Image by Alex Shuper.
In John LeCarre’s novel, A Delicate Truth, we see the protagonist, an English civil servant, volunteering to take on an assignment for British intelligence. During his briefing, an intelligence officer makes the statement that “War has gone corporate”. Even as a novelist, Le Carre has plenty of street cred based on his real-life experience in MI6. His novels accurately reflect the harsh realities of Cold War realpolitik, past and present. Although this notion is presented in a fictional setting, it’s an eye-opening and rarely acknowledged trend that seems to have been set in motion after 9/11 and seems to have gathered significant momentum in recent years. The Bush Administration in particular seems to have opened the door to “outsourcing” major aspects of the war in Iraq to military contractors and various dark corporate entities.
Here in the present day, it seems clear that war has indeed become a solid and profitable corporate business, and is increasingly well-supported by the so-called liberal establishment. Coupled with this trend is the unfortunate reality that wars have always provided an economic boost of sorts. Many political commentators have argued that financial elites are the ultimate beneficiaries of conflict since they sometimes provide funding for both the horrific destruction of military “solutions” and the re-building that follows, a perverse kind of “win-win”. According to an article in The Guardian George Bush’s now deceased grandfather, Prescott Bush, was, in addition to being a Senator, a shareholder of companies that profited from involvement with financial backers of Nazi Germany’s war efforts. It’s a bit hard to believe that if such a high-profile figure was engaged in this kind of duplicity, there weren’t in all likelihood many other un-reported instances of playing both sides for financial gain.
Winning By Losing
It’s not necessary to be winning a war to profit from it. In fact, losing or sustaining a war might be the way to go for corporate profiteers. Writing in Counterpunch, Frank Joyce notes that: “The more wars the Pentagon loses—which is all of them, albeit at the cost of millions of lives and other damage—the more money it gets. The more they fail to meet their recruitment goals, the more they up the incentives for enlistment. And hire mercenaries. And invest in automated warfare. The post-WWII era of U.S. global hegemony is in irreversible decline. For peace advocates, appreciating this profound shift is important to our analysis and strategy. Given this reality, who are the actual beneficiaries of both automated warfare and private armies? The answer is obvious: the increasingly powerful corporations that supply both including Big Tech companies heavily involved in perfecting AI for military use (arguably why it was developed in the first place.)
We seem to have entered an historically unprecedented period where the act of war has paradoxically been both normalized and, at the same time, downsized as it metastasizes throughout the geopolitical system. This new modality of endless wars – unfortunately developed here in the US – is rapidly becoming a regional phenomenon globally, which is to say it involves smaller footprints of conflict over a wider area. As we have seen, “forever wars”, while smaller in scope, can go on for decades draining precious government resources away from the urgent and highly challenging macro-problems that humanity now faces.
Proxy Wars and Their Economic Benefits
What should we make of this apparent normalization of war and its relationship to corporate profitability? Economic interests in both Russia and the US, for example – both major arms suppliers – have benefitted from the ongoing conflict in the Ukraine proxy war. Here in the US, companies such as Palantir and Blackrock spring to mind with the latter poised to receive millions from the rebuilding of Ukraine. Is it too preposterous to suggest that, as long as this conflict continues, corporate entities in both countries will continue to enjoy a business bonanza in terms of not only building and supplying weapons but also re-building the country’s badly damaged infrastructure?
Applying this model to the notion of forever wars in general and Ukraine in particular easily connects to possible geo-politically-related ulterior motives. If this conflict were to be diplomatically settled, defense contractors on both sides would lose their gravy train. In the US, given their outsized lobbying influence in Washington, it’s not surprising that the war has continued for as long as it has. Somewhat cynically we might even ask: is nuclear brinksmanship simply a fake maneuver used to maintain this status quo? Or are we simply witnessing the failure of governments that reflexively fall back on war when they are out of other ideas?
Only time will tell if downsized weaponry such as drones – which have also arguably downsized the scope and scale of wartime efforts – has mitigated or enhanced the risk of greater conflict. Conceivably, these new patterns of warfare might serve to avoid nuclear conflict. That said, the risks entailed in a nuclear mistake of epic proportions will never go away as long as massive arsenals remain in the US, Russia, and China. The bottom line is that governments on all sides have to disengage corporate profits from military engagement to radically shift their focus and find a way for their economies to become robust by doing the more difficult work of building a sustainable planet.