Job Creation and War
Matthew Birkhold

People who oppose the war in Iraq normally say the war is caused by the Bush administration’s desire for oil, power, and oil money. While plausible, I believe these are only partial explanations.  If we want to completely understand the reasons for war, we have to understand something called the military industrial complex.  If we understand this, we’ll see that one reason we’re at war is because it provides jobs.

According to former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson, the economic and political collapse of the US is near because of something he calls “military Keynesianism.”  According to Johnson, military Keynesianism creates a situation where “the domestic economy requires sustained military ambition in order to avoid recession or collapse.”  In other words, if we are to enjoy a fully functioning economy, we must be at war.

In the midst of the depression preceding WW II, British economist John Keynes put forth a series of economic theories widely referred to as Keynesian economics. According to Keynes, in order to prevent the social unrest and social movements that typically arise from hard times, governments should go into debt to create jobs for citizens. To accomplish this Keynes suggested that governments borrow money from other governments to fund job-creating projects. These projects may involve tearing down public housing and rebuilding it, or building things like bridges and roads. The crux of Keynes argument is that putting people to work incurs spending and creates jobs. When this happens, economies recover, contractions are resolved, and the government can repay its debts.

According to Johnson however, US military Keynesianism has not involved the repayment of debts by the federal government. Instead, the federal government has incurred tremendous debt financing economic growth through military production, which according to Johnson, decreases the value of the dollar and fuels the potential for economic collapse.

The term military industrial complex was first used in the US during president Eisenhower’s farewell address. As the cold war began, Eisenhower told US citizens that, “Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment.  We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.”

What Eisenhower called “the permanent defense industry,” the three and half million men and women employed by it, and the jobs and economic growth created as a consequence of defense industry employment make up the US military industrial complex.

Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Reagan used the cold war to justify massive defense spending and global construction of US military bases.  According to Johnson, if this were the only reason, when the cold war was over, defense spending and base construction would have stopped.

Because neither happened, Johnson assumed they served a post-cold war use. As it turns out, the economic growth created by the defense industry became a crucial part of the national economy and cutting it would have been costly. The military industrial complex has created jobs in the US and these jobs have fueled economic growth.  In the US, if we are not at war, unemployment will increase dramatically.

Because war provides income for families and individuals alike, we’ll be at war until that’s no longer the case.

Matt Birkhold is a Brooklyn based writer and educator.  He can be reached at birkhold (at) gmail (dot) com.