We Cover Endless War in the Off Season: A Fundraising Pitch
Our coverage of the military-industrial complex is resurfacing across media outlets as national attention turns to endless war. Plus: My favorite books on this beat for your holiday reading.
Hi,
Greetings from Atlanta and welcome to the fifth dispatch of Military-Industrial America. I’m back at my desk after pounding a lot of pavement lately in Marietta and surrounding Cobb County, the top defense contracting location here in Georgia, as part of a nationwide public opinion research study I’m pitching in on. More on that in our next dispatch!
Today I wanted to use this space to highlight the unique value of this journalistic beat in this horrible time. Israel’s assault on Gaza, Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, and the violence on several fronts in the region have revived national attention on what we at Inkstick believe is a defining feature of modern life: endless war.
On Oct. 19, President Joe Biden asked taxpayers for an additional $106 billion in spending, largely for weapons and aid to warfronts and conflicts in Israel, Ukraine, and the Pacific. for an additional $75 billion for weapons for Israel and Ukraine. One justification he gave for doing so was that weapons plants support US jobs: “Equipment that defends America and is made in America. Patriot missiles for air defense batteries, made in Arizona. Artillery shells manufactured in 12 states across the country, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas.” He added that “today patriotic American workers are building the arsenal of democracy and serving the cause of freedom.”
I cover the people and places tied up in US military spending. I think of it as an inversion of the traditional Pentagon beat, covering the military-industrial complex not from inside the Beltway but from the field, going to the towns and workplaces impacted by decisions made in Washington. It’s been humbling and gratifying for me to see that people trying to make sense of this current wartime moment — and a way out of it — have been turning to my work for unique and authoritative reporting about the “jobs card” that Biden and so many have used in moments like these.
Here’s where our work is informing and shifting the conversation
The labor outlet More Perfect Union did a very entertaining 14-minute “classroom” video on jobs created by defense spending that extensively cited our reporting. (This in particular meant a lot to me, because I had to dig for days through an obscure archive to get the historical Lockheed union data they cited.)
Labor historian Jeff Schuhrke also cited our figures on dwindling union strength in the defense industry for an essay in Jewish Currents on the economic conversion movement that attempted to “beat swords into plowshares” during and after the Cold War. (Shoutout here to our friends at the Valley Labor Report, a talk radio show in Huntsville, Ala., “the Pentagon of the South,” who did a segment on the topic and Schuhrke’s article.) Activists in Missouri quoted my recent interview with Boeing workers in their piece about how deeply their local economy is tied into the company’s weapons plant.
This next one is a subtle but very important point. I noticed a recent Congressional Research Service report included figures on the remarkably few people employed in the private defense industry, just 1.1 million, a figure that was about 3 million in 1985. Those figures are buried in an annual report from a trade group called the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), and I found and began including them in my reporting in 2020. In the meantime, I’ve noticed the numbers become widely cited in other outlets. (Another important figure from the NDIA: Over the same time, not just job numbers but also inflation-adjusted average compensation dropped.) Those figures underscore a crucial point: Despite ever-increasing defense budgets, job creation is falling, not rising. This ain’t your mama’s military-industrial complex.
I do this reporting all year round, because, of course, there is no off season for endless war. There’s so much more I want and plan to do. I’ve been cultivating a pipeline of reporters in other defense industry hubs I’d like us to hire. I’d like to dive more into state and local public records to scrutinize the job creation claims made by powerful defense contractors. I’d like to report and commission more solutions journalism about “just transition” and the variety of ways Americans both imagine and already are redeploying the talented labor pool currently employed in the arms industry for domestic needs.
I’m a millennial who came of age in the Great Recession, which is a big part of my journalistic obsession with employment and economic precarity. We millennials don’t beat around the bush when it comes to talking about money. We’re fundraising here at Inkstick both to continue employing myself and to bring other journalists onto the beat. If you’re able to support our work, every donation helps. And if you’ve got the finances to support a whole new reporter on this beat, we’d love to tell you what we’re scheming up over here!
What I’m reading
Air Force veteran and researcher Christian Sorensen put together a remarkable map of the manufacturing facilities of the top six defense contractors, describing what each plant currently produces and what civilian use they could pivot to if the industry were nationalized tomorrow. I’ve sent this map around to a few reporters who used it as a handy shortcut to learn about the major arms plants in their states.
Lion Electric Company Workers Launch Campaign to Unionize with the IAMAW
The Machinists union, the largest in the defense industry, is organizing about 140 workers at a plant that makes electric school buses and trucks in Illinois. The union says many workers were attracted to the plant in order to work in a “new groundbreaking industry” but have been frustrated by poor working conditions. This is the second organizing drive I’ve seen in the EV sector by the Machinists in recent months, following one at Rivian, also in Illinois. You can read more about the Machinists and their efforts to diversify their membership into new sectors in our report, “Union Strength Dwindles at Top Defense Contractors.”
Holiday reading?
If you’re looking for a not-exactly-cheery gift for someone this holiday season, here’s my reading list about the people and places tied up in US war spending. This is my favorite genre of books on this beat, and there’s not very many of them.
Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, California, Arkansas, and New Mexico: Six Stops on the National Security Tour, by my friend and mentor Miriam Pemberton, about the towns and workers who have occasionally beat swords into plowshares.
The Great Plains: The Missile Next Door, by Gretchen Heefner, a fantastic history of how the US military convinced Americans to host nuclear weapons silos near or on their properties, a request at odds with their Third Amendment protections to not have to quarter soldiers in times of peace.
Rocky Flats, Colorado: Making a Real Killing, published in 1999 by journalist and professor Len Ackland, about labor and environmental abuses at a plutonium pit plant.
South Carolina: Cold War Dixie, by Kari Frederickson, about how a rural corner of the state known for horseback riding and health retreats was transformed into a 310-square-mile nuclear weapons plant. (When I visited the plant’s museum, the receptionist and I chatted about how this was our favorite book about the site.)
North Carolina: Homefront, by Catherine Lutz, about the US’ largest military base in the world, Fort Bragg (since renamed Fort Liberty).
Connecticut: Spoils of War, published in 1997 by John Tirman, is a remarkable book that devastatingly links local New England economics to the deadly use of US-made weapons by Turkey in its war on the Kurdish people.
Georgia: As I was pounding pavement in Marietta, I got a tip about a relatively recent new book to add to my list about desegregating the local Lockheed plant. Holiday reading!
Thank You for Reading!
If you’re not a defense contractor or a government entity, we’d love for you to consider a tax-deductible donation to our work. Endless war is a defining feature of American life, and we believe there should be a public interest media outlet dedicated to covering it. You can read more about our work in our impact report.
Thoughts, comments, story suggestions? Send them my way at tbarnes@inkstickmedia.com. We may publish them in a future newsletter.
Taylor