaps three to five times the resources to technical education as the Americans do, with many more engineers per capita. The US lags by 5 years in hypersonics and by they time they reach the level of either country today, those countries will be 10 years ahead. China is now ahead in 42 or the 45 most crucial areas and are leading in the race for next-generation non-silicon semiconductors and even more important superconductors. US military tech is all “pie in the sky”. It’s value-added just like consumer products. The F35 is a good example. Hugely expensive and still not fully operational or debugged. By the time, it is really ready for combat, it will be obsolete. Aircraft carriers are just like the Japanese super battleships of WWII – large, fat targets. I write about this.
It is my sucspiscion that Silicon Valley & their love affair with implanting people, Humane Society adopted pets, avian & aquatic species, & connecting a trillion things to the IoT is for the purpose of mining cryptocurrencies. The Silicon Valley Titans have said outloud that everyone is going to have to get computer chip implants, and many of them have also endorsed banning cash & forcing everyone to use cryptos that expire and can control purchases. I believe that they intend to enslave everyone even more by implanting people with computer chips that would mine cryptos, which the employees would be oblivioys to, falsely believing that employers are paying them cryptos. This Brain Initaitive legalized by Obama in 2014 required informed consent of all research subjects, and that people could withdraw from it at any time for any reason that they chose, & that research subjects must be financially compensated. People cannot withdraw if they are not being informed, & cannot be paid without being informed. They are telling people that they have done this to illegally that they have Havana Syndrome, long “covid”, or that they are crazy & imagining it. Austin Texas anesthesiologist John R Hall MD has documented that this is being done to people without informed consent on his Internation Center Against Abuse of Covert Technologies site, ICAACT.org. People in the surveillance state are notorious for saying that there are no coincidences. They had every intention of destroying the goobal economy in order to enslave people, hoping that people will demand to get paid with cryptos over hypernflated currencies, being complicit accomplices to their own enslavement, yet again. You can tell how stupid Americans are by how they chose to spend $35 trillion. Wars, Data Centers, & tevhnology that totally sucks. I agree with MGT on the national divorce. Give me my divorce settelement America, so that I can trade U in for a more civilized, mature, refined society, Vatican City, where there are no military bases, government, & is totally beautiful. They say that it is tacky, but do not think that violating everyone’s constitutional rights and terrorizing everyone is tacky?! WTF?! They get magnificence, and we get Data Centers! Raw Deal!
By Andrea Iravani
Citizens of the U.S. should worry, but won’t. Russia and China won’t have to worry much, because for every $100 the U.S. spends, they will only have to spend $10 to keep up. Spending $11 will keep them well ahead, in perpetuity. Remember, the aim of the U.S. MIC is to make profits, while the aim of the Russian and Chinese MIC is to keep their respective countries safe, mostly from the U.S. That is why Russia has planes that work and can operate at a high tempo, whilst we have extremely expensive hangar queens that are rarely available and don’t work anything like they were advertised to do when the contracts were handed out. That is why the Russians have AD that works, while we have… Patriot missiles that cannot even take down Houthi subsonic drones, let alone Russian and Chinese hypersonic missiles. The same vast gaps apply to surface navy ships from carriers to ‘littoral combat ships’, or tanks, or howitzers, or an endless host of other boondoggles.
All those 900 or so U.S. bases abroad are just targets, in the modern environment. Expensive to run, easy to hit, hard to defend, harder still to resupply.
The country is run by lunatics, and has been for at least forty years. Longer really, Truman was the one who unlocked the asylum doors wide open and threw away the key, but it took awhile for all the inmates to find their way out.
The US establishment really is determined to destroy the world in its ever more desperate attempts to maintain its illusion of hegemony and dominance.
All intelligence, reason, logic and common sense has long gone, leaving a bunch of mad rabid attack dogs frothing at the mouth and salivating with blood lust.
Like their canine equivalents, they need to be put down – and soon. Before they destroy us all.
Artificial Intelligence.
Hmmmm, well it appears that America does not put its focus on any kind of sanity. Sadly, planet Earth, it seems that the US Military is more impressed with power than with sanity. More impressed with winning rather than living.
Perhaps it’s time to change this mindset. Those who want to go to war need to personally go to war, and please—- leave the rest of us and the planet in peace. Let’s waste money on an artificial planet where military leaders can fight and die to their hearts content—-Perhaps you have forgotten what wars have done to life and humanity over Earth time. Leave the planet alone—–your actions harm this planet and any future. Remember—–“Live by the sword, die by the sword,” is the sad result of all that you will gain.
That may be the plan. I doubt it will come to fruition before the BRICS and other emerging economic systems overtake the US imposed economic order. Once that happens, this imperial dream of unipolar dominance via military technological sophistication will be impossible to finance.
Wow – these morons don’t appear to have been paying attention for the past year-plus: the world is no longer the U.S. military’s playground, which means that all we need is a Department of DEFENSE, not the Department of OFFENSE that this article largely describes. The idea that anyone is going to invade the U.S. in any manner which creates a need for ‘battlefield’ supremacy is ludicrous: for well over a half-century the good old MAD threat has kept us safe and sound with the guarantee that anyone trying to do so will be nuked back into the stone age before they make any progress. And if we try to export battlefield supremacy elsewhere (as we did so ineffectively in Ukraine) it may well be sent to the bottom of international waters well before it arrives at its destination.
The only obvious questions are whether the U.S. dollar will lose enough of its power to make us far more realistic in where we use it and/or whether we’ll elect a government which actually concentrates on the needs of its citizenry.
“The Pentagon” represents about ten million people directly as consultants/lobbyists/defense contractors/etc. who make a living off the “Pentagon budget”. Imagine what happens if that budget goes down! Imagine a resounding international come down abroad for American militarism, and empire! What happens then? the last time the pentagon budget was reduced was Bill Clinton, and he had to literally PAY the defense industry’s “restructuring charges” so that they merge and charge more for their widgets nuts bolts etc. But that didn’t entail a curtailment of Empire. TOday American Empire itself is on the edge of shrinking. I don’t think those ten million rabid people in the military complex will take kindly to decline. They will start to eat America itself to satisfy their return on capital.
Just imagine the nastiness to come! Trump is nothing.
The US’s 0fficials must learn fast how to have a dialogue and diplomacy, VIOLENCE ONLY BRING MORE VIOLENCE!
This growing “abomination”! While two-thirds of American citizens, are struggling to survive & Corp’ 1% Capitalist’, along with their Congress/government, continue to FEED the RICH! This MUST STOP NOW! This is NOT Democracy! It’s an Oligarchy (RULED by the RICH)!
He buried his lead to the end. The gist of this article is: We citizens of the USA are going to see a decline in every area of life–education, health care, housing, transportation, environmental quality, you name it — as long as our national wealth is poured down the sewer of military profiteering and in waging wars provoked mainly as an excuse for more such diversion of our physical, intellectual and spiritual assets.
As long as the world orbits around global capitalism there will be wars. Period. The deadly struggle to control/exploit resources and markets ensures increased militarism.
The world must transition to an eco-socialist model of organization. ALL the world’s resources, including all scientific knowledge, must be democratically harnessed for the betterment of all the world’s people. ……In the meantime, the ill gotten TRILLIONS of dollars owned by global oligarchs needs to be expropriated to immediately remedy the suffering of the least fortunate. NOBODY in the world should be without clean drinking water, for example.
Perhaps this won’t evolve until one day humanity finds itself trying to carry on post nuclear winter, but, it must come to pass.
The US public will have all sorts of fancy, cutting-edge dystopian robotic and AI weapons systems for the imperial military, but no health care, crumbling infrastructure, declining average life expectancy, ever increasing numbers of house-less, more polluted, toxic environment and general Techno-Totalitarian Financial Tyranny. How wonderful! Time to invest in Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics etc. We can make a killing from this new wave of “defense” spending.
Some senior folks over at the CFR and Atlantic Council are calling to DOUBLE the “defense” budget. Who needs Soc. Sec. and Medicare?