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I think that Marine Major General Smedley Butler gave us the answer seventy-five years ago in a little booklet he wrote called War is a Racket. Here are some excerpts"
"WAR is a racket. It always has been."
"It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.
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."
"In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows""
"It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum."
"Listen to Senate Document No. 259. The Sixty-Fifth Congress, reporting on corporate earnings and government revenues. Considering the profits of 122 meat packers, 153 cotton manufacturers, 299 garment makers, 49 steel plants, and 340 coal producers during the war. Profits under 25 per cent were exceptional. For instance the coal companies made between 100 per cent and 7,856 per cent on their capital stock during the war. The Chicago packers doubled and tripled their earnings""
"Who provides the profits--these nice little profits of 20, 100, 300, 1,500 and 1,800 per cent? We all pay them--in taxation. We paid the bankers their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100.00 and sold them back at $84 or $86 to the bankers. These bankers collected $100 plus. It was a simple manipulation. The bankers control the security marts. It was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds. Then all of us--the people--got frightened and sold the bonds at $84 or $86. The bankers bought them. Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par--and above. Then the bankers collected their profits""
General Butler was hardly some sort of socialist/pacifist. He was twice awarded the Medal of Honor, and is credited with developing the system of close air support that saved thousands of Marines during the Second World War from Guadalcanal to Okinawa.
I think the state of continual fear that our government has been able to inflict upon us since the end of the Second World War, with the Cold War and now the War on Terror, has also permitted what President Eisenhower referred to as the Military-Industrial Complex to act as if our nation is in a continual state of war, without having to declare war. If the Congress actually declared war, then at some point we would either have to utterly defeat our enemy, or negotiate a peace.
By keeping us in this continuous "pseudo-war state," the Military-Industrial Complex can hide the transgressions of those corporations and military officers who are advancing their own interests at the cost of the nation's best interests behind the cloak of "National Security." We know that the Pentagon has admitted that it cannot account for more than one trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000) in funds that have gone missing. My personal suspicion is that as much as forty percent of our national debt could be immediately repaid if we could find and recover those missing Pentagon funds. Unfortunately, it will never happen: it has all gone into the pockets of contractors and officials as bribes and kickbacks.
This doesn't count the billions spent on wasteful military projects including: the F-22A Raptor (which can't fly in the rain without compromising its radar absorbent skin), the B-1B Lancer (the only aircraft in our inventory conspicuous by its absence in Gulf Wars I and II), the Sergeant York Self-propelled, radar aimed, anti aircraft gun, and the whole "Star Wars" SDI program. I would even argue that the last two Nimitz-class carriers (USS Ronald Reagan, USS George H.W. Bush) were not yet needed when their keels were laid, as we still possessed two carriers (USS America and USS John F. Kennedy) that had not reached forty years in their service life. (I also object to naming ships after living individuals. The Reagan should have been named after Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was President during World War II as well as the greatest period of naval construction in our nation's history, and then, after Ronald Reagan passed, the last Nimitz-class carrier could be named after him.)
We must begin as a nation to have a realistic view of our military, its capabilities, and how we should use it. The profligate spending and unchecked waste by our primarily Republican government over the last 28 years, which has increased our budget deficit more than twelve-fold (from $914 billion at the end of 1980 to more than $11 trillion today), with little constructive to show for our expenditures, must end. Supply-side economics has again proven itself a failure for the majority of the American people, just as it did in the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties. We have seen an unprecedented transference of wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthiest Americans: the top 1% of whom, in 1980, held 20% of our nation's wealth, and today hold 40% of that wealth.
More than two thousand years ago, Marcus Tullius Cicero made a simple but accurate observation, "The sinews of war, a limitless supply of money." In their attempt to starve the social safety net that they hate to death, the Republicans have made it impossible to properly feed and maintain the military machine that they believe is the primary pride of our nation. They have shifted the tax burden downward from the large corporations and multimillionaires, to the small businesses, working and middle class. They have allowed these self-same large corporations to ship our industrial base out of the country, and have in fact, given them tax incentives to do so. This has led to the unfortunate fact that we can no longer manufacture and maintain our basic military supplies of matériel and ordnance with domestic manufacturers alone. It should be noted, for example, that we had to buy more than a billion rounds of rifle and machine gun ammunition in 2004 from Israel, in order to supply our troops who were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This is tragic: we are a "superpower" who can no longer fully produce what our troops need to maintain our superpower status. And all in the name of profit.
To quote Malcolm X, "The chickens are coming home to roost."
