Introducing Weapons of the Week, a Military-Industrial Newsletter
WoW #1, May 6: Who rules Columbia? How's it going at Boeing?
Note to readers: Today’s post is the first installment of Weapons of the Week, a regular roundup newsletter covering the military-industrial complex and the politics of militarism broadly construed. One reason that I’m excited to kick this off is that this weekly newsletter will be the first content I am offering exclusively to paid subscribers. Until now, everything I’ve written has been public. Like all writers, I like to be read, and like all leftists, I dislike commodification. Taking out a free subscription to a newsletter is still an imposition on your inbox, and I’ve been so gratified to see how many of you are willing to do that. Without advertising it, I’ve also had a paid option, which more people than I expected have signed up for even though I haven’t offered them anything special. To these readers: I cannot thank you enough for your show of faith.
So why introduce paid content now? I like writing this newsletter, and I’d like to put it out more regularly. Offering a specific product - Weapons of the Week - lets me give me people something in exchange for their money, while allowing me to keep the other essays and comments I write available to the widest audience possible.
I’ve made this first edition of Weapons of the Week public, so that you can get a sense of what you might get, but after this week these dispatches will be limited to subscribers only.
Above: Seymour Melman was one of the last century’s most important American critics of the military-industrial complex. His life and ideas will feature in future newsletters.
Who rules Columbia?
The big news of the week was the police raid on Columbia, part of a nationwide crackdown in which thousands have been arrested. It’s too soon to sort out the conflicting effects of political polarization and media mystification, but there can be no question that the week’s events express the increasingly explosive interpenetration of international conflict and domestic social order in the US. The New York Times may find it faintly ridiculous that US students are outraged over a war “in a land they’ve never set foot in,” and it’s true that those willing to risk arrest or even terrorism charges in defense of strangers will always be a minority. But millions of Americans, on both sides, clearly feel that the outcome of the Gaza war bears directly on the future of American politics.
Much the same, when Joe Biden says that US weapons transfers to Ukraine and Israel promote employment in the US defense industry, his remarks are irrelevant to the vast majority of American workers. But, aside from the million or so workers employed in the private production of armaments, many others have an investment of some kind — in the maintenance of American prestige against China, in the expansion of state capacity after neoliberalism, in the frontiers of technology, and so on. For doves, especially young people who grew up within a seeming consensus on the value of symbolic antiracism, it is morally objectionable to profit from “a war of cruel rich people,” regardless of the quantitative contribution to GDP or endowment returns.
It’s nicer not to think about such things, which explains why the campus explosion has called forth empty handwringing and a good deal of outright misinformation. By contrast, Columbia historian Adam Tooze has responded with appropriate candor: “There was no riot last night at Columbia any more than there has been at any other point. The violence came from the police side and it came at the invitation and request of the University administration.”
Above: Structure (military-industrial research funding) meets Event (the campus lockdown)
Shortly before the police raid, Tooze posted a “sketch map” of Columbia's political economic structure, his preliminary extrapolation of a power map produced by the organization Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD). Tooze was handed this flyer during a visit to the antiwar encampment.
Tooze’s map tries to expand beyond the immediate relationship between the educational institution and the Israeli war. Columbia, according to Tooze, is only residually a college: “Tuition revenue from Columbia College undergrads makes up at most 3.25% of Columbia University annual revenue, likely less.” Six other entities are, collectively, far more important: a medical-industrial complex, an externally funded research complex, very large professional schools, a real estate empire, the organization that manages the endowment, and a development arm.
Of these, the “externally funded research complex” is likely the most closely tied to the military-industrial complex. The university website has a page describing some of the linkages, along with advice on how to apply for DARPA grants. The program contact, Greg Culler, has an interesting resume which includes a stint at the Fortress Investment Group, a hedge fund with a checkered performance record and at least some ties to the aerospace sector.
The 2024 power mapping directly references the power structure research done by the movement of 1968, collected in Who Rules Columbia? Like the 2024 CUAD document, the popular 1968 pamphlet opens with historian Charles Beard’s statement upon resigning from the Columbia faculty during the war hysteria of 1917:
I have been driven to the conclusion that the University is really under the control of a small and active group of Trustees who have no standing in the world of education, who are reactionary and visionless in politics, narrow and medieval in religion. Their conduct betrays a profound misconception of the true function of a university in the advancement of learning.
Naturally, military-industrialism featured prominently in the 1968 document. One of the inciting incidents for the 1968 uprising had been the discovery of papers linking Columbia to secret defense research under the auspices of the Institute for Defense Analyses. Just as Tooze’s post distinguishes seven entities, the New Leftists picked out 22 individuals representing five interlocking segments, including “the defense-research nexus.” Further background on Who Rules Columbia? can be found here.
Months before the student takeover in 1968, university president Grayson Kirk created a commission to study Columbia’s links to the defense industry. Even so, Diana Trilling (no friend of SDS) thought it was “unquestionable” that “Kirk and his coadjutors were unequal to the demands made on them in the revolt, and in ways that showed not only a grave deficiency of statesmanship but also a perilously inadequate reading of present-day student emotion.” If that is a fair judgment of Kirk, what can one possibly say about Minouche Shafik and her cohort of bureaucrats? Or about the business school visionaries who propose that student protestors “become investors in the U.S. defense contractors...[allowing] them to become activist investors and push for the changes they want to see from the inside”?
There has been a great deal of Establishment amnesia about this earlier moment of student protest. Supposedly serious people are acting panicked about bike locks, a single broken window, and very large reproductions of Very Short Introductions. The 1968 occupations at Columbia lasted a week (Diana Trilling: “a long week, the longest in memory”). The students kidnapped a dean, vandalized multiple buildings, and shared space with dozens if not hundreds of “outside agitators” (mostly Harlem residents). There were threats to burn buildings and widespread rumors—disputed to this day—that radicals were armed with guns. There was also a well-organized, violent opposition movement of right-wing students. In 1969, the disused offices of Columbia’s ROTC office (shut down in a concession to the soixante-huitards) were firebombed, an event which has apparently been completely forgotten.
(Above: Op-ed by the Student Afro-American Society, Columbia Spectator, April 4, 1970)
One person who ought to remember how crazy things got is Eric Holder, Columbia '73 (BA) and '76 (JD), who by his own account belonged to “a large group of students who felt strongly about the way we thought the world should be, and we weren’t afraid to make our opinions heard. I did not take a final exam until my junior year at Columbia—we were on strike every time finals seemed to roll around.” In April 1970, Holder and other members of the Student Afro-American Society (SAS) occupied the disused ROTC office in Hartley Hall (directly adjacent to Hamilton Hall). Decades later, Columbia deans would celebrate Holder’s participation in the occupation. In a commencement address, Holder expressed special gratitude to the university administration, which “allowed an impetuous, testosterone laced youngster to express himself in ways that other institutions would have considered unacceptable.”
As with the recent decision to rename Hamilton as Hind’s Hall, after a six year old girl murdered in Gaza, the SAS dubbed the occupied space the Malcolm X Lounge. Today, the Malcolm X Lounge remains a space for black students and organizations. Among those who spent considerable time in the Malcolm X Lounge was Barack Obama, Columbia (BA) ‘83. The future president’s own thoughts on the military-industrial-university complex were so radical that he criticized the existing student peace movement from the left, complaining that the “the narrow focus of the [Nuclear] Freeze movement…suit[s] the military-industrial interests, as they continue adding to their billion dollar erector sets.”
Above: Barack Obama, second from left, at an anti-apartheid rally at Occidental College
In light of his collegiate attitudes, Obama’s decision to reappoint Bush-era Defense Secretary Robert Gates, is noteworthy. Even Obama recognized the irony:
He was a Republican, a Cold War hawk, a card-carrying member of the national security establishment, a prior champion of foreign interventions I had likely protested while in college, and now defense secretary to a president whose war policies I abhorred.
Obama explained this as a concession to the deep state:
As with my economic appointments, my reasons were practical. I understood that moving America’s national security apparatus in a new direction wasn’t easy for any president. If President Eisenhower, the former Supreme Allied Commander and one of the architects of D-Day, had occasionally felt stymied by what he called the “military-industrial complex,” there was a high likelihood that pushing reform might be harder for a newly elected African American president [who] wanted to rein in the military budget…
Obama’s concession that a powerful military-industrial-complex exists should not be taken for granted, especially given the liberal embrace of the national security state since 2016. Last fall, Paul Krugman dismissed references to Eisenhower’s farewell address as “60-year-old clichés.” More gravely, Krugman identified criticism of the MIC as a symptom of the same “horseshoe” alliance of extremes which has witnessed “the far left and the far right [become] increasingly united in antisemitism.”1
Even before he reappointed Robert Gates, Obama had formed an alliance with Jeh Johnson, a powerful corporate lawyer who had served as Air Force General Counsel during the Clinton bombing of Yugoslavia. Johnson became a major Obama fundraiser by late 2006. At that point, according to the New York Times:
The Obama campaign hopes to draw from pools that barely existed four years ago, particularly hedge fund and private-equity fund principals who only recently acquired their money and their interest in the political process.
Johnson would serve as Secretary of Defense 2009 to 2012, then as Secretary of Homeland Security until 2017. He is a director of Lockheed Martin and a Columbia trustee. Among Johnson’s honors is the “Ronald Reagan Peace Through Strength Award,” awarded annually in the Air Force One Pavilion of the Reagan Library.
The award itself sounds kind of nuts:
The Ronald Reagan Peace Through Strength Award is represented by a bronze eagle set upon a black granite base. The eagle symbolizes the strength, courage and wisdom of both Reagan and the country that he loved so dearly. Captured within the eagle’s talon is a piece of the Berlin Wall, a powerful reminder that, in Reagan’s own words, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”
After the raid on Columbia, it’s hard to disagree.
How It’s Going at Boeing
At Portland State University, activist demands that the university cut ties with Boeing succeeded in getting the PSU administration to “pause” any new donations from the troubled aircraft maker. Occupy PSU’s response: “This is institutional jargon attempting to placate. We will not stop until demands are met.” Despite widespread reports that campus protests reflect peer pressure or TikTok manipulation - if not anti-Semitism - PSU students have been campaigning against Boeing since 2016.
At Washington University in St. Louis, where the business school boasts a “Boeing Center,” the student union adopted a resolution calling for the school to divest from Boeing. 20 miles northwest of Wash U, in St. Charles, protestors blocked the entrances to Boeing Manufacturing Plant 598 in St. Charles, Missouri, in order “to make clear that if they won’t stop the bombs, we will.” Boeing’s deliveries to Israel include 250-pound Small Diameter Bombs, euphemistically called “smart” bombs.
Above: unexploded ordnance, reportedly manufactured by Boeing (Gaza, April 2024)
In Hazelwood, another northern St. Louis suburb, Boeing repurchased a parts manufacturer which it spun off shortly after acquiring McDonnell Douglas back in the late 1990s. The deal reflects Boeing’s confidence in the accelerated flow of procurement contracts, including the Navy’s order of 17 new F/A-18s, which “extended the life of the St. Louis County manufacturing line into 2027.” Boeing - and the Hazelwood assembly line - also stand to benefit from the sale of dozens of F-15s to Israel. According to one defense analyst: “It’s clear that Boeing thinks there’s an ongoing international market, and therefore this could be a long-term business.”
Demand conditions may be strong, but Boeing has other things to worry about. Wall Street is closely watching the corporation’s search for a new CEO, given the impending departure of Dave Calhoun over repeated revelations of dangerous and illegal disregard of product safety. Glass Lewis, a shareholder proxy advisor, “recommended shareholders vote against the reelection of three [Boeing] directors.” In a silver lining for the existing management, “Glass Lewis also recommended Boeing shareholders vote to approve top executives’ 2023 compensation, under which CEO Calhoun’s pay package rose about 45% to nearly $33 million.” As far as I can tell, no one from the Federal Reserve has complained about this salary increase, which far exceeds the rate of consumer price inflation plus productivity increases.
An encouraging development came last week when Boeing “raised $10 billion from a bond sale …that attracted about $77 billion of orders and allowed the planemaker to ease some of its financial strains by refinancing part of its massive debt load.” The successful turn to credit markets was especially notable given that it “came just days after the company posted a first-quarter loss and said it burned through $3.9 billion, prompting Moody’s Ratings to cut the aviation giant’s credit grade to the edge of junk.” In order to allay fears about credit ratings, “Boeing included a provision in the bonds known as step-up coupons, in which investors get paid higher yields if the company is downgraded to junk.” If you expect that “Boeing can’t go bust due to its industry and defense position,” there’s no default risk, and no reason not to buy the bonds if you’re compensated with higher yield for the risk of a credit downgrade.
Presumably the credit ratings agencies noticed when, on April 31, the second Boeing whistleblower in three months turned up dead. As a responsible conspiracy theorist— and, my lawyers remind me, not a medical doctor—I don’t see anything especially suspicious in the second whistleblower’s reported cause of death, MRSA/pneumonia. But there’s no denying the fear that surviving whistleblowers feel. Last month, Boeing quality engineer Sam Salehpoor told the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations that his supervisor threatened him by saying: “I would have killed someone who said what you said in the meeting.” Added Salehpoor:
They call you on your personal phone to let you know that they know where you live. They know where you are. And they can hurt you. The threats ... really scare me, believe me, but I am at peace. If something happens to me, I am at peace because I feel like coming forward, I will be saving a lot of lives.
Further Reading
Charles A. Beard, “Statement” [on resignation from Columbia] (1917)
NACLA, Who Rules Columbia? (1968)
Columbia College Today [alumni magazine] (Spring 1968)
Barack Obama, “Breaking the War Mentality” (1983)
G. William Domhoff, “How to Do Power Structure Research” (2012)
US Senate, Permanent Subcommittee On Investigations Examining Boeing’s Broken Safety Culture: Firsthand Accounts (2024)
Elsewhere on Substack
Speaking Security (Stephen Semler, Security Policy Reform Institute)'
Warfare and Welfare (Michael Brenes)
Incidentally, Tooze’s power mapping has called forth the same risible accusation.
New subscriber. Good stuff.