Stephen Mayer

Just over 6 months ago, the Pentagon announced its largest budget in American history: $842 billion, *half* of which will go to for-profit defense contractors. The military-industrial complex’s recent roots trace to a 1993 secret Pentagon dinner hosted by Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense Les Aspin who summoned CEOs of America's largest defense contractors to the so-called “Last Supper” to lobby the nation's top defense contractors into consolidations by merging with one another. It worked: the number of prime contractors in the United States has dropped by 90%, from 50+ in the 90s to just 5 today, creating a concentrated cartel of defense contractors who profit handsomely from war. Take a shoulder-fired Stinger missile that is used today in the Ukraine war: In 1991, it cost $25,000. Today, it costs more than $400,000 to replace each missile sent to Ukraine. Even adjusting for inflation & product improvements, that's a >7x cost increase. In 2015, a Pentagon review found Lockheed Martin and its subcontractor, Boeing, were grossly overcharging the Pentagon & US allies by hundreds of millions of dollars for the Patriot's PAC-3 missiles: total profits approached 40%.  Is it a coincidence the Department of Defense is the only US federal agency to *never* have completed or passed an audit? This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s just mundane reality.