IPFS News Link • Military Industrial Complex
The military 'solution': even the military has been "militarized"
• Tom Engelhardt, Asia TimesAnd yet the militarization of the United States and the strengthening of the National Security Complex continues to accelerate. The Pentagon is, by now, a world unto itself, with a staggering budget at a moment when no other power or combination of powers comes near to challenging this country's might.
In the era following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the military-industrial complex has been thoroughly mobilized under the rubric of "privatization" and now goes to war with the Pentagon. With its US$80 billion-plus budget, the intelligence bureaucracy has simply exploded. There are so many competing agencies and outfits, surrounded by a universe of private intelligence contractors, all swathed in a penumbra of secrecy, and they have grown so large, mainly under the Pentagon's aegis, that you could say intelligence is now a ruling way of life in Washington - and it, too, is being thoroughly militarized.