VII. The Security-Industrial Complex

When Eisenhower in his farewell speech of January 1961 warned against the rise of a “military-industrial complex,” he was warning the country about a system that was rigged in favor of inside deal-making between private industry and the government—where both sides have a vested interest in maintaining the system. Instead of a simple supply and demand, buyer/seller transaction, where the military gets the arms it wants and the companies that supply them get business from the military—the system distorts supply and demand; retired military and others work for arms suppliers, become lobbyists for the industry, influence policy. Thus, demand is created and prices inflated. More worrisome is that to keep the industry growing requires keeping up the perception of threat and menace. It is in the interest of the security-industrial complex to focus on those fears that are most melodramatic—usually ones associated with physical violence. This “sells” better than focusing on dangers that are long range and whose effects may be gradual, but which are more consequential.

The cost of overestimating risks is of course hard to determine, but to put things in perspective well over $1 trillion has been spent on homeland security since 9/11. The 2016 budget of the Department of Homeland Security (which did not exist before 9/11) was $41.6 billion. Under the Trump administration’s budget, DHS stands to gain a 7 percent increase over 2016, in no small measure to make good on the campaign promise of building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.¹

There is of course a spectrum of costs related to security. At the more reasonable end, the cost of street corner cameras in cities has proven to be a good investment, even though this may erode civil rights and the right to privacy. Further along the spectrum there are some routine costs such as the militarization of local and city police forces requiring more and more expensive equipment, the maintenance of that equipment, and training officers in their use. On a case by case basis some of these costs may be justifiable, some not.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are obviously costs in the security apparatus that are close to a complete waste of money and time. For example, the thousands of personnel at hundreds of airports who ask travelers “Did you pack your bags yourself? Have your bags been out of your sight since you packed them? Did anyone give you anything to take with you?” Once a silly mechanism like this is put in place, no one asks “Why do we keep doing this?” even though it should be obvious that any halfway intelligent potential attacker would know enough to answer such questions correctly. Yet there is a cost in personnel, training, and consumer inconvenience and time associated with this hard-to-break habit.

Some costs are related to single events; the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing resulted in three immediate deaths and over 250 injured. During the manhunt that followed, a police officer was killed and there were additional injuries. The city responded by asking people in one large neighborhood to shelter in place. Boston public transit, train service, schools, and universities closed. The costs are hard to determine, but they would seem to be out of proportion to what happened. Former congressman Ron Paul called this a “military style takeover of parts of Boston,” and said that “this unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.” In any case, while this was purely a terrorist attack, it was not part of a conspiracy, nor related to ISIS or Al Qaeda. In the public mind, however, reinforced by officials, it became part of the Islamic terrorism phenomenon, and thus bolsters the security-industrial complex.

The number of full-time security workers is between 1.9 million and 2.1 million competing in a $350 billion “market” as of 2013, according to a market report by ASIS International. If this figure is right, it dwarfs U.S. foreign aid (2017 projection $34 billion) by a factor of ten.

There are other costs incurred by our sometimes irrational or heavy-handed approaches to security which are not quantifiable. In April 2016, an enormous convoy of vehicles and guards was carrying Samantha Power, who was then the U.S. ambassador to the UN, to a rural Cameroonian village to see a poverty alleviation project. Proceeding at high speed, for “security reasons,” one of the vehicles killed a child on the roadside. The head of security deemed it a risk to stop and so the convoy continued.² It would be easy to believe that once pro-American people suddenly became quite anti-American as a result. A cookie-cutter approach to the security of overseas personnel—specifying numbers of armed guards and vehicles in all circumstances regardless of relative dangers, while benefitting the suppliers of guards and vehicles, can have indeterminate costs to the reputation of the U.S. abroad; can result in the subsequent potential loss of better intelligence gathering by putting a proverbial wall between our human intelligence sources. Just as important, a fortress mentality in our diplomatic and aid posts overseas can result in a longer-term loss of “intelligence” in the largest sense—that is to our understanding of the world outside our borders.