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it's not a conspiracy at all. the national security state is the institutional framework created in 1948 as a modification of state of emergency law that was to enable the united states to respond to some (imaginary) action by the soviets without the bother of that pesky democratic process stuff. it also refers to the logic of the cold war---endless war without events that involved empire against empire, so was the logical extension of nation-state/nation-state war---shiny pretty expensive weapons systems, nuclear weapons, stockpiles all over the world. the cold war was basically a logistics chess match. it was subject to principles of turn over--self-perpetuating in that way--if one side introduced a new shiny weapon system, the other felt compelled to match it. on and on.
the term military-industrial complex was used by dwight eisenhower to refer to the oligarchy that was taking shape in the middle 50s out of the national-security state apparatus. a massing of political and financial power within the patronage system linked to the military by the logic (and practices) of cold war production.
the cold war enabled a partial resolution of the old problem of over-capacity in production for the united states. war economy, this once was. war was good for bidness. capitalism at its finest.
despite the fact that the cold war is over--it resulted in the soviet system spending itself into a problem that opened onto a political crisis---and despite the fact that no wars have been fought on a strategic plane symmetrical with the procurement protocols of the cold war, the whole patronage system is still in place an still **very** lucrative. conservatives owe a lot to the military. a. lot. so they protect the national-security state as a way of protecting the patronage system.
it can and should be dismantled. what the military is, its role as a motor of economic activity, all of it should be rethought. there is absolutely no justification for the levels of spending. there is no justification for the strategic assumptions that enable such levels of spending. none.
and the political logic of the national-security state is quite dangerous. witness the bush regime. think: iraq. that should be taken apart as well.
but the american system has a self-correction problem. it has an introspection problem. its design seems to be such that quite enormous problems like a war launched on false pretenses and war crimes (torture/rendition) are not actionable. and this quite apart from the retrograde defenses of the national-security state by the right.
irony is that you can see the revolts in north africa/middle east as revolts against the consequences of exactly this model, of this version of the american empire. so it's more than passing strange that the action in libya is being carried out....there's apparently some misunderstanding of what the revolts are about----just as there is some misunderstanding within the united states about what this place is---is it the way people inside the bubble of ideology like to think it is, or is it a military-industrial machine? does it stand for democracy (even though there isn't one in the united states really) or for whatever is politically expedient?
it's both, yes?
military bases are only a relatively small aspect of the expenditures on the military. something on the order of 26-29% of total federal expenditures goes into military expenditures. and that does not count any of the war actions (not on the books) nor the obscene levels of money that's been pissed down the drain in the name of "homeland security" since 2001. fear is never boring, as the song says. and it is profitable. this spills over into the prison complex, another conservative favorite. and you thought the right wasn't aware that their policies generate intensified class war...well....
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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