ANDREW COCKBURN, amcockburn@
Cockburn is author of the new book The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine.
He said today: “Two days after Putin took over Crimea in 2014, military lobbyists in Washington met for breakfast in a state, according to one attendee, of ‘borderline euphoria.’ As we head to a $800 billion Pentagon budget, we can see that their hopes and dreams have been entirely justified.”
The Spoils of War reports on how “Washington expanded NATO to satisfy an arms manufacturer’s urgent financial requirements; the U.S. Navy’s Pacific fleet deployments were for years dictated by a corrupt contractor who bribed high-ranking officers with cash and prostitutes; senior Marine commanders agreed to a troop surge in Afghanistan in 2017 for budgetary reasons.”
Cockburn recently wrote the piece “Can Joe Biden channel John F. Kennedy over Ukraine?” for The Spectator. His past pieces include “How the U.S. military got rich from Afghanistan.”
Cockburn is Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine. His past books include Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins.
