 We start from the premise that the defense and security industries are actually producing insecurity and that profit generation plays a main role in this dynamic. Over the course of this session, we will try to answer the following questions. How do arms manufacturers and the general corporate sector influence our society and politics to gain financial and ideological support for their aims? How does the European Union externalize its border security and who is influencing the related policies? Lastly, what can be done to restrain the industry's destructive expansion? To discuss these questions with us, we have invited Shayna Marshall, Associate Director of the Institute for Middle East Studies, author of Middle East Armies and the Global Military Industrial Complex and currently doing research on patterns of military entrepreneurship in Egypt, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates. Also joining us is Steven Semmler, a former lobbyist on Capitol Hill and expert on U.S. military finance. Steven is co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, a grassroots funded think tank promoting a working class approach to U.S. foreign policy. Steven is also author of the newsletter, Speaking Security, available on Substack. Lastly, to discuss these questions with us is Mark Ackerman, Researcher on Arms Trade and Border Militarization at the Transnational Institute and Stop Whoppin'Hundle. His recent publications include Outsourcing Oppression, How Europe Externalizes Migrant Detention Beyond Its Shores and Financing Border Wars, The Border Industry, Its Financiers and Human Rights. Greetings and welcome to the second session of the Alternative Security Conference. I would like to welcome our guests Mark Ackerman, Steven Semmler and Dr. Shayna Marshall. And thank you all for joining us. So first just to give an outline of the session for our audience that the session will be split into three parts. First we have a 10 minutes monologue for each of our guests followed by a 30 to 40 minutes panel discussion. And then finally we will have a Q&A session. So for our audience if you have any questions or comments just put it on the chat on your right hand side. So let's start first with our guest presentations. So first we will hear from Mark Ackerman. Mark will elaborate on how the EU externalizes its borders and how European arms industries make profit from conflicts abroad and from the increase in the security of domestic apparatus. So please Mark, the virtual stage is yours. Yes, thank you. Let me first start by telling a bit about EU arms exports because they are connected to all this. The countries of the EU together are the second largest arms exporter in the world after the USA and are responsible for about a quarter of the global total. During the last decade over 450,000 arms export licenses worth 276 billion euros have been granted in the EU. The largest customer was Saudi Arabia. Other important export destinations outside the EU include India, USA, Egypt, Algeria, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Turkey. Or in other words massive amounts of European arms end up in countries at war with internal conflicts, authoritarian regimes and human rights violations. European arms exports have for example kept the Yemen war going and contributed to the violence, repression and chaos in the Middle East and North Africa. European arms companies, BIA systems, Airbus, Leonardo and Thales are among the largest military companies in the world and are the main winners of European arms exports. Now the EU has arms export rules, eight criteria from the so-called common position which should prevent exports to countries at war and human rights violators. Each member state is responsible for implementing this criteria when granting or refusing an arms export permit. Because of the fakeness of the criteria however this has led to vastly different arms export regimes between member states ranging from somewhat strict to very permissive. While some countries have halted or restricted arms exports to Saudi Arabia for example, others have gone on providing large amounts of arms for the Yemen war. Repeated attempts to come to an EU arms embargo against Saudi Arabia have failed. With or without an embargo the EU arms exports criteria which member states are bound to implement have not prevented these highly problematic arms exports as well as many others fueling war and human rights violations all over the world. Other interests prevail. President Macron of France states last December the severe human rights concerns regarding Egypt shouldn't stand in the way of arms exports to the authoritarian regime of Sisi because it is more important to cooperate with it in the war on terror and to help build its military capacities. These permissive export policies are not a coincidence. They must be seen in the context of EU foreign military and trade policies that are all aimed at arms export promotion. The main role in this is played by EU funding for research and development of new arms and security technologies. For the next seven years the EU will spend a total of 8 billion euros for the development of new arms under the new European Defence Fund. The lobby of the arms industry has been very influential in setting up this fund as well as other financial instruments to its benefit. Regulation for the Defence Fund was based on an advisory report of a so-called group of personalities made up majority of representatives of the military and security industry, turning it into foremost a subsidy tool for the industry. The EU promotes the Defence Fund as part of it attempts to build more of its own military capacities, echoing calls for higher European military budgets unless European dependents on the USA within NATO. It states that a stronger European arms industry is needed for these efforts and emphasizes that in turn these industries global competitiveness needs to be improved. This means more European arms exports to strengthen European military capabilities. A coalition of armed forces, the military industry and right-wing politicians constantly pushes for higher military budgets and more arms purchases in general. However, the lobby of the military and security industry has broader goals than more funding, higher budgets and more support for arms exports. Seeking new markets after the end of the Cold War and a temporary decrease in military global spending, it has moved into other areas as well. Industry representatives have been successful in positioning themselves as experts on rising global political problems and phenomenons, such as climate change, pandemics and migration. In all instances, they have been embraced by authorities in framing these developments as threats and security problems. This process of so-called securityization leads to looking for militarized answers, happily provided by the military and security industry, presenting itself and its goods and services as a solution to deal with these problems. I will now zoom in on the issue of migration and border militarization. Ever since the establishment of the Schengen area in the early 1990s, the EU has been building up security and control at its external borders, which has seen an extreme escalation since the so-called refugee crisis of 2015. This has included sending military forces to the borders, the use of military equipment to stop migration, including drones and other autonomous systems, the expansion of biometric border control systems and the introduction of artificial intelligence for border control. The same large arms companies mentioned before, in particular Airbus, Leonardo and Thales, are the main beneficiaries of the European spending spree for border security. As cynical as it is, they profit twice at the expense of refugees, first by fueling the reasons people are forced to flee with arms exports for war and repression, second by providing the equipment to stop them on the migration journey. The EU Border Guard Agency Frontex has seen a fast expansion of its organization, budgets and tasks since its establishment in 2005. Starting with a budget of 6 million euros in that year, this is now over 90 times as high, with 544 million euros in 2021. Under the current multi-annual financial framework, the seven-year EU budget frontex gets at least 5.6 billion euros. Another 6.5 billion euros is reserved to fund member states' measures to strengthen border security, including purchasing military equipment under the new integrated border management fund. And under other financial instruments, billions more are bound to go to EU member states, candidate member states and third countries for similar objectives. Frontex will use parts of its billions to build a 10,000-person standing border guard corpse and to buy or lease its own equipment for border security. The first large contract was issued last autumn, 50 million euros for drone-surfying services in the Mediterranean from Airbus Israel Aerospace Industries in Elbit. This means Israeli killer drones, which are promoted as being tested on Palestinians, are now targeting desperate people looking for safety and a better life. The pushback and violence at the borders in which frontex is involved are a consequence of Europe's obsession with keeping or getting refugees out and a subsequent border militarization. This also forces migrants to more dangerous routes, leading to an increase in the relative death toll among migrants coming towards Europe and drives them into the hands of criminal smuggling networks. In other words, the EU creates the market it says it wants to fight. Boosting and militarizing border security and control is not something that is only happening at the external borders of the EU. The EU and its member states put pressure on third countries, using a carrot and stick approach to act as outpost border guards to stop migrants before they reach Europe. This process of so-called border externalization caused a conflict with military training, advice, funding for purchases of border security and control equipment and donations of such equipment. The EU pours billions of euros in a wide range of projects in this field. This is serious and far-reaching consequences and not only for migrants. Once again, these policies lead to pushing refugees to more dangerous routes and into the hands of smuggling networks. But they also legitimize and strengthen authoritarian regimes, in particular their military and security forces. Under mine migration-based economies, destabilized fragile states, deferred development cooperation spending, and are effectively a clear example of neocolonialism. Again, the arms industry is one of the few winners. Some striking examples. The EU and Italy together paid the Italian arms company Leonardo some 500 million euros to construct a border security system along Libya's southern border. This project dates back to the Gaddafi regime and has been stalled since the start of the civil war, but is still being negotiated for a restart. Germany donated tens of millions of euros worth of border security equipment from Airbus to Tunisia and is closely cooperating with Egyptian security forces for border security and many other purposes. France's public-private company CIFIPOL, owned by the state and large arms companies, was selected to set up fingerprint databases of the whole population of Mali and Senegal, with 53 million euros funding from the EU emergency trustant for Africa. One of the objectives, seeking to identify irregular migrants from both countries in Europe and being able to deport them. Such external policies to pursue Europe's own interests by providing arms and security equipment, giving military training and donating money aren't confined to migration. The Merkel government in Germany has been the leading proponent of providing more arms to European countries, arguing that helping build their military capacities and extensive security infrastructures will lead to more stability around Europe. In reality, this will lead to providing tools for repression and to pumping arms in a highly volatile conflict-ridden region. Such policies are bound to result in more forced migration in the future and continuing the cycle of keeping out the consequences of EU arms exports and broader foreign and military policies by ever strengthening and expanding Fortress Europe. As human costs rise, the arms industry profits will increase. Thank you. Thank you, Mark, for this interesting and insightful information. I guess we'll have some questions about it or to have a discussion in the second section. So now we go to Stephen Zemler. Stephen will elaborate on the influence of the arms industries in Washington DC and how think tanks work in general and what this meant by revolving doors. So please, Stephen, the virtual stage is yours. Thanks. Appreciate it. Earlier this week, there was a report out by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute that showed that the United States is again the world's leader in military spending, and it's not clearly close either. This is at a far distant first. And one of the things that an excessively high military budget does is that it drives future military budgets up and increases the likelihood that the next one and the one after that will be high as well. And the primary driver is the privatization of funds. So the pool of funds that the U.S. government publishes every year are public funds, meaning that they come from the U.S. taxpayer or more specifically the U.S. Treasury. And about 50 to 60% of the total Pentagon budget, military budget goes to private contracts. And there are about 50,000 private contractors out there, but the space is dominated by the top five. So for example, the top five military contractors, they eat up about a third of all contracts each year. In these top five, they obligate a lot of funds to think tanks to lobbyists and to campaign contributions. But going back to just the share of funds that are privatized each year in 2017, the U.S. military budget just for the Department of Defense was 610 billion. And the total number of contracts obligated that year was 328. Now, in 2020, the military budget rose 130 billion to 741 billion, about 438 billion, which is 110 billion increase from 2017 went to contracts. So it's one of these things where the number of contracts tends to stay stable over time at about 60% of the DOD budget. And once those funds are privatized, they're privatized for contractors to build military equipment, to arrange services for the military, etc. But a lot of it is sort of fed back into the system to make sure that those military budget stay high because it's where they derive most of their bottom line. Lockheed Martin, for example, which is the top military contractor pretty much year after year. Last year, and in 2019, it was about 70% of their total company revenue came from the U.S. government, and that excludes arm sales. In total, Lockheed relied on the U.S. government, either for arm sales approval or direct contracts from the government upwards of 97% of their total revenue. So these are really, effectively, I mean, this is a system that should be nationalized, because it basically already is. It's just that there are private sectors that sort of intervene, that sort of interject themselves into the system and create a profit incentive into an otherwise kind of boring system of government contracting. So one of the ways that the military industrial complex works is that these private firms give campaign contributions to members of Congress. Now, this is familiar, not familiar with the U.S. government. Congress is the one that ultimately writes the checks. It's the one, it's the body that controls the purse rings of the U.S. government without sort of congressional authorization. The President can't just spend the money. It has to go through Congress. So when you hear something saying like, oh, Trump increased military spending over $130 billion, that required a lot of Democratic votes to as well as Republican, so it wasn't just Trump himself doing it. One of the effects of campaign contributions on Congress is that it makes them more likely to vote for military increases and reject decreases to military spending. So for example, last year there was a vote introduced by a representative that would have cut Pentagon spending by 10%. It failed, but looking at the vote count, members who voted for the bill, who voted for defense cut, took three times less cash from military contractors than those who voted against it. So regardless of whether you're looking at absolute remit or sort of the annual spending bills, if you're in advocacy and you're looking for people, members of Congress to get on your side to military spending, a good place to start is to look at how much cash they have from military contractors because the ones who take not a lot of money are the ones who may have a poor voting record with those. You'll have a much easier time convincing those people, usually, especially among Democrats than members of Congress who take a lot. Now, these private contractors also give a ton of money to think tanks over $1 billion, went from the government or private military contractors to think tanks between 2014 and 2019. And the purpose of think tanks is to make the stuff that these weapons manufacturers say through their blind capitals in terms of wanting to increase their bottom line. It makes those demands seem a bit more, it makes them seem normal or reasonable or even appropriate, really, because if a contractor says that China is a threat, people will question its legitimacy because obviously it's a military contractor and wants to increase bottom line and by situating China as a threat, then they're able to increase their, you know, produce, you know, sort of the outcome they want to. But because in order for them to be taken seriously, they have to have a sort of, they have to have a sort of a sheath of believability or scientific evidence or professionalism. And that sort of incentivizes their giving to think tanks, which provides sort of a basis and scholarship for their claims that are profit driven. Now, I mean, it's not necessarily conspiratorial. I mean, a lot of people believe in these think tanks when they say that the US should increase military budget by $100 billion. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't a problem because just because a person there and believes what he or she's saying, there's a lot of other people who would argue the opposite who wouldn't be hired by that think tank. So it sort of gives you an idea of just how the interest of military contractors side of sort of not only reaches members of Congress directly but also through the public to the public by funding different think tank reports. The final area I want to touch on is lobbying and lobbying the difference between advocacy and lobbying is that lobbying involves a specific intervention on an active piece of legislation. So if you testify in front of Congress as an expert, that's not lobbying. But the benefit that lobbying has over advocacy is that it's usually direct in tradition for a piece of legislation. So if a certain member of Congress is debating to reduce military spending, the military industry can deploy a team of lobbyists and they do every year to sort of keep military spending from being, you know, intercepted by other forces coming from outside. So at the beginning to summarize, basically you have campaign cash flooding and sort of setting the bottom line and sort of creasing the wheels for the system for members of Congress to be favorable to increasing the military budget. They fund think tanks to make that sort of seem logical or respectable or somehow rooted in area addition and not greed. And lobbying sort of keeps the same going by making sure that if there's a letter issued by progressive groups, for instance, that can be struck down very easily just by just deploying a team of lobbyists to make sure that to keep members in line to speak. So I'm open to any questions and I yield the rest of my time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Steven this very interesting and also raise a lot of questions that we were actually for sure we have an interesting discussion afterwards. And so lastly, we'll hear from Dr. Marshall, Dr. Marshall will elaborate on how the transnational capital facilitate arm straight and what to what is meant by offsets and how it introduces also corruption in different states. So please Dr. Marshall that virtual stages yours. Thanks. First of all, thanks for having me I'm very excited to be here and to hear everyone's questions and the excellent research being done by other scholars and organizations and advocacy organizations. So, I think it's, it's super important that we think about how the global military industrial complex and the global arms trade is intertwined with the financial industry, especially in this sort of contemporary stage of financialized capitalism or late stage capitalism with financial inflections. So on the one hand, there's this story of excess capital, right, and the increasing influence of the financial industry globally, and then you simultaneously have increasing militarization and increased investment in weapons production intelligence applications security, Homeland Security, machine learning for military applications, et cetera, et cetera. So you have these sort of bizarre financial innovations and neoliberal fantasies that we've seen sort of laid bare in the multiple recent financial crises that we've had. And those are also reflected in the military industrial complex, the global in the global sense. So all of this excess investment capital that's being generated by this extreme wealth inequality is combined with imperialism and war and the drive for new weapons systems developing next generation systems and the proliferation of those systems and has sort of given birth to this new niche area in the global financial industry that's called offset brokerage or defense offsets. Some people call them industrial participation agreements. They have lots of different names in industry and according to sort of government and military industry officials that talk about them. But essentially what they are at is investment agreements that are attached to arms sales contracts. And they're offered by defense firms as sort of a sweetener to encourage countries to purchase weapons from that particular firm. So this is a hypothetical example just to give you an idea of what it is, but say Lockheed Martin sells a billion dollars of fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. So Saudi Arabia has a regulation that a third or you know 33% of the contract value has to be reinvested in the Saudi economy by the defense firm in this case Lockheed Martin. So obviously that's an enormous number. There's no way that a private firm could turn around and take 33% of its contract value and invest it in the purchasing country. Unless the contract itself was inflated to such a degree that it ended up covering not only the cost and the profit margin but also the offset agreement or the offset investment that is signed as a part of the sales contract. And so I was actually I was really interested in looking at how militaries in the Middle East were able in the era of liberalization to sort of grow their own grow the number of factories and you know auto dealerships and other enterprises that they had control over. And I happened along a bunch of US government documents that had been misplaced in an archive that were from the General Accountability Office which is like the US government's auditor that we're asking about these offset contracts. Because countries in the Middle East that were getting free weapons through military assistance funds were then going back to the defense firm and asking for you know 30% in offsets. And this was upsetting a lot of US congressmen because they had military subcontractors and suppliers in their district who were saying look you're essentially outsourcing the production of all of these military weapons systems to these other countries. Right because Saudi Arabia would say OK if I'm going to buy these planes from Lockheed Martin then Lockheed Martin needs to build a factory in Saudi Arabia that is going to assemble or produce some component that then is later integrated into that weapon system. And so this was this became sort of a domestic politics issue. But to me it immediately struck me that well this can't possibly the money can't possibly be coming from these defense firms. They would go bankrupt if they were actually financing these kinds of investments. And so through really sort of years of reading lots of industry publications and doing interviews with people. It became very clear that these defense firms were just tacking that cost on to the contract and then charging the procuring country government for that. And what that did was create sort of a huge slush fund that financial industry experts saw sort of as a as a major opportunity for them. And they stepped in and started creating these offset brokerage firms. Offsets are essentially sort of like blood in the water of the global financial system. And so these financial actors can smell that like sharks and they're and they're and they're drawn to it. And as a result the offset industry has blossomed into this extremely complex and complicated industry that marries arms dealers with investment bankers. Offsets are have been implicated in a huge range of bribery scandals. I think Germany and South Africa is a good case where essentially you know the German government said it had paid to build a factory somewhere in South Africa. And then when somebody actually went to do some due diligence discovered that the factory had didn't even exist right except on paper. And they're also sort of sold to critics as a form of industrial participation or development projects there that are being led in the developing world by these defense industrial corporations. Right so Lockheed Martin says you know look we're being good corporate citizens by going into these countries and helping them diversify their domestic economies. And a lot of the regional especially in the Middle East but also in places like South Korea and South Africa and some places in South America. A big impetus for the growth of domestic defense industries was these offset agreements right so Turkey manufacturing you know F-15 fighter jets. That process originated through an investment agreement through an offset agreement and so offsets really proliferate the production of weapons abroad. They proliferate sensitive technologies abroad and there's really very little U.S. government oversight of these projects. So that same government agency the G.A.O. the government accountability office you know went to some of these factories in other countries that were producing inputs for these U.S. weapons systems. And they were like hey look there's no security here you know they're inviting third party foreign officials to come tour these sensitive weapons production facilities. And they're proliferating these technologies and they're selling them on to third parties and not recording that. And to the defense firm of course this is like a built in benefit. Because if you're proliferating all of these technologies to all of these other parties then that firm can go back to the U.S. government and say look we lost our qualitative edge. We need to develop new next generation systems because all of you know the previous generation systems are in control of all of these third parties and we don't have a technological edge anymore. So you need to fund some additional research and development so that we can develop even better new weapons that they will then turn around and proliferate again. Offsets are also used as collateral right as a literally as a financial tool by the procuring countries to qualify for more loans to buy more weapons systems which is you know sounds insane. But if the country can say look we expect to get investment equaling XYZ and that's going to build a factory which is going to produce this much money in exports. Then they can actually use that as collateral to borrow on global markets and then they use that money to buy additional weapons. And so of course the defense firm has an interest in helping that process along also. So this is really expanding sort of the global supply chain of weapons producers and creating new domestic defense industries in many countries in the developing world. In addition to Turkey Israel built a lot of its current domestic defense industry through previous offset agreements with U.S. firms. And the growth of offset brokerage firms has been really extremely dramatic. So there's tens of billions of dollars in offset agreements signed every year. They've been made confidential in the U.S. because industry went to the U.S. government and said look you can't be asking for this kind of information and recording it. The Bureau of Industry and Security in the U.S. used to actually require that firms provide this information. Where are the offsets going? What countries? What's the equipment? How much is it worth? So they were producing 30, 40, 50 page reports on these activities. The defense firms didn't like that and so they lobbied the U.S. government to make it confidential. So now there's really no information at all collected on any of these things. And in many European countries there's enormous numbers of offset brokerage firms sort of popping up to help firms manage these contracts and then to also act as fiduciary agents on behalf of the procuring country governments. And so everyone, the procuring country government, the defense firm, and this huge sort of complementary industry of financial actors have an interest in promoting and growing this industry, which acts as a dramatic tool for the proliferation of weapons and for the growth of the industry overall. And because the weapons industry is not immune to the forces of financialization, it has become a real site for increased focus from financial actors and for financial investment. We see similar sort of trends and patterns in venture capital and private equity firms sort of turning their focus on the defense industry also because budgets are so huge and so reliable. So there's all of these sort of financial factors that are all sort of pouring into the defense industry and just making it larger and larger every year. And I think that's something that we should all sort of be cognizant of and try to fight against. Thank you, Dr. Martins, for clarifying important information that also kind of pushed us to wonder like as Stephen mentioned earlier that the latest report showed that there's around two trillion dollars as in arms sales last year in a year of a pandemic. So now we're in the second section of the panel discussion. So my first question is how is this investment we put in all these military spending and for the arms sales and all these stuff and for loving as well kind of takes money away from solutions that society needs. We have investment in hospitals and education, all these stuff that really matters for society. And really is the security of human beings. So can you elaborate on what are the forces behind it, what are the needs or what are the forces and how the media also like plays a role in that to divert the discussion from important things. I'm pretty free who would like to start. I mean I can say something briefly. But I was writing a piece for the Middle East report, which is part of the Middle East research and information project, which is a great organization that I'm a part of. And I was looking into this specific question sort of how content made it from the defense industry into think tanks and then into the media to promote like sort of continued militarization. And the Center for Strategic and International Studies is a think tank in D.C. And you know it I think 17 of its top donors are military firms or firms like insurance companies whose primary sector is ensuring military contractors that are overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are all sort of defense military adjacent companies that are donating primarily to CSIS. And there was money given to CSIS to do a study on the U.S. Defense Industrial Base. Right, this was in I think 2014. And CSIS published a report that said you know it looks like the number of military defense industrial firms in the U.S. has gone from you know 78,000 to 68,000 or to 61,000 so a drop of like 19,000 over the past three years between you know maybe 2014 and 2017. And they said you know if you look at the language of the report they clarify. They say we don't know actually what happened to these firms. Maybe they changed their name. Maybe they got bought out by a bigger defense firm. Maybe they started making civilian technologies. Maybe they acquired a third party firm and so they changed their name together. We don't know what happened to them. We just see that they're not still under that same industrial code in U.S. government reporting documents. And so that conclusion that was in the CSIS report made its way into sort of defense industry publications as this sort of hysteria over the declining defense industrial base in the U.S. and then it eventually ended up in the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal that declining U.S. military spending was creating a crisis in the U.S. defense industrial base and that all of these companies were going out of business where none of that was present in the CSIS report. I mean that's what they tried to indicate in the language and the rhetoric of the report but none of those actual conclusions are anywhere supported in the data that's in that report and yet it flows into the sort of the mainstream media as you know the disappearance of the U.S. military industrial base because of declining budgets whereas I mean the budget never declined. It grew at a smaller rate but there's never been an actual decline and so it's really dangerous to see how firms promote a particular kind of research in particular institutions and how that is permeates into sort of the popular media and how misleading it really is. Yeah I think if we look at Europe we also see rapidly rising military budgets in the last few years. I think lobby from different angles comes together for this. I think yeah what I already discussed in my presentation was the lobby by the military industry for higher budgets and for securitization so militarizing the so-called solution to a lot of problems like migration, like climate change, like even pandemics. The lobby organization of the European defense industry really put forward that higher military budgets are part of the answer to the COVID-19 crisis for example. But I think there are also other factors playing in. There's the pressure from within NATO, European NATO member states to have higher budgets to increase it to 2% of the gross domestic product. I know many armed forces themselves are saying they desperately need more money and yeah I see it challenged very little. Everyone seems to agree that more money for militaries is needed and everywhere threats are presented I'd like to discuss refugees as threats but of course also Russia, China instead of looking for cooperation looking for diplomacy and new arms races going on with higher military budgets. So I think there's a lot of work for us to do to counter this. One thing I'll add just really quickly to cap up two really excellent responses is oftentimes you'll hear the justification for increasing military budgets on the basis of job creation and that there's very few manufacturing jobs left in the United States. The first or in pretty much any sector but you know the problem with that is one or I guess the biggest problem is that yes military spending does create jobs but if you're after military spending is the worst possible way to go about it. The cost of war project usually has something out every couple of years at least that shows that military spending creates about seven jobs per million dollars invested while green energy and infrastructure create like close to nine and healthcare produces almost twice that of an equal investment in military expenditures and then education is something crazy it's like two and a half or three times as much. So oftentimes what you're saying they're like oh well we need to invest more in defense because it creates jobs it's like okay yeah I mean it does but I mean it'd be a lot better to take that money and invest it elsewhere if that's what you truly care about. Great thank you thank you all for the elaborative answers and highly needed. So we often hear something called revolving doors like when individuals sit on corporate boards and of arms industries and then in the government offices and afterwards on the media stage so how does in Europe but also in the US the revolving doors work and are they kind of legal or are there restrictions for such employment behavior if I can put it that way. I can start off with a short comment in the US if that's okay Mark. I'm actually really interested to hear Mark's answer. I think the one thing that there are prohibitions in place regarding the sort of revolving nature between government private industry than government but I've noticed that especially for executive positions those there's often waivers granted and that there has to be a what they call a cooling off period between being in the private sector and then going back into government. Those are frequently waived so with the Lloyd Austin and now Secretary of Defense there's a waiver for him for the previous Secretary of Defense or a couple back I guess General Mattis James Mattis under Trump he was also granted a similar waiver. So there's a problem but oftentimes those rules themselves are just are almost performative to an extent because it doesn't address the problem which is public shoulders gaining an immense amount of access through their public service and then coming out the other end and then exploiting those connections that access they have for the benefit of Prophecy Concordia. I can just add a quick comment which is that like there are actual formal programs in the U.S. government to take people from industry and from people who are you know doing people who are scientists working in sort of military research firms and actually put them into government posts as a form of like exchange right so all many U.S. government agencies have these programs so the Department of Energy has an experts exchange program you know the Department of State has one also but the Department of Defense has you know like ten times as many of these pipelines that are specifically meant to bring industry people into the U.S. government so that they can sort of learn how it works and I'm sure that if anyone actually ever did a study of that they would find that those people do end up sort of recirculating between industry and the U.S. government and then of course in strategic consulting firms which you know if you're in a strategic consulting firm you might as well be in the U.S. government right because that's pretty much what you're doing right is acting on behalf of whoever your former employer was as a strategic consultant by being a government relations expert who goes on to Capitol Hill every day and explains to the staff member of a particular congressman why this weapons system is superior and why it provides XYZ benefit to the United States you know national security or whatever so even if there is sort of a law it's pretty much irrelevant and there's so many ways to get around it that it doesn't actually function effectively as any sort of deterrent. Yeah I think in general it is more of a problem in the U.S. than it is in Europe of course more there but there are some striking examples in Europe as well of revolving doors I mean the current European commissioner for the internal markets which includes the defense industry came directly from ATOS company that's also active in the military field and the other way around former I think vice president of European defense agency is now working at Airbus and yeah you see a lot of other people especially from the military after they retire ending up on boards of arms companies or consultancy. I'm not completely sure about formal procedures but I think there is at least officially there needs to be when people retire from government position there needs to be some time I think it's half year or a year before you pick up a position at the company and they need a waiver if it's a company in the field that they used to work in but it happens all the time I mean the high profile case of this this president of the European defense agency which is now working at Airbus ignored the rules for example. Great thank you thank you all again that's very insightful so to move a bit or not to move it the same like we see now in Ukraine there's a buildup of military like NATO soldiers as well as the Russian so just would like to ask about are the same forces as we learned in this discussion to now like in the US or in Europe also similar for the NATO I mean we know the US is the major player there but so are there specific think tanks that work with the NATO or no there are similar think tanks like the same ones but they just have kind of departments regarding NATO if you can please elaborate on and if there any specific think tank that we should be aware of in that regard I really don't know much about this so I hope the other two are able to answer this I mean I'm not sure if there are specific think tanks that work sort of on behalf of I guess NATO I'm sure that NATO has its own sort of internal think tank that produces research that's requested by military leaders but there are plenty of heavily militarized think tanks in the US there's more than enough to supply all of NATO with any justification they want for any sort of military activity I mean I'm looking back at this thing this piece that I wrote that I mentioned earlier which says 12 of the 25 most sided US think tanks receive most of their money from weapons manufacturers and I think that actually came from FAIR the foundation for fairness and accuracy in reporting FAIR.org which does a lot of really great work tracking defense industry sort of influence in the US media but there's also lots of strategic think tanks emerging in the Gulf countries and the GCC countries that are producing as expected the kind of research that those governments are looking for which is basically that Israel is a good ally to have strategically and that Iran is a major threat that needs to be countered in the Persian Gulf and all of the sort of very sort of hawkish neo-conservative policies that you would expect to come out of those organizations so I'm sure it's the same with NATO but I don't know specifically okay thank you so I would try to I mean all these military apparatuses they consume oil and so when we see a lot of bases from US bases are located in very strategic areas where there's all for example the Middle East but I would like to cover another angle like for instance Timothy Mitchell in his book on democracy talks how life size were engineered so that demand and oil would increase so for example SUVs for instance so from your research did you see any collusion between the oil corporations and military industries so that all these weapons the conventional weapons they consume oil and receive like almost two trillion dollars trade arms sales so is there any collusion between the two so that at the end the two sides of the equation just benefit on the cost of the society and sorry just a question from Mark for the European arms industry so the US is kind of almost the biggest but European industries or sales are kind of relatively small so I was wondering like are these sales kind of just a small door for bigger economic contracts they receive from the states that are buying these for example the oil rich countries yeah well I think the largest European arms companies are still in the top ten of the largest arms companies in the world so I think they are quite large themselves but yeah European arms export policies are also an instrument for EU foreign and trade policies in general so yeah part of the reason that many countries are reluctant to have an embargo against Saudi Arabia for example is about oil yeah so that and yeah sometimes arms exports are also used to get more access to market in general so yeah in that sense it could be as you say yeah what I want to say about the other question I think most part of the international military strategies be it the EU or NATO or the United States one of the most important things is getting and maintaining access to fossil fuels so I think it plays a role in military strategy all the time I'm not completely sure about the role of fossil fuel industry simply because I never looked into it but I know they are connected I remember that the Dutch government for example granted an export license for patrol boats to Nigeria saying that one of the reasons that they granted this license even with the bad human rights situation in Nigeria itself was because it would benefit the interests of Shell in Nigeria so yeah it plays a role in military and arms trade policies all the time yeah I mean it's great that you mentioned Tim Mitchell's book his research is really interesting I mean you know after World War II part of the Marshall Plan was about converting Europe from coal to oil because there were lots of US independent producers also that were very politically influential that had a great interest in converting the European economy to run on oil also so it wasn't just like you know the suburbanization of the United States right which required an enormous amount of energy and personal automobiles that would run on oil it was also about the US trying to you know alter other countries sort of energy reliance also I mean the link between oil and arms or some people write about it as petrodollars right is very clear and goes back a long way I mean Saudi Arabia one of the biggest arms deals ever Saudi Arabia paid for an oil right the Al Yamama deal with the UK which just Google that because you know it will blow your mind the amount of corruption and bribery that has been proven to be a part of I think what is now is still the largest arms contract in history basically Saudi Arabia paid the British state in oil for all of this weaponry and I think that I think it was BP and Shell you know then sold the oil on global markets kept a massive amount of it as a as you know their contract to pay them to pay them for the trouble and then what was left over went to the British Treasury because oil of course is sort of like hard currency right a lot of countries can't don't have access to hard currency to pay for weapons but no core capitalist weapons exporter is going to accept anything other than like dollars or euros in payment for weapons but they will accept payment in oil right so in that sense it's like a fungible commodity oil access currency in that exchange and of course the relationship between the core capitalist countries who are trying to keep afloat these industrial jobs in a post-industrial sort of scenario who are their major clients for weapons purchases their oil producing countries because they have such an enormous amount of liquid capital that's coming in from the export of oil because the production of oil is extremely cheap right so it may cost you five cents a barrel if you're selling it for $80 a barrel you know the the rent that you're getting off that difference is enormous so you're accumulating such a such a large amount of capital and then you're investing the returns from previous years and so that's additional oil money that's coming in because of all these all these countries have large sovereign wealth funds so they have you know basically lots of money sort of floating around that needs to be invested sort of in a political outcome and that political outcome is getting a security guarantee from the US and Europe and other increasingly other sort of lower tier weapons producers you know China, India, South Africa, South Korea, Israel so it's definitely sort of a political relationship that is just expedited through this relationship between oil and weapons I think okay thank you thank you again a couple questions before we move to the Q&A so regarding lobbying is there any foreign interference like foreign countries lobbying for themselves for their interest in the US and Europe and how does that affect their foreign policies as well and this is the first question and second question is how do the US and members of the European Union kind of break their own laws by exporting weapons to states or regimes involved in atrocities for example the AD and it's war on Yemen, the Israeli apartheid for instance so can you elaborate on these two different to these two questions that's part of it probably to speak a little bit to the first question regarding foreign lobbying that is an issue and there are sort of shortfalls with it when it comes to how much data we have available on it because there's a lot of I guess foreign interference that doesn't necessarily qualify as lobbying even though it's aimed to steer policy it also the foreign influence also runs through think tanks for example Center for American Progress which is the most quote unquote progressive attack or at least mainstream one had an actual UAE official United Arab Emirates official right one of its policy papers so this is one of the things that incentivizes countries to have sort of a path in because it's a way to not only gain access to sort of officials to steer laws or certain provisions in your direction but also to sort of cleanse one's image as well if you go through sort of progressive institutions. I mean they can also. It's more about right funding the organizations that are already promoting your point of view right. It's not necessarily a tit for tat exchange although that the case of the Center for American Progress was very clearly sort of tit for tat because they actually someone got copies of the emails. Right so that was a very sort of clear cut case of I guess influence peddling you know but they also you know contribute to sort of right wing leaning universities where they know the professors are going to produce content that promotes their point of view right but they're already sort of promoting that point of view but that's the way. Those institutions and organizations continue to exist and can amplify their point of view is by getting money from you know from foreign agents from industry actors or whoever is looking for a place to to amplify whatever their ideological viewpoint is in terms of limit limitations on exports I mean you know it's always a very sort of limited rule you know there's never like a real embargo. It might be a limitation on new licenses right as in the case of the UK and Saudi Arabia. I wouldn't issue new licenses for different weapons systems but the previously existing licenses you know remain sort of in operation so that they can get the spare parts that they were getting before anyway so it's sort of promoted as you know taking action against these gross human rights violations but it's it's leaving most of the relationship intact right so even when there is and when there is an embargo you know half the time the people who initiate the embargo like the United States doesn't observe it anyway and they just allow for the transfer from Saudi Arabia to a third party anyway right so even if there is sort of an embargo in place or some sort of formal agreement they're constantly undercutting that either legally or illegally and when they do it illegally no one suffers for it anyway right because they usually have either presidential immunity or you know really good lawyers so. Yeah I would say it's pretty much the same in Europe. There is an EU common position arms exports that gives eight criteria that countries have to check against when when giving arms export license but they are so broad and fake. That's really a question of implementation and it's never prohibits or any kind of. Kind of exports and yeah of course they're binding so called binding embargoes UN and you level so Shannon mentioned but there's always a way around them and no one's gonna hold people or governments to account for it. And as for foreign lobbying yeah I don't know much about it there's not much information about these things of course. But yeah there are some examples you know Israel has been lobbying really for its privilege position regarding EU funding basically the only non EU non European country that's eligible for which companies are eligible for EU military research funding. And I know Saudi Arabia has been really busy lobbying against restrictions on arms exports. Or there's no enforcement mechanism right who's going to enforce that and then the United States there are sort of government agencies that are tasked. Legally with enforcing these rules and regulations but business leaders lobby their congressmen to cut the budgets specifically of those agencies that are tasked with oversight and regulation right. So you may have one government sort of contractor oversight person who is in charge of hundreds of contracts right and it's impossible for them to actually regulate any of these activities effectively and industry knows that and that's why they consistently. Promote policies that cut the budgets of these agencies and it becomes an ideological viewpoint right it's about small government limited government you know letting the free market get on with the job of producing. You know economic growth and prosperity but what it's really about is limiting the ability of regulators monitors and overseers to actually control any of this activity effectively even if they are legally tasked with doing so they're they're completely incapable of handling it. So this is I mean this is terrifying but so the question is what can we do so what can citizens and particular parties who are engaged in anti-war movements and activists can do to push against this. So I'll ask you all mark with your work at stop button on those even at the with cooperation at the security form security policy reform institute and China at the security in context initiative. What can we do to push against the question. Yeah it's a very difficult question. First I want to say if an eye on the comments and I really want to say that I'm very much in favor of abolishing and dissolving NATO. Yeah working against the arms rights. It's very hard to think it's often possible to challenge specific exports. I mean there was quite a lot of opposition against arms exports to Syria. Yeah for example. There are other examples like that. If you really want to get to the court of the issue you have to challenge the underlying narratives. For arms exports for militarization. And promote efficient alternative security efficient. One that's based on diplomacy cooperation. Sharing. Yeah completely different policy than the current military and capitalist policies. And yeah I think that has to be done in any way it has to be done by lobbying by publications by writing letters. And then a whole set of activities you can do up until demonstrations and direct action to challenge. I'm afraid there's no like one magic thing that we all have to do to change it. It's a very hard work and it's really going against the tide in the current times. I echo Mark and that there is not necessarily one thing you can do about leveraging your position and finding what you're good at within your sort of your sort of realm can be labor oriented. For example during the pandemic there are several factories in the United States that wrote public letters by other unions or directly had the publisher and local or national newspapers that said basically we have the pasties and a ventilators we have the pasties. Masks. Right now we're for load or we're making you know fighter jet engines. So that's one way. Another could be just interactions with government just going through and figuring out how your politicians are funded. And basically making a huge deal out of relationships with military contractors, especially due to the nature of it I mean. You know taking cash from you know private you know medical firm or private energy firm or private defense contractor you know if you do believe the same. But I think there's more you can do with sort of relationships military contractors because they're contractors from the federal government. So in my mind it's a lot easier to sort of fit that into the discourse on inequality and corruption because. They these firms are generating most of their profits from the public sector, which a lot of people don't know a lot of people are unaware of contractors as well. So it's about such as finding through your niche and finding out sort of what your best and most interested in. I don't have a very good answer for that I mean I guess as an American the best thing you could do would be to not pay your taxes right since most of it goes to the Department of Defense. But I think making life uncomfortable for people for industry executives right. So just you know yelling at them in restaurants right not you know letting your kids play with their kids at play dates. I mean things like that where you're actually sort of undermining someone's social standing and when you do it directly to the individuals that are involved in that industry I think can be very productive. Like in the US a lot of the Trump administration officials were sort of verbally berated very publicly, which was frequently caught on camera. And you could tell that that actually really took a toll on their ability to like go to work every day and continue you know the destruction of the country that of course has been initiated under previous administrations for a very long time. But afflicting the comfortable I think is one way of doing that. And then of course supporting direct actions right so like when dock workers refused to load weapons systems onto cargo ships. Anyway you can you can support actions like that financially or physically I think is is also something that we can all do. Thank you. Thank you all. And so before we move to the QA there's one more question to Steven like you mentioned that the to see who like or try to get in contact with the Congress woman or man. And so I was wondering I assumed that you had already experienced with that when you contact them try to to breathe them on something or provide them with research data so can you elaborate on your experience with that approach. With engaging Congress broadly you mean or I won't speak about my personal experiences but I think some tactics that work. Extremely well. It's just being nice to the person you reach out to and being very brief in your position you can don't be afraid to come off as terse but you can't be rude to the person. This isn't about no kind of, you know, valley down it's about being courteous a lot of these congressional staffers are overworked tremendously overworked and underpaid. And a lot of discussion this matter here is far beyond a lot of what they even heard about. So sometimes they're lazy, you know, sometimes their boss is terrible, but, you know, in general if you're going to approach an office and that's the route you're going to take. Then definitely be nice. Thanks for the meeting, etc. But as far as as far as forms of advocacy go. That's a very small piece of I think I think it's more to show it's easier to walk in a meeting with you have if you can get that meeting in the first place if you show that you're representing an issue that's broadly popular there's just a hell of a lot of work. To give you a certain amount of credibility before you go in. And it's sort of one of those things where you have to make it make sense to that other person. And that doesn't necessarily involve, you know, you know, hysterics usually. Great. I guess we reached the end of our panel discussion. We have a couple of questions from our audience. So one of the questions also for Stephen that was. So I'm going to read it. It's be interesting to know from Stephen the longer term historical trend of the private privatization proportion of the Department of Defense funds. What was it 20 years ago, 40 years ago. I know this better than me. I don't really I can't give you a specific number. I think. Over the last 20 years at least that's remained somewhat stable. Although the one thing that I do keep my eye on is industry consolidation. So, since the top six weapons manufacturers or military contractors. Last year, if you trade back to the 80s or pre Cold War, those six firms, just sort of if you traced it back on mergers and acquisitions and that sort of thing. Those firms were once, you know, 270 firms about that they sort of coalesced throughout that time. And what that does is that it's sort of when when certain military military contractors get sort of dominance or head on control over the market. They sort of it becomes less about competition between those forces and more about sort of working together in collaboration. So they do compete with one another over huge contracts of course that all happened but overall it's about sort of. Not just about privatization but also sort of the hierarchy that's built with this because again remember there's about 50,000 military contractors and five. Get awarded over a third sometimes close to 40% of all the contracts given here. Yeah, I actually don't know the answer to that question either I mean but a lot of the costs that are not sort of weapons procurement. Are, you know, pushed to other parts of the budget right so like contingent budgets for contingency operations overseas right so actual actual wars, right are not included in that sort of official DoD budget. So it's also the case that it's extremely difficult to ever develop any kind of time series data, or actual comprehensive figures about military spending, or even you know the number of firms involved or the proportion of exports in their corporate profits or like that, because they intentionally obfuscate all of this information, and they divide it into different industrial codes, so it's impossible for you to actually get like a reliable figure. So even I think it's impossible actually to ever answer a question like that. They do, you know, push more and more sort of personnel costs and other costs off onto other budgets so that that sort of procurement budget for acquiring weapons can remain very large. So that's also something that makes it really difficult to say, I think. We're going to take one more question from the audience and also please take the chance to also kind of give your last or conclude with your opinion on. So the question is, to what extent do you think the military industrial complex is incentivized countries to go to war. So please, Mark, if you want to go ahead and then Steven, then we finish by with shark. Yeah. Again, this is hard to say. It plays a role. But I don't think the lobby from the military industrial complex alone would drive countries to go to war. But yeah, it's part of it's just as just as a lot of other things. So yeah, I really don't have much more to say about about this question, I think. As far as I'm unsure if it's rolling, you know, incentivizing other countries to go to war. But I know that it is instrumental in sort of US keeping its imperial presence raw. And I don't think sort of US is endless wars as it's as it's called now. I don't think they fell from the sky. I think they were born out of an imperial posture. And I think I think it's obvious by this point in the conversation how the military industrial complex, especially the private interests is reinforcing that posture abroad. So that's why I can sort of. It's my general answer to that question. I mean, you can look at things like share prices, right? That are on trading indexes for defense firms and see that they are that they track directly with war and with US announcements about pending conflicts or. I remember when I mean, you know, Trump made some announcement about improving relations with North Korea and the stock for a number of defense firms like plummeted immediately, right? So there is a direct connection between US foreign policy and the share prices of private defense industrial firms, right? That's very clear. And the financial and professional and personal interests of an enormous number of sort of middle class professionals are bound up in the pursuit and the continuation of wars overseas, right? So, you know, people who you would think of as only secondarily or tertiary related to the defense industry still rely essentially on conflict for their own, you know, for their own like standard of living, right? People who organize arms trade fairs abroad, right? There are huge like arms trade conferences. People who do photography for defense industry publications like Defense News or Aviation Weekly. So if you if you really think about it, there's so many people whose livelihoods are bound up in this industry that you really have to be able to dismantle that connection by replacing it with something else. Otherwise, you have really a built in impetus for continued conflict and it's not that I think those people are lobbying the US government to, you know, to invade Syria or anything, but they develop through their day to day interactions with other people who also work in that industry, a certain outlook, a certain understanding of history, a certain understanding of geopolitics and war that contributes to the continuation of those conflicts, right? I mean, the entire system sort of has to be dismantled with other and replaced with other, you know, with green energy, with civilian conservation cores, you know, with all of these other projects that can give people meaning and give them some quality of life that is not directly linked to the war machine and the continuation of conflicts. One last question is, so we recently heard that the US military is also investing in I guess $21 billion in like virtual reality research, and also recently with the also autonomous weapons and autonomous drones, like wondering like how is the relationship between universities, research and the military and how, I mean, how problematic because the military presents itself as an R&D pioneer somehow, so if you can quickly or shortly elaborate on it if you have any experience with it. I mean, I've been reading a lot about venture capital and private equity in the defense industry, and what I'm seeing is that, you know, a lot of sort of tech startups are getting financial investment from these financial actors because they have some technology which has some military application. It's not necessarily that they're developing it to be used by the military, but someone from a venture capital firm or a private equity fund comes in and says, hey, you know, you could get a lot of really huge government contracts if you modify this code a little bit so that it could be used by unmanned aerial vehicles, you know, weaponized drones, and then of course they're going to get an enormous amount of investment and then the trajectory of that startup firm is forever changed and securitized and militarized. So that's something that I've definitely read a lot about in the past 10 years and it seems like that's going to be the probably the trend going forward. Yeah, the relationship between arms companies and universities is high on the list of things that I want to research in the future. I think in general the relationship is getting closer and closer and I think one of the most important drivers for this is our reductions in spending on education and universities getting more dependent on third party funding. Changing that would help to get these relations less close. Yeah, one echo in Mark. One of the things that would be tremendously beneficial for some of that relationship is just having alternative sources of funding, especially federal funding. Again, the contracts that I talked about earlier I should have included that about 500 billion contracts were given out last year close to 440 went to the military. So there's a serious problem here that if a company or an organization or an academic institution is seeking money from the federal government just sort of by virtue of how the government sort of funds itself. The limited number of options so ideally I would sort of. And this this could be relevant to sort of academic organizing by faculty or students is to sort of push for conversion between. Between combat and climate funding disparities and that disparity is truly massive. So I think I think that. That those that those relationships exist between sort of academic institutions and arms manufacturers so shows sort of a hubris on the on the account of manufacturers just how so much organizing the past has been at college campuses. Unfortunately, we are running out of time, but I would like to thank you all for joining us for this insightful and clarifying discussion and information. So again, thank you all and we appreciate it. It's been great. Nice to meet everyone. Thanks for having me.