How the Military-Industrial Complex Retains Its Grip, and RFK Jr. Is Bound to Be Its Nemesis

By Dario Calvisi, Special to The Kennedy Beacon

By Dario Calvisi, Special to The Kennedy Beacon

People say the Pentagon does not have a strategy. They are wrong.
The Pentagon does have a strategy; it is: “Don’t interrupt the money flow, add to it.”

Col. John R. Boyd, U.S. Air Force

The news that Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. is seeking the presidency has electrified a US electorate that is longing for real, meaningful change in US politics and policies. It has also prompted extremely harsh, even obsessive reactions from a broad swath of the US establishment.

One all-powerful coalition of players that stands to lose the most from the election of RFK Jr. is what has come to be known as the military-industrial complex (MIC), also called the military-industrial-congressional complex, a sprawling system of defense contractors, military and intelligence agencies, politicians (especially congressional), and cultural and academic actors that connive to keep the war machine running.

Over 60 years ago, President Eisenhower warned against the corroding influence of the MIC in the domestic policymaking process. In the decades since his famous and prescient warning, highly informative studies such as Andrew Cockburn’s The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine have exposed the MIC’s incredible aptitude for regenerating itself, and its unsurpassed ability to engender endless wars.

Most tellingly, as Cockburn wrote in Harper’s magazine, the US defense budget has for decades been remarkably resistant to any decline in its annual increases, even after seismic de-escalation events such as the withdrawal from Vietnam and the end of the Cold War. Cockburn intriguingly concluded, quoting Pentagon analyst and reformer Franklin Spinney, that the MIC had mutated into a “living organic system,” effectively capable of triggering a counter-reaction any time political action seriously threatens to downsize defense spending beyond an “accepted” threshold, always keeping such decreases below 5%.

The policy proposals of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would fundamentally alter this system, chiefly by reducing the overbearing influence of the corporate sector in politics, a crucial preservation tool of the MIC. RFK Jr. not only seeks to terminate endless foreign wars and other military entanglements. He is also advancing a political agenda that would reorient the whole of the US economy, by reallocating war-bound resources toward a more productive and economically fair society. In fact, reducing the colossal investment in the defense sector would also free up vital resources to achieve crucial goals that RFK Jr. is also pursuing, such as the realization of a greener economy and the restoration of purchasing power in the American middle and working class. Under his leadership the US defense budget would inevitably and dramatically collapse, and with it the MIC as we know it.

Exposing how the MIC permeates the economic, political, and social fabric of the US is tantamount to exposing the many ways the MIC would attempt, and has attempted, to defuse a most-feared candidate such as RFK Jr.

The Vital Lifeline of the MIC: Congress Knows

How does the MIC perpetuate itself as we approach the second quarter of the 21st century? Aggressive lobbying of Congress and the executive branch continues to play an indispensable role, right out in the open, especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Even before that notorious ruling, which enables corporations and other interests to spend unlimited funds to influence elections, tracking of defense contractors’ federal and state lobbying showed a sustained effort to shape federal policies through financial contributions. “Since 2003,” according to watchdog organization OpenSecrets, “the defense industry’s extensive network of lobbyists and donors have steered $374 million into campaign contributions and $2.7 billion into lobbying spending to influence defense policy.” Like their Republican counterparts, top Democratic Party leaders, including President Biden, overwhelmingly benefit from defense contractors’ largesse.

A most pernicious practice that is key to the collusion between corporate interests and US lawmakers is the so-called revolving door. Between 2011 and 2022, OpenSecrets reports, more than three-quarters of defense-sector lobbyists had previously worked in the federal government, and their efforts continue to pay off: “President Joe Biden’s 2024 budget proposal requested a record $886 billion for defense spending. Over one-third of the defense budget went to the top 100 Department of Defense contractors in 2021, the most recent year for which the U.S. government has published contracting data.”

Kennedy has not only promised to “slam shut the revolving door that shunts people from government agencies to lucrative positions in the companies they were supposed to regulate, and back again,” but also to radically restrain lobbying influence by “getting money out of politics” altogether. 

Such bold plans are unthinkable in the current Uniparty environment. For that crucial opposition alone, Kennedy is bound to be anathema to the MIC, and to mainstream Republicans and Democrats alike. 

His firm opposition to the unnecessary escalation with China is a case in point. He rightly critiques the extremely dangerous, grossly fraudulent inflation of China’s assumed security threat. Pushing for war with China not only produces an absolute bonanza for the MIC, but epitomizes the dishonest exploits the MIC resorts to in endlessly restoring itself.

RFK Jr. has also spoken firmly in favor of a negotiated solution for Ukraine, the most recent exceptional revenue booster for the MIC, and has bravely pointed out the extensive responsibilities of the US and the West in provoking the conflict – something virtually no one in the Democratic Party will do.

The overbearing influence of the MIC, however, extends far beyond the political sphere, into academic, cultural, and social domains.

Policy Influencers and Media: In the Tank

Leading and supposedly independent think tanks such as the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment, and the Wilson Center exert considerable influence in foreign and defense policymaking. They also happen to have disturbing connections to the MIC, which cast strong doubts on the reliability of their hardly unbiased coverage of current events and their policy recommendations. As late as June 2023, a comprehensive analysis by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft effectively exposed the entrenched interests of the defense industry in this influential field, finding that “of the 27 think tanks whose donors could be identified, 21 received funding from the defense sector (77 percent).” 

The role of think tanks in shaping public opinion regarding the Ukrainian conflict, where defense contractors have a marked vested interest, is especially troubling. RFK Jr. has repeatedly indicted the MIC’s draining of national resources to provide financial and military support to Ukraine, calling it “a money-laundering scheme” that is redirecting billions of dollars to the coffers of the defense industry. 

Photo: OpenClipArt-Vectors on Pixabay

Of extreme concern is the Quincy Institute’s finding that “in articles related to U.S. military involvement in Ukraine media outlets have cited think tanks with financial backing from the defense industry,” which were largely favorable to any and all military support to Kiev, “85 percent of the time, or seven times as often as [they cited] think tanks that do not accept funding from Pentagon contractors.” Those same media outlets, the study points out, “rarely identify conflicts of interest posed” by experts they cite from defense-industry-funded think tanks.

Of course, neither the legacy media nor social media can escape manipulation by the MIC. The Pentagon has benefited from colossal budgets for what are neutrally called “psychological operations.” Ostensibly aimed at countering foreign actors’ disinformation, these Pentagon programs, as investigative reporter Kit Klarenberg found, have been exploited to spread US government propaganda, including outright disinformation, in domestic and foreign media.

Congress recently required “a sweeping audit of how [the Pentagon] conducts clandestine information warfare, after major social media companies identified and took offline fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military in violation of the platforms’ rules.” “Undesirable” candidates such as Kennedy happen to be prominent targets of the MIC’s disinformation-promoting activities. The “Twitter Files” reporting revealed that he was specifically targeted for censorship by the Biden administration not for spreading misinformation or disinformation, but for sharing facts and truth. That unconstitutional censorship is now subject to a lawsuit, Missouri v. Biden, that will be heard by the Supreme Court.

The CIA’s collusion with the media has long been known. US intelligence services have also been exposed for editing the contents of Wikipedia pages. Supposedly an unbiased encyclopedia, Wikipedia deceitfully introduces Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as an “American environmental lawyer and writer who promotes anti-vaccine misinformation and public health conspiracy theories.” 

The Kennedy Beacon recently revealed disturbing and extensive involvement of the CIA in Meta platforms, where former CIA officers “personally oversaw the banning of over three dozen pages, groups, and accounts associated with individuals” perceived to be spreading “disinformation,” including RFK Jr.

Cultural Wars

Perhaps more surprisingly, the Defense Department is intimately involved in the entertainment industry as well. In National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood, researchers Matthew Alford and Tom Secker expose a deeply entrenched system for manipulating and outright censoring the contents of movies and TV shows on behalf of government agencies.

Alford and Secker compiled an impressive list of DoD-supported films, which, from 1911 through 2017, amounted to a total of 814 items, 117 of them produced after 2004. Iconic titles such as Top Gun and Charlie Wilson’s War are among this group. They also found that “the Pentagon has worked on 1133 TV titles, 977 of them between 2004 and 2016,” including American Idol and The X Factor.

Filmmakers who do not earn a DoD-CIA “stamp of approval” for their work and who present unsanctioned versions of current or historical events encounter pervasive marginalization and obstruction. The 2022 documentary Theaters of War: How the Pentagon and CIA Took Hollywood features interviews with director Oliver Stone, who recounts his long story of opposition and exclusion from the MIC-influenced industry, most recently in distributing and promoting his documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, on the recently released JFK assassination evidence, which is largely absent from mainstream platforms.

RFK Jr. has called for a fresh look into his uncle’s and his father’s assassinations, exceptionally important events in US history, not least in how they exemplify the fate of any major political actor who dares to challenge the MIC.

The MIC has been the driving force in the media cover-up of JFK and RFK assassination facts since the beginning. As Aaron Good reported for The Kennedy Beacon, it was actually because of CIA intervention that colluding media, described by a CIA memo as “propaganda assets,” first began to circulate the term conspiracy theorist to attack early critics of the Warren Commission Report. That term has been used more and more frequently to this day, in order “to summarily discredit narratives and narrators who question or falsify official stories—including, of course, RFK Jr. and his supporters.”

The MIC’s Death Warrant: RFK Jr.’s Vision for a New Society

Finally, the education benefits offered by the armed forces as a recruitment incentive have also contributed, in the current inequitable social context, to perversely embedding the military into the fabric of US society. Military-based educational benefits, regardless of the desirable size of the armed forces, have turned into a not-so-subtle form of sociological manipulation, if not blackmailing.

While both enlistment rates and confidence in the armed forces appear to be very low today, the US still has an extremely high proportion of its citizens enlisted in the armed forces for a country not currently (directly) at war.

A January 2023 study published by the National Defense University showed that “84 percent of new enlistees” cited “money for education as a primary motivator to join.” Hardly surprising, if one factors in that “the cost of college tuition has increased by approximately 3 percent per year over and above the inflation rate since 1985.” Thus, even the strong measures to make education more affordable that Kennedy suggests would subvert machinations of the MIC.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not just seeking a balanced and peace-oriented foreign policy. He also envisions a fundamentally different political, social, and economic system. His proposed reforms and innovations would strike at the core of the MIC’s power, attacking its very roots in lobbying and defense-driven allocation of resources. And the MIC, the “living organic system” that has fought such change at every turn for the past 70 years, cannot help but view him as its nemesis.