If War Was a Business, It Would Have Long Ago Gone Bankrupt
And, of course, war is a business, probably the largest business in the world, dollar wise. The military-industrial complex (MIC), President Eisenhower warned us about when he left office, swallows 42% of the American national budget. If you don’t have a nose for numbers, that’s about $1 trillion each and every year—one thousand billion dollars.
Yet Eisenhower, who knew as much about war as anyone, told us that “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
We all smiled at his eloquence, polished our ‘I Like Ike’ button and forgot
Besides, feeding the hungry, and clothing the cold are not business decisions and irrelevant to the conversation. Personally, I liked Ike and still remember.
What is relevant is the brutally truthful fact that all this wasteful expense doesn’t even work. Vietnam remained communist after 56,000 American lives lost, Iraq and Afghanistan remain under the control of insurgents, Afghanistan having lasted five times as long as World War Two. Thank you, George. The rattle of the American saber has become more faint and less successful with every passing decade.
The product that we turn out by manufacturing wars is a failure by any business calculation except profit
And should you think ‘manufacturing’ is a wrongheaded term for the reasons to go to war, you haven’t been paying attention. The MIC pushes for war at every peaceful moment. We don’t even have to be directly involved. Ukraine? Bring it on, look at all the obsolete weaponry we can sell. And the best part is the American public will always pay the bill. $120 hammers, no problem.
If things get slack, the military guys quickly turn China from America’s largest trading partner to the biggest threat to our worldwide supremacy. How the hell did that happen?
Don’t forget Taiwan, it’s on the back burner
So, a corporation (the military-industrial complex is a group of corporations) that produces aircraft carriers six years late and at triple budget, still sucks up huge amounts of money, every nickel of it at cost-plus. And there are no costs in industry that are more plus than these military fraudsters.
Did I mention Gaza? The 40,000 civilians dead in Gaza, two thirds of them women and children, are super profitable
Add that to the unwinnable wars the West fights these days, but then the contractors swoop in to rebuild and more profits are swindled away. The graft in Iraq alone were enough to float the MIC boat for a decade.
Success begins at home, and home for the military-industrial guys is Congress. Vice-President Chaney lined his pockets while telling George what to think, as former CEO and Chairman of Halliburton. That was (and is) an American multinational corporation and the world's second largest oil service company that employs approximately 55,000 people through its hundreds of subsidiaries, affiliates, branches, brands, and divisions in more than 70 countries.
Being Vice-President of the United States doesn’t pay all that well.
If you wonder why America has come to the hard times, hard politics and harder ways to feed your family these days, remember Ike
Dwight Eisenhower was a man of few words. “If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.” We solved WWII with 34 generals. Not able to win any wars since then, today the Pentagon houses 900 flag officers (generals and admirals). That’s enlargement on a national scale.
And if the problem happens to be the need for war materials, simply instill fear in the wealthy countries of the planet, bank the profits and don’t be surprised when they use them against one another.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE are the largest market, followed by Turkey, South Korea, Australia, Taiwan, India, Singapore, Iraq, and Egypt.
Experts believe the Middle East will remain a top destination for weapons for some time – it currently accounts for about 40% of U.S. arms exports – especially given the rise of ISIS
Yep, movies and music were once the big American exports, but now it’s weaponry and has been for some time. Wars guarantee a profitable future in the military game and producing something useful like Casablanca and Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour risks too narrow a profit and is a fool’s errand when other choices are available.
Even so, Humphrey Bogart’s films and Taylor Swift’s concerts never tied up 42% of the national budget.