Manufacturing Weapons Isn’t an Industry—It’s a Death Sentence

On Thursday, June 25, President Donald Trump’s re-election efforts took him to the “battleground” state of Wisconsin, where he toured a shipyard in the small city of Marinette. There, he railed against Democrats as a more dangerous enemy than Russia or China. He also celebrated Wisconsin’s win over domestic enemies, such as the state of Maine, in securing a key shipbuilding project. 

Representative Gallagher and President Trump both support building a new U.S. fleet of 355 warships by 2030, mostly by adding multiple unmanned vessels.

“The first-in-class [frigate] will not just be a win for Wisconsin workers; it will also be a major victory for our Navy,” Trump said. “The stunning ships will deliver the overwhelming force, lethality, and power we need to engage America’s enemies anywhere and at any time.” 

On many military minds, it seems, this enemy was China.

“If you just look at the geography of [the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command] , these ships can go a lot of places that destroyers can’t go,” said U.S. Representative Mike Gallagher, a hawkish Republican who represents Northeast Wisconsin. “[I]t will align nicely with a lot of what the Marine Corps Commandant is talking about in terms of capitalizing on the overdue death of the [Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces] Treaty, and fielding intermediate range fires.”

The commandant he’s referring to, General David Berger, has explained: “The thing that has driven us to where we are right now is the paradigm shift by China moving to sea.” Berger wants “mobile and fast” ships to keep American marines on temporary bases as near as possible to China, since “the farther you back away from China, they will move toward you.”

The shipyard Trump toured, Fincantieri Marinette Marine, was acquired by an Italian company in 2009 and recently received a lucrative U.S. Navy contract to build between one and ten frigates, representing a tactical shift from larger destroyers. Outfitted by Lockheed Martin with thirty-two vertical launch tubes and a “state of the art SPY-6 radar system,” with power capacity to accommodate arriving “electronic warfare systems,” the frigate will be capable of simultaneously attacking submarines, land targets, and surface ships. 

If all ten ships are built in the shipyard, the contract will be worth $5.5 billion dollars. Representative Gallagher and President Trump both support building a new U.S. fleet of 355 warships by 2030, mostly by adding multiple unmanned vessels.

Marinette had been vying with several other shipyards, including Bath Iron Works in Maine, for the multi-billion-dollar contract. On March 2, a bipartisan coalition of fifty-four Wisconsin legislators sent a letter urging President Trump to direct the U.S. Navy frigate construction contract to the Marinette shipyard. 

“We are hopeful that the U.S. Navy will decide to bring additional ship construction to the state of Wisconsin,” the legislators wrote, calling the opportunity vital not just for a growing Wisconsin shipyard “but for the communities of great Americans who will benefit for years to come from valuable and meaningful work on behalf of our country.”

The deal could add 1,000 jobs in the area and the shipbuilder plans to invest $200 million to expand the Marinette facility because of the contract. So this was a victory lap for the shipyard, but also for Trump, who can tout these jobs in his efforts to win the “battleground” state of Wisconsin. 

Before the pandemic hit, and before this U.S. Navy contract was awarded to Marinette, my fellow activists at Voices for Creative Nonviolence were planning a protest walk to the Marinette shipyard. As Trump noted in his speech, the company is currently building four Littoral Combat Ships for sale to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Defense industry analysts noted, in late 2019, with the U.S. Navy no longer interested in purchasing Littoral Combat Ships from the yard, the Marinette shipyard had been “saved by the Saudis” and by Lockheed Martin, which had helped arrange the contract. 

The Saudi military has been using U.S.-supplied Littoral Combat Ships to blockade the coastal ports of Yemen, which is undergoing the world’s worst humanitarian crisis due to a famine exacerbated by the Saudi-led blockade and an invasion involving relentless aerial bombardment. 

The world that our global empire is swiftly creating, through our devastating oil wars in the Middle East and our burgeoning cold wars with Russia and China, is a world without winners.

Actual cholera epidemics, reminiscent of centuries past, have been another result of the war’s creation of lethal delays and shortages for Yemeni people in desperate need of fuel, food, medicine, and clean water. Yemen’s humanitarian situation, worsened by the spread of COVID-19, is now so desperate that the United Nations humanitarian chief, Mark Lowcock, warned Yemen will “fall off the cliff” without massive financial support. President Trump took full credit for the Saudi contract at his June 25 event.  

The world that our global empire is swiftly creating, through our devastating oil wars in the Middle East and our burgeoning cold wars with Russia and China, is a world without winners. It includes devastating climate change, a global pandemic, and the corrosive shame of endless war. We must resist signing contracts with weapons makers profiting from the endless immiseration of the Middle East and needless superpower rivalries inviting full nuclear war. Such contracts, inked in blood, doom every corner of our world to perish as a battleground.

Asked to comment on whether Maine “lost” when the contract went to Wisconsin, Lisa Savage, who is campaigning as an Independent Green to represent Maine as a U.S. Senator, offered this statement:

“The time for manufacturing of weapons of war has passed as a viable industry for our nation, despite the way some of our political leadership clings to economies of the past. The global pandemic emphasizes for us all the interconnectivity of our global society and the folly, wastefulness, and moral failure of war in all forms. We must transform facilities like [Bath Iron Works] and Marinette into hubs of manufacturing for solutions to the climate crisis, including public transportation, resources for the creation of renewable energy, and disaster-response vessels.”