Tag: military industrial complex
What Costs Four Times As Much As 'Build Back Better'? The Pentagon Budget

What Costs Four Times As Much As 'Build Back Better'? The Pentagon Budget

2021 was another banner year for the military-industrial complex, as Congress signed off on a near-record $778 billion in spending for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy. That was $25 billion more than the Pentagon had even asked for.

It can’t be emphasized enough just how many taxpayer dollars are now being showered on the Pentagon. That department’s astronomical budget adds up, for instance, to more than four times the cost of the most recent version of President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which sparked such horrified opposition from Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) and other alleged fiscal conservatives. Naturally, they didn’t blink when it came to lavishing ever more taxpayer dollars on the military-industrial complex.

Opposing Build Back Better while throwing so much more money at the Pentagon marks the ultimate in budgetary and national-security hypocrisy. The Congressional Budget Office has determined that, if current trends continue, the Pentagon could receive a monumental $7.3 trillion-plus over the next decade, more than was spent during the peak decade of the Afghan and Iraq wars, when there were up to 190,000 American troops in those two countries alone.

Sadly, but all too predictably, President Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops and contractors from Afghanistan hasn’t generated even the slightest peace dividend. Instead, any savings from that war are already being plowed into programs to counter China, official Washington’s budget-justifying threat of choice (even if outshone for the moment by the possibility of a Russian invasion of Ukraine). And all of this despite the fact that the United States already spends three times as much as China on its military.

The Pentagon budget is not only gargantuan, but replete with waste — from vast overcharges for spare parts to weapons that don’t work at unaffordable prices to forever wars with immense human and economic consequences. Simply put, the current level of Pentagon spending is both unnecessary and irrational.

Price Gouging On Spare Parts

Overcharging the Pentagon for spare parts has a long and inglorious history, reaching its previous peak of public visibility during the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Then, blanket media coverage of $640 toilet seats and $7,600 coffee makers sparked public outrage and a series of hearings on Capitol hill, strengthening the backbone of members of Congress. In those years, they did indeed curb at least the worst excesses of the Reagan military buildup.

Such pricing horror stories didn’t emerge from thin air. They came from the work of people like legendary Pentagon whistleblower Ernest Fitzgerald. He initially made his mark by exposing the Air Force’s efforts to hide billions in cost overruns on Lockheed’s massive C-5A transport plane. At the time, he was described by former Air Force Secretary Verne Orr as “the most hated man in the Air Force.” Fitzgerald and other Pentagon insiders became sources for Dina Rasor, a young journalist who began drawing the attention of the media and congressional representatives to spare-parts overcharges and other military horrors. In the end, she formed an organization, the Project on Military Procurement, to investigate and expose waste, fraud, and abuse. It would later evolve into the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), the most effective current watchdog when it comes to Pentagon spending.

A recent POGO analysis, for instance, documented the malfeasance of TransDigm, a military parts supplier that the Department of Defense’s Inspector General caught overcharging the Pentagon by as much as 3,800 percent — yes, you read that figure right! — on routine items. The company was able to do so only because, bizarrely enough, Pentagon buying rules prevent contract officers from getting accurate information on what any given item should cost or might cost the supplying company to produce it.

In other words, thanks to Pentagon regulations, those oversight officials are quite literally flying blind when it comes to cost control. The companies supplying the military take full advantage of that. The Pentagon Inspector General’s office has, in fact, uncovered more than 100 overcharges by TransDigm alone, to the tune of $20.8 million. A comprehensive audit of all spare-parts suppliers would undoubtedly find billions of wasted dollars. And this, of course, spills over into ever more staggering costs for finished weapons systems. As Ernest Fitzgerald once said, a military aircraft is just a collection of “overpriced spare parts flying in formation.”

Weapons This Country Doesn’t Need At Prices We Can’t Afford

The next level of Pentagon waste involves weapons we don’t need at prices we can’t afford, systems that, for staggering sums, fail to deliver on promises to enhance our safety and security. The poster child for such costly, dysfunctional systems is the F-35 combat aircraft, a plane tasked with multiple missions, none of which it does well. The Pentagon is slated to buy more than 2,400 F-35s for the Air Force, Marines, and Navy. The estimated lifetime cost for procuring and operating those planes, a mere $1.7 trillion, would make it the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons project ever.

Once upon a time (as in some fairy tale), the idea behind the creation of the F-35 was to build a plane that, in several variations, would be able to carry out many different tasks relatively cheaply, with potential savings generated by economies of scale. Theoretically, that meant the bulk of the parts for the thousands of planes to be built would be the same for all of them. This approach has proven a dismal failure so far, so much so that the researchers at POGO are convinced the F-35 may never be fully ready for combat.

Its failures are too numerous to recount here, but a few examples should suffice to suggest why the program minimally needs to be scaled back in a major way, if not canceled completely. For a start, though meant to provide air support for troops on the ground, it’s proved anything but well-designed to do so. In fact, that job is already handled far better and more cheaply by the existing A-10 “Warthog” attack aircraft. A 2021 Pentagon assessment of the F-35 — and keep in mind that this is the Department of Defense, not some outside expert — found 800 unresolved defects in the plane. Typical of its never-ending problems: a wildly expensive and not particularly functional high-tech helmet which, at the cost of $400,000 each, is meant to give its pilot special awareness of what’s happening around and below the plane as well as to the horizon. And don’t forget that the F-35 will be staggeringly expensive to maintain and already costs an impressive $38,000 an hour to fly.

In December 2020, House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith finally claimed he was “tired of pouring money down the F-35 rathole.” Even former Air Force Chief of Staff General Charles Brown acknowledged that it couldn’t meet its original goal — to be a low-cost fighter — and would have to be supplemented with a less costly plane. He compared it to a Ferrari, adding, “You don’t drive your Ferrari to work every day, you only drive it on Sundays.” It was a stunning admission, given the original claims that the F-35 would be the Air Force’s affordable, lightweight fighter and the ultimate workhorse for future air operations.

It’s no longer clear what the rationale even is for building more F-35s at a time when the Pentagon has grown obsessed with preparing for a potential war with China. After all, if that country is the concern (an exaggerated one, to be sure), it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which fighter planes would go into combat against Chinese aircraft, or be engaged in protecting American troops on the ground — not at a moment when the Pentagon is increasingly focused on long-range missiles, hypersonic weapons, and unpiloted vehicles as its China-focused weapons of choice.

When all else fails, the Pentagon’s fallback argument for the F-35 is the number of jobs it will create in states or districts of key members of Congress. As it happens, virtually any other investment of public funds would build back better with more jobs than F-35s would. Treating weapons systems as jobs programs, however, has long helped pump up Pentagon spending way beyond what’s needed to provide an adequate defense of the United States and its allies.

And that plane is hardly alone in the ongoing history of Pentagon overspending. There are many other systems that similarly deserve to be thrown on the scrap heap of history, chief among them the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), essentially an F-35 of the sea. Similarly designed for multiple roles, it, too, has fallen far short in every imaginable respect. The Navy is now trying to gin up a new mission for the LCS, with little success.

This comes on top of buying outmoded aircraft carriers for up to $13 billion a pop and planning to spend more than a quarter of a trillion dollars on a new nuclear-armed missile, known as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, or GBSD. Such land-based missiles are, according to former Secretary of Defense William Perry, “among the most dangerous weapons in the world,” because a president would have only minutes to decide whether to launch them on being warned of an enemy nuclear attack. In other words, a false alarm (of which there have been numerous examples during the nuclear age) could lead to a planetary nuclear conflagration.

The organization Global Zero has demonstrated convincingly that eliminating land-based missiles altogether, rather than building new ones, would make the United States and the rest of the world safer, with a small force of nuclear-armed submarines and bombers left to dissuade any nation from launching a nuclear war. Eliminating ICBMs would be a salutary and cost-saving first step towards nuclear sanity, as former Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg and other experts have made all too clear.

America’s Cover-the-Globe Defense Strategy

And yet, unbelievably enough, I haven’t even mentioned the greatest waste of all: this country’s “cover the globe” military strategy, including a planet-wide “footprint” of more than 750 military bases, more than 200,000 troops stationed overseas, huge and costly aircraft-carrier task forces eternally floating the seven seas, and a massive nuclear arsenal that could destroy life as we know it (with thousands of warheads to spare).

You only need to look at the human and economic costs of America’s post-9/11 wars to grasp the utter folly of such a strategy. According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, the conflicts waged by the United States in this century have cost $8 trillion and counting, with hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, thousands of U.S. troops killed, and hundreds of thousands more suffering from traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. And for what? In Iraq, the U.S. cleared the way for a sectarian regime that then helped create the conditions for ISIS to sweep in and conquer significant parts of the country, only to be repelled (but not thoroughly defeated) at great cost in lives and treasure. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, after a conflict doomed as soon as it morphed into an exercise in nation-building and large-scale counterinsurgency, the Taliban is now in power. It’s hard to imagine a more ringing indictment of the policy of endless war.

Despite the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, for which the Biden administration deserves considerable credit, spending on global counterterror operations remains at high levels, thanks to ongoing missions by Special Operations forces, repeated air strikes, ongoing military aid and training, and other kinds of involvement short of full-scale war. Given the opportunity to rethink strategy as part of a “global force posture” review released late last year, the Biden administration opted for a remarkably status quo approach, insisting on maintaining substantial bases in the Middle East, while modestly boosting the U.S. troop presence in East Asia.

As anyone who’s followed the news knows, despite the immediate headlines about sending troops and planes to Eastern Europe and weapons to Ukraine in response to Russia’s massing of its forces on that country’s borders, the dominant narrative for keeping the Pentagon budget at its current size remains China, China, China. It matters little that the greatest challenges posed by Beijing are political and economic, not military. “Threat inflation” with respect to that country continues to be the Pentagon’s surest route to acquiring yet more resources and has been endlessly hyped in recent years by, among others, analysts and organizations with close ties to the arms industry and the Department of Defense.

For example, the National Defense Strategy Commission, a congressionally mandated body charged with critiquing the Pentagon’s official strategy document, drew more than half its members from individuals on the boards of arms-making corporations, working as consultants for the arms industry, or from think tanks heavily funded by just such contractors. Not surprisingly, the commission called for a three to five percent annual increase in the Pentagon budget into the foreseeable future. Follow that blueprint and you’re talking $1 trillion annually by the middle of this decade, according to an analysis by Taxpayers for Common Sense. Such an increase, in other words, would prove unsustainable in a country where so much else is needed, but that won’t stop Pentagon budget hawks from using it as their North Star.

In March of this year, the Pentagon is expected to release both its new national defense strategy and its budget for 2023. There are a few small glimmers of hope, like reports that the administration may abandon certain dangerous (and unnecessary) nuclear-weapons programs instituted by the Trump administration.

However, the true challenge, crafting a budget that addresses genuine security problems like public health and the climate crisis, would require fresh thinking and persistent public pressure to slash the Pentagon budget, while reducing the size of the military-industrial complex. Without a significant change of course, 2022 will once again be a banner year for Lockheed Martin and other top weapons makers at the expense of investing in programs necessary to combat urgent challenges from pandemics to climate change to global inequality.

Copyright 2022 William Hartung

William D. Hartung is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author ofProfits of War: Corporate Beneficiaries of the Post-9/11 Surge in Pentagon Spending(Brown University's the Costs of War Project and the Center for International Policy, September 2021).

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch


Remaking Our Military To Serve The American People

Remaking Our Military To Serve The American People

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch

As a ROTC cadet and an Air Force officer, I was a tiny part of America's vast Department of Defense (DoD) for 24 years until I retired and returned to civilian life as a history professor. My time in the military ran from the election of Ronald Reagan to the reign of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. It was defined by the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, America's brief unipolar moment of dominance and the beginning of its end, as Washington embroiled itself in needless, disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks. Throughout those years of service, I rarely thought about a question that seems ever more critical to me today: What would a real system of American national defense look like?

During the Cold War, I took it for granted that this country needed a sprawling network of military bases, hundreds of them globally. Back then, of course, the stated U.S. mission was to "contain" the communist pathogen. To accomplish that mission, it seemed all too logical to me then for our military to emphasize its worldwide presence. Yes, I knew that the Soviet threat was much exaggerated. Threat inflation has always been a feature of the DoD and at the time I'd read books like Andrew Cockburn'sThe Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Machine. Still, the challenge was there and, as the leader of the "free world," it seemed obvious to me that the U.S. had to meet it.

And then the Soviet Union collapsed — and nothing changed in the U.S. military's global posture.

Or, put differently, everything changed. For with the implosion of the USSR, what turned out to remain truly uncontained was our military, along with the dreams of neoconservatives who sought to remake the world in America's image. But which image? That of a republic empowering its citizens in a participatory democracy or of an expansionist capitalist empire, driven by the ambition and greed of a set of oligarchs?

A few people spoke then of a "peace dividend." They were, however, quickly drowned out by the military-industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower had warned this country about. That complex, to which today we might add not only Congress (as Ike had done in an earlier draft of his address) but America's sprawling intelligence apparatus of 18 agencies, eagerly moved into the void created by the Soviet collapse and that of the Warsaw Pact. It quickly came to dominate the world's trade in arms, for instance, even as Washington sought to expand NATO, an alliance created to contain a Soviet threat that no longer existed. Such an expansion made no sense, defensively speaking, but it did serve to facilitate further arms sales and bring U.S. imperial hegemony to the very borders of Russia.

And there was the rub — for me at least. As an Air Force officer, I'd always thought of myself, however naively, as supporting and defending the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic (the words of my oath of office). After 1991, however, the main foreign enemy had disappeared and, though I didn't grasp it then, our new enemy would prove to be domestic, not foreign. It consisted of those who embraced as a positive good what I've come to think of as greed-war, while making no apologies for American leadership, no matter how violent, destructive, or self-centered it might prove to be.

In short, the arsenal of democracy of World War II fame had, by the 1960s, become the very complex of imperialism, militarism, and industrialism that Eisenhower warned Americans about first in his 1953 "Cross of Iron" speech and then in his more famous farewell address of 1961. Despite the efforts of a few brave Americans, that arsenal of democracy was largely allowed to morph into an arsenal of empire, a radical change that came shrouded in the myth of "national security." The complex would then only serve to facilitate the war crimes of Vietnam and of subsequent disasters like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, among so many others.

Yet those same misdeeds were so often dismissed by the mainstream media as the unavoidable costs of "national defense" or even supported as the unavoidable price of spreading freedom and democracy around the world. It was as if, in some twisted Orwellian fashion, war had come to be seen as conducive to liberty and righteousness. But as George Orwell had indeed warned us, war is not peace, nor should constant warfare at a global level be the product of any democratic government worthy of its name. War is what empires do and it's what America has become: a machine for war.

Creating a People's Military

So, I ask again: What would real national defense for this country look like? Rarely do any of us pose this question, no less examine what it might truly mean. Rarely do we think about all the changes we'd have to make as a nation and a people if we were to put defense first, second, and last, while leaving behind both our imperial wars and domestic militarism.

I know what it wouldn't look like. It wouldn't look like today's grossly inflated military. A true Department of Defense wouldn't need 800 foreign military bases, nor would the national security state need a budget that routinely exceeds a trillion dollars annually. We wouldn't need a huge, mechanized army, a navy built around aircraft carriers, or an air force that boasts of its global reach and global power, all of it created not for defense but for offense — for destruction, anytime, anywhere.

As a country, we would need to imagine a new "people's" military as a force that could truly defend the American republic. That would obviously mean one focused above all on supporting the Constitution and the rights we (at least theoretically) hold sacred like freedom of speech, the press, and assembly, the right to privacy and due process, and of course the right to justice for all, not just for the highest bidder or those with the deepest pockets.

What might such a new military look like? First, it would be much smaller. America's current military, including troops on active duty, reservists, and members of the National Guard, consists of roughly 2.4 million men and women. Those numbers should gradually be cut at least in half. Second, its budget should similarly be dramatically cut, the end goal being to have it 50% lower than next year's proposed budget of $715 billion. Third, it wouldn't be based and deployed around the world. As a republican force (note the lower-case "r"), it would instead serve democratic ends rather than imperial ones. It would certainly need far fewer generals and admirals. Its mission wouldn't involve "global reach," but would be defensive, focused on our borders and this hemisphere.

A friend of mine, a Navy veteran of the Vietnam War, speaks of a military that would consist of a Coast Guard, "militias" (that is, the National Guard) for each of the fifty states, and little else. Yes, in this America, that sounds beyond extreme, but he has a point. Consider our unique advantages in terms of geography. Our continent is protected by two vast oceans. We share a long and peaceful border with Canada. While the border with Mexico is certainly troubled, we're talking about unarmed, desperate migrants, not a military invasion flooding into Texas to retake the Alamo.

Here, then, are just 10 ways America's military could change under a vision that would put the defense of America first and free up some genuine funds for domestic needs as well:

  1. No more new nuclear weapons. It's time to stop "modernizing" that arsenal to the tune of possibly $1.7 trillion over the next three decades. Land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles like the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, expected to cost more than $264 billion during its lifetime, and "strategic" (nuclear) bombers like the Air Force's proposed B-21 Raider should be eliminated. The Trident submarine force should also be made smaller, with limited modernization to improve its survivability.
  2. All Army divisions should be reduced to cadres (smaller units capable of expansion in times of war), except the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions and the 10th Mountain Division.
  3. The Navy should largely be redeployed to our hemisphere, while aircraft carriers and related major surface ships are significantly reduced in number.
  4. The Air Force should be redesigned around the defense of America's air space, rather than attacking others across the planet at any time. Meanwhile, costly offensive fighter-bombers like the F-35, itself a potential $1.7 trillion boondoggle, should simply be eliminated and the habit of committing drone assassinations across the planet ended. Similarly, the separate space force created by President Trump should be folded back into a much-reduced Air Force.
  5. The training of foreign militaries and police forces in places like Iraq and Afghanistan should be stopped. The utter collapse of the U.S.-trained forces in Iraq in the face of the Islamic State in 2014 and the ongoing collapse of the U.S.-trained Afghan military today have made a mockery of this whole process.
  6. Military missions launched by intelligence agencies like the CIA, including those drone assassination programs overseas, should be halted and the urge to intervene secretly in the political and military lives of so many other countries finally brought under some kind of control.
  7. The "industrial" part of the military-industrial complex should also be brought under control, so that taxpayer dollars don't go to fabulously expensive, largely useless weaponry. At the same time, the U.S. government should stop promoting the products of our major weapons makers around the planet.
  8. Above all, in a democracy like ours, a future defensive military should only fight in a war when Congress, as the Constitution demands, formally declares one.
  9. The military draft should be restored. With a far smaller force, such a draft should have a limited impact, but it would ensure that the working classes of America, which have historically shouldered a heavy burden in military service, will no longer do so alone. In the future America of my military dreams, a draft would take the eligible sons and daughters of our politicians first, followed by all eligible students enrolled in elite prep schools and private colleges and universities, beginning with the Ivy League. After all, America's best and brightest will surely want to serve in a military devoted to defending their way of life.
  10. Finally, there should be only one four-star general or admiral in each of the three services. Currently, believe it or not, there are an astonishing 44 four-star generals and admirals in America's imperial forces. There are also hundreds of one-star, two-star, and three-star officers. This top-heavy structure inhibits reform even as the highest-ranking officers never take responsibility for America's lost wars.

Pivoting To America

Perhaps you've heard of the "pivot to Asia" under the Obama administration — the idea of redeploying U.S. military forces from the Greater Middle East and elsewhere in response to perceived threats from China. As it happened, it took the new Biden administration to begin to pull off that particular pivot, but America's imperial military regularly seems to be pivoting somewhere or other. It's time to pivot to this country instead.

Echoing the words of George McGovern, a highly decorated World War II bomber pilot who unsuccessfully ran for president against Richard Nixon in 1972, "Come home, America." Close all those foreign military bases. Redirect resources from wars and weapons to peace and prosperity. Focus on restoring the republic. That's how Americans working together could truly defend ourselves, not only from our "enemies" overseas, almost always much exaggerated, but from ourselves, the military-industrial-congressional complex, and all our fears.

Because let's be frank: how could striking at allegedly Iranian-backed militias operating in Iraq and Syria possibly be a form of self-defense, as the Biden administration claimed back in June? How is keeping U.S. troops in either of those two countries, or almost any other foreign country, truly a "defensive" act? America's "new" department of genuine defense, the one I imagine anyway, will know better.

In my nearly six decades, I've come to witness an America that increasingly equates "might" with "right," and praises its presidents whenever they decide to bomb anyone (usually people in the Middle East or Central Asia, but occasionally in Africa now, too), as long as it's framed in defensive or "preemptive" terms. Whether you call this aggression, imperialism, militarism, or something even more unflattering (atrocity?), the one thing it shouldn't be called is national defense.

Collectively, we need to imagine a world in which we as Americans are no longer the foremost merchants of death, in which we don't imagine ourselves as the eternal global police force, in which we don't spend as much on our military as the next 10 countries combined. We need to dream of a world that's not totally sliced and diced into U.S. military commands like Africa Command (AFRICOM); the Indo-Pacific Command or INDOPACOM; and the Middle Eastern Central Command (CENTCOM), among others. How would Americans feel if China had an "AMERICOM" and patrolled the Gulf of Mexico with nuclear-armed aircraft carriers very much "Made in China"? Chances are we wouldn't accept Beijing's high-minded claims about the "defensive" nature of those patrols.

This country's rebirth will only begin when we truly put our Constitution first and seek to defend it in wiser, which means so much more restrained, ways.

William Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, is a TomDispatch regular and a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals. His personal blog is Bracing Views.

Weekend Reader: ‘Arms And The Dudes: How Three Stoners From Miami Beach Became The Most Unlikely Gunrunners In History’

Weekend Reader: ‘Arms And The Dudes: How Three Stoners From Miami Beach Became The Most Unlikely Gunrunners In History’

It’s a story so outrageous it could only be true. In 2007, three beach-bumming potheads — with a little gumption, luck, and mendacity — rose from the sandy shores of Miami to the height of geopolitical intrigue, becoming international arms dealers and private weapons contractors for the U.S. military.

Arms and the Dudes: How Three Stoners from Miami Beach Became the Most Unlikely Gunrunners in History is Guy Lawson’s sprawling, meticulously researched, and compulsively readable account of the “improbable voyage” of three kids in their early twenties thrown into a picaresque mess of Albanian mobsters, Pentagon investigators, and Chinese weapons manufacturers — and something else too: the sobering story of the American government’s logistical and moral failings in the Middle East wars of the 00s, as illustrated by the strange odysseys of three dudes.

You can read an excerpt below. The book is available for purchase here.


In 2004 Efraim Diveroli did $1,043,869 in business with the U.S. govern­ment. In 2005 that number leaped to $7,238,329, as he liked to boast to his buddies David Packouz and Alex Podrizki. Diveroli was getting rich, and he reveled in his triumphs. He finally moved out of his tiny studio into a one-bedroom apartment overlooking the ocean in a building called Executive Condos. He hired a cleaning lady to come to his place once a week to get rid of the worst of the squalor. He treated himself to a black Mercedes. It was used, but still: the luxury sedan spoke to the status he’d achieved in such an improbable way at such a young age.

Smoking dope with David Packouz, Alex Podrizki, and their gang of Orthodox kids, Diveroli constantly bragged about the deals he was doing. Diveroli was younger than the other dudes in their posse, who were now in their early twenties and mostly going to college. Diveroli had always been the designated clown, the one who mooned patrons in the Eden Roc’s exclusive dining room and was willing to take up any dare. But his personality was changing as he grew more obsessed with business. So were his appetites.

“I started to see my first girlfriend,” Diveroli recalled. “She was a Jewish girl, artsy, pretty. My second love was drugs and alcohol. I loved to get high. I couldn’t enjoy life sober. I would wake up to a joint. I’d smoke another for lunch. In the evening, I’d drink and snort cocaine.

My buddies would all get high, too, but I was always the extremist, doing the most drugs and making an asshole out of myself when I was wasted. My girlfriend hated all the drugs—the weed, the Ecstasy, the mescaline, the ketamine, the hallucinogenic mushrooms, and probably some other shit I can’t remember.”

Nothing mattered to Diveroli as much as business and money and getting high. He started to fight with his girlfriend more and more often. The couple broke up, got together, and broke up again, every few weeks—an emotional roller coaster.

Then a friend told Diveroli that his girlfriend had cheated on him. Diveroli got drunk that night and drove over to her parents’ house, where she lived, parking his car on the front lawn.

“I started to bang on her bedroom window, demanding to talk to her,” Diveroli recalled. “Her mother came out and threatened to call the police—which she then did. In a matter of minutes the relationship was gone forever.”

Diveroli’s ex-girlfriend obtained a restraining order. The brush with the law could have chastened Diveroli, but he was heedless. He was too caught up in his new life as an arms dealer to care—or to worry that he might be spinning out of control.

On the contrary, Diveroli was convinced he needed to expand his business. He was going to turn AEY into a conglomerate. But his band­width was already stretched to the breaking point. He needed help. Whom in his posse could he trust? Who was smart, ambitious, and looking to make a lot of money?

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David Packouz was a few years older than Diveroli and studying science at college—an attribute that impressed the younger man greatly. They’d been friends since Diveroli was twelve and Packouz was sixteen, and both attended the same synagogue—or, to be more accu­rate, both skipped the services to smoke reefer and wreak havoc.

“Efraim would steal the yarmulkes of older kids,” Packouz recalled. “He’d pick on the boys with short tempers, the ones he knew he could get a reaction from. He’d run off with their yarmulke and they’d chase him and finally catch him and beat him a little. Then when they’d walk away, he’d steal the yarmulke again. He was an annoying kid who en­joyed being an annoying kid. My friends liked him because it was fun watching him annoy uptight people. I wasn’t so crazy about him.”

Now twenty-four, Packouz was good at school, but he couldn’t imagine spending his life as a scientist in a lab coat doing research. Privately, he longed to be a rock star. He spent hours practicing the guitar and dreaming of performing in front of arena-size audiences. His music was soulful, layered with complex movements, a blend of Pink Floyd, Alice in Chains, and Simon and Garfunkel—though he knew that sounded like a strange combination.

To get the chance to sing, sometimes Packouz went to open-microphone nights at clubs in Miami, but his main outlet was karaoke in a basement bar called the Studio. While others treated karaoke as an excuse to get drunk and bellow power ballads, Packouz took his per­formances seriously, concentrating on pitch and timbre as he imagined himself to be a real rock and roller. To develop a distinctive look, and to hide premature balding, he’d shaved his head, making his sharp blue eyes more striking.

“I planned on recording an album one day when I had enough money,” Packouz recalled. “But the truth is that I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself.”

To support himself, Packouz advertised his services as a masseur on Craigslist. He figured that massage beat flipping burgers for mini­mum wage, even if fending off the sexual advances of clients was often a problem.

But Packouz had found another way to make money. He told Diver­oli that he’d started to trade goods on the Internet to supplement his income. Packouz bought textiles online on websites like Alibaba.com, purchasing bibs and towels and sheets from manufacturers in Pakistan and India, then selling them to a contact in Miami who supplied old folks’ homes. The business was tiny, with deals worth only a couple of thousand dollars for each transaction, but he’d fulfilled a few contracts and was starting to concentrate more on the Web—in essence, the same twenty-first-century business model Diveroli was following on a much larger scale.

Apart from their burgeoning online businesses, the thing that Di­veroli and Packouz had most in common was money. Both were very, very interested in money. Diveroli was already well off, at least for someone so young, but the early wealth only made him want more. Packouz was effectively broke, but he didn’t want to stay that way. Mas­sage was never going to allow him the means to pursue a professional music career, he figured, nor would a job as a scientist. He was looking for a way to make a lot of money—the faster the better.

From ARMS AND THE DUDES: How Three Stoners From Miami Beach Became The Most Unlikely Gunrunners In History by Guy Lawson. Copyright © 2015 by Guy Lawson. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

If you enjoyed this excerpt, purchase the full book here.

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