 On July 14th, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an $840 billion military policy bill. The amount is $37 billion more than what President Joe Biden had sought for funding the Pentagon. The U.S. Senate will now vote for its version of the bill and there will be a process whereby the two bills are reconciled. However, the trend is clear. The U.S. continues to be the highest spender of defense globally by a huge margin. What are some of the key aspects of the bill and are we likely to see a continuation of this trend of increased spending due to the war in Ukraine? Eugene Perrier of Breakthrough News explains. You know, it's unbelievable in a way when you look at the military budget in the United States. This has actually happened the past few budgets in a row that the Pentagon request actually has just moved to the side by Congress who adds a significant amount of money. So President Biden was proposing around $803 billion for fiscal year 23. The Senate and their version of the bill added about $47 billion. The House and their version of the bill added about $37 billion. So both houses of Congress who will now have to reconcile their bill, which will be somewhere in the middle of that, have essentially added $30 to $40 billion over top of what the Pentagon was asking for. And the reason for that is multi-fold. A lot of Congress people will often say that the Pentagon is responding to pressure from people who just hate the military and want to cut the budget, that they secretly really want all of this money. But what it often ends up being is that there's a restoration of various projects that either speak very heavily to a certain foreign policy goal or speak very heavily to a piece of equipment that is being built in a certain person's district. And the United States, all of the different production for the various military goods is heavily spread out. You look at a plane like the F-35, it'll be like they'll make one part of the cockpit in California, they'll make the wheel in Illinois, they'll make one little sort of, you know, technical widget in Iowa. And so they spread it out in such a way that that way it creates a pressure on the politicians to not ever do any cuts to the budget because they don't want to lose anything that's there. But when you look at what is being pushed forward in the budget, I think there's a few things that we can see that are notable. I think one of the number one things is the budget restored the money, which seems like a small amount of money, but it's research money, $45 million for a new sea-based nuclear weapon. Now, the United States already has 4,000 nuclear weapons. It's unclear exactly why they would need this new nuclear weapon that can be fired from a ship or a submarine when they already have that capability. It's not even 100% clear what this weapon would be. But nevertheless, we saw Congress restore the funding for this weapon, which obviously is something that is directly related to the idea that we are politically, and Congress is a big part of this, pushing towards this idea of a Cold War style confrontation with China. And a major element of that is to use the nuclear arms race to attempt to cow China and contain them and make sure that they feel terrified about potentially being against how the US wants to reorder things in Asia because they'll be destroyed by nuclear weapons. And so that was one element that was put in there. Another thing that we have continued to see is this, and this is very also similar to the new Cold War mentality, is this pushing around many failed platforms, but relevant ones, the stealth fighters, different types of new kind of low stealth style. They call them literal, but combat ships that are supposed to work right up against the coast, all these sort of like new, you know, not that proven ideas, but that are all deeply rooted in the same mentality. And that's the mentality that China especially is far ahead of the United States technologically, that they have secret technology that we don't know about, that it's a different form of fighting. And so even though there's really no proof of concept in many of these platforms, actually, to the extent they already rolled out aren't working very well, you see that this new Cold War style mentality shows that Congress only wants to increase these new weapons, not even necessarily because they work, but because it creates the perception that the United States is countering, you know, some, you know, big nuclear, some non-existent buildup by China and by a lesser extent Russia. So we can see in the budget itself that some of these key pillars that exist really are centered around this idea of a new Cold War with China and Russia, even when things have been proven not to really work. It's all about really creating a perception using this huge amount of money that the US is rolling out these various weapons systems that are going to allow them to continue to dominate the globe, continue to dominate the world. And I think almost use like a bluff as it were that, well, we have, you know, hundreds or thousands of these planes and these ships. And if you go against us, you're going to be destroyed because they're so high tech and they're so good. So I think this is really a solidification when we look at this military budget of the overall agenda of the United States to not only maintain its overall imperial world domination, but to directly focus almost all of its military spending and posture on the idea of containing and ultimately potentially overthrowing China and Russia. We're seeing significantly more money that's coming through Ukraine, both through this budget, the National Defense Authorization Act, and through all sorts of supplementary budgets that continue to come forward. I mean, this has really been a question. And it was a question in this budgetary process of whether or not the US even has the stockpile to meet some of the needs that Ukraine is laying out. And so that was a big conversation about the need to not only restore things that have been sent, but also to create more capacity for the United States to continue to support them. So, you know, we've seen recently, I think a $400 million request that came through the first lady of the Ukraine was actually here in the United States at the end of last week, early into this week, meeting with various individuals on Capitol Hill to try to insert even more money into the National Defense Authorization Act. So it'll be interesting to see what that final number is on funding for Ukraine between the two houses once they reconcile their bill, because there's a huge amount of lobbying happening right now to make that number as big as it is and to create as much of a flood of weapons towards Ukraine as possible. Laws like this are not passed in a vacuum. Every provision is a result of intense lobbying by private interests which seek to make massive profits. The military industrial complex in the US has a huge role to play in the direction defense budgets take. What are the ways in which the military industrial complex achieve its aims by lobbying those in power? You know, there's so many different links and so many different pieces to how the military industrial complex is affecting the role of politicians and, you know, I alluded to it earlier with the issue of how they structure production. But it's also the things that people know about in terms of how influence is peddled all around the world. That's campaign donations, especially in the United States. And when you look at what has happened just in the 2022 election cycle, so that's basically the money that people in Congress have been raising since about this time last year. And so ultimately what we see is in the House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee. And these are really important committees because this is where the decision to increase the defense budget over and above what the administration asked for is made. So they're having all sorts of deliberations, they're holding hearings and they're deciding really the basic contours of what the military budget is going to look like when it goes to the whole House to be voted on. So when you look at those two committees, what you find is $10 million has flown from the military industrial complex into Congresspeople who are in the House or the Senate Armed Services Committee. And this is a very small number of people overall, you know, I mean, it's I think 40 some odd people when you combine them maybe a little bit more than that. And it really is very top heavy that the majority of the money is going to the chairs and the ranking members and other people who are perceived to be influential. But nevertheless, I mean, you have a number of people on each of these that are getting hundreds of thousands of dollars individually, you know, the highest is coming in the Senate where you had a few people getting 800 some thousand odd dollars in the House, you have 400 some thousand odd dollars for a number of the leading officials in both committees. And then as they're getting this money, they're arguing that these exact companies should be getting more and more military contracts because the budget will increase. And this is actually just the tip of the iceberg because these are like the transparent funds that have to be reported on. But of course, there are super PACs and other things like that, the so-called dark money where we don't really know a lot actually about anyone who's donating to these super PACs. But we can certainly assume that the tens of billions of dollars, the billions of dollars that are spent in these election cycles in these super PACs that many military contractors are looking at it. But with just the money, we know $10 million just to two committees, a handful of legislators. And there's a direct quid pro quo where they're the money is coming in and the money is going out and they're getting huge returns because of these increases that are taking place in the military industrial complex. So whether it's how they spread around their production, whether it's the campaign donations, whether it's the revolving door, because many, many politicians who leave the White House and leave Congress end up working in high level positions for military contractors, also people who leave the military. Of course, the current secretary of defense in the United States, Lloyd Austin, that's exactly what he was doing before he came into the position. Now is after he left the military, he went and became a high level executive in the military industrial complex. So it's the retirement jobs, it's the campaign donations while you're there, and it's the so-called jobs that they're creating, although they don't create that many jobs in your district that all go to create a tremendous cauldron of corruption between the military industrial complex and Congress.