The War Business

by Chalmers Johnson.
This article is amazing. Please read!

• "Munitions making and war profiteering have supplanted the energy and telecoms deals pioneered by Enron and WorldCom in the late 1990s as the most efficient means for well-connected capitalists to engorge themselves at the public trough. To call these companies 'private,' though, is merely ideology. Munitions making in the United States today is not really private enterprise. It is state socialism."

• This ‘sepoy strategy’ once involved training ‘native’ troops to serve in regiments commanded by British officers or in imperial Indian regiments thought to be loyal to the British crown, which were normally composed of Sikh and Gurka mercenaries…
• The Americans tried their hand at sepoyism in Vietnam in 1962… and in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989, the CIA supplied mujaedeen (‘freedom fighter’) groups with more than $2 billion worth of weapons…
• Soviets + US abandoned Afgh; mujadedeen Islam fund turned against US
• It is possible to think of the suicidal attacks of 9/11 as a contemporary version of the Sepoy mutiny.

• Sepoys are useful, but real money is in governmental contracts.
• Vinnell Corporation received $48 million to train Iraqi army…
• International Peace Operations Association—a name George Orwell would have cherished, is made up of private military companies, the revenues of which will rise to $202 billion by 2010.
• DynCorp ‘trained’ Haitian police after US intervention in 1994. By 2002 it was the nation’s 13^th-largest military contractor, with $2.3 billion in revenue, 96 percent of it from contracts and subcontracts with the US government.
• Camp Bondsteel in the Balkans costs $180 million to operate… it seems too large and permanent an installation merely to meet the requirements of peacekeeping in southern Serbia, amission that President Clinton asserted would last no longer than six months and that Bush said in his election campaign he wanted to eliminate. As it happens… it is located astride the rout of a $1.3 billion pipeline project.
• “military-petroleum” complex
• Halliburton went from paying $302 million in taxes in 1998 to getting an $85 million tax refund in 1999 from relocation offshore.

• When G. Washington warned in 1796 that ‘overgrown military establishments’ are ‘inauspicious to liberty,’ he had something quite specific in mind. He feared that the US might develop a state apparatus, comparable to those of the autocratic states of Europe, that could displace the constitutional order.
• The military-industrial complex is an appropriate place for high-ranking military officers to ‘retire’—circulation of elites
• “We have a military presence in 120 of 189 member countries of the UN, including large-scale deployments in 25 of them.”
• “This is the future. When war becomes the most profitable course of action, we can certainly expect more of it.”