The cost of war is always huge for all concerned, and is very rarely the outcome of any sort of cost-benefit analysis. Most wars between nations are fought for something like honour: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2013/07/16/most-wars-are-...
As recently as the first Gulf War, Microsoft (for example) was a tiny speck compared to the military industrial complex. In five years or so, Microsoft's annual sales will be equal to about 25% of the annual US military budget (not meant to be apples to apples, it merely points out the massively increased scale of big tech vs eg 1990; Microsoft's sales for fiscal 1990 were... $1.18 billion).
To put it into tangible dollar terms:
Apple, by itself, generates approximately twice the annual operating profit of all US defense contractors combined.
Apple benefits from calm globalization, not war.
Big tech humiliates the military industrial complex on generating profits. And big tech is still expanding, whereas most major sectors are not. Which is to say, big tech money looks like it's going to double in size again in the next ten years (7% * 10 years).
AAPL + MSFT + GOOGL + FB + INTC + AMZN = ~$220-$230 billion in annual operating profit for 2020.
There are three trillion dollar corporations in there (Amazon is just shy of it; and FB will join them in that club within a few years). The rest of the world has one, which isn't really a corporation, in Aramco. It's $5.5 trillion in combined market cap. The Tokyo stock exchange is the third most valuable exchange by total market cap in the world, at about $5.5 to $5.7 trillion (the next two are US exchanges).
But more to the point of the GP, to think that only the military industrial complex profits from American global dominance is incredibly naive. All the U.S. interventionism in South America for the last century (i.e. armed insurrection against democracies to install fascist dictatorships) was about opening markets and resources for exploitation by American (civil) corporations.
In the next 20 years both oil companies and central banks are getting distrupted, at the same time a brave new world is coming...
I know he warned about it in his last speech, but do you have a source or more specifics on how he witnessed it?
> Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.
His point wasn’t about specific instances of armaments manufacturers influencing foreign policy, it was simply about the existence of a new and vast industry permanently dedicated to manufacturing armaments.
This is not true. Wars are fought for wealth or to protect wealth ( perceived or not ). "Honor" ( like freedom, human rights, etc ) is the lie the elites employ to sell the war to the public and dupe the masses into sending their sons and daughters to the battlefield.
We didn't fight the korean war, vietnam war, iraq wars, etc for "honor". We fought it for wealth. Every single war we fought ( from the Revolutionary War to the wars today ) was about wealth.
The cost-benefit analysis of war is another thing altogether. It isn't an exact science and it's like playing a game of "what-if". In some wars, you can see clear winners who made out like bandits. I don't think anyone would claim the US didn't come out the big winner of ww2. There are clearly some wars where it was a complete waste of lives ( ww1 ) since no side really won and the only winners were bankers and war profiteers. Most other wars, who knows. The cost-benefit analysis comes down to your own biases and how you perceive a non-military solution would have worked out.
If wars were truly fought for honor, then we'd have a lot more wars and a lot more nukings. Honor is the fake thin veneer of war. Scratch it and you'll find the true cause of wealth - greed.