From Global Post, two articles which detail the contracts given out the past two years, and which companies receive them:
Until recently, the United States and Egypt shared a very special arrangement.
Here’s how it went: the US government would collect taxes from the American people. It would give a portion of the proceeds — about $1.3 billion a year — to help Egypt’s military. Egypt’s military would then give that money back to the United States, or at least to the country’s major defense corporations, in return for goods and services.
Would you like to round your budget figures as precisely as the following:
Contract details cited here were compiled from the US Defense Department database, where contracts over $6.5 million are published each business day. Dollar amounts are rounded to the nearest tenth of a million.
And here, without ado, is the beginning of the list:
The list below were the 10 biggest US Defense contracts involving direct military aid to Egypt from 2009 to 2011, according to The Institute for Southern Studies.
See the table at the bottom of the page for full details of the contracts.
1. Lockheed Martin
Amount: $259 million
Boeing (5th) and Raytheon (6th) were the only other names I recognized. It is not that US military spending is improper, it is that US aid must be recognized also for this reality: It is a subsidy to the defense industry.
If we define our terms properly we can have better debate on policy.
Jayson Casper 