Putting Biden’s new whopping $33B Ukraine package into context
His proposal ‘would make Kyiv the largest yearly recipient of U.S. military aid of at least the past two decades.’
William D. Hartung is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His work focuses on the arms industry and U.S. military budget. He was previously the director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Policy and the co-director of the Center’s Sustainable Defense Task Force. He is the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (Nation Books, 2011) and the co-editor, with Miriam Pemberton, of Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War (Paradigm Press, 2008). His previous books include And Weapons for All (HarperCollins, 1995), a critique of U.S. arms sales policies from the Nixon through Clinton administrations.
From July 2007 through March 2011, Mr. Hartung was the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. Prior to that, he served as the director of the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute. He also worked as a speechwriter and policy analyst for New York State Attorney General Robert Abrams. Hartung’s articles on security issues have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and the World Policy Journal.
He has been a featured expert on national security issues on CBS 60 Minutes, NBC Nightly News, the PBS Newshour, CNN, Fox News, and scores of local, regional, and international radio outlets.
His proposal ‘would make Kyiv the largest yearly recipient of U.S. military aid of at least the past two decades.’
The US far outpaces all spenders when pressing threats like climate change and nuclear conflict that require diplomatic strategies receive little funding.
Though Russia’s war on Ukraine is a tragedy for the world, one group is already benefiting from it: U.S. arms contractors.
DC establishmentarian says we’ve allowed our military to atrophy, and need more than $1 trillion a year to restore its ‘reach and its punch.’