Permanent wartime economy
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The permanent wartime economy is John Kiriakou's term for what the United States became after September 11, 2001. He says it is "not an accident" that there are more millionaires around Washington than anywhere else in America, including Silicon Valley, and that the defense budget, larger than the next eight countries combined, is now so central that cutting it would cause an economic depression. He likens the dependency to crack addiction: "the first thing you say in the morning is I have to smoke crack." With 900 bases and 11 carrier groups, Kiriakou warns the logic makes a large confrontation, most dangerously with China in the South China Sea, almost inevitable, since decades of spending demand a use.

Promoting the arms race (Reason2Resist)

John Kiriakou notes a senior Republican senator's proposal to raise the Pentagon budget to 5% of GDP, up from about 3.2%, money he says the Pentagon "couldn't even spend," diverted from socially beneficial uses. Belligerence between the U.S. and Russia, he argues, inevitably drives an arms race that harms Americans, Russians and Canadians alike, and the U.S. is "the one promoting" it.

Bigger than the next eight combined (Austin and Matt)

John Kiriakou reiterates that the U.S. defense budget is "bigger than the next eight largest countries combined", "eight to ten times" more than those eight together, which is "why we have bridges falling into the rivers" and crumbling airports and hospitals while other nations, spending less on arms, have good infrastructure. He notes the highest concentration of millionaires shifted from Silicon Valley to Washington after 9/11, and calls a unified BRICS currency a genuine threat to a system built on the dollar. Elsewhere, Kiriakou traces this same dynamic to elite gatherings like Bilderberg, which a former attendee told him ultimately come down to "which defense contractor made what deal," beneath the discussion of global issues.

Elite gatherings and district-level entrenchment

Kiriakou says someone once close to him who had attended the Trilateral Commission, the Shangri-La summit, and Davos told him such elite gatherings are ultimately all about selling weapons and weapon systems, regardless of the policy discussions on the surface: "they all take place just to sell weapons and weapon systems. That's all anybody ever talks about." He ties this to the Pentagon's decades-long cultivation of weapons-manufacturing relationships in every one of the country's 435 congressional districts, an entrenchment built over 75 years that he says is why Pentagon budget votes pass almost unanimously.

He has given the account of the elite gatherings in more detail, and noted that it changed his own mind. He says he "used to just piss all over people's analysis" when it invoked the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg or the Shangri-La conference; the source who altered that was someone formerly close to him, a person he says a court order forbids him from identifying, who rose high enough in a corporate structure to be invited. Her report was blunt: the meetings are "a lot of really rich, really important people talking about arms deals." The exception she named was Davos, where the subject was how to manage the global economy. Asked whether that meant such bodies really do set policy, she answered that she had seen it herself. He notes the organisations are not secret at all, they publish websites listing attendees by name, most of whom a reader would recognise.

The congressional-district point he puts in the same terms with a figure attached: fully a third of the Pentagon's roughly trillion-dollar budget goes to weapons and weapons systems, and orders have been placed with manufacturers in every one of the 435 districts, so that "there's no incentive for any member of Congress to vote no on DoD", reinforced by the defence political action committees funding campaigns that cost millions every two years. The example he gives is a friend with a small manufacturing plant in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, who told him he was entirely dependent on the Pentagon and could not say why, because the programme was classified; the part turned out to be a widget fitting inside the motor of something like a Patriot missile.

Sanctions and the dollar

Kiriakou traces part of the wartime economy's cost to the overuse of sanctions, which he says the U.S. now maintains against 68 different countries, a policy he blames for pushing Saudi Arabia to accept Chinese yuan, instead of dollars, as payment for oil. He points to Venezuela as another example: crippling U.S. sanctions collapsed its economy, driving Venezuelans to migrate north, a self-inflicted crisis the U.S. then treats as an illegal-immigration problem of its own making.

A trillion-dollar-a-year machine

Kiriakou dates the permanent wartime economy to the September 11 attacks, after which Washington, D.C., not Silicon Valley, became the wealthiest place in America, driven by trillions of dollars flowing to the military-industrial complex and its "Beltway Bandit" contractors. He puts the defense budget at bigger than the next nine largest countries combined, and says billions are quietly funneled into Sahel countries, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Conakry, and Guinea-Bissau. As one illustration of where U.S.-supplied weapons end up, he cites a Paris policeman shot with an assault rifle whose serial number matched a shipment sent to Ukraine about six months earlier, evidence, in his telling, that American arms in Ukraine are being resold on the black market. He credits his former CIA colleague Ray McGovern with coining the term "military industrial Congressional complex" for the bipartisan machine that drives unified support for defense appropriations regardless of ideology.

Kiriakou puts the number at more than $1 trillion a year on defense, roughly what the rest of the world spends combined, while roads, bridges, airports, hospitals, and schools go underfunded, and warns the national debt is nearing a tipping point where the U.S. will not be able to sustain interest payments. He says Price Waterhouse Coopers was brought in to conduct an external audit of Pentagon spending and gave up after three years, unable to determine where the money went; DOGE, tasked with finding $2 trillion in savings, recovered only about $250 billion over a ten-year period.

Financing by borrowing rather than taxation

A structural account of the same problem was given to John Kiriakou in 2026 by the economist Richard D. Wolff, who argued that governments of both parties have chosen to pay for what the state does by borrowing rather than by taxing. Corporations and the wealthy will not accept higher taxes and can withdraw campaign money from any candidate who proposes them; working people, already stretched, cannot absorb more. The remaining option is to let the rich keep the money and then borrow it back from them at interest, an arrangement Wolff described as a no-brainer for the lender.

Wolff put the resulting annual shortfall at just under two trillion dollars, with Kiriakou drawing the distinction between the deficit and the accumulated debt, and warned that the country's largest creditors, Japan first, China second, have begun to signal reluctance to keep lending to a government they see as overextended.

Where the millionaires moved

Kiriakou's shorthand for the redirection of American wealth is a single comparison he says he makes all the time: before 9/11 the highest concentration of millionaires per capita in America was in Silicon Valley, and after 9/11 it was in Washington DC. "It's not an accident."

He pairs it with an answer about why weapons companies funded the neoconservative think tanks of the 1990s, not because they shared the ideology, but because the business followed. On his interviewer's observation that Washington produces nothing except weapons of war, Kiriakou's agreement is unqualified.

Aid that is really procurement

Kiriakou has described American assistance as structurally different from the Chinese programme it competes with. Where Belt and Road builds things, he offers a water system in Yemen as the example, American aid is largely weapons, and is not even given cleanly: recipient countries are given credits with American defence contractors and spend those credits on American arms. "Really we're just subsidising" the arms industry.

The second half of the problem, in his account, is domestic: so many Americans are opposed to foreign aid in any form, hating the idea of giving taxpayers' money to other countries, that the United States arrives with nothing to offer. "Now without foreign aid, why would any country want to do anything for the United States?", why would they vote a given way at the United Nations, or join in Afghanistan, or support the United States in Libya, if it refuses to give them anything, while the Chinese do?

What the money is not spent on

Kiriakou sets the military budget, more than $800 billion, "more than the next nine largest countries in the world combined", directly against American infrastructure. The country has a rail system "we should be embarrassed about", "second and third world airports", roads that are a wreck, and bridges falling into the rivers below them.

His summary is imperial rather than budgetary: "All empires have an arc. The United States is on the back end of that arc. It's going down. And... as a government, we just don't see it."

See also

- Secret Service
- Iraq WMD intelligence
