Five of the top defense companies in the US , Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman, spent a combined $34.2 million in lobbying in the first half of 2021 compared to about $33 million in the same period of 2020
From a paper written by Heidi Peltier as part of an ongoing project sponsored by Brown’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Its 35 scholars, physicians, legal experts and human-rights advocates began their work in 2011.
The project has pegged the costs of the war on terror at US $6.4 trillion through fiscal 2020.
US “Defense spending now accounts for more than half of all discretionary spending, a category that also includes education, transportation, and healthcare—virtually everything the government does other than Medicare and Social Security,” Peltier writes.
“Most of these inflated costs are due to payments to overly expensive military contractors.”
A Canadian perspective :Excepted from Legion Magazine article: July 8,2020 Rise in military contracting hides human, monetary costs by Stephen J. Thorne
Canada’s military contracting is generally limited to food and technical services, consultants and translators, though it hired private security firms to conduct perimeter security on its forward operating bases during latter deployments to Afghanistan, and at its embassy in Kabul.
Vice News reported in 2018 that Canadian government payments to private security firms—mercenaries, essentially—had doubled under the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, numbering in the millions of dollars.
Many are ex-Canadian soldiers working for defence contractors providing security for high-profile executives or government officials in foreign countries.
GardaWorld, a multimillion-dollar company based in Montreal, has thousands of security contractors globally, protecting everything from embassies to businesses in hostile areas and peaceful nations alike
A 2007 report by David Perry of Dalhousie University in Halifax said the Canadian military pursued private logistics services for many of the same reasons that the American military has come to increasingly rely on private military providers, namely “manpower shortages and a desire to maintain troop ceilings.”
“These shortages have been exacerbated by repeated deployments to Afghanistan [and] the scope of services contracting under the CANCAP program has expanded significantly,” Perry wrote.
Proponents of military contracting contend that what Heidi Peltier calls “commercialization” of government services decreases costs and increases quality of goods and services, thereby benefitting the public purse.
But Peltier’s paper asserts that military contracting is at least as expensive, and often more expensive, than if the military were to perform the same services in-house.
“This is because contractors lack competitive pressures to reduce the prices they charge to the government,” says the document. “This lack of competition is due, first, to the nature of the contracts themselves.”
