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.[1][2] He likens the dependency to crack addiction: “the first thing you say in the morning is I have to smoke crack.”[3] 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.[4][5][6]
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.[7][8]
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.[9][10] 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.[10][11] 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.[12][13]
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.”[14] 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.[15]
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.[16] 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.[17]
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.[18] 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.[19] 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.[20] 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.[21]
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.[22][23] 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.[24][25]