William Hartung
William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. He is the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (Nation Books, 2011). He is the co-editor of Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War (Paradigm Press, 2008).
Articles by this author
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Views Tuesday, July 07, 2020 Police, Prisons, and the Pentagon Think of it as a war system that’s been coming home for years. The murder of George Floyd has finally shone a spotlight on the need to defund local police departments and find alternatives that provide more genuine safety and security. The same sort of spotlight needs soon to be shone on the... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, February 11, 2020 Will Trump Ride Pentagon Spending to Reelection? Donald Trump likes to posture as a tough guy and part of that tough-guy persona involves bragging about how much he’s spent on the U.S. military. This tendency was on full display in a tweet he posted three days after an American drone killed Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani in Baghdad: “The... Read more |
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Views Monday, December 16, 2019 Lessons From Battling the Pentagon for Four Decades I’ve been writing critiques of the Pentagon, the national security state, and America’s never-ending military overreach since at least 1979—in other words, virtually my entire working life. In those decades, there were moments when positive changes did occur. They ranged from ending the apartheid... Read more |
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Views Monday, November 18, 2019 America's Arms Sales Addiction It’s no secret that Donald Trump is one of the most aggressive arms salesmen in history. How do we know? Because he tells us so at every conceivable opportunity. It started with his much exaggerated “$110 billion arms deal” with Saudi Arabia, announced on his first foreign trip as president. It... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, October 02, 2019 Trump and Money Are Shielding Saudi Arabia From Accountability for Khashoggi's Killing Following the brutal killing of Saudi dissident and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi at Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, one year ago, the Saudi government became something of a toxic commodity in American politics. Several high-profile lobbying and public relations firms... Read more |
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Views Friday, September 27, 2019 Bestselling Pentagon Fiction: Beware of Defense Secretaries Pledging Reform For the Pentagon, happy days are here again (if they ever left). With a budget totaling more than $1.4 trillion for the next two years, the department is riding high, even as it attempts to set the stage for yet more spending increases in the years to come. With such enormous sums now locked in,... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, July 16, 2019 Merger Mania: The Military-Industrial Complex on Steroids When, in his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the “unwarranted influence” wielded by the “military-industrial complex,” he could never have dreamed of an arms-making corporation of the size and political clout of Lockheed Martin. In a good year, it... Read more |
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Views Thursday, May 16, 2019 It’s Time to Stop Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia The Senate’s failure to override President Trump’s veto of its effort to end U.S. military support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen is not the end of the story. A way can and must be found to stop U.S. assistance in refueling, targeting, and other activities that bolster the Saudi/United Arab Emirats... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, May 07, 2019 Boondoggle, Inc: Making Sense of the $1.25 Trillion National Security State Budget In its latest budget request, the Trump administration is asking for a near-record $750 billion for the Pentagon and related defense activities, an astonishing figure by any measure. If passed by Congress, it will, in fact, be one of the largest military budgets in American history, topping peak... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, January 29, 2019 Our Man From Boeing: The Pentagon's Revolving Door Spins Fast The way personnel spin through Washington’s infamous revolving door between the Pentagon and the arms industry is nothing new. That door, however, is moving ever faster with the appointment of Patrick Shanahan , who spent 30 years at Boeing, the Pentagon’s second largest contractor , as the Trump... Read more |