The arms industry

The arms industry is often cited as a productive component of our society, creating jobs, employment, and exports. As we shall see, this is a false assertion and weapons manufacture is more damaging than just about any other industry on the planet, including pharmaceuticals, sex trafficking, illegal drugs, and the oil and mining industries. It wastes precious resources, both human and material.

But first, is it any coincidence that the two most successful economic recoveries in the years after the Second World War were in the two countries forbidden to spend on arms or standing armies after their defeat? Can it be an accident that when you do not throw a large chunk of the nation’s wealth down the toilet, the rest of the economy does a lot better? Perhaps this was key to making Japan and Germany, in 2012, the third and fourth largest economies in the world. Since the war, the victors (America, Russia, Britain, and France) have poured large sums into the arms industry and procured positions as suppliers of military hardware to the nations of the world. At the same time they maintain oversized standing armies and an inefficient, dangerous, and costly nuclear power establishment, built in order to support the production of nuclear weapons.

The fundamental difference between the arms industry and the majority of other commercial enterprises is that the value of military product is negative. This is an important concept. Large sums of society’s money are spent manufacturing weapon products that we hope never to use. Assuming the weapons are not put to use, then considerable further sums are wasted looking after them, updating them, destroying old stocks, and maintaining a force of people ready and willing to use them if ever ordered to do so. And even though one country might seem to profit from selling these items to another, our global society as a whole is dragged down by the weight of their uselessness and literally torn apart if they are put to use. For if and when these products are used, an even greater cost becomes apparent. When weapon products are deployed, they tend to dramatically decrease the value of other products that we already possess, including our lives.

The contrast with productive products like the train or truck, the smartphone, and the sewing machine could not be greater, since these devices enable us to do useful things that add value to the lives of people and other products of planet Earth. We (you and me) don’t buy the military technology, traded between and used by a very exclusive club, although the product itself is bought with money taken from our pockets in one country or another. Money we have justly earned with our energy and intellect, trucks and computers, is being flushed down a toilet that could easily take us with it.

Undoubtedly, while our world is run by a collection of coercively based states, we need to have what protection we can from the Hitlers, Starmers, Trumps, Netanyahus, Putins, Pol Pots, and countless others who assume leadership of nations, and with it the power to do great damage. Of course, every bad guy’s biggest dream is to take control of a nation, complete with a tax collecting base and population that is used to being under control. It might have taken centuries for this state structure to develop its power base, but it can take just a few months for a new and powerful despot to gain control. There will always be unsavory people seeking to manipulate or control any organization that has legitimized its right to take money from the population by force. The great challenge facing humanity is to one day arrive at a condition where there is no powerful state in this position of control.

A thousand years scarce serve to form a state. An hour may lay it in the dust.

Byron, 1788–1824, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

Sadly, when governments collapse today, the popular mindset is always limited to keeping the same structure and putting new people with fresh ideas in charge. But it is the structure that is at fault, and if we allow our society to self-govern, as did my ancestral Dithmarscheners in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the medieval cities of twelfth and thirteenth century Europe, we would for once experience real democracy (self-rule). In this state, we would be in a position to prevent future despots or fanatics starting from scratch and building coercive structures large enough to take anything over by force.

We have been told for decades by the world’s great powers that their armaments buy us peace and a safe climate in which to develop our society. Yet from the examples that history has given us, it does not appear that a strong and successful arms industry and military establishment are signs of a healthy society—one able to endure and improve for future generations. Many of the world’s great empires collapsed soon after reaching the peak of their military strength. Yet this “Who’s got the biggest dick” attitude to arms acquisition is typical for the rulers of most large modern states.

The negative effect of arms industry and military expenditure is enormous when the full costs are recognized, and it is no surprise that they result in the collapse of communities and social disorder. Enormous sums are worse than wasted, instead of being productively re-circulated in the society that created the wealth. Most visible are the fixed military overhead of feet on the ground and facilities. Each year another trillion or so dollars are spent adding to their arsenals. Millions are employed in maintaining, storing, and guarding these deadly military “assets.” Within the total cost we can include the wasted education and skills of those who devise new ways of killing us, and that of the engineers who turn these negative ideas into lethal weapons products. We must include the loss of many precious resources of the planet and the lost productive capacity of those producing the weaponry as well as those killed by it. And there are the widows, the disabled, the refugees, the orphans, and the famines caused by war. How do we put a value on those idyllic islands and other areas of our planet destroyed forever or rendered uninhabitable for millennia by war or weapons testing? Consider also the vast expanse of desert in Nevada where obsolete American warplanes are parked wing to wing as far as the eye can see, and the mountains in nearby New Mexico that have been hollowed to store obsolete nuclear warheads. Finally, we have the ongoing costs arising from the regular re-introduction into society of those who have been trained to kill their fellow human beings. How can a stable society continue to suffer this expense, which is extracted in order to bring us security from other countries that buy arms so that their society is secure from us? We need security, but with two World Wars in memory, dozens of major wars, ongoing conflicts across the world, and an endless amorphous war on terrorism, it is apparent that our traditional approach is tragically flawed.

Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

George Washington, first US President, 1732–1799

So don’t buy the argument that the weapons industry creates employment, or that it is good for the economy, security, or peace. It would be better for our overall economy to take the vast amount of government money spent on arms purchases, pile it into an enormous heap, and set fire to it. Better yet, leave the money working in society in the first place. In order to do this, we will first need to find more innovative ways of preventing the Germans, French, Koreans, Chinese, Brazilians, or Libyans from taking over the Houses of Parliament and government of Great Britain or Washington DC. I doubt we need fear them taking over the offices of the European Commission in Brussels.

Peace will ultimately arise from cooperation, freedom, and an absence of the obsession with where borderlines are drawn on the map; not from our possession of more and more lethal and dangerous weaponry. What could be more obvious?

Chapter from:

The State is Out of Date, We can do it better, by Gregory Sams