Gangsters for Capitalism - A tale of the US Military Industrial Complex
Truth to Power
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. The United States is spending close to a trillion dollars a year on its military while defunding the department of education. Where the fuck are our priorities? Greedy, stupid, or both -lawmakers openly discuss “needing” a trillion-dollar Pentagon topline, and recent defense proposals already sit in the $800+ billion range, not counting nuclear weapons in the Department of Energy, veterans’ care, and war-related interest payments. By the time you include all of that, we are functionally there.
I served in OIF (Iraq), OEF (Afghanistan) campaigns during the Global War on Terror and also spent time in Haiti, Oman, Djibouti, Spain, UK, Guam and others aside from duty stations in the US.
I’m not the only Marine that served who witnessed this manipulative industry firsthand. At the time of his death, Maj. Gen. Smedley Darlington 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. He had also become an unrelenting voice against the business of war. Gen. 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 talking. Not a campus protester. Not a pundit. A Marine. In uniform. With combat credibility. Now zoom forward.
Smedley Butler served in numerous countries, primarily during the "Banana Wars," including the Philippines, China, Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, Panama, and Honduras, and also in France during World War I, participating in conflicts like the Boxer Rebellion and interventions to protect U.S. business interests.
Post-9/11 wars produced massive contracts, revolving-door careers, private security fortunes, logistics empires, aircraft programs that still aren’t finished or functional, $1,000 hammers and $10,000 toilet seats in new digital camouflage. 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 “thank you for your sacrifice.” Whose sacrifice? Because it sure wasn’t Lockheed’s shareholders.
“Support the Troops” is a Shield for War Profiteering
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 what is basically an oligopoly. Today, the U.S. is dominated by five giant primes - Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon (RTX), General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman who sit at the top of almost every major program. This is textbook concentration of profit and influence. That consolidation 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. AP News
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.” That’s straight-up rent 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. Yet while those invoices clear, junior enlisted Marines are still dealing with black mold in barracks, broken air conditioning, and pay so low that some qualify for food assistance. So when politicians wave a flag and tell America, “Support the troops,” what they often mean is “Support the contracts.”
The Audit Nobody Passes and Nobody Pays For
Here’s the part that should make every taxpayer furious: The Department of Defense 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 $824 billion 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. EconoFact
We are pouring historically unprecedented money into a machine we cannot even track. Meanwhile, the people who actually wear the uniform—the ones called “heroes” when it’s time for a photo op and forgotten when it’s time for funding—are sent to fight and die while defense contractors and political careers get fat. That’s not “national defense.” That’s an extraction economy with uniforms on top of it. Let’s slow down and sit with the number again: Nearly $1 trillion a year. The Pentagon has failed seven straight, department-wide audits. 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. Congress.gov
Let’s translate that into human terms: If a junior Marine loses a rifle, it is the end of the world. There will be a full base lockdown and a career-ending investigation. If the Pentagon “loses” billions in inventory, misprices billions more in foreign arms transfers, or can’t explain where money went, it shrugs and says “momentum is on our side.” This is a culture problem. This is not readiness. This is impunity.
Here’s the modern military industrial complex cycle:
Congress funds the Pentagon at historic levels—hundreds of billions, 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,” and sit on advisory boards, to argue for more missions, more systems, more 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.
That’s the quiet part: every new generation of warfighters is raised on the language of honor and patriotism and then fed into a structure that behaves like a subsidy pipeline for boardrooms. The uniforms change. The business model doesn’t. If you speak up from inside, you’re told to shut up and get in line because “national security.”
We have exactly the kind of standing army the people who built this country warned us about. 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 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. The Anti-Federalist writer “Brutus” warned that once you fund a big military machine, it becomes political: it exists to protect itself, it can intimidate the public, and it 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.
The 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, permanent, industrialized 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.
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,”
How to fix a Military at Permanent War and a Country at Permanent Funeral?
The Founders warned about the danger of a standing army that becomes an engine of its own power. We built that engine anyway, wrapped it in the flag and called any oversight “unpatriotic.” Now we spend nearly a trillion dollars a year on a war machine that can’t pass an audit and routinely enriches a handful of corporations while young Americans come home in boxes.
The ugliest truth is that the system hasn’t changed. It’s just gotten bigger, more automated, and harder to see. Unless we break profit out of war, demand real audits, and make “support the troops” mean “support the actual troops, not their contractors,” the next generation of warriors—the ones who are 17 right now and signing paperwork in a strip mall recruiting office—will walk straight into the exact same racket. So how do we fix it?
Here are ways to start.
1. Tie the budget to clean books.
No clean audit, no budget increase. Period. Every normal agency lives under basic financial accountability. The Pentagon should not be exempt from adulthood. Congress is already being pushed in this direction; legislation has been introduced to force a clean audit. Congress.gov
2. Break the monopoly.
Rebuild antitrust in the defense sector. Five primes controlling the lifeline of U.S. warfighting is not “strength.” It’s capture. Force competition. Cap obscene markups. If Boeing is charging 8,000% for fairly standard parts, that’s not “supporting the troops.” That’s looting the flag. AP News
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 offshore 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 VA funding at gold standard levels for life for those who serve in it—housing, mental health, job placement, GI Bill expansion, survivor benefits. Not optional. Mandatory. Front-load care, not funerals.
5. Narrow the mission.
The Marine rifleman is not the enforcement arm for oil concessions, mining rights, or weapons export quotas. 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, we need to evolve past our tribal tendencies and work towards global peace.