Defense lobby is hugely powerful over Congress- they mobilize money to reward candidates

David Isenberg is an independent researcher and writer on U.S. military, foreign policy, and national and international security issues; The Impact Of Money In Politics On National Security ; Lobe Log; https://lobelog.com/the-impact-of-money-in-politics-on-national-security/

Today’s military contractors are highly sophisticated and successful companies. They have done exceedingly well the past five years. They have vast budgets for lobbying and are not shy in using them to make campaign donations and job appeals. In 2015, the Senate was debating the National Defense Authorization Act, which contained reforms of the acquisition process affecting Pentagon defense contractors. During the first quarter of 2015, Honeywell’s PAC topped the list of corporate PACs that contributed the most money to members of Congress. Joining Honeywell ($553,999) on the list were Northrop Grumman ($416,900), and Boeing ($304,500), which spent millions on lobbying when they earlier competed for the new Long Range Strike Bomber contract in the NDAA. Raytheon also contributed $238,500. Some members of Congress are especially vulnerable to lobbying by military contractors due to the economic makeup of their districts. In her 2014 book The American Warfare State: The Domestic Politics of Military Spending, political scientist Rebecca Thorpe found that “districts with less diverse economies are disproportionately reliant on defense dollars that they receive.” Consider the Joint Strike Fighter program. Its technical problems have been well documented over the years. What has not been nearly as well understood is the huge lobbying effort behind it, spearheaded by Lockheed Martin. With 12 in-house lobbyists working on the issue, the contractor also paid over $7 million to keep 26 K Street firms on retainer for 2014. BAE Systems, United Technologies, Rockwell Collins, and Northrop Grumman have also maintained similar lobbying efforts. But the F-35 lobbying goes well beyond that. In 2011, Kay Granger (R-TX) and Norm Dicks (D-WA) announced the formation of a Congressional Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) Caucus. The primary contractors building the JSF (Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, and Pratt & Whitney) contributed $326,400 to members of the JSF Caucus in the first year of the 2012 election cycle. These firms’ PACs, which distribute campaign contributions to promote the contractors’ political goals, gave the average member of the JSF Caucus $6,094 — nearly double what they gave to the average representative not in the caucus ($3,077). Furthermore, the home states of members of JSF Caucus receive a disproportionate share of JSF dollars, and, in turn, jobs for their constituents. Lobbying and campaign spending distort national security policy decision-making. The sheer enormity of the defense industry’s lobbying in pursuit of its interests is overwhelming to members of Congress, who have very little stake in standing up to the defense establishment and lots to lose by doing so. Moreover, the ability to give enormous campaign donations provides the defense industry a disproportionate edge in pushing projects and programs that are not necessarily in the national interest. As John McCain wrote in 2011, The fiftieth anniversary of President Eisenhower’s address presents us with a valuable opportunity today to carefully consider, have we heeded President Eisenhower’s admonition? Regrettably and categorically, the answer is, no. In fact, the military-industrial complex has become much worse than President Eisenhower originally envisioned: it’s evolved to capture Congress. So, the phenomenon should now rightly be called, the ‘military-industrial-congressional’ complex.