Simply as an observation, it’s interesting that serving in the military is usually treated as honorable, but working at a defense contractor is viewed as unethical. I wonder why that is?
I suspect in part it comes from the country having its genesis in a war, its first president being a general, and its republic built around a president whose title is "commander in chief."
That and its economic supremacy / dominance is supported in part by its military dominance.
The head of this new force and later the whole country, Eisenhower, even warned us that the military-industrial complex he leveraged was starting to become too powerful: https://youtu.be/uGd-rkPoGa4
Nonetheless is it bad to associate welfare with honor?
Defense contracting has complex returns for its owners. On the one hand it’s a ton of fucking money for stuff that again, never sees combat. On the other hand, you have to spend that money in Alabama, not New York or Los Angeles (where rich people want to live). On the other hand, you’re spending a lot of that money in Alabama.
I sympathize with the idea that the graft and inefficiency, in this abstract sense, is unethical, at least at the same magnitude as building a missile platform. It will never be used, making it only abstractly a support of violence against innocents. Whereas some enlisted are ultimately sent out to go kill people in the Middle East — but weren’t they just the ones to lose the welfare lotto of a cushy deployment in the 9,999 other places you could be sent? Or that the drones that actually routinely perform violence at a distance are considerably cheaper than the SpaceX missile platform, so if you sought to reduce the military budget the drones would be the LAST thing that gets cut and actually violence per dollar would RISE? Anyway, the ethics are hard to boil down to some pithy one liner, it’s an immature and unjust reduction of the complexities of real politics and how we measure things.
Besides, the EU also does this. A lot of governments do.
(A side effect here: the military finds it harder to recruit in places which have good job markets and higher minimum wages, because their value proposition isn't as strong in comparison, and the risk of moral injury and regular old injury weighs against that choice. Here's an article about it, from a right-leaning news site no less: https://dailycaller.com/2019/01/02/us-army-recruiting-proble...)
While "just following orders" isn't a defense for war crimes, I think there's a lot of sympathy for people who enlist and follow the rules of war, and we don't see them as morally culpable for making the wars happen (or giving the military the ability to engage in war). Most of them would prefer to finish their agreed term of service and go back home.
Meanwhile, defense contractors profit specifically from military engagements ("Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired...") and have more of an incentive to see wars happen, and they generally employ people who can find equivalent jobs and careers outside of defense, so if you're the sort of person who finds the military-industrial complex unethical, it makes a lot more sense to pin it on the industrial part of that complex.
No, I'm not judging, maybe I would do it myself. I'm just refusing to pretend there's is anything honourable about that.
Edit: https://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/06/middleeast/us-collateral-... has some more info.
There are many people who forego more lucrative careers (in a monetary sense) as a private contractor because of the idea of service. In other words, they feel they are serving a higher purpose in the military and would be selling out to go to a defense contractor. Ironically, these careers in the military are the ones with the largest retention incentives due to this very reason.
A company like Blackwater is much closer to actual mercenaries - they're trying to build their own private, independent military-industrial complex, in a sense, by selling their services to existing complexes.
For this matter, Department of Defense is also a euphemism. It used to have the more honest name Department of War until that was changed in the late 1940s.
If the difference between criminal and lawful is just a matter of profit margins, I suspect it's hard for people think of you as being dirty, and the only question is how dirty.
The military is mostly reacting to the executive branch and doesn't have the same perceived corrupting influence.
It does differ by region and time, though.
Still, great observation.