Forever War Profiteering
The Founders Feared This Exact Thing
Before the Constitution was even ratified, early American thinkers argued that a large, permanent, federally controlled standing army was dangerous to liberty. James Madison and other early voices echoed the fear that “a standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.” The Anti-Federalist writer Brutus warned that once you fund a big military machine, it becomes political. It exists to protect itself, can intimidate the public and can start dictating policy. “The liberties of a people are in danger from a large standing army,” he wrote, because those forces can prop up whoever holds power or become a power of their own.
Their logic was simple. A republic relies on citizens and militias for defense in true emergencies. A permanent war machine fed year after year stops being a shield and becomes an industry. We now live inside the world they warned us about. America maintains a global war apparatus that eats hundreds of billions of dollars a year and dares you to question it. If you do question it, you are told you don’t support the troops. Let’s talk about who’s actually being supported.
Support the Troops = Support the Contractors
During World War II, the United States had 50+ major defense firms competing, innovating, and producing. Since then relentless consolidation has collapsed the sector into a shadow of corruption. Today the U.S. is dominated by five giant primes; Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. These behemoths sit atop of almost every major program. This is textbook concentration of profit and influence which means fewer bidders → higher prices. Higher prices → bigger budgets. Bigger budgets → more political leverage to demand even bigger budgets.
We’ve already seen Pentagon audits flag obscene markups on simple parts like basic C-17 aircraft components and even things as trivial as soap dispensers sold back to the U.S. military at thousands of percent above their normal cost. One audit found markups approaching 8,000% for routine parts. Boeing contested the specific comparisons, but the pattern of extreme overcharge is familiar to anyone who’s watched defense procurement.
The Audit Nobody Passes and Everybody Pays For
Here’s the part that should make every taxpayer furious: The DoD has never passed a full financial audit. It has failed every single year since audits became mandatory, most recently in November 2024 its seventh failed department-wide audit in a row covering roughly an $824B budget. Auditors literally could not verify where all the money went. The Pentagon admits it still can’t produce complete, reliable books and doesn’t expect a clean audit until at least 2028. We are pouring historically unprecedented money into a machine we cannot even track. Meanwhile, the people who actually wear the uniform are sent to fight and die while defense contractors and political careers get fat. That’s not national defense, it is an extraction economy with uniforms.
Let’s slow down and sit with the number again, nearly $1 trillion a year. The Pentagon cannot pass an audit. Auditors cannot verify basic inventory, cannot reconcile ledgers, cannot track assets we ship overseas. The Government Accountability Office has warned that leadership commitment is not enough and that DOD is unlikely to be clean until 2028 at the earliest.
Where are our legislative priorities? We are going to defund PBS and the Department of Education but expand and militarize ICE, bloat the defense budget with unnecessary weapon systems like the Golden Dome. Greedy, stupid, or both these lawmakers openly discuss needing a $1T plus Pentagon budget. The modern military industrial complex is a culture problem.
Congress funds the Pentagon at historic levels on its way to a trillion.
The Pentagon steers gigantic contracts to a handful of mega-contractors who have swallowed almost all their competitors since WWII.
Those contractors then lobby Congress, donate through PACs and executives, sponsor think tanks and defense studies, sit on advisory boards to argue for more missions, systems, bases, more threat inflation.
Young Americans sign up often from working class backgrounds believing they are defending freedom. Many of them are then used, as Butler said, as muscle to secure geopolitical and corporate interests abroad.
When they die, we hold a ceremony and call it noble. We do not call it profitable, even when it clearly was.
If you speak up from inside, you’re told to shut up and get in line because of national security. As an infantry Marine that served from 2003 to 2012, I feel uniquely qualified to call out the unethical war profiteering that is taking place while the best men I ever knew came home in caskets. I’m not the only Marine that served who witnessed this manipulative industry firsthand. At the time of his death Major General Smedley D. Butler was the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. He was the only person to have been awarded a Marine Corps Brevet Medal and the Medal of Honor twice for separate military actions.
General Smedley Darlington Butler, one of the most decorated Marines in U.S. history, said it out loud almost a century ago. He called himself “a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers… a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism”.
He had also become an unrelenting voice against the business of war. General Butler described how he was deployed to protect oil, banking, sugar, and corporate interests in places like Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and China. He said, “War like any other racket, pays high dividends to the very few. The cost of operations is always transferred to the people who do not profit.”
That’s a Marine General with combat credibility talking. Not a campus protester or a pundit. Now zoom forward to post-9/11 wars that produced massive contracts, revolving-door careers, private security fortunes, logistics empires, aircraft programs that still aren’t finished or functional. Yet after all that blood and cash Iraq is unstable, Afghanistan collapsed back to Taliban control, and Gold Star families were handed folded flags and told thank you for your sacrifice. Whose sacrifice - because it sure wasn’t Lockheed shareholders.
The F-35 program is the most expensive weapons system in U.S. history, with total lifecycle costs projected to surpass $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion for operation and sustainment over its lifetime, according to the GAO.
For the U.S. Air Force, the F-35A fleet's mission-capable rate fell to just 51.5% in fiscal 2024. This means roughly half of the most advanced fighters were not able to perform their assigned missions on any given day.
That’s not the cost of readiness, its extraction off the lives and labor of young Americans in uniform and the taxes of everyone back home. Call it what it is, war profiteering. So when politicians wave a flag and tell America to support the troops, what they often mean is support the contracts.
Endless War and Corruption - How to Fix It?
The Founders warned us but we still built a war machine, wrapped it in the flag and called any oversight unpatriotic. Now in 2026 we spend nearly a trillion dollars a year on a department that can’t pass an audit and routinely enriches a handful of corporations while young Americans come home in boxes. Unless we break profit out of war and demand real audits the scam will continue. We need to make support the troops mean support the actual troops, not their contractors. We morally cannot allow the next generation of warriors to walk straight into the exact same racket. So how do we fix it?
1. Tie the budget to clean books. No clean audit, no budget increase period. Every normal agency lives under basic financial accountability and the Pentagon should not be exempt from adulthood. Legislate to force a clean audit.
2. Break the monopoly. Rebuild antitrust in the defense sector. Five primes controlling the lifeline of U.S. warfighting is not strength, it’s corporate capture. Force competition, criminalize and challenge obscene markups. If Boeing is charging 8,000% for fairly standard parts, that’s punishable.
3. Ban profit from endless war. When we deploy troops the money should go to pay, housing, medical care, survivor benefits, and long-term treatment for those who serve. Not to no-bid consulting contracts. Not to defense company shareholders, not to political funders. We can cap profit margins on war-zone contracts the same way we cap utilities in some states. Butler said it plainly in 1933: “It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.”
4. Put real support the troops into law. If you vote for war, you automatically vote for mandatory VA funding at gold standard levels for life for those who serve in it. From housing, mental health, job placement, GI Bill expansion, survivor benefits. Front-load care, not funerals.
5. Narrow the mission. We either defend our people and our actual treaty allies or we admit what we are: an armed wing of multinational capital, say the United Corporations of America, flying a U.S. flag for cover. The bottom line is that we need to evolve past our tribal tendencies and work towards global peace so that armies of any kind are no longer required.