Last week, the US Senate joined the House of Representatives and voted to pass a record-breaking $901 billion defense budget, in addition to the $156 billion in military spending allocated by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July. This means that the US military will, for the first time, enjoy more than $1 trillion in annual funding next year, even though the United States already spends more on its military than the next nine nations combined.
This comes after the editorial board of the New York Times — the (generally liberal) paper of record — recently published seven military-focused op-eds in a single week, some of which explicitly called for more military spending. Parroting potentially exaggerated claims of China’s military threat, the Times board contended that, to “prevent wars from starting and winning them if they do,” the United States must expand its military budget and “[keep] pace in these 21st-century arms races.”
“Half a percentage point more, or around $150 billion, spent on [defense] manufacturing capacity would represent a major effort to rebuild our industrial base,” the Times board wrote.
Compare that to recent polling, which shows just one in ten voters supports higher defense spending.
Where does this vast disagreement between Americans, their elected officials, and their media come from? Experts have pointed, in part, to the far-reaching influence of defense-industry-backed research groups that help legitimize and justify militarization.
“The [defense] industry’s greatest asset . . . is the vast troves of seemingly independent research that supports interventionist foreign policies and loose weapons export regimes,” writes Shana Marshall, director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University.
Meanwhile, of the twenty-five public policy institutes most frequently cited by US government officials, media, government officials, and academics, twelve are funded in part by weapons manufacturers.
Research and analysis produced by the defense-industry-backed blob is relied on by many corporate media outlets to color their coverage and is frequently cited uncritically.
For example, a 2023 Quincy Institute of Responsible Statecraft analysis of coverage of US interventionism in Ukraine found that American media outlets cited think tanks with defense-industry backing in 85 percent of articles. These articles rarely disclosed the conflicts of interest posed by citing so-called experts who stand to financially benefit from increased militarization.
According to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a media accountability group, between 2015 and 2016, the New York Times published op-eds written by or citing staffers from the national security think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies at least ten times. Later the Times accused the think tank (funded by groups including weapons manufacturers, fossil fuel giants, the Pentagon, the United Arab Emirates, and more) of soft corruption.
That article’s title was “How Think Tanks Amplify Corporate America’s Influence.”
Great Job Veronica Riccobene & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
