Reference News Network, July 12 report - According to the UK's Guardian website on July 8, a study on the US Department of Defense spending shows that most of the Pentagon's discretionary funding from 2020 to 2024 went to external military contractors, with $2.4 trillion in public funds provided to private companies, "a continuous large-scale transfer of wealth from taxpayers to fund war and weapons production."
The report from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Brown University's "Costs of War" project states that the latest Pentagon budget under the Trump administration will make the US annual defense spending exceed the $1 trillion threshold.
The report said this would bring over $500 billion in wealth, benefiting large arms companies such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, as well as the military technology sector, which is growing larger and has close allies within the government (such as Vice President Vance).
This report is compiled from data on Pentagon spending and contracts from 2020 to 2024. During this period, the Pentagon's top five contractors (Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman) received contracts worth $771 billion. Overall, private companies received about 54% of the $4.4 trillion in discretionary funding allocated by the Department of Defense during this period.
The report said that considering the supplemental appropriations for the Pentagon approved by Congress based on President Trump's "Big and Beautiful Act," military spending has increased by 99% since 2000. US military spending rapidly increased after the early 2000s when the Bush administration launched the "Global War on Terror."
The authors of the report wrote: "The US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 did not bring a peace dividend. Instead, President Biden requested and Congress authorized further increases in the Pentagon's annual budget, while Trump continued this trend of increasing military spending."
This contradicts Trump's statement in February that he could cut military spending by half. Trump also said, "We have no reason to spend nearly $1 trillion on military spending... I say we can spend this money elsewhere." However, in fact, the spending bill that Trump pushed through Congress included an additional $157 billion in spending for the Pentagon.
The report said that the growth in spending will increasingly benefit companies in the "military technology" sector, which includes tech companies such as SpaceX, Palantir, and Anduril. These companies "have deep roots in the Trump administration, which will give them an advantage in future budget battles."
William Hartung, a senior researcher at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and one of the report's authors, said: "The high Pentagon budget often cites 'funding for the troops' as a justification. But as this report shows, most of the department's budget goes to companies, which are related to reasonable defense planning but also to special interest groups. A large portion of this money is wasted on malfunctioning or overpriced weapon systems and luxurious salary schemes."
Stephanie Savransky, director of the "Costs of War" project, said: "These figures show that taxpayers' wealth is continuously being transferred in large quantities to fund war and weapons production." (Translated by Zhao Feifei)
Original: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7526148672652853787/
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