What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about, if we can’t use it.
-Madeline Albright
Tim L. asks and Jim H. echoes the question: Why shoot million-dollar missiles at shacks? Hey, State Capital!
It goes a little something like this. Hum along if you like. Most of the combat in the world today, and most of the death in warfare, comes in the form of small arms. There is plenty of money to be made in selling guns, of course, but much of it by the middlemen. On the manufacturing side, small arms are easy to manufacture, simple and stable in design, almost infinitely replicable, and at this point in their development very, very, very reliable. No government is spending billions of dollars on semi-automatic rifle R&D. Billion-dollar maintenance contracts aren't required. Distributed revenues across component manufacturers and systems designers and computer programmers, und und und, are nowhere to be found. Guns are a fine business, but, like, totally mom-n-pop.
Million-dollar missiles are another thing entirely. Million-dollar missiles pad the pockets of everyone from research universities to advanced technology companies to Congressmen and their congressional districts. Now naturally Congresscreatures want this money and their constituents want this money and the companies and research universities surely want this money and the US military works for the same government as all those Congresscreatures who give the military money to give to the companies to give to the districts to give to the congresscreatures and back again. How much of our military policy is driven by the ouroboran economics of Procurement? Quite a fucking lot. The machinery of death is an investment vehicle. The reason we blow up huts with million-dollar smart bombs is so that we can buy more million-dollar smart bombs, and not one tear is going to be shed if another shanty-town traning camp pops up another mile down the road and "costs" another missile.
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
-Smedley D. Butler
12 comments:
"...we must guard against the aquistion of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex..."
"Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."
You think it's bad now, just you wait until we start throwing corn at them.
Just a week or so ago I e-mailed the link http://warisaracket.com/ to my brother about to sign up for ROTC, because I do everything Lew Rockwell's site tells me to do. He said he didn't have time to read it.
Though scarcely referenced these days, Juan Bosch's _Pentagonism: A Substitute for Imperialism_ makes a more incisive point: it's not just that non-productive capital - smart bomb or otherwise - is fired at the enemy du jour in order to justify new procurement. Rather, weapons are sold abroad en masse, often financed with generous, long-term loans to the purchasing country (read: transfer of taxpayer dollars to the armaments industry). This, in turn, provides justification for expensive R&D for new generations of weapons because, you know, the towel-heads have nearly all our latest stuff. After the newer weapons become available, they just repeat the process. For the companies involved, it's a virtuous circle generating an infinite supply of mana.
Nice blog, by the way. One of my favorites.
Der schlimmste Fall für den Kriegsgewinnler: das Ende des Krieges.
So I guess it all makes sense.
Just lurking...
Ah yes, Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC, the most highly decorated marine in U.S. history at the time he wrote War is a Racket. Just one more reason I'm proud to be a Quaker. What's that line from the Gospel? "There's more rejoicing in heaven over one repentant sinner ..."
[Smedley was known as the "Fighting Quaker"]
Oh man, thank you guys for bring up Smedley Butler, I never knew about him before, or the "Business Plot" for that matter. Fascinating stuff.
More information you might not have known about Smedley here.
I was watching "Carrier" last week on PBS -- I could swear I was hearing "Yvan Eht Nioj" chanting in the background -- and the pilots from the air wing were complaining about having tons of bombs on board the Nimitz, but nothing to drop them on.
"We've already destroyed the big targets in Iraq," one pilot said. During the series, the feeling seemed to be one of major disappointment that large pieces of Iraq couldn't be turned into smaller pieces.
At least, not everyone PBS talked to on board the Nimitz seemed to be all that gung ho. More than one sailor said matter-of-frankly (and with disgust) "It's about the oil."
Good ol' Smeds. Was he the last honorable soldier? Or was that Ollie North, perhaps?
I love how people in the "defense industry" never acknowledge that they work toward murder of innocents. How is it that they get fatter wallets, while drug dealers and corner soldiers are "inhumane urban terrorists"?
Amusing at least, isn't it, to see that when you kill from a distance with the stroke of a pen or a few keyboard entries, you're a brilliant statesman and business tycoon, but if you shoot someone who's trying to steal your bag of crack vials, you're a heartless murderer.
Viva Class Warfare! Viva America!
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