the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Mar 6, 2023
Democrats and Republicans in Congress are openly talking up a mad rush to increase military production. “We desperately need to increase our manufacturing base for key weapons systems,” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a Fox News interview. “It’s a huge priority for our committee to increase that production capacity.”
According to these lawmakers, the war in Ukraine was a kind of wake-up call. In order to fuel that war, the U.S. and its NATO allies have been burning through enormous stockpiles of artillery, ammunition and air defenses compared to recent wars.
For example, in their 20-year-war in Afghanistan, the U.S. and NATO forces fired at most 300 artillery rounds a day. Compare that to Ukraine, where thousands of rounds of artillery are fired every day. On some days in the Donbas region, the Ukrainian army fires 6,000 to 7,000 rounds of artillery. “A day in Ukraine is a month or more in Afghanistan,” said Camille Grand, a defense expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, who until recently was NATO’s assistant secretary general for defense investment.
According to U.S. and NATO officials, U.S. weapons makers are not producing nearly enough just to replenish those stocks. “We’re on a peacetime footing with our industrial base,” complained Republican Michael Waltz of Florida, the chair of the House Armed Services Readiness Subcommittee.
The fact that Waltz calls the trillion dollars spent on the U.S. military every year a “peacetime footing” is an indication of just how much more both parties intend to increase military spending. That money is aimed at paying U.S. weapons manufacturers to be ready "to flip a switch and start mass producing high-tech, high-end weapons," as Waltz said.
Of course, all that new war spending will be a source of guaranteed profits for the big weapons manufacturers. But their big increases in the production of weapons and ammunition goes way beyond U.S. support for the Ukrainian Army to continue to fight Russia. U.S. officials are openly threatening much wider wars—"high intensity wars"—not just against Russia, but also China.
In other words, the U.S. government is pushing the world toward new mass blood baths—all so that the U.S. super-power can impose its power over the peoples of the rest of the world. And all for the profits of the biggest U.S. companies and banks.