Pentagon Pork and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood

Analyses of who won and who lost in this year’s midterm elections are well underway.

For its part, the arms industry had one big win, among others: the likely ascension of Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) to the chair of the House Armed Services Committee. Rogers is a hawks’ hawk and longtime advocate of 3 to 5% annual growth in Pentagon spending, adjusted for inflation. Spending at this rate would push the Pentagon budget to $1 trillion or more before the end of this decade, an unprecedented figure that would be by far the highest level reached by the department since World War II.

The 3 to 5% figure, touted not only by Rogers but by other Pentagon budget boosters like outgoing ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), is not based on a careful consideration of America’s defense needs. It is rooted in an offhand comment by former Trump administration defense secretary and General DynamicsGD
board member James Mattis, amplified by a 2018 report by the Congressionally mandated National Defense Strategy Commission.

Before going deeper into Rogers’ record, it is worth reflecting briefly on Mattis’s career path given his advocacy of a huge influx of funding for the military-industrial complex. Mattis came into the Trump administration from a board position at General Dynamics, a top 5 arms contractor, and returned there after leaving government.

Mattis is a poster child for the revolving door, in which officials employed by weapons contractors move in and out of government, wielding insider influence on behalf of their corporate employers along the way.

Mattis is far from the only one to take a spin through the revolving door – “Brass Parachutes,” a 2018 report by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), found “645 instances of the top 20 defense contractors . . . hiring former senior government officials, military officers, Members of Congress, and senior legislative staff as lobbyists, board members, or senior executives.” A September 2021 analysis by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) identified even more “revolvers.” Looking only at the top 14 arms contractors, the GAO found that they had hired “about 1,700 recent former DOD senior civilian and military officials, such as general or admiral, or former acquisition officials.”

Mike Rogers is an integral part of this process. To cite just one example, his former chief of staff Andy Keiser left his office to work for Navigators Global, an all-Republican lobbying shop.

Getting back to the origins of Rogers’ favorite Pentagon budget talking point, as noted above it was cited in the 2018 National Defense Strategy Commission report, which has become a bit of a bible for key advocates of throwing more money at the department. But the commission was far from an unbiased body – research by the aforementioned Project on Government Oversight found that a majority of members of the panel that produced the report worked as board members or consultants of arms makers, or as analysts at think tanks funded by the industry. In other words, the arms industry’s fingerprints are all over the estimate Rogers’ regularly uses in his advocacy for ever higher Pentagon budgets.

Rogers likely believes the hype about needing more military funding, but he is also awash in financial ties to the Pentagon and the arms sector. He was the top recipient of weapons industry contributions in the 2022 election cycle, at a hefty figure of over $440,000. And his home state of Alabama receives over $12 billion per year in Pentagon contracts, with the bulk of it concentrated in Huntsville, which is informally known as “Rocket City” because it is home to so many contractors working on missile programs. Huntsville is about an hour north of Rogers’ Congressional District, and he has been a loyal advocate of projects that pour funds into the city and its environs.

A shift from current armed services committee chair Adam Smith (D-WA) to Rogers as chair could be a major boon to the arms industry. Smith voted against adding tens of billions of dollars more to the Pentagon’s budget request for Fiscal Year 2023, while Rogers was a central player in pushing for the increase. Smith has expressed skepticism about the costs of the Pentagon’s three decades-long, $1.7 trillion nuclear weapons buildup, while Rogers has heartily endorsed it. Last but not least, Smith has been much more measured in his assessment of the challenges posed by China, suggesting that it is unrealistic to build a strategy around the goal of winning a war with that nation, but that the goal should be to deter a conflict between nuclear-armed powers. He articulated this view in a November 2020 conversation at the Council on Foreign Relations:

“I think building our defense policy around the idea that we have to be able to beat China in an all-out war is wrong. It’s not the way it’s going to play out. If we get into an all-out war with China, we’re all screwed anyway. So we better focus on the steps that are necessary to prevent that. We should get off of this idea that we have to win a war in Asia, with China, what we have to do from a national security perspective, from a military perspective, is we have to be strong enough to deter the worst of China’s behavior.”

Don’t expect to hear anything like this realistic, nuanced view of the challenge posed by China from Mike Rogers.

In fact, the arms industry couldn’t have done better if it had placed one of its own lobbyists at the head of the House Armed Services Committee. They can rest assured that Mike Rogers will do their work for them.