I turned on NPR out of force of habit this evening and heard a rather strange report. It started with this sentence: “China continues to spend vast amounts of money on its military.” That phrase, “vast amounts,” really struck me.
Is it true that “China continues to spend vast amounts on its military?” Let's take a look at the numbers. Keep in mind that China has an economy that is 14 percent larger than that of the United States, if you look at total GDP by Purchasing Power Parity (a measure of economic size that takes into account cost of local goods, whereas nominal GDP does not). If China and the US had similar levels of spending on their military relative to their overall economy, China should have a military budget that is also about 18 percent larger than that of the United States. Being charitable to NPR, I think to myself as I look it up: maybe that's where talk of all the “vast spending” came from!
No. The United States military budget for this year, 2021, is $715 billion. China's “vast amounts” of spending on its military for 2021? $205 billion.
That's right. China has an economy that is 14 percent larger than ours, and yet it only spends less than a third as much on its military as we do.
The allegation that “China continues to spend vast amounts of money on its military,” isn't strictly false. $205 billion is a lot of money. But it's incredibly misleading, as they spend only about a third as much as the United States does on their military. The NPR story starts off with “China continues to spend vast amounts of money on its military,” and buried about halfway through is the fact that the United States now spends $715 billion on its military annually – but nowhere does the story quantify what China spends on its military annually, let alone directly compare what the US and China spend on their militaries side by side. This is a lie of omission, a lie of omission that is critical to maintaining the alarmist tone of the piece.
This chart, compiled from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s Military Expenditure Database, gives a more complete story. The line graphs show raw military spending as of 2019, and the numbers on the right show how much each country spends on their military relative to GDP, Gross Domestic Product, a measure of the overall size of their economies:
Military spending as a proportion of GDP tells you a lot. It tells you how much spending on the military is prioritized over other things, like consumer items and civilian goods and services, and hence standard of living, or capital investments that can improve future standard of living, or spending on power and transportation infrastructure, and so on. From this chart, Russia appears to be the most warlike of the bunch, devoting 4.26% of their entire economy to military spending, the United States is a close second at 3.74%... and China a distant third at 1.74%. Clearly, while they're spending “vast” sums on their military, they prioritize it much less — about half as much, according to this chart, as we do — preferring to focus more of their spending on more peaceful purposes.
Let's talk more about China's “vast” spending on its military, and the increasingly belligerent and militaristic attitude of China's leaders that NPR has told us so much about. If a country is trying to project power overseas and dominate other countries around the world, they build a lot of military bases. You need bases in order to quickly and efficiently launch interventions in other countries, and the mere presence of a military base can be a powerful incentive not to interfere with your country's interests. So to gauge how aggressive the foreign policies of each country truly are – and NPR, again, has told us a lot over the past year about how aggressive China has been getting – let's take a look at the number of overseas military bases the United States and China have. The United States has 800 official military bases in 80 countries. China has 1. Yes, 1. It's located in Djibouti.
But what about increased Chinese bellicosity towards Taiwan, and their increasing aggression in the South China Sea? Let's think about if the shoe were on the other foot, for a moment. The official doctrine of United States policy in the Western Hemisphere, the Monroe Doctrine, claims that the US has the right to intervene anywhere in North or South America, and that it will not tolerate outside interference in the hemisphere's affairs. The United States has the right to dominate its hemisphere. The American military has intervened in countries in the Southern hemisphere thousands of times, and has had full-on military occupations of Latin American countries dozens of times since the 1800s. There are very few countries in Latin America where we have not intervened.
For a country that officially claims an entire hemisphere to itself, to complain about Chinese “aggression” in a neighboring sea that has its name on it, is a bit rich.
As for Taiwan, let's imagine that after the US civil war, the Confederacy retreated to a remote, underdeveloped state – let's say Florida – held on to it for decades, and established a regime that claimed rightful sovereignty over all of the United States. If, say, Britain moved troops into Florida to protect it from “American aggression,” how would we react? Would we perceive that as Britain defending a “rules-based international order,” or would we see it as a massive imposition on our sovereignty? I leave that to you, dear reader.
We have a somewhat analogous situation with Taiwan. After the Chinese Civil War, the Communist CPC had defeated the KMT nationalist party, which fled to the nearby island, now known as Taiwan. The KMT, for decades, claimed that they were the rightful rulers of China, and the CPC has always claimed that this is invalid, they are the rightful rulers of China, including Taiwan. Neither party in this conflict has officially renounced the idea that Taiwan is part of China. If Taiwan were to do so and declare its independence officially, it would set off a diplomatic crisis and possibly even war.
The US, by getting involved in the Taiwan question and threatening to defend it with its military, is effectively meddling in a civil war thousands of miles away. Not that this is anything new for us. The U.S. backed Chiang Kai Shek's government before it was kicked out in 1949 and, before that, invaded China at the turn of the twentieth century as part of a multinational coalition of colonial powers after the Boxer rebellion, a coalition that committed atrocities alongside the ruling Qing government like mass execution by beheadings. (There is a photograph of this at the beginning of James Hevia’s excellent book English Lessons, on page 2). One of our main allies in the pacific region, Japan, who we've been nudging towards re-armament as the conflict with China has heated up, also invaded China — during WWII, and killed about 30 million Chinese people according to Peter Li, a historian at Rutgers University. Maybe, from the Chinese perspective, America enlisting a country that murdered 30 million of their people as a military ally can be seen as belligerent.
But I digress. Back to NPR's silly piece in All Things Considered.
The headline for this piece on NPR's website is “China could have 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030, according to Pentagon report.” What they fail to mention is the fact that the United States currently has 3,750 nuclear warheads. They also fail to mention the fact that China is currently estimated to have only around 200 warheads. No, each of these is less relevant than the fact that China is ramping up its production of warheads more rapidly than expected, and is expected to possess 1,000 of them in a decade.
Instead, they prefer to dishonestly emphasize the “vast” military spending of China, the fact that “China could have 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030,” without mentioning the fact that America spends three times as much on its military and currently holds about 18 times as many nuclear warheads. Even after the more rapid than expected ramping up of China's stockpile, America will still have over three times as many nukes, assuming we don't decommission large amounts of our stockpile. And this is unlikely, given the fairly belligerent nuclear stance the Biden administration has taken in practice so far, in spite of the his promises on the campaign trail. This excerpt from a recent post by the Union of Concerned Scientists (please read the entire piece, it's excellent):
The 2020 Democratic Party Platform declared the previous administration’s new nuclear weapons “unnecessary, wasteful, and indefensible.” President Joe Biden has long opposed new nuclear weapons and supported reducing the size of the nuclear stockpile. But you’d never know it from the Department of Energy’s recently released FY22 budget request for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the agency responsible for developing, producing and maintaining nuclear warheads and bombs.
This request fully funds all the nuclear weapons the Trump administration proposed and sets funding for the nuclear arsenal slightly above the huge budget from last year. This is disappointing given that the United States already has many more nuclear weapons than it needs and scientific analysis shows the lives of those warheads remaining in the stockpile can be extended. Extending the life of existing warheads would eliminate the need to produce, at great cost, new plutonium pits, as the current plan requires.
So far, however, the Biden administration has not chosen the more conservative route, instead continuing to err on the side of excess. Specifically, the FY22 budget request funds a provocative new submarine-launched, nuclear-armed cruise missile. It funds the new W87-1 warhead for the proposed Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD)—an unneeded new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program. It supports the excessive and unachievable requirement to achieve a capability to produce 80 plutonium pits for nuclear weapons each year beginning in 2030. It even increases funding for the B83 bomb, a massively destructive and unnecessary weapon the Obama-Biden administration planned to retire.
No mention of any of this in NPR's story on China's supposed nuclear build-up. Nowhere is talk of a “New Cold War With China” more directly relevant than here: even the old mythological “missile gap” that right-wingers loved to talk up, and that John F. Kennedy touted in his presidential campaign, is making a comeback. This was the idea that the Soviets had built up a vastly superior arsenal of nuclear missiles and could destroy the United States in a nuclear exchange easily before we even had a chance to strike back – and it turned out to be a fabrication, much like the new missile gap fabrication NPR is carefully assembling via omission and uncritical journalism right now.
All of the above deconstructs some of the context of China alarmism in the American news media, title of the All Things Considered story, and the first sentence thereof.
The main body of the story went into a speech by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, at the Aspen Security Forum. General Milley emphasized “One of the areas that concerns me a lot is space and cyber, as we go forward. Operations in space, and then, second to that is cyber. Those are going to be key determiners of who has decisive advantage at the beginning of a conflict.”
The crux of the issue, as NPR put it:
Other officials tell me China, in some areas, is exceeding US capabilities.A Pentagon report just released says China is prioritizing space capabilities to include anti-satellite weapons and again focusing on cyber warfare. Now of course the US spends some $715 billion each year on defense that number's not expected to increase. So a big question in the coming years is how much the Pentagon spends on ships and planes and troops, and how much on the more futuristic items – lasers, robotics, and drones, cyber of course – you're going to have to make some hard choices in some areas.
The way that this chunk of the news item is framed is fairly comical – since our 715 billion dollar defense budget isn't going to go up anytime soon, we're forced to make “hard choices” as to what to spend our limited $715 billion budget on rather than just increase it to fund new technologies for our military.
So where is this alarmism coming from, when China spends less than a third as much as the United States does on its military, when unlike America's global military power projection, it only seeks to project power in its own backyard, and we even see alarmism over China's nuclear capabilities when it currently possesses about one eighteenth as many nukes as the United States? The aforementioned “hard choices,” as to what the Pentagon gets to spend its measly $715 billion annual budget on, might have something to do with it.
It's amazing what a few minutes of research turns up. Sixteen large corporate sponsors are listed on the Aspen Security Forum's website, and, wouldn't you guess it, cybersecurity and space firms are well represented. We've got Lockheed Martin, whose sizable space division, Lockheed Martin Space, saw revenues increase roughly twenty percent from 2018 to 2020, from $9.81 billion to $11.88 billion. There's also ULA, United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, an aerospace contractor that also has a sizable and growing space division. Boeing doesn't list its total revenues from space-related products separately, but its total from defense and space combined is $26.26 billion – ten billion more than it makes off of commercial airliners – and we know that Boeing gets some pretty sweet space-related contracts with the US government. Exhibit A is Boeing being paid $2 billion more than SpaceX for an identical ISS mission.
Coincidentally, I'm sure, Boeing was also the third largest political lobbying spender as of 2019, clocking in at $13.8 million behind just Facebook and Amazon, and Lockheed isn't far behind at $12.9 million. Interesting that the two biggest spenders on political lobbying were Facebook and Amazon – right as the US government was eliminating a lot of their competition through bans or restrictions on Chinese firms like WeChat and TikTok out of concerns over American cybersecurity.
And speaking of... let's take a look at some of the other sponsors of the Aspen Security Forum. There's Amazon Web Services – which scored a $600 million contract with the CIA in 2013, and a new $10 billion contract to store (our) classified data for the NSA this year, a $100 million 2019 contract with the Navy and contracts with several agencies in British intelligence that are estimated to add up to anywhere from 500 million to 1 billion pounds over the next ten years. Amazon was the second largest political lobbying spender in 2019. There's Microsoft, which made $1.5 billion off of government contracts in 2020 (see last paragraph on this) and just scored a $21.9 billion dollar deal to provide the US military with AR headsets over the next decade. Microsoft also made the top 20 political spenders list for 2019, coming in at 18th place with $10.2 million. Cybersecurity consulting giant (around $50 billion annual revenues) Accenture, which scored a decade-long $7.5 billion contract with Defense Information System's Agency, is also a major supporter. There's Shield AI, which makes artificial intelligence systems for autonomous military drones (not horrifying at all). We have Mitre, which does systems engineering and cybersecurity work for the military, and the cybersecurity company formerly known as Symantec but now called NortonLifeLock, cloud computing and IT firm Oracle, Ayasdi, which originally developed defense-related AI products but now mostly deals in software that detects financial crime.
The question of the day seems to be: if the United States military shifts a meaningful portion of its $715 billion from spending on “ships and planes and troops” and shifts towards “the more futuristic technologies,” who will stand to make the really obscene amounts of money? The answer: many of the sponsors of this very same Aspen Security Forum.
The reality is that in the United States, a thick and tangled nexus of large corporate conglomerates, defense contractors, media companies, and think tanks influence both what gets on the news, and what sorts of policy options are given to American elected leaders. As the military industrial complex lurches into gear towards its “New Cold War With China,” there's plenty of money to be directly made for both defense contractors and media – and indirectly for think tanks and other assorted corporate giants – off of constant alarmist reports of America falling behind other countries' military technological abilities. It can also give politicians more of a free hand to crack down on dissent at home – we've already seen how the “Russian hacking” story from 2016 was used to demonize not only the right wing, but also progressives in the United States, as groups like Black Lives Matter and the Bernie Sanders campaign were scurrilously linked to Russian destabilization campaigns by more hawkish liberals. We need to pay careful attention to the kind of militaristic yellow journalism that can come out of respectable, liberal news outlets when it's convenient for the rich and powerful — lest we end up unwittingly feeding a machine that consumes lives, democratic freedoms, and economic resources, and produces nothing but mass death.