The War Racket
On the Profits of Warfare
As Smedley Butler said nearly a century ago, war is a racket. None of the global rackets started as rackets. In a world of scarcity, many people will try to rig any system so that it serves their interests at the expense of the rest of us. When I wrote my essay on war in 1999, it was largely to disabuse my fellow Americans about the mythology around World War II. That war resulted in American ascendance to becoming history’s richest and most powerful nation, by far, which is really an empire that pretends that it is not one.
Azar Gat stated it as succinctly as it ever will be: the biological compulsion to survive and reproduce in a world of scarcity is at the root of all violence. A few days ago, I finished his follow-up book to his masterpiece. There was not much new in it, and Gat is really an imperial apologist, as Ian Morris and Steven Pinker are. It is a typical fate of white male scholars.
Warfare goes back at least to chimps, and I have studied warfare too much since 1990. It took a huge emotional toll, as did studying the genocides that have been inflicted so often during the human journey. One of my “hobbies” since the 1990s has been studying the Jewish Holocaust, and I have several more World War II books to review in the near future, which I read while writing my book preview.
For many years after the World Wars, anthropology was dominated by two ideological precepts: preliterate peoples lived in harmony with nature and each other, in the Rousseauian “peaceful savage” idyll. That is a fantasy, and those ideas have been convincingly dethroned in the past generation. Actually, the opposite was true. About 25% of hunter-gatherer men died violently (up to half of male chimps did), and humanity has been wrecking ecosystems from the first stone tools onward. The rise of civilization only took warfare and environmental destruction to new levels. Today, we are well on the way to making Earth uninhabitable and the USA is toying with nuclear war once again.
Butler wrote of war profiteering during World War I in his War is a Racket, but that was trivial compared to World War II war profiteering. The end of World War II saw the rise of the national security state, as the Department of War was renamed the Department of Defense (in a parody of Orwell), and organizations such as the NSA and CIA were established. The USA has engaged in Orwell’s permanent war ever since.
The war industry dominates Washington, D.C., today. John Kennedy was likely murdered because he tried to end the Cold War, which would have ended the military-industrial complex’s cash cow as well as scuttled various imperial opportunities.
Waging war to plunder neighboring societies was the noblest of professions in ancient times. To this day, war is generally waged over resources, and oil-rich nations had hell to pay if they did not open themselves to capitalist exploitation, such as Iraq and Libya in the past generation (and Iran before that). Middle East oil is history’s richest material prize, and the USA’s military and weaponry will not be leaving the area anytime soon. The USA prefers to use proxies, such as how it is using Ukraine against Russia and Taiwan against China, but invades when it must, although we are definitely an empire in decline.
War still provides excellent profit opportunities for those on the right end of the weaponry and military contracts. Arguably the first thing to go in the Fifth Epoch will be warfare of any kind. It will no longer make any economic sense. I foresee maybe a generation of peacekeeping grandmothers and others to ensure that free energy technology is not weaponized, until those hard-headed and hard-hearted men finally begin to understand. Weaponizing anything will quickly become nonsensical in a world of abundance. But until then, war is a racket.
War has always been a racket. The first such racket that I learned about was when certain Senators in ancient Rome became involved in investing in certain businesses that produced badly needed things for war such as swords, shields, and food. They would make secret investments in these businesses and then begin making inflammatory speeches in the Senate designed to convince the rest of the Senate to declare war on some other people living more or less nearby, such as elsewhere in Europe. The Senate would declare war, the troops would pack up to leave, the management of the army would purchase huge amounts of swords, shields, and food from a certain supplier (in which our lucky Senator friend had made a huge investment), then go marching off to war. Rome generally won such wars, and the lucky Senator was then able to build a large villa for himself on the pleasure island of Capri.
I am sure the same process was carried out over and over again through all human history before and after the Roman Empire, but this was the first such process that I learned about in my school years.
Another great example closer to my American home is our early American wars. "In 1800 Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours and his family immigrated to the United States from France. Pierre's son, Eleuthère Irénée du Pont, was a French-American chemist and industrialist who was impressed by the quality of American gunpowder used for hunting guns and pistols. In 1802, Éleuthère began building a gunpowder mill on the Brandywine River near Wilmington, Delaware, using equipment and capital raised in France. The mill, which he named Eleutherian Mills, began operating in 1803." [the previous quote was obtained by doing a Google Advanced Search for these 5 words - dupont 1800 france america gunpowder, and then copying the text returned to me by Google AI] The Dupont family business sold gunpowder to the US Department of War and made a huge fortune quickly as the US went to war more and more often.
When the Civil War broke out in the USA, some war businesses sold spoiled meat and other inferior foods to the military of both sides. They had a captive customer and took as much advantage of it as possible.
The USA's military is far larger now, and its wars have turned into a racket and possibly the biggest of all business in the US. The businesses that sell things to the military are still delivering lower than top quality goods to the military. It is all a racket and individual soldiers are the biggest losers.