This has probably been obvious to a lot of people for a long time. It only just became clear to me. If there’s already a name for this line of thought, I would love to know it:
It seems to me that war is, among other things, a subtle way to transfer money from the American taxpayers to a specific group of people. A way to extract billions of dollars from the country as a whole, and funnel it back to the military industrial complex.
I was looking at the figures: We’ve “spent” $200 billion on this fiasco in Iraq so far. I started asking myself “where did that money actually go?” A lot of it re-entered our economy. The most obvious place is through the salaries of military personnel – when the reservists started drawing full time pay and troops started to be paid deployment bonuses. More money went to purchase fuel, eventually ending up in the hands of OPEC, but leaving profits in the hands of American suppliers. Still more money goes to replenishing stocks of bullets, armor, vehicles, and the like. Then there are the lucrative contracts won by American contractors over in Iraq. All of that money comes directly back into the US economy. Some of it is even taxable. So “spent,” yes indeedy … but it’s the sort of spending that economists love, because it helps business and keeps the economy spinning.
Wars kick start our economy. They are one way to focus money from the taxpaying population back into a few selected industries.
So, it’s a question of economics. One can therefore try to calculate the value of a military life. At what pricepoint does it make sense to “spend” our troops? As of this morning, icasualties says that 1911 US military have been killed in operations in Iraq. Taking that as a minimum, and the $200B number as a maximum, we’ve got a maximum cash-flow of about $100 Million per US service person killed. That’s pretty damn good, especially if nobody in your family is in the military (hell-o US Senate!). Say I’m off by a factor of 10 on both sides (i.e: We assume that we’re only making 10% of the money (maybe the rest goes to propping up the Family Saud), and that 10 times more people are affected than the 2K who actually died). It’s still a cool million per soldier.
Of course, that’s not really how it works. It’s far more horrible than all that. The profits have nothing to do with how many soldiers die, because the soldiers aren’t the ones making the big bucks. It’s just silly for me to be dividing by that 2,000.
One important point to acknowledge is that some wars are justified. Defending ourselves from invasion makes a great deal of sense, and there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with getting a thriving industrial base out of it. Add to that a mechanism to give a college education to a massive population who would never have been able to afford it otherwise, so much the better. So, the second world war, great. Boffo. Iraq, by contrast, was a war of choice. We decided when it started, we decided where. We’ve dictated the scope and timing of every single operation over there. We decided, even after all of our original justifications for invading were gone, to continue.
So: The Bush team created a job, hired their political base to do it, and their political supporters (and family friends in the oil business) are getting rich off of it.
It gets worse if you want to include Iraqi deaths, and way, way more complex if you want to look at the might-have-beens and side aspects.
Thoughts?
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