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The business of buying weapons that takes place in the Pentagon is a corrupt business-ethically and morally corrupt from top to bottom. The process is dominated by advocacy, with few, if any, checks and balances. Most people in power like this system of doing business and do not want it changed.
-Colonel James G. Burton, The Pentagon Wars
In countries such as the United States, whose economies are commonly, though inaccurately, described as "capitalist" or "free market," war and preparation for war systematically corrupt both parties in the state-private transactions by which the government obtains the bulk of its military goods and services. On one side, business interests seek to bend the state's decisions in their favor by corrupting official decision makers with outright and de facto bribes. The outright bribes include cash, gifts in kind, loans, entertainment, transportation, lodging, prostitutes' services, inside information about personal investment opportunities, overly generous speaking fees, and promises of future employment or consulting patronage for officials or their family members. The de facto bribes include campaign contributions (sometimes legal, sometimes illegal), sponsorship of political fund-raising events, and donations to charities or other causes favored by the relevant government officials. Reports of this sort of corruption appear from time to time in the press under the rubric of "military scandal" (see, for example, Biddle 1985; Wines 1989; Hinds 1992; "National Briefing" 2003; Colarusso 2004; Pasztor and Karp 2004; Calbreath and Kammer 2005; Wood 2005; Babcock 2006; "Defense Contractor Guilty in Bribe Case" 2006; Ross 2006; "5 Americans Indicted" 2007; "Feinstein Quits Committee" 2007; and Levesque 2007). On the other, much more important side, the state corrupts businesspeople by effectively turning them into co-conspirators in and beneficiaries of its most fundamental activity - plundering the general public.
Participants in the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) are routinely blamed for mismanagement; frequently accused of waste, fraud, and abuse; and from time to time indicted for criminal offenses (Higgs 1988, 1990, xx-xxiii, 2004; Fitzgerald 1989; Kovacic 199Oa, 199Ob). All of these unsavory actions, however, are typically viewed as "aberrations" - misfeasances to be rectified or malfeasances to be punished while retaining the basic system of state-private cooperation in the production of military goods and services (for an explicit example of the "aberration" claim, see Fitzgerald...