Military-industrial complex: Bad for workers

After months of looking for work, a young acquaintance of mine finally landed a job manufacturing ships at the Philadelphia Naval Yard, including for the Pentagon. This job was the only job they could find after a year of searching.

A long list of state and federal politicians claim those military jobs are good for workers. In reality, the military-industrial complex is harmful to the working class in many ways. The build up of the U.S. war machine actively works against the well-being of people domestically and on a global scale.

As a Vietnam War veteran, I experienced how patriotism can fool people into supporting reactionary wars, leading to many unnecessary deaths. As a factory laborer and later a postal worker, I learned how management will often lie to us in order to get maximum profits from our exploitation.

Because extreme profits are involved in the military-industrial complex, those lies can become supercharged. It’s in our interest to understand how the use of government funds for military production hurts the working class while enriching wealthy investors.

We should all know that investments in civilian sectors create many more jobs, especially more union jobs. But you wouldn’t know any of this from listening to mainstream politicians, either Republican or Democrat.

For instance, President Trump applauded the latest investments in Pennsylvania’s defense manufacturing and research at a Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on July 15. He said, “Pennsylvania workers will build the ships, submarines, trucks, weapons and industries that will ensure America remains the strongest and the most powerful nation in the history of the world.” (Philadelphia Inquirer, July 15)

“Defense is critical to the future growth of this commonwealth,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) said. He fully endorsed the summit’s goal of supercharging the defense industry and placing Pennsylvania at the center of the expansion. (Philadelphia Inquirer, July 15)

Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle L. Parker (D) announced her support for shipbuilding, heavy industry and job creation along the Delaware River waterfront and pledged to speed up issuing permits for large projects. The Naval Yard, which includes the Hanwha and Rhoads ship facilities, is co-owned by the city and the Chamber of Commerce. Parker promised “to make sure government bureaucracy” is kept out of the way.

U.S. Senator Dave McCormick (R), U.S. Representative Mary Gay Scanlon (D), Philadelphia City Council President Kenyatta Johnson and other politicians have also made statements welcoming increased military production in Pennsylvania.

By arguing for job creation, these politicians all hide the giveaway to the military-industrial complex and disguise the role of the U.S. military worldwide.

Trillion dollar war budgets

According to the Aerospace Industries Association, defense contractors directly employed 370,084 workers in the U.S. in 2019, which jumped to around 493,560 employees by 2024, averaging a 6.7% yearly growth.

Pennsylvania’s increased industrial production for the Pentagon is part of Biden’s — and now Trump’s — massive increase. The war budget is now over $1 trillion for 2026 and projected to be $1.5 trillion in 2027.

The United States spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined, including China and Russia. The military infrastructure of the U.S.’s global empire comes at a cost of more than $10,700 per U.S. household each year.

When politicians cite the “defense budget,” they mean the Department of War line item. But national security spending is spread across dozens of agencies, carefully structured to obscure its true size.

The official Department of Defense budget for fiscal year 2025 is approximately $886 billion. When you include Veterans Affairs ($325 billion); nuclear weapons via the Department of Energy ($51 billion); CIA, NSA, NRO, DIA and 14 other intelligence agencies ($90 billion+); Homeland Security ($28 billion); and interest on war debt ($100 billion+), the true national security budget exceeds $1.4 trillion annually.

Congress always approves

The top five defense contractors (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon Technologies, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics) spend $247 million per year lobbying (or bribing) Congress. It’s well worth the effort since their close ties to Congress resulted in $771 billion in very profitable contracts from 2020 to 2024, according to costofwar.com.

The people doing the lobbying are often former senior Pentagon officials who left the government to take jobs with defense contractors, a process known as the “revolving door.” The Boston Globe found that between 2004 and 2008, some 80% of retiring, three-star and four-star officers went to work as consultants or defense executives. (warincontext.org, Dec. 26, 2010)

The Pentagon and the military contractors further ensure political support by distributing defense contracts to all 435 congressional districts. For example, in Pennsylvania’s 17 congressional districts, there were 528,015 military contracts worth a total of $10,371,743,570 in 2020 alone, according to governmentcontractswon.com.

Warmongers summit

At the July 14-15 summit, Sen. McCormick announced $10 billion for Pennsylvania in additional military investments in categories described as Defense Industrial Base, R&D, Workforce Pennsylvania and Emerging Technology.

The announcement included:

• A 10-year, $2.5 billion strategic agreement for advanced manufacturing and shipbuilding at the Rhoads Industries & General Dynamics Electric Boat in the Philadelphia Naval Yard, to support U.S. Navy submarine construction, promising approximately 1,350 jobs through 2035.
• Another $1.5 billion in program costs for the Hanwha Group at the Philadelphia Shipyard for National Security Multi-Mission Vessels through the Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration (MARAD), supporting over 2,000 jobs.
• Nearly $31 million in loans, investments and grants from JPMorganChase to expand the submarine manufacturing facility at the Philadelphia Naval Yard, which is projected to create 450 permanent jobs, train hundreds of workers, and support up to 100 maritime suppliers.
• A $2.3 billion contract with Day & Zimmermann in Philadelphia to provide operations, maintenance and modernization for the Hawthorne Army Depot in Nevada.

Other contracts amounting to billions of dollars were announced for military industrial firms in Pittsburgh, Allentown, York, Horsham, Lancaster, Erie and Scranton, as well as for the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, Penn State University, Bucknell University, Lackawanna College and other R&D centers.

The current administration’s proposed War Department budget for 2027 is for $1.5 trillion. According to Jules W. Hurst III, acting as War Department comptroller, this is a 42% increase over the 2026 military budget. (war.gov, April 21, 2026)

‘War is a racket’

In his 1935 book “War Is a Racket,” U.S. Marine Corps veteran Major General Smedley Butler wrote: “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” This was years before the military-industrial complex became a dominant part of the U.S. economy.

When it comes to war, Marxism asks us to look for the class interests that lie beneath the surface of every conflict. Whose access to oil, minerals or markets is being protected? Which industries grow rich from wars? Who supplies the weapons?

In an age of obscenely vast defense budgets, powerful arms industries, competition over resources and trade routes and U.S. global economic decline, these questions remain strikingly relevant. Conflict is about profit, power and the people of wealth who benefit from both.

Workers lose

The majority of military members come from working-class communities. Many are recruited via an economic draft. But taking everything into account, the working class gets no benefit from imperialist wars nor from the industries that make war possible.

My worker friend is now one of over 500,000 workers with jobs in the military industrial complex, making weapons and ships and other military support hardware and software that serve to destroy homes and cities and kill other workers in other countries. But instead of manufacturing arms, they could be making things that benefit society.

According to the Political Economy Research Institute, military spending creates far fewer jobs per dollar than most other major government spending categories.

The defense industry averages 5,000 jobs per $1 billion, as most funds go to expensive equipment, e.g., F‑35 jets and aircraft carriers, rather than labor.

In education there are 13,000 jobs per $1 billion, concentrated on employing teachers, administrators, counselors and support staff. In healthcare there are 9,000 to 11,000 jobs per $1 billion for nurses, doctors, technicians, home health aides and administrative roles. In clean energy, 8,000 jobs per $1 billion for solar installers, wind technicians, grid workers and engineers. In infrastructure, 7,000 jobs per $1 billion for construction workers, engineers, planners and maintenance.

These jobs require human labor that benefits society. War production is capital intensive, and its purpose is to destroy infrastructure and kill people.

Moreso, every dollar spent in the military-industrial complex is tax money stolen from cuts in SNAP, Medicare, healthcare, housing, childcare, education and other community needs.

According to WarCosts.org, the 2025 military budget could have eliminated all U.S. medical debt ($195 billion), made all public universities free for one year ($79 billion), ended homelessness permanently ($20 billion), repaired every deficient U.S. bridge ($125 billion), instituted universal pre-K for all 3 and 4 year olds ($34 billion), tripled the National Institutes of Health research budget ($94 billion), provided clean water to every U.S. resident ($45 billion) and doubled the EPA budget ($12 billion). All of the above combined equals $604 billion.

You could fund every item on this list and still have $282 billion left over — more than China’s entire military budget.

Increased military spending vs cuts in healthcare

Mary Gay Scanlon, U.S. Congressional Representative for Pennsylvania’s 5th District, put out a slick release Sept. 2, 2025, titled “PA-05 Deep Dive: The Philly Shipyard,” bragging about her role in expanding military production at the Philadelphia Naval Yard.

Scanlon’s district includes all of Delaware County, adjacent to Philadelphia, where Crozer-Chester Medical Center and Taylor Hospital were shut down last year, costing over 2,650 jobs. Over 330 additional jobs were lost when Delaware County Memorial Hospital closed in 2022. These facilities were critical healthcare providers in the region, with Crozer being the last remaining trauma center in Delaware County.

The closure of these hospitals in Scanlon’s district significantly impacts healthcare access for the approximately half a million residents in Delaware County, forcing patients to travel longer distances for medical care, leading to delays in receiving critical services.

Over the past decade, about a quarter of Pennsylvania’s rural hospitals have either closed or drastically reduced services.

While Scanlon welcomed the military-industrial complex into the Philadelphia region, some of the funds she voted for to fuel that war preparation development came from decreased funding for Medicaid reimbursements, cuts in National Institutes of Health grants to hospitals, reduced Affordable Care Act participation and other federal policies that have led to hospital closings.

Defense industry largely non-union, low paid

Defense industry jobs are relatively few compared to socially beneficial jobs, because corporate profit making searches for as many job-eliminating methods as possible through the use of automation, computerization and artificial intelligence (AI).

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s so-called “Arsenal of Freedom” initiative included much-publicized visits to unionized arms plants in four states across the U.S. But transitionsecurity.org reports the density of unionized workers in locations such as Fort Worth, Texas, and Newport News, Virginia, are exceptions within a defense workforce where the vast majority of workers are nonunion and employment has declined by the thousands from historical peaks in the last century.

For example, at least 69% of the Lockheed Corporation was unionized in 1971. The unionization rate today is 19% at Lockheed Martin and as low as 4% at Northrop Grumman. An estimated 10% to 14% of the private military contracting sector are union jobs.

Multiple trends affecting labor unions in particular and the defense industry as a whole have driven down unionization in the sector. These include automation, subcontracting, anti-union campaigns and evolving political calculations that scatter jobs across Congressional districts to garner political support. Those scattered jobs almost always involve non-union subcontractors.

My newly hired friend is being trained as a welder at Hanwha Philly Shipyard building commercial and military ships. The yard was recently chosen to build two Missile Range Instrumentation Vessels for the Pentagon to the tune of $2 billion. The two ships, working on behalf of the Missile Defense Agency, will monitor and collect data on ballistic missile tests in the Pacific Ocean and also support the Golden Dome missile defense system.

Workers there should pay some attention to Hanwha’s Geoje shipyard in South Korea, where the techniques of veteran welders are recorded, and that data is used to train AI systems that work alongside them. AI now assists with 67% of indoor welding there, and the company is targeting 100% by 2030, supported by robotics with a real-time Digital Production Center. H​​anwha Ocean has plans to transfer these “smart yard” technologies from Korea to the Hanwha Philly Shipyard. (hanwha.com/newsroom, July 21)

Every announcement of a new military production contract includes the number of jobs it will create. What’s not detailed is how many of those jobs are temporary for construction, what their pay will be, or how long they will last. Oftentimes, the number of jobs never reach what was promised.

Workers are not our enemies

The purpose of the military-industrial complex should never be forgotten — to provide weapons for imperialist wars and increase profits for the superrich.

The United States government alone operates more than 90% of the world’s foreign military bases, controls more than 42% of the world’s nuclear warheads and dominates 43% of the global arms trade.

As the world’s largest arms dealer, the U.S. sells weapons to the majority of the world’s authoritarian governments, and U.S.-made weapons are routinely implicated in human rights abuses, including facilitating Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza, ethnic cleansing of the occupied West Bank, waging war on Iran and fueling the brutal proxy wars in Ukraine and Sudan. Cuba, China and other countries are in the crosshairs for the next wars of imperialist aggression.

At the same time, despite being the richest country in the world, the U.S. has the lowest education and health outcomes and highest rate of child poverty among all economically advanced nations. Wealth inequality in the U.S. has never been higher.

The companies that supply the armaments to the military that cause so much harm to the people of the world deserve the wrath of us workers. We need to do everything we can to put an end to these weapons manufacturers that can destroy the world as we know it.

But the workers such as my friend at Hanwha’s shipyard are not our enemies. Those who make blood money from waging wars — the owners of Lockheed Martin, Day and Zimmermann, Northrop Grumman and other military-industrial companies, plus the capitalist billionaires and their political partners who run this imperialist government — are our class enemies.

We need to end the imperialist system and replace it with a system that puts human needs first, not profits — a system where workers and their families can thrive with jobs that benefit society instead of warmongering billionaires.