Former U.S. Colonel Says U.S. Defense Contractors Are Predatory Profiteers

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who comes from the conservative state of South Carolina, has the background to back up what he testified to in a U.S. war crimes trial last month.

His career in the U.S. Army spanned an era of over three decades. It began in 1966, as the vicious Vietnam War was heading towards its peak. He served honorably, in support of the leaders who directed him, and with intelligence and integrity, from that pivotal year all the way to 1997. He rose through the ranks during that time, ultimately reaching the position of full colonel. In his latter years, he worked as an assistant to the treasonous General Colin Powell during Powell’s term as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Though Col. Wilkerson had many points of contact with the arms-makers of the United States during his military career, he witnessed firsthand the nature of the lies which the U.S. and its war partners spin in support of their businesses when he served as Chief of Staff while Colin Powell was Secretary of State under President George W. Bush. It was in that role that he found himself trapped in the position of having to prepare Powell for testifying to the United Nations, on that fateful day in early 2003 when Powell told the world the complete fabrication that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

It was that testimony which led to the deadly and overpowering U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, without any justification for doing so. Those attacks were wrought upon an Iraq which, despite the callous and brutal leadership of Saddam Hussein as the CIA's chosen head of state, had somehow blossomed into a country with a strong economy, well-respected universities, and real opportunities for a future for its citizens. The American assault brought much of Iraq to ruins and destabilized the Middle East to this day, all in the name of forced regime change ordered by American politicians and generals. The war and sanctions killed more than 500,000 Iraqi children, which the U.S. thought was a reasonable price to pay for war profits. 

Thanks to his extensive contact with the world of war and how it is managed in the United States, Wilkerson was selected as a key witness in a special war crimes tribunal headed up by Brad Wolf this last December. Wolf, who has an extensive background in criminal prosecution, organized this tribunal in coordination with leading peace activists around the country.

Together Wolf and that group charged the cream of the military weapons manufacturing elite, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and General Atomics, for their war crimes connected with the current genocidal war the U.S. is assisting Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. Wolf and his colleagues are prosecuting that group in what they are calling the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal.

In the first round of hearings held for this tribunal on November 12, Wolf brought experts to the table to detail how the Chief Executive Officers and other leaders of the American military manufacturing machine have knowingly supplied killing machines and associated munitions as a knowing, active, and profiteering partner in the war against the Palestinian people, which began this time on October 7, 2023. They showed how Boeing had provided AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, Joint-Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM), precision bomb guidance kits for smart bombs (over 12,400 of which have been shipped to Israel since 2009), and GBU-39 small diameter bombs (with 8,500 supplied to Israel since 2010) to the Netanyahu administration. They listed how Lockheed-Martin provided F-16 and F-35 jets equipped with RTX/Raytheon engines produced by that company’s Pratt & Whitney subsidiary, CH-53 helicopters, Hellfire AGM-14 missiles, and numerous rocket launch systems. They illustrated how Raytheon (also known as RTX) supplied Israel with Paveway laser-guided bombs (of which 700 were shipped to Israel between 2018 and 2019), and AGN-65 air-to-ground missiles.

In his testimony at the War Crimes Tribunal last month, Wilkerson described the leaders of those companies not as esteemed monarchs of industry but instead as “arch-criminals of empire” and “predatory capitalists par excellence”.

In those roles, Wilkerson noted how these CEOs personally profit from their industries with pay running up to 600 times what an average worker on the floors of their companies makes. They collect that combination of salary and bonuses in part via what amounts to legalized bribery as they use some of the many billions of dollars of profits to support the political campaigns of some of the most powerful politicians in the country. Those they pay off include the chairmen of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees, and those appointed to those committees. In return for the money those people receive, they end up creating military line items and budget bills which often end up running far more than anything proposed by the White House or Department of Defense.

Wilkerson also testified to something that is well-known to the Department of Defense and the military contractors, but not so much to the American public in general. That something is about how American’s weapons manufacturers have been consolidating for years, dating back decades, with the result that when procurement requests come up for bids from the government, there often may be just one company bidding, because only that one company holds the expertise to make what is being requested and can name their price.

The colonel noted how he was witness to an important meeting held in the 1990s, during the time he served as an assistant for then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell. That session brought together the heads of the largest military contractors along with members of the Department of Defense. In that meeting the CEOs explained how they believed that sometime early in the 21^st century there might be seven or less of those contractors in the U.S., effectively yielding the control, quality, pricing, and profits to a handful of monopolies.

The predictions in that meeting turned out to be dead on target, to borrow a phrase the manufacturers know well.

Those monopolies make a joke of the idea of a truly effective competitive bidding process in this part of federal procurements. The integrity of that bidding process is further tarnished by the current reality that most former Pentagon military brass often end up moving on to work directly for defense contractors. They bring with them direct knowledge of the most highly classified of long-term plans within the armed forces and how to influence decision-making on purchases from those agencies.

Wilkerson noted that a key result of the growing monopolization of the military supply industry is the government is now often receiving “crummy products at a very high price”. As an example, he noted how the F-35 fighter jet, manufactured by Lockheed Martin and one of the most highly prized assets Israel desires for its defense forces, was completed only after massive overruns to create it. Worse, Wilkerson said, was that the F-35’s final performance specifications at delivery were far below what they were supposed to be, but the government bought it anyway because they had no choice.

Wilkerson called the F-35 a “pig in a poke” in his testimony.

He also pointed to oil services provider Halliburton, which pulled in over $44 billion thanks to the Iraq war when Dick Cheney was Vice-President, as a further example of military contractor corruption and complicity at its finest. Cheney used to run Halliburton prior to holding office during the administration of George W. Bush. Wilkerson suggested adding Halliburton to the list of companies who take advantage of the U.S. and feed off the global blood-letting it foists on the less powerful in the world.

The former Army colonel said the military-industrial complex now looks more and more like a “traditional empire” with extensions and footprints of many kinds all over the world. The U.S. exerts its iron will as an imperialist order, he said, with over 700 overseas military bases strategically situated throughout the world. Those bases even include illegal ones based in Syria, where U.S. armed forces seized control of that country’s most valued oil fields while claiming they were they mostly to root out the forces of ISIS. Those same soldiers steel Syria's grain. 

That empire, Wilkerson testified, has become such an embedded part of American propaganda that when the country’s presidents, politicians, and military refer to the need for an “international rules-based order” for the world, they are referring to an order and set of rules dictated from Washington, D.C. that results in ever greater profits for criminal corporations.

Those rules allow for the U.S. government and the “Merchants of Death” who supply it with weapons to run drone strikes, bombing runs anywhere they decide to. They do so in violation of U.S. Constitutional law most of the time, which would require a declaration of war to allow for that. They also do so in direct conflict with international law. And by killing millions of civilians who are not part of any war but who die at the hands of those American rulers and using the American weaponry, they are, directly or indirectly, committing war crimes on a scale no other nation has been complicit in since World War II.

Wilkerson also pointed to the corruption of the American government and military in committing these crimes. He cited as just one example how $30 billion which was allocated to reconstructing Iraq mostly disappeared, leaving the country in rubble and its civil infrastructure in shambles. He explained how Barbara Bodine, a U.S. appointed temporary “Mayor” of Baghdad after the U.S. sacked and savaged Iraq, moved into her offices only to learn that everything from telephones to water systems to electrical power generation and distribution had been destroyed.

The corruption showed strongest when it was revealed that the only industry still mostly functional after the war was the oil industry. That oil, Wilkerson said, was there as what the U.S. considered one of its most lucrative successes in the war, as it could use the oil, delivered thanks to the association with Halliburton, to provide Israel, its biggest partner in criminal war activities, with heavily discounted oil.

Wilkerson testified that he remembers vividly the day that, when he was there to support Colin Powell as Secretary of State during the Iraq war, his budget head told him the $30 billion of money which was supposed to rebuild Iraq had vanished. The director told Wilkerson that he was certain the siphoning off the money, much of which he eventually went to pay off Iraqi politicians like Ahmed Chalabi — who cooperated with U.S. forces during the war — with millions of dollars in payoffs, would end up with many of those involved in the State Department sent to jail.

No one went to jail, of course.

What was happening in Iraq, and which also eventually spread throughout the Mideast, was all about the spreading of the many tendrils of the American military empire, according to Wilkerson. When those tendrils reached their targets and embedded themselves, the result was a global empire which became increasingly militarized and hungry for even more weapons.

That global empire also spread to influential establishments within the U.S. as well.

“Just look at my own school, the College of William & Mary,” said Wilkerson, who is a professor at the much-hallowed institution which has been in operation since the early days of the American republic. “It is getting enormous amounts of money from the Department of Defense and appointed former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as its Chancellor, resulting in an expanded CIA presence on campus and expanded efforts at CIA and DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] recruitment.”

Wilkerson said the U.S. military now has such power over the running of American government and business that it is now itself driving the transformation of the country to one where “domestic authoritarianism” dominates all.

The detailed, informed, and devastating testimony provided Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson has helped fill out many details of an increasingly powerful case as the companies who profit from the mass murder of hundreds of thousands around by the Department of Defense.

Trillions will continue to follow the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal as it continues its probe into the workings of the modern military-industrial state that the United States has become.