What you describe is the effect of war, not its origin. Ironmongers get rich from war, but they probably don't make the conflict happen. How could Northrup Grumman force the invasion of Kuwait to improve F117 sales?
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.