Tag: military industrial complex

We need to talk about what bombs do in war. Bombs shred flesh. Bombs shatter bones. Bombs dismember. Bombs cause brains, lungs, and other organs to shake so violently they bleed, rupture, and cease functioning. Bombs injure. Bombs kill. Bombs destroy.

Bombs also make people rich.

When a bomb explodes, someone profits. And when someone profits, bombs claim more unseen victims. Every dollar spent on a bomb is a dollar not spent saving a life from a preventable death, a dollar not spent curing cancer, a dollar not spent educating children. That’s why, so long ago, retired five-star general and President Dwight D. Eisenhower rightly called spending on bombs and all things military a “theft.”

The perpetrator of that theft is perhaps the world’s most overlooked destructive force. It looms unnoticed behind so many major problems in the United States and the world today. Eisenhower famously warned Americans about it in his 1961 farewell address, calling it for the first time “the military-industrial complex,” or the MIC.

Start with the fact that, thanks to the MIC’s ability to hijack the federal budget, total annual military spending is far larger than most people realize: around $1,500,000,000,000 ($1.5 trillion). Contrary to what the MIC scares us into believing, that incomprehensibly large figure is monstrously out of proportion to the few military threats facing the United States. One-and-a-half trillion dollars is about double what Congress spends annually on all non-military purposes combined.

Calling this massive transfer of wealth a “theft” is no exaggeration, since it’s taken from pressing needs like ending hunger and homelessness, offering free college and pre-K, providing universal health care, and building a green energy infrastructure to save ourselves from climate change. Virtually every major problem touched by federal resources could be ameliorated or solved with fractions of the cash claimed by the MIC. The money is there.

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Death from a thermobaric weapon is articulated by two events. The first is the release of the fuel aerosol. The second is the igniting of the aerosol. 

Within the immediate vicinity of the explosion, flesh is pulverized, blown to bits or melted as the temperature reaches up to 3000°C, about half as hot as the sun. The burning fuel can be inhaled, incinerating a person from the inside out. Lungs, ears, sinuses and intestines are particularly vulnerable, collapsing as the vacuum created by the combustion sucks the oxygen from the surrounding air. 

Those not incinerated in the initial kill zone will be hit by the shockwave, which moves with immense force and can cause internal injuries to the pulmonary, cardiovascular, auditory, gastrointestinal and central nervous systems. Victims may harbor fragments from the blast that are undetectable to medics using X-rays. A recent study in the International Review of the Red Cross notes that the injuries caused by the “enhanced explosions” of thermobaric explosions are “difficult to treat.” 

Because thermobarics produce clouds of fuel mixed with the atmosphere that can penetrate buildings and confined spaces, they are often used against bunkers, trenches, caves and armored vehicles. In villages and cities, the weapons can obliterate civilians hiding in basements and subway systems, as the enclosure transforms into an oven for those sheltered there. This new weapons group is diverse. It includes air-dropped ordnance (known as fuel-air and vacuum bombs), shoulder-launched rockets and even hand-held grenades.

For militaries, thermobarics are efficient and useful. Few other non-nuclear technologies of mass death can compare. For human rights lawyers who specialize in war crimes, thermobarics are an object of outrage and loathing.

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