美國的五大軍火商

簡介：愛國者導彈、戰斧巡航導彈、F-16戰 鬥機……在很多人眼裏，它們都已是美軍的代名詞。阿富汗戰爭和伊拉克戰爭中，美軍靠著這些武器，在戰場上勢如破竹；也是靠著這些武器，美軍在全球範圍內確 立了無可撼動的優勢。如此強悍的軍事力量，是誰武裝起來的？

戰備專家指出，不是白宮和五角大樓，而是美國的五大軍火商：洛克希德·馬丁公司( Lockheed Martin Corp , NYSE : LMT ) 、波音公司(Boeing company , NYSE : BA )、“雷神”公司（Raytheon Company, NYSE : RTN）、諾斯羅普·格魯曼公司（Northrop Grumman, NYSE : NOC）和通用動力公司（General Dynamics, NYSE : GD）。

▉洛克希德.馬丁公司( Lockheed Martin Corporation ) 

　　公司概況
　　洛克希德.馬丁作爲全球最大防務商，是一家以宇航和高技術爲主的跨國公司，其總部地址是在馬裏蘭州接近華盛頓特區的市郊。公司約有95%業務來自五角大樓，其他聯邦部門，以及對外軍事貿易。2004年，洛克希德.馬丁收入爲355億美元，定單總額近740億美元。135000名職員遍佈全球56個國家，現任董事長兼首席執行官和總裁是Robert J. Stevens。
　　公司歷史
　　1912年，格林.馬丁公司創立。
　　1916年，洛希德飛機製造公司創立。
　　1921年，洛希德飛機製造公司改名爲洛克希德飛機公司。
　　1961年，格林.馬丁公司與美國瑪利埃塔公司合併。
　　1995年洛克希得公司與馬丁.瑪利埃塔公司合併。
　　1996年收購勞拉公司電子防務與系統集成業務。
　　2000年宇航電子分部出售給英國宇航系統公司。
　　軍用産品
　　A-10攻擊機升級，F-16戰機，F-22隱形戰機，F-35隱形戰機，F-117隱形戰機，P-3反潛機，S-3巡邏機，U-2偵察機，C-5運輸機，C-130運輸機，C-141運輸機，“海軍陸戰隊一號”總統直升機，“三叉戟-2”洲際導彈，“宇宙神”系列運載火箭，“智慧女神”運載火箭，“聯合通用導彈”，“陸軍戰術導彈系統”，“愛國者-3”地對空導彈/“中程增程防空系統”，“戰區高空區域防空系統”，“聯合空對地防區外導彈”，“風力修正布彈器”，“輕標槍”反坦克導彈，“地獄火”反坦克導彈，“緊湊型動能導彈”，“寶石路”制導炸彈，“多管火箭炮系統”，“高機動火炮系統”，“未來戰鬥系統”無人車，“瀕海戰鬥艦”，制導火箭彈藥，制導炮彈，“宙斯盾”武器指揮系統，武器平臺集成與升級，軍用衛星與空間系統，軍用雷達，航空電子設備，軍用通信設備，等。

▉波音公司(The Boeing Company)
 

波音公司（The Boeing Company）是美國一家開發、生產及銷售固定翼飛機、旋翼機、運載火箭、飛彈和人造衛星等產品，為世界最大的航天航空器製造商。於1997年併購麥克唐納-道格拉斯後，現在為美國境內唯一製造民航用廣體客機的公司，與歐洲空中巴士公司同為世界唯二的大型民航機製造商，彼此瓜分市場。它也提供租賃及產品售後服務。波音公司總部設於伊利諾州芝加哥，在民用航空市場上擁有頗高的佔有率。
波音同時是全球第二大國防承包商，軍售武器量僅僅次於洛克希德·馬丁，產值則高於全球第三的英國航太。單單2014年，該公司國防部門銷售總額達到290億美元，佔波音公司總收入的32%-35%左右。

波音公司更完成超大型轟炸機B-29超級堡壘轟炸機，且大量的需求必須將飛機移至其他企業的工廠才能完成，長距離的侵略攻擊能力使得B-29使用於空襲日本的作戰。在這之中，被命名為艾諾拉·蓋號和博克斯卡號的兩架B-29轟炸機，亦是分別在長崎與廣島投下原子彈的轟炸機，B-29迄今仍是唯一於實戰中投下原子彈的機種。

　　公司概況
　　來自依利諾易州芝加哥的波音是全球第二大防務商，並于2005年重新超越空中客車公司而成爲世界最大飛機製造商。它也是美國第一大出口企業，收入總值高達524億美元，擁有近152100名員工，生意遍及世界146個國家與地區。現任首席執行官是Jim McNerney。
　　公司歷史
　　1916年，公司創立。
　　1927年成立了波音航空運輸公司。
　　1934年公司一分爲三，演變爲現在的波音公司，聯合航空公司，聯合技術公司。
　　1958年第一代民用噴氣客機波音-707正式啓用。
　　1960年收購皮亞索奇直升機公司，成爲波音伏托爾分部。
　　1996年收購羅克威爾國際公司的宇航與防務業務。
　　1997年與麥克唐納.道格拉斯公司合併。
　　2005年波音的火箭發動機分部洛克達因出售給聯合技術公司旗下的普.惠公司。
　　2005年與洛克希德.馬丁公司合資創建聯合發射聯盟。
　　公司組成
　　波音分爲兩大集團：波音集成防務系統，波音商用機。其他子公司：波音合夥服務集團，波音資本公司，連線公司。幻影工廠是波音公司的高級研發機構。
　　軍用産品
　　B-1轟炸機，B-52轟炸機，P-8反潛機，E-3預警機，E-737預警機，E-4指揮機，E-6指揮機，C-17運輸機，C-40運輸機，KC-10加油機，KC-135加油機，KC-767加油機，“機載雷射器”，“空軍一號”總統機，C-32要員機，X-45無人戰機，F-15戰機，F/A-18戰機，AV-8攻擊機，T-45教練機，AH-64武裝直升機，CH-46運輸直升機，CH-47運輸直升機，V-22機，“掃描鷹”無人機，“蜂鳥”無人直升機，“箭”/“箭-2”地對空導彈，“捕鯨叉”反艦導彈/“斯拉姆”巡航導彈，“空射巡航導彈”，“硫黃”反坦克導彈，“民兵-3”洲際導彈，“德爾它”系列運載火箭，“地基中端防禦”，“地獄火”反坦克導彈，“傑達姆”制導炸彈，“小直徑炸彈”，“未來戰鬥系統”集成，“復仇者”野戰防空系統，武器平臺集成與升級，軍用衛星與空間系統，軍用雷達，航空電子設備，軍用通信設備，等。
波音公司更完成超大型轟炸機B-29超級堡壘轟炸機，且大量的需求必須將飛機移至其他企業的工廠才能完成，長距離的侵略攻擊能力使得B-29使用於空襲日本的作戰。在這之中，被命名為艾諾拉·蓋號和博克斯卡號的兩架B-29轟炸機，亦是分別在長崎與廣島投下原子彈的轟炸機，B-29迄今仍是唯一於實戰中投下原子彈的機種。

▉諾斯羅普.格魯曼公司(Northrop Grumman Corporation) 

http://www.mg21.com/noc.html
　　
公司概況
　　諾斯羅普.格魯曼在全球防務商排行第三位，也是最大的雷達與軍艦製造商。公司總部位於加利福尼亞州聖地牙哥，在全世界100多個地區擁有工廠或辦事機構和125400名職工，年收入爲307億美元。
　　公司歷史
　　1929年，諾斯羅普航空公司被聯合航空運輸公司收購，後並入道格拉斯飛機公司。
　　1930年，格魯曼飛機工程公司創立。
　　1939年，諾斯羅普公司重新成立。
　　1994年，諾斯羅普公司與格魯曼公司合併。
　　2001年收購利頓工業公司。
　　2001年收購紐斯波特造船與幹船塢公司。
　　2002年收購TRW公司。
　　公司組成
　　諾斯羅普.格魯曼下設8個業務部：電子系統，集成系統，使命系統，造船系統，紐斯波特船廠，資訊技術部，空間技術部，技術服務部。
　　軍用産品
　　B-2隱形轟炸機，E-2預警機，E-8預警機，E-10預警機，EA-6電子戰機，KC-30加油機，X-47無人戰機，“全球鷹”無人機，“火力偵察兵”無人直升機，“尼米茲級”/CVN21航空母艦，“朱姆沃爾特級”驅逐艦，“佛吉尼亞級”核潛艇，“先進海豹輸送系統”，“大黃蜂級”/LHAR兩棲突擊艦，“聖安東尼級”兩棲運輸艦，“海上安全巡防艦“，“艾拉特級”護衛艦，“民兵-3”導彈升級，航空靶彈，海軍艦艇維修保障，武器平臺集成與升級，導彈防禦系統，軍用衛星與空間系統，軍用雷達，航空電子設備，軍用通信設備，探雷與排雷設備，等。 

▉雷神公司( Raytheon Company )
 

　　公司概況
　　雷神公司是位於馬塞諸塞州波士頓市郊的一家大型軍工企業。公司年收入約220億美元，其中超過90%來自國防領域，在29個國家和地區設有工廠或銷售部門，擁有8萬名員工，2005排名全球第五大防務商。現任董事長兼首席執行官是William H. Swanson。
　　公司歷史
　　1922年，美國器械公司成立。
　　1925年改名爲雷神公司，Raytheon原意是“衆神之光”。
　　第二次世界大戰起家爲美軍製造雷達。
　　1945年發明微波爐。
　　1948年開始製造導彈。
　　1980年收購比奇飛機公司。
　　1993年收購了英國宇航公司的霍克商務機生產線。
　　1990年代中期收購了德州儀器公司的防務部門E-系統。
　　1997年收購通用汽車公司休斯電子分部的軍事業務，包括原通用動力公司的導彈業務，德爾科電子公司防務部。
　　公司組成
　　雷神分成7個分部：集成防務系統，情報與資訊系統，導彈系統，網路中心系統，空間與航空系統，雷神飛機公司，雷神技術服務有限責任公司。
　　軍用産品
　　“幼畜”空對地導彈，“高速反輻射導彈”，“先進巡航導彈”，“聯合防區外武器”，“戰斧”巡航導彈，“響尾蛇”空對空導彈，“先進中距空對空導彈”，“愛國者”/“愛國者-2”地對空導彈，“毒刺”地對空導彈，“精確攻擊導彈”，“動能攔截彈”，“輕標槍”反坦克導彈，“陶-2”反坦克導彈，“標準-2”/“標準-3”艦對空導彈，“海麻雀”艦對空導彈，“拉姆”艦對空導彈，“寶石路”制導炸彈，“神劍”制導炮彈，T-6“聯合初級飛機訓練系統”，“密集陣”艦防系統，MK45魚雷，武器平臺集成與升級，導彈防禦系統，軍用雷達，軍用感測器，艦載武器指揮系統，航空電子設備，軍用通信設備，夜視儀器，等。

 ▉通用動力公司( General Dynamics Corporation ) 

　　公司概況
　　通用動力是家綜合性防務集團公司，總部在佛吉尼亞州巴爾的摩市郊。2005年該公司位居全球第六大防務商，在世界各地有72200多名職工，收入總值達到212億美元。現任董事長兼首席執行官是Nicholas D. Chabraja。
　　公司歷史
　　1899年，電船公司成立。
　　1952年改名爲通用動力公司。
　　1953年與康維爾公司合併。
　　1982年收購克萊斯勒公司防務部。
　　1991年資料系統分部出售給電腦科學公司。
　　1992年戰術導彈業務出售給通用汽車公司休斯電子分部。
　　1992年賽斯納商務機生產線出售給達信公司。
　　1993年軍用飛機業務出售給洛克希德.馬丁公司；同年空間系統分部出售給馬丁.瑪利埃塔公司。
　　1995年收購有百年歷史的巴斯鋼鐵廠。
　　1996年康維爾分部出售給麥克唐納.道格拉斯公司。
　　1998年收購另一家大型船廠國家鋼鐵與造船公司。
　　1999年收購灣流宇航公司。
　　2001年收購摩托羅拉公司的集成資訊系統集團。
　　2003年收購通用汽車公司防務部及其在加拿大和歐洲的子公司；同年收購奧地利斯泰爾-戴姆勒-普希公司與西班牙國營企業聖大巴巴拉系統公司.
　　2005年收購威爾第公司。
　　公司組成
　　通用動力目前由4個分部和2個子公司組成：通用動力宇航集團，通用動力戰鬥系統，通用動力海洋系統，通用動力資訊系統與技術部，自由人能源公司，材料服務公司。
　　軍用産品
　　“艾布拉姆斯”坦克，遠征戰車，未來戰鬥系統作戰車/無人車，“食人魚”/“斯瑞克”/LAV系列輪式裝甲車，“潘多爾”輪式裝甲車，“皮薩羅”步兵戰車，“海狼”級核潛艇，“洛杉磯級”核潛艇，“佛吉尼亞級”核潛艇，“俄亥俄級”核潛艇，“伯克級”驅逐艦，“劉易斯與克拉客級”幹貨船，“瀕海戰鬥艦”，“九頭怪-70”火箭，“遠征火力支援系統”，迫擊炮，坦克炮，機炮/機槍，海軍艦艇維修保障，各類口徑彈藥，導彈部件，軍用通信電子設備，核生化防禦設備。

Upon leaving the White House in 1961, President Eisenhower famously warned Americans about the dangers of a "military industrial complex,"〔               〕 and was clearly worried about the destabilizing effects of a national economy based on outsized investments in military spending. As more and more Americans fall into poverty and the global economy spirals downward, the United States is spending more on the military than ever before. What are the consequences and what can be done?

http://www.amazon.com/National-Insecurity-American-Militarism-Media/dp/0872865894

sixty-two legislators sit on the House Armed Services Committee〔               〕, the largest committee in Congress. Since January, 2011, when Republicans took control of the House, the committee has been chaired by Howard P. McKeon〔               〕, who goes by Buck. He has never served in the military, but this month he begins his third decade representing California’s Twenty-fifth Congressional District, the home of a naval weapons station, an Army fort, an Air Force base, and, for the Marines, a place to train for mountain warfare.* McKeon believes that it’s his job to protect the Pentagon from budget cuts. On New Year’s Day, after a thirteenth-hour deal was sealed with spit in the Senate, McKeon issued a press statement lamenting that the compromise had failed to “shield a wartime military from further reductions.”

The debate about taxes is over, which is one of the few good things that can be said for it. The debate about spending, which has already proved narrow and grubby, is pending.

The United States spends more on defense than all the other nations of the world combined. Between 1998 and 2011, military spending doubled, reaching more than seven hundred billion dollars a year—more, in adjusted dollars, than at any time since the Allies were fighting the Axis. The 2011 Budget Control Act〔                                                                〕, which raised the debt ceiling and created both the fiscal cliff and a Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction〔                                                               〕, which was supposed to find a way to steer clear of it, required four hundred and eighty-seven billion dollars in cuts to military spending, spread over the next ten years. The cliff-fall mandates an additional defense-budget reduction of fifty-five billion dollars annually. None of these cuts have gone into effect. McKeon has been maneuvering to hold the line.

In the fall of 2011, McKeon convened a series of hearings on “The Future of National Defense and the United States Military Ten Years After 9/11.” The first hearing was held on September 8th, the same day as, and down the hall from, the first meeting of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction〔                                                               〕, which is known as the Supercommittee. It was no one’s finest hour. By the time McKeon gavelled his meeting to order, just after ten in the morning, only seventeen members of the House Armed Services Committee 〔                                                               〕( five Democrats and twelve Republicans ) had shown up to hear the three former heads of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had been called to testify. Congressional attendance lies, ordinarily, somewhere between spotty and lousy. In committees, roll is generally called only if there’s a vote, and, despite pressure for reform, attendance isn’t even recorded except on “gavel sheets,” compiled by staffers, which are said to be unreliable. In short, it’s easy for lawmakers to skip meetings in which there’s little to be decided. In any case, the point of the Armed Services Committee hearings wasn’t really to debate the future of the American military; it was to give the Department of Defense〔                                        〕 the chance to argue against the automatic, across-the-board cuts that were scheduled to go into effect this month if the Supercommittee failed to reach a compromise.

“Our nation finds itself at a strategic juncture,” McKeon began. “Osama bin Laden is dead. Al Qaeda is on its back. The Taliban has lost its strategic momentum in Afghanistan, and Iraq is an emerging democracy.” Yet, “faced with serious economic challenges, we are slipping back into the September 10th mentality that a solid defense can be dictated by budget choices, not strategic ones.”

He then welcomed prepared remarks from two former chairs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and one former vice-chair. No one denied the size of the deficit. At issue was whether military spending should be on the table or off. General Peter Pace, of the Marine Corps, insisted that it was inappropriate to look at defense “from a dollar-and-cents perspective.” Better to count risks and threats: Iran, North Korea, and, looking ahead, China. Admiral Edmund P. Giambastiani, Jr〔                                                                                 〕., compared the prospective cuts to “performing brain surgery with a chainsaw.” General Richard B. Myers〔                                                         〕, of the Air Force, declared that “the world is a more dangerous and uncertain place today than it has been for decades.”

None of this was contested by anyone, including the ranking Democrat, Adam Smith〔                                       〕, a lawyer from Bellevue, Washington, who has served on the House Armed Services Committee since 1997 and who agreed that “defense is in an incredibly vulnerable position” because budget cuts, which could lead to force reductions and base closings, would “change the equation of power projection.” Around the world, “power projection” is, in fact, a central mission of American forces. Smith expressed alarm at the prospect of its diminishment. He asked a question, which was purely rhetorical: “What if, all of a sudden, we don’t have troops in Europe, we don’t have troops in Asia, we are just, frankly, like pretty much every other country in the world?”

The long history of military spending in the United States begins with the establishment of the War Department〔                         〕, in 1789. At first, the Secretary of War, a Cabinet member who, from the start, was a civilian, was called the Secretary at War, a holdover from the Revolution but also a prepositional manifestation of an ideological commitment: the department was chiefly to be called upon only if the nation was at war. Early Americans considered a standing army—a permanent army kept even in times of peace—to be a form of tyranny. “What a deformed monster is a standing army in a free nation,” Josiah Quincy〔                           〕, of Boston, wrote in 1774. Instead, they favored militias. About the first thing Henry Knox did when he became George Washington’s War Secretary was to draft a plan for establishing a uniform militia.

Beginning in 1822, congressional oversight was handled by two standing committees: one for the Army, the other for the Navy. A committee on the militia, established in 1815, was abolished in 1911—the militia itself having been essentially abandoned. Six years later, the United States entered the First World War, and the staggering devastation of that war raised both new and old fears about the business of arming men. In 1934, the publication of “Merchants of Death,”〔                                                       〕 a best-seller and a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, contributed to the formation, that year, of the Senate Munitions Committee, headed by Gerald P. Nye〔                                                             〕, a North Dakota Republican. Not coincidentally, that was also the year Congress passed the National Firearms Act, which, among other things, strictly regulated the private ownership of machine guns. (Keeping military weapons out of the hands of civilians seemed to the Supreme Court, when it upheld the Firearms Act, in 1939, entirely consistent with the Second Amendment, which provides for the arming of militias.) For two years, Nye led the most rigorous inquiry into the arms industry that any branch of the federal government has ever conducted. He convened ninety-three hearings. He thought the ability to manufacture weapons should be restricted to the government. “The removal of the element of profit from war would materially remove the danger of more war,” he said. That never came to pass, partly because Nye was unable to distinguish his opposition to arms profiteering from his advocacy of isolationism, a position that had become indefensible.

Not until the Second World War did the United States establish what would become a standing army. And even that didn’t happen without dissent. In May of 1941, Robert Taft〔                                       〕, a Republican senator from Ohio, warned that America’s entry into the Second World War would mean, ultimately, that the United States “will have to maintain a police force perpetually in Germany and throughout Europe.” Taft, like Nye, was an ardent isolationist. “Frankly, the American people don’t want to rule the world, and we are not equipped to do it. Such imperialism is wholly foreign to our ideals of democracy and freedom,” he said. “It is not our manifest destiny or our national destiny.”                                                 〔                                                               〕 In 1944, when Nye ran for reëlection, he was defeated. Taft three times failed to win the Republican Presidential nomination. The Second World War demonstrated the folly〔                                                               〕 of their vantage on foreign policy. It also made it more difficult to speak out against arms manufacturers and proponents of boundless military spending.

A peace dividend expected after the Allied victory in 1945 never came. Instead, the fight against Communism arrived, as well as a new bureaucratic regime. In 1946, the standing committees on military and naval affairs combined to become the Armed Services Committee. Under amendments to the National Security Act of 1947, which created the position of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the War Department, now housed for the first time in a building of its own, became the Department of Defense.

Meanwhile, during Senate hearings concerning the future of the national defense, military contractors such as the Lockheed Corporation*〔                                                         〕—which was an object of Nye’s investigation in the nineteen-thirties, and built more than ten thousand aircraft during the Second World War—argued not only for military expansion but also for federal subsidies. In 1947, Lockheed’s* chief executive told a Senate committee that the nation needed funding for military production that was “adequate, continuous, and permanent.”

In the nineteen-fifties, at the height of both the Korean War and McCarthyism〔                                                                〕, the United States’ foreign policy had become the containment of Communism the world over, and military spending made up close to three-quarters of the federal budget. “Defense,” no less than “national security,” is a product and an artifact of the Cold War. So, in large part, is the budget for it.

On September 8, 2011, when Buck McKeon convened the first of his House Armed Services Committee hearings on the future of the military, no one much disputed the idea that the manifest destiny of the United States is to patrol the world. Truth be told, no one asked any particularly searching questions at all. The only real flareup occurred when McKeon had to suspend the session briefly owing to the noise of protesters in the hall. “This demonstration that is going on outside is not to do with us,” the chairman explained. (It was a spillover from the Supercommittee.)

💢 New American Militarism
The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War.
http://www.jameswebb.com/books/book-reviews-by-jim/the-new-american-militarism-how-americans-are-seduced-by-war.

Andrew Bacevich on the New American Militarism  April 20, 2005.

Still, John Garamendi〔                                       〕, a Democrat from California, who during the Vietnam War served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia, read aloud from “Chance for Peace,” Eisenhower’s first major address as President, delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953. Eisenhower had sought the Republican Presidential nomination in order to defeat Taft and the isolationist wing of the G.O.P., but, six years into the Cold War, he was as worried as Nye had been about what an arms race would cost. In the speech, Eisenhower reckoned the price of arms:

    Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This is a world in arms. This world in arms is not spending money alone; it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. . . . This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Eisenhower, a five-star general who during the Second World War had served as the Supreme Allied Commander, was the son of pacifist Mennonites who considered war a sin, as James Ledbetter reports in “Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex” (Yale)〔               〕. Ledbetter writes that “when, as a child, Dwight began to show a voracious appetite for military history, his mother was disturbed and tried to keep the family’s history books locked in a closet.” Better known, if less stark, than “Chance for Peace” is the farewell address that Eisenhower delivered when he left office, in 1961, after years of failing to end the U.S.-Soviet arms race. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower warned then. “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

If any arms manufacturer today holds what Eisenhower called “unwarranted influence,” it is Lockheed Martin. The firm’s contracts with the Pentagon amount to some thirty billion dollars annually, as William D. Hartung〔                                                               〕, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy〔                                                               〕, reports in his book “Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex” (Nation).                                                 〔                                                               〕 Today, Lockheed Martin spends fifteen million dollars a year on lobbying efforts and campaign contributions. The company was the single largest contributor to Buck McKeon’s last campaign. (Lockheed Martin has a major R. & D. center in McKeon’s congressional district.) This patronage hardly distinguishes McKeon from his colleagues on Capitol Hill. Lockheed Martin contributed to the campaigns of nine of the twelve members of the Supercommittee, fifty-one of the sixty-two members of the House Armed Services Committee, twenty-four of the twenty-five members of that committee’s Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces—in all, to three hundred and eighty-six of the four hundred and thirty-five members of the 112th Congress.

The merchants-of-death argument explains only so much, as the political scientist Daniel Wirls observes in “Irrational Security: The Politics of Defense from Reagan to Obama” (Johns Hopkins): “The military-industrial complex, such as it is, does not produce the propensity or predisposition for war or even hawkish policies short of conflict, as much as war or hawkish policies (driven primarily by political decisions) produce an opening for the military-industrial coalition to take advantage of the biases built into the system that favor, over the long run, hawkish policies.” Ledbetter is less concerned with Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex than with private contractors, abuses of civil liberties, and foreign arms sales (the U.S. sells more guns than any other country), which, he believes, together “constitute an overreaching military-industrial complex at least equal to the one Eisenhower warned against” and create “problems that cannot simply be resolved with more rational budgets.” Neither can these problems be solved without thinking about guns sold, owned, and carried within the United States. At home and abroad, in uniform and out, in war and in peace, Americans are armed to the teeth.

“Every gun that is made,” Eisenhower said, “signifies, in the final sense, a theft.” During that first hearing, when Garamendi finished quoting Eisenhower, he invited General Myers to comment. Myers said, “I wonder what President Eisenhower would have done in New York City on 9/12/2001.”

In 2001, military spending, as a function of the over-all American economy, was, at six per cent, the lowest it had been since the Second World War. Then, for a decade, it rose. In much the same way that the peace dividend expected with the Allied victory never came because of the Cold War (during most of which military spending made up roughly half the federal budget), a peace dividend expected after the end of the Warsaw Pact〔               〕, in 1991, came but didn’t last. Instead, after 9/11 the United States declared a “global war on terror,” a fight against fear itself. The Iraq War, 2003-11, went on longer than the American Revolution. The war in Afghanistan, begun in 2001, isn’t over yet, making it the second-longest war in American history. (Only Vietnam lasted longer.) Troops may be withdrawn in 2014; the fighting will rage on. During George W. Bush’s second term, the National Defense Strategy of the United States became “ending tyranny in our world.” But a war to end tyranny has no end; it’s not even a war.

The United States, separated from much of the world by two oceans and bordered by allies, is, by dint of geography, among the best-protected countries on earth. Nevertheless, six decades after V-J Day nearly three hundred thousand American troops are stationed overseas, including fifty-five thousand in Germany, thirty-five thousand in Japan, and ten thousand in Italy. Much of the money that the federal government spends on “defense” involves neither securing the nation’s borders nor protecting its citizens. Instead, the U.S. military enforces American foreign policy.

“We have hundreds of military bases all over the world,” Melvin A. Goodman 〔《國家不安全：美國軍國主義的支出》 〕observes in “National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism” (City Lights). “Few other countries have any.” Goodman, a former Army cryptographer and a longtime C.I.A. analyst who taught at the National War College for eighteen years, is one of a growing number of critics of U.S. military spending, policy, and culture who are veterans of earlier wars. Younger veterans are critical, too. A 2011 Pew survey of veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq found that half thought the war in Afghanistan wasn’t worth fighting, and nearly sixty per cent thought the Iraq War wasn’t.

The most persuasive of these soldier-critics is Andrew J. Bacevich, a West Point graduate who fought in Vietnam in 1970 and 1971; served as a career Army officer, rising to the rank of colonel; and is now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. A Catholic and a conservative, Bacevich is viscerally pained by Americans’ ”infatuation with military power.” Everything, in Bacevich’s account, comes back to Vietnam, the way it does for a great many of that war’s veterans, including Chuck Hagel, the President’s nominee for Secretary of Defense.

Lately, Bacevich argues, Americans “have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force. To a degree without precedent in U.S. history, Americans have come to define the nation’s strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness, military action, and the fostering of (or nostalgia for) military ideals.” Even as military spending has soared, war has become more distant: less known than imagined, less remembered than forgotten. War has become a fantasy: sleek, glossy, high-tech (more “Top Gun”〔 《壯志淩雲》〕 than “Apocalypse Now”〔《現代啟示錄》 〕), and bloodless. Americans have less experience of war, and know less about the military, than at any point in the past century. Since 9/11, at any given time about one-half of one per cent of Americans have been on active duty. Only a tiny minority of members of Congress have known combat, or have family members who have. “God help this country when someone sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do,” Eisenhower once said. From Reagan to Obama, but especially during the Administrations of the past three Presidents, none of whom ever saw active duty, civilian thinking about foreign policy has been subordinated to military thinking. The State Department has deferred to the Department of Defense. And the Commander-in-Chief has deferred to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The United States, a nation founded on opposition to a standing army, is now a nation engaged in a standing war. Bacevich locates the origins of America’s permanent war more than a decade before 9/11. “During the entire Cold War era, from 1945 through 1988, large-scale U.S. military actions abroad totalled a scant six,” he reports. “Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, they have become almost annual events.” Bacevich places much of the blame for this state of affairs on intellectuals, especially neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz and Donald Rumsfeld, but also liberals, who, he points out, have eagerly supported the use of the military and of military force “not as an obstacle to social change but as a venue in which to promote it.” The resort to force is not a partisan position; it is a product of political failure.

And a failure, as well, of political culture. CNN loudmouths〔               〕, neocon opinion-page columnists, retired generals who run for office, Hollywood action-film directors, Jerry Falwell〔               〕, Wesley Clark〔               〕, Tom Clancy〔               〕, Bill Clinton〔               〕—Bacevich has long since lost patience with all these people. He deplores their ego-driven mythmaking, their love of glory, their indifference to brutality.

War, by its nature, is barbarous, grievous, and untamable. There never has been a “smart war.” Still, some wars are worse than others. “Surely, the surprises, disappointments, painful losses, and woeful, even shameful failures of the Iraq War make clear the need to rethink the fundamentals of U.S. military policy,” Bacevich suggested in his 2005 book “The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War.” 〔 《新的美國軍國主義：美國人是怎樣被帶入戰爭的》 〕That scrutiny has not yet been given, not least because, as Bacevich has observed, “The citizens of the United States have essentially forfeited any capacity to ask first-order questions about the fundamentals of national security policy.” Don’t ask, don’t tell. But, especially, don’t ask.

In 2007, Bacevich’s only son, Andrew Bacevich, Jr., a twenty-seven-year-old first lieutenant in the U.S. Army’s First Cavalry Division,* died of wounds sustained during combat in Iraq. Bacevich didn’t testify at Buck McKeon’s hearings on the military’s future in 2011, but he did testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, when its chairman, John Kerry, convened a hearing about the war in Afghanistan. This winter, the President nominated Kerry as Secretary of State.

During the hearing on Afghanistan, Kerry looked exhausted. “Colonel Bacevich,” he said, “you get to be the wrap-up.”Bacevich read a statement. Kerry listened intently, covering his mouth with his hand.

The war in Afghanistan, Bacevich said, reminded him of Vietnam and of how, in 1971, Kerry testified before this committee on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. “Yet there’s one notable difference between today and the day, thirty-eight years ago, when the chairman of this committee testified against the then seemingly endless Vietnam War,” Bacevich said. “When the young John Kerry spoke, many of his contemporaries had angrily turned against their generation’s war. Today, most of the contemporaries of those fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have simply tuned out.”

Kerry picked up his pen.

Bacevich read on: “Recall that in his testimony before this committee, speaking on behalf of other antiwar veterans, the young John Kerry remarked that ‘we are probably angriest about all that we were told about Vietnam, and about the mystical war against Communism.’ ”

Kerry looked down at his notes.

“The mystical war against Communism,” Bacevich said, “finds its counterpart in the mystical war on terrorism.” Mystification, he said, leads us to exaggerate threats and ignore costs. “It prevents us from seeing things as they are.”

People in the room began to applaud.

Kerry wiped his brow. “Please, folks,” he begged. “We will have no demonstrations of any kind.”

On October 13, 2011, at the fifth of Buck McKeon’s hearings on the future of the military, the House Armed Services Committee heard testimony from Leon Panetta, the Secretary of Defense, and General Martin Dempsey〔马丁·登普西将军 〔 Gen. Martin Dempsey〕 〕, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Committee〔 参谋长联席会议主席的证词 〕 attendance was bad, but better than before. (Eleven Democrats and twenty-two Republicans were in the room when the hearing began.)

“There are some in government who want to use the military to pay for the rest, to protect the sacred cow that is entitlement spending,” McKeon said, in his opening remarks, referring to Social Security and Medicare. “Not only should that be a non-starter from a national-security and economic perspective, but it should also be a non-starter from a moral perspective.” Cuts should be made, he said, not to “the protector of our prosperity” but to “the driver of the debt.”

“The driver of our debt is our military-complex machine!” someone shouted from the gallery.〔   “我们复杂的军事机器推动形成了我们的债务问题！” 〕

The Capitol Hill Police stepped in and arrested several protesters, including Leah Bolger〔 利娅·博尔杰女士〕, the vice-president of Veterans for Peace.

“The war machine is killing this country!” she cried, as she was carried away.

The hearing resumed. McKeon introduced Panetta. But the moment Panetta began to speak a protester interrupted. He identified himself as an Iraq War veteran. “You are murdering people!” he shouted. “I saw what we did to people. I saw.” He was escorted out of the room.

The hearing lasted two more hours. Much time was spent defending defense spending. “I don’t believe that the D.O.D. should have to pay one penny more in discretionary budget cuts,” McKeon said. Much time was devoted to inventorying threats to national security, which, Panetta said, are only increasing in both danger and number. (His list included Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and North Africa.)

Hank Johnson〔佐治亚州的民主党人，汉克·约翰逊 〕, a Democrat from Georgia, attempted to draw an analogy between the Capitol Hill Police’s ability to arrest protesters in a hearing room in the Rayburn House Office Building〔 雷伯恩众议院办公大楼    〕 and the deployment of U.S. forces〔               〕 in every corner of the globe. “From time to time, there are disturbances throughout the world, and these disturbances may interrupt some of our various interests around the world, and it is necessary for us to have some kind of force to maintain order,” he said. “It is like competition, like capitalism.”

Protesters are by no means uncommon at congressional hearings, but this particular protest had rattled people. “I know we started the day with protesters in the room, and sometimes they seem disruptive or their tactics are some we might argue with,” Chellie Pingree〔 缅因州的民主党人切利·平格里〕, a Democrat from Maine, said. “But, frankly, we are facing a time when there are protesters in almost every city where we reside or represent.”

This time—emboldened, maybe, by the protesters—a few committee members offered comments that were more pointed. Niki Tsongas   , a Democrat from Massachusetts, told Dempsey〔 登普西将军〕, “I would hope you also take into account that not every risk can be dealt with through a military response.” And the questions were tougher. Walter B. Jones, a Republican* from North Carolina, asked Panetta〔 帕内塔 〕, “Why are we still in Afghanistan?”

Leon Panetta〔 帕内塔  〕 circled around an answer. “One thing we do not want,” he said, “is Afghanistan becoming a safe haven again for Al Qaeda.”

“Mr. Secretary,” Jones pressed, “we got bin Laden, and Al Qaeda has dispersed all around the world. Let’s bring them home.”

But by far the most adamant statement came from Dempsey. “I didn’t become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to oversee the decline of the Armed Forces of the United States, and an end state that would have this nation and its military not be a global power,” he said. “That is not who we are as a nation.”“〔
我没有成为目睹美国军事力量衰落的参联会主席，也没有看到美国作为全球性力量的终结。 〕

Either the United States rules the world or Americans are no longer Americans? Happily, that’s not the choice the 113th Congress faces. The decision at hand concerns limits, not some kind of national, existential apocalypse. Force requires bounds. Between militarism and pacifism lie diplomacy, accountability, and restraint. Dempsey’s won’t be the last word. ♦

*A redistricting of California’s Twenty-fifth Congressional District went into effect in January, 2013. The district no longer includes a naval weapons station, Army fort, or a Marine mountain-warfare training center.

*Walter B. Jones is a Republican, not a Democrat, as originally stated.

*Executives from the Lockheed Corporation appeared at the hearings and before a Senate Committee. They were not from Lockheed Martin, as originally stated; the Lockheed Corporation became Lockheed Martin in 1995.

*The original article stated that Andrew Bacevich, Jr., served in the U.S. Army’s Third Battalion, but there are multiple Third Battalions in the U.S. Army.