Let’s talk about a subject that everyone seems to ignore. Is the war in Ukraine good for the American economy?
Don’t get me wrong, I am as big of a patriot as any of you. However, I often wonder about some of the military decisions coming out of Washington these days.
Let’s take a look.
Weapons manufacturers rake in a fortune as arms flood into Ukraine from the U.S. and Europe. Experts warn sending more will only fuel continued global violence.
BY ATIF RASHID
As the war continues, U.S. aid to Ukraine now stands at a staggering $37.6 billion, by far the largest amount of military aid given to Ukraine by any country.
Billions of dollars worth of military equipment has poured into Ukraine since Russia launched dozens of missile strikes into Ukraine late last year, marking the start of its full-scale military invasion into the country.
From state-of-the-art tanks and missile systems to helicopters, helmets and ammunition, rounds and rounds of military hardware continue to fly in. The vast majority, experts say, is coming from the United States.
“It’s certainly more than we’ve given any country before, even at the height of the Afghanistan war,” says Hanna Homestead, a policy analyst at the Center for International Policy who focuses on the impact of the U.S. arms trade around the world. “The aid that we’ve sent to Ukraine for their military is more than our NASA budget for space.”
By the end of last year, Washington had spent almost $20 billion on arming Ukraine — nearly double the amount the United States gave in 2021 to 12 other countries combined, including Afghanistan ($4.1 billion), Israel ($3.3 billion) and Egypt ($1.3 billion).
Ukraine is going through extremely high rates of artillery, Homestead says. Some of the weapons being provided are so sophisticated that Ukraine’s military is untrained in how to utilize them; the New York Times reports that some soldiers are using Google Translate to understand English-language manuals for instructions.
As the conflict drags on with little hope for a resolution soon, it’s the U.S. military-industrial complex that enjoys the spoils of war.
“When you have a military that’s not as professionalized, you have a lot more inaccuracies. You have a lot more artillery used than you necessarily should, especially [when] it’s being given for free,” Homestead explains. “The Ukrainians are really burning through a lot of that artillery much faster than they should be.”
As the war continues, U.S. military aid to Ukraine now stands at a staggering $37.6 billion, by far the largest amount of military aid given to Ukraine by any country. And with the Pentagon looking to compete with China by accelerating arms sales to allies, experts say there is no end in sight.
The European Union, meanwhile, has given Ukraine €4.6 billion ($5 billion) in military aid, marking the first time in its history that the bloc has armed a non-member country. The U.K. has also pledged £4.6 billion ($5.7 billion) in military assistance and is aiming to train 30,000 Ukrainians by the end of the year.
Ukraine has certainly pinned its hopes of victory on shipments of sophisticated Western military equipment. But as the conflict drags on with little hope for a resolution soon, it’s the U.S. military-industrial complex that enjoys the spoils of war.
So, we are spending a fortune of our hard earned tax dollars on a war with no clear ending in sight. We really need to ask ourselves, why?
Who is benefiting from the war?
Nearly 15 months since Russia invaded, the conflict has become a war of attrition.
With the International Criminal Court’s warrant of arrest against Russian President Vladimir Putin, a reluctance to negotiate, allegations of war crimes, personal jabs and no apparent peace talks in progress, the war is likely to simmer on.
So far, American defense firms have been the only winners in the conflict. Officials from Russia, China and the European Union — where it will cost €175 billion ($190 billion) to offset price hikes and supply chain issues, as well as improve its energy independence, host refugees and bolster its defense — have accused Washington of prolonging the conflict to its own benefit.
“The fact is, if you look at it soberly, the country that is most profiting from this war is the U.S. because they are selling more gas and at higher prices, and because they are selling more weapons,” an unnamed EU official told Politico in November last year.
Regardless of declining public support for military spending and a protracted conflict, American weapons manufacturers have seen their values skyrocket since the war began. In the weeks after Russia’s invasion, the market capitalization of Raytheon Technologies shot up to $155 billion from $128 billion at the start of the year. Lockheed Martin started 2022 worth $98 billion; by the end of year, it had reached $127 billion — its highest since records show. Northrop Grumman started the year on $61 billion and ended at $84 billion.
“It’s a huge profit center for the big companies: Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and Boeing,” says William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute, where he focuses on the global arms trade and Pentagon spending. “At the moment, I think they’re riding the wave.”
Officials from Russia, China and the European Union have accused Washington of prolonging the conflict to its own benefit.
Wait. What? Are they saying making a profit is a higher priority than helping the people of Ukraine? Surely not.
If so, has this ever happened before? Of course it has and we simply have to look back to our history during WWII.
The might of the military-industrial complex
In 1961, former U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower warned in his farewell address “about the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex to push for higher and higher spending,” Hartung says.
So how about a little history?
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/ford-and-fuhrer/
Ford and the Führer
We have sworn to you once,
But now we make our allegiance permanent.
Like currents in a torrent lost,
We all flow into you.
Even when we cannot understand you,
We will go with you.
One day we may comprehend,
How you can see our future.
Hearts like bronze shields,
We have placed around you,
And it seems to us, that only
You can reveal God’s world to us.
This poem ran in an in-house magazine published by Ford Motor Company’s German subsidiary in April of 1940. Titled “Führer,” the poem appeared at a time when Ford maintained complete control of the German company and two of its top executives sat on the subsidiary’s board.
It was also a time when the object of Ford’s affection was in the process of overrunning Western Europe after already having swallowed up Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland in the East.
“Führer” was among thousands of pages of documents compiled by the Washington law firm of Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, which sought damages from Ford on behalf of a Russian woman who toiled as a slave laborer at its German plant.
This past September, a judge in New Jersey, Joseph Greenaway Jr., threw the case out on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired. Greenaway, who did not exonerate Ford, did accept the company’s argument that “redressing the tragedies of that period has been–and should continue to be–a nation-to-nation, government-to-government concern.”
Ford argues that company headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, lost control of its German plant after the United States entered the war in 1941. Hence, Ford is not responsible for any actions taken by its German subsidiary during World War II.
“We did not do business in Germany during the war,” says Lydia Cisaruk, a Ford spokeswoman. “The Nazis confiscated the plant there and we lost all contact.” She added that Ford played a “pivotal role in the American war effort. After the United States entered the war, Ford threw its entire backing to the war effort.”
That Ford and a number of other American firms–including General Motors and Chase Manhattan–worked with the Nazis has been previously disclosed.
So, too, has Henry Ford’s role as a leader of the America First Committee, which sought to keep the United States out of World War II.
However, the new materials, most of which were found at the National Archives, are far more damning than earlier revelations. They show, among other things, that up until Pearl Harbor, Dearborn made huge revenues by producing war matériel for the Reich and that the man it selected to run its German subsidiary was an enthusiastic backer of Hitler.
German Ford served as an “arsenal of Nazism” with the consent of headquarters in Dearborn, says a US Army report prepared in 1945.
Moreover, Ford’s cooperation with the Nazis continued until at least August 1942–eight months after the United States entered the war–through its properties in Vichy France.
Indeed, a secret wartime report prepared by the US Treasury Department concluded that the Ford family sought to further its business interests by encouraging Ford of France executives to work with German officials overseeing the occupation.
“There would seem to be at least a tacit acceptance by [Henry Ford’s son] Mr. Edsel Ford of the reliance…on the known neutrality of the Ford family as a basis of receipt of favors from the German Reich,” it says.
The new information about Ford’s World War II role comes at a time of growing attention to corporate collaboration with the Third Reich.
In 1998 Swiss banks reached a settlement with Holocaust survivors and agreed to pay $1.25 billion. That set the stage for a host of new Holocaust-related revelations as well as legal claims stemming from such issues as looted art and unpaid insurance benefits.
This past November NBC News reported that Chase Manhattan’s French branch froze Jewish accounts at the request of German occupation authorities. Chase’s Paris branch manager, Carlos Niedermann, worked closely with German officials and approved loans to finance war production for the Nazi Army.
In Germany the government and about fifty firms that employed slave and forced labor during World War II–including Bayer, BMW, Volkswagen and Daimler-Chrysler–reached agreement in mid-December to establish a $5.1 billion fund to pay victims.
Opel, General Motors’ German subsidiary, announced it would contribute to the fund. (As reported last year in the Washington Post, an FBI report from 1941 quoted James Mooney, GM’s director of overseas operations, as saying he would refuse to do anything that might “make Hitler mad.”)
Ford refused to participate in the settlement talks, though its collaboration with the Third Reich was egregious and extensive.
Ford’s director of global operations, Jim Vella, said in a statement, “Because Ford did not do business in Germany during the war–our Cologne plant was confiscated by the Nazi government–it would be inappropriate for Ford to participate in such a fund.”
The generous treatment allotted Ford Motor by the Nazi regime is partially attributable to the violent anti-Semitism of the company’s founder, Henry Ford.
His pamphlet The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem brought him to the attention of a former German Army corporal named Adolf Hitler, who in 1921 became chairman of the fledgling Nazi Party.
When Ford was considering a run for the presidency that year, Hitler told the Chicago Tribune, “I wish that I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help.” (The story comes from Charles Higham’s Trading With the Enemy, which details American business collaboration with the Nazis.)
In Mein Kampf, written two years later, Hitler singled Ford out for praise. “It is Jews who govern the stock exchange forces of the American Union,” he wrote. “Every year makes them more and more the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions; only a single great man, Ford, to their fury, still maintains full independence.”
In 1938, long after the vicious character of Hitler’s government had become clear, Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the Nazi regime’s highest honor for foreigners.
Woah! Wait a minute. Did they just say that Hitler awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle to Henry Ford?
Ford Motor set up shop in Germany in 1925, when it opened an office in Berlin. Six years later, it built a large plant in Cologne, which became its headquarters in the country.
Ford of Germany prospered during the Nazi years, especially with the economic boom brought on by World War II.
Sales increased by more than half between 1938 and 1943, and, according to a US government report found at the National Archives, the value of the German subsidiary more than doubled during the course of the war.
Does this sound familiar folks?
Ford eagerly collaborated with the Nazis, which greatly enhanced its business prospects and at the same time helped Hitler prepare for war (and after the 1939 invasion of Poland, conduct it).
In the mid-thirties, Dearborn helped boost German Ford’s profits by placing orders with the Cologne plant for direct delivery to Ford plants in Latin America and Japan.
In 1936, as a means of preserving the Reich’s foreign reserves, the Nazi government blocked the German subsidiary from buying needed raw materials.
Ford headquarters in Dearborn responded–just as the Nazis hoped it would–by shipping rubber and other materials to Cologne in exchange for German-made parts.
The Nazi government took a 25 percent cut out of the imported raw materials and gave them to other manufacturers, an arrangement approved by Dearborn.
According to the US Army report of 1945, prepared by Henry Schneider, German Ford began producing vehicles of a strictly military nature for the Reich even before the war began.
The company also established a war plant ready for mobilization day in a “‘safe’ zone” near Berlin, a step taken, according to Schneider, “with the…approval of Dearborn.”
Following Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland, which set off World War II, German Ford became one of the largest suppliers of vehicles to the Wehrmacht (the German Army).
Papers found at the National Archives show that the company was selling to the SS and the police as well. By 1941 Ford of Germany had stopped manufacturing passenger vehicles and was devoting its entire production capacity to military trucks.
That May the leader of the Nazi Party in Cologne sent a letter to the plant thanking its leaders for helping “assure us victory in the present [war] struggle” and for demonstrating the willingness to “cooperate in the establishment of an exemplary social state.”
Ford vehicles were crucial to the revolutionary Nazi military strategy of blitzkrieg. Of the 350,000 trucks used by the motorized German Army as of 1942, roughly one-third were Ford-made.
The Schneider report states that when American troops reached the European theater, “Ford trucks prominently present in the supply lines of the Wehrmacht were understandably an unpleasant sight to men in our Army.”
Indeed, the Cologne plant proved to be so important to the Reich’s war effort that the Allies bombed it on several occasions. A secret 1944 US Air Force “Target Information Sheet” on the factory said that for the previous five years it had been “geared for war production on a high level.”
While Ford Motor enthusiastically worked for the Reich, the company initially resisted calls from President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill to increase war production for the Allies.
Now folks, just recently I have seen news articles stating that analysts fear that we are depleting our supply of munitions here at home in an effort to continue supplying the Ukraine. They stated that in the event the US finds itself in a conflict with China over Taiwan, we are said to have only a two-month supply of necessary munitions.
Is that not exactly what Roosevelt and Churchill were telling Ford during WWII? In other words, your priority should be supplying the US, NOT Germany.
Tell me history doesn’t repeat itself. Is the military industrial complex really fighting for the preservation of democracy worldwide, or are they simply in it for the almighty dollar? It could have a lot to do with how long the war in Ukraine continues.
PS. Is it not interesting that one of the largest munitions plants in the US is in Scranton, Pennsylvania?