Explainer: What is military aid, who benefits?

Photo by Joel Rivera-Camacho on Unsplash

Why We Can't Have Nice Things

It’s open enrollment season for health insurance plans. Obama Care went into effect a decade ago, and I still cannot explain the health insurance marketplace to you. I do know, however, that come January 2024, in my least favorite holiday tradition, I will pay more money for worse care. To add injury to injury, I just got my fourth letter this quarter from the Department of Education reminding me that it’s a wrap for the student loan repayment pause. I’m in a great mood. 

It seems as though every few months, the federal government promises billions of dollars to another foreign military. Billions of dollars that, mysteriously, do not exist when working class people ask for trifles such as education and health care. (How would we pay for it, after all?) Something changed when I learned of President Biden’s October request to Congress for an additional $105 billion, principally for the Ukrainian and Israeli militaries. 

I realized that “military aid” is one of those terms that I loosely understood and could use in a sentence, but not one I could neatly define. In particular, how much the U.S. spends propping up foreign militaries, where the money goes, who benefits at home and abroad, and why our government does this. So, I thought a brief explainer might be helpful for others, as well. 

What Is Military Aid?  

In 2022 alone, the United States gave $10.1 billion in military aid to 141 countries. The program has operated uninterrupted at this scale or greater under presidents of both parties since the end of World War II. Israel ($3.3 billion), Ukraine ($1.5 billion), and Egypt ($1.7 billion) were by far the three largest recipients. Military aid typically takes the form of weapons purchases and training through grants that do not need to be repaid and some direct loans. 

While that seems simple enough, there is a problem of fuzzy categorization. Under most theories of war, the United States has been at war with Yemen since the 2014 Houthi takeover of the country. Congress has not declared a war despite decades of military action in the country. From March 2015 to November 2018, as part of this non-war-war, the Pentagon spent approximately $300 million to perform aerial refueling missions for Saudi jets between bombing campaigns in Yemen. That money does not show up as military aid in the government’s public database of foreign aid. It’s not war, it’s not aid, it’s a mystery!

This sort of aid attempts to expand U.S. military might without overextending its main fighting force. Given that there are more than 750 U.S. bases across 80 countries, it would not be difficult to overextend the roughly 2.2 million member standing military. By extending the military’s reach, it also extends its foreign mission; namely, to control territories and the resources therein, and to make those markets favorable for capitalist industry and investment. In mainstream foreign policy literature, its stated aim is the same as boots on the ground interventions; namely, stability. That’s all “stability” means in practice: control and capital penetration.

Who Benefits?

Military aid is also an extension of the U.S.-based weapons industry. The free weapons to our international partners is essentially a massive government subsidy of the industry that has remained incredibly powerful since it was hastily expanded to respond to the combat needs of WWII. The federal government’s relationship to the weapons industry is multifaceted: it is at once an angel investor given its donations to foreign governments, a bank for foreign countries to purchase U.S.-made weapons, and a broker that U.S. contractors interface with instead of directly with foreign governments. 

It’s going great for the industry. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the United States is by far the world leader in weapons exports, accounting for 40 percent of the global market from 2018 to 2022. U.S. arms exports are up 14 percent from the previous four-year period. The next closest competitors were Russia (16 percent) and France (11 percent). Fiscal year 2020 saw $50.8 billion in sales mediated by the government, and $124.3 billion in direct commercial sales with foreign governments. 

The national and statewide economies are fully integrated with warmaking. This shows up in some straightforward ways and others that are less so. For instance, while manufacturing contributes much less to GDP now than 40 years ago, the U.S. is still the second largest manufacturer in the world after China. Weapons manufacturers Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon are still among the top-15 manufacturers in the U.S. 

Furthermore, the tech sector is an integral part of modern warfare. Amazon Web Services provides the majority of the cloud computing for the U.S. intelligence services. The satellites of Elon Musk’s Starlink provides communications and internet connectivity for warzones like Ukraine. As far as profit share goes, compared to these ventures, delivering your packages and ruining Twitter are side projects.

It’s sometimes difficult to talk about politics without sounding conspiratorial. This is especially true in the current climate in which the average person – and, for a time, the White House – is inundated with outlandish explanations about how things really are. Sometimes, however, things look bad because they are. Poor and working class Americans’ relationship to the project of U.S. militarism is tenuous. Sure, some sectors benefit sometimes relative to their counterparts in the countries we exploit, but those benefits are fleeting. 

We are a nation of people living  shorter lives, with $1.77 trillion of educational debt, nearly $200 billion of medical debt, all in a country with such degraded physical infrastructure that it will cost an estimated $2.6 trillion to repair. Yet we find the spare change to prop up militaries and maintain over 750 bases the world over. So how do we explain this discrepancy between the needs of the many and the policies of our putatively democratic government without appealing to bizarre notions or abstract actors like the all-powerful “they”? (You know “them.” They don’t want you to read Religion in Revolt. They definitely don’t want you to tell your friends to subscribe to our newsletter.)

The short answer is, the bright-line distinction between economics and politics is a wholly modern fiction. Politics are an outgrowth of the prevailing economic systems. The policies enacted under feudalism centered the interests of feudal lords. Slave economies produce policies that support slaveholders. Capitalist countries enact policies that most benefit people who buy our labor and keep the value that we generate; namely, capitalists.

Consumption and exploitation are the defining features of capitalism. This fact limits the prospects for peace. Indeed, it limits the prospects for many things that we care about such as environmental justice, an end to hunger, housing and the like. The tension that we feel in applying that logic to our own national situation is that we live in a democracy, which conditions us to expect otherwise. And there’s real truth to that; it’s not a closed, wholly determined system. Resistance is worthwhile, but we need to be clear-sighted about what we’re resisting.

In solidarity,

Dwayne