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| Format: | Recurso digital |
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Zenodo
2026
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| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18896601 |
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Table of Contents:
- <p>This paper examines how defense-related lobbying expenditures correlate with public spending on war and national military policy in the United States (2000–2025). It maps major lobbying organizations, their spending levels, and resulting defense budget decisions and legislative outputs — highlighting patterns of financial influence, structural "cash out" mechanisms, and the extraordinary leverage ratios achieved by political investment in the defense sector.<br>A central finding is that millions spent on lobbying routinely unlock billions — sometimes trillions — in public defense appropriations, representing one of the highest return-on-investment ratios in modern political economy. The paper further introduces an efficiency analysis comparing the total cost of war-linked public expenditure (~$25–30 trillion, 2001–2025) against the estimated market cost of directly purchasing the natural resources at strategic stake — finding war to be a structurally inefficient acquisition method whose persistence is explained by private rather than national rationality.<br>A dedicated case study examines AIPAC's electoral capture model — a qualitatively different influence architecture from traditional corporate lobbying — analyzing its spending scale (2022–2025), targeted electoral interventions, and the leverage ratio between political spending and U.S. military aid to Israel unlocked.<br>The paper draws a structural parallel between the modern U.S. defense economy and ancient Sparta, arguing that the United States operates a permanent war economy beneath a democratic veneer, in which the financial architecture of lobbying, procurement cycles, and electoral influence systematically prioritizes private returns over public resource efficiency.</p>