Melvin A. Goodman — The Military-Industrial Complex Gets Its Man

Carter has been disingenuous in challenging the notion that there are savings to be had in reducing spending on strategic weaponry. As recently as last year, then Deputy Defense Secretary Carter argued that “you would be surprised to know that nuclear weapons don’t actually cost that much…. It is not a big swinger of the budget. You don’t save a lot of money by having arms control and so forth.” In fact, one of the best-kept defense secrets of the past sixty years has been the high cost of producing and maintaining nuclear weapons, somewhere between $5-6 trillion, which represents more than one-fourth of overall defense spending. A great deal of this money is in the budget for the Department of Energy, and therefore defense intellectuals such as Ashton Carter can say that it is not part of the defense budget.

And he is a neocon.

Once again, the Pentagon is in the hands of someone who believes in American exceptionalism and that the United States has a moral obligation to make the world over in our image.

Counterpunch
The Military-Industrial Complex Gets Its Man

Melvin A. Goodman | senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and professor of government at Johns Hopkins University