24 February 2004, World Policy Institute
New York, NY, February 24th -- As a network of citizen's groups rallies today at scores of sites in the United States and around the world to denounce what organizers characterize as war profiteering by major contractors like Halliburton, Bechtel, and Lockheed Martin, the New York-based World Policy Institute is releasing a new analysis that documents a rapid increase in military contracts flowing to these firms as a result of the U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan (See Table I for an analysis of the Pentagon's top 10 contractors for FY 2003, the most recent year for which full statistics are available).
With the Pentagon budget at $400 billion per year and counting, plus a new Department of Homeland Security with a $40 billion per year budget, plus wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have cost $180 billion to date, these are lucrative times to be a military contractor," said Michelle Ciarrocca, a Senior Research Associate at the World Policy Institute and co-author of a new analysis on the Pentagon's top 10 contractors.
The Pentagon's "Big Three contractors -- Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman -- alone split over $50 billion in prime contracts among them in FY 2003, noted Ciarrocca. To put this in some perspective, Lockheed Martin's Pentagon awards, at $21.9 billion, are greater in value than the entire budget for the federal government's largest single welfare program-- Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)-- which is meant to keep several million single parents and dependent children out of poverty," Ciarrocca noted.
"The greatest beneficiary thus far from the Bush administration's 'war without end' approach to fighting terrorism has been Vice President Cheney's former company, Halliburton, notes, William D. Hartung, the co-author of the Institute's new analysis and the author of a new book on war profiteering in the Bush era entitled How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy?: A Quick and Dirty Guide to War Profiteering in the Bush Administration (Nation Books/Avalon Group, 2004). Halliburton's prime contracts with the Pentagon jumped from $483 million in Fiscal Year 2002 to $3.9 billion in Fiscal year 2003, an increase of almost 700%.
World Policy Institute Special Report: Is What's Good for Boeing and Halliburton Good for America?
