Is war a racket?

Racket? A gross oversimplification.

Were it not for war(s) I would not be here today.

Therefore I cannot answer with complete objectivity.

Wars are complex, but in general most or all wars have had strong elements of what Butler describes, especially in modern times, where banks and corporations and the media and politicians they own pull most of the strings and tell most of the “mainstream” stories.

In general, the people for whom a war is about freedom, tend not to be the ones who determined whether the war would be fought or not.

Eisenhower described the “military-industrial complex” – the symbiotic relationship between big industry and the military to keep arms factories going.

Is that a racket? Or is that simply America being sensible and preparing for the next wars, or the ones after that. That’s a tough judgment to make.

In general (no pun intended) I would say that war (itself) is not a racket, but that the business and the army have common goals which are not necessarily sensible or shared by the general public.

For the sake of argument, suppose we assume that war is indeed a racket. The question then becomes who or which people can we expect to benefit lucratively in the process. Does war fulfill the prime directve? Do the rich get richer?

@SecondHandStoke – I’m not comfortable with that answer. It’s a bit too glib.

My grandfather got his family out of Germany in the late 1930s, just before the huge crackdowns against Jews in Germany, and just before the death camps were being considered and built. My grandfather would never have done this except for the rise of Hitler and the nazi party.

Once in the US, my grandparents and my father settled and thrived, and my father married, and my parents had me.

So following your reasoning, I cannot be objective about WW2 Germany, Nazis, or Hitler, because were it not for them, I would not be here today.

There is no doubt that war creates opportunities for profit and owning stock in companies with war contracts can bring one wealth. BUT war is often uncontrollable and creates chaos in the areas in which it takes place. I don’t think the the executive officers of companies like Siemens, Krupp, Mercedes-Benz or any other manufacturer in the highly industrialized Ruhr Valley, or those in the heavy industrial cities of Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester were very happy after 1943. Getting paid can be a problem as well when the country you’ve sold machinery to is bankrupted by war. In many cases, even the winners, like France and Britain were bankrupted. The Brits were still rationing automobile tires when I was there in the mid-1980s.

What can’t be reasonably predicted is not good for business. For the most part, business requires social and political stability, whether that is provided by stern authoritarianism, or laissez faire democracy. War can be a crapshoot, as many American brokerages that were heavily invested in German industry in the thirties discovered in the forties. Prescott Bush, later the father and grandfather of two American presidents, in charge of German investments for his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, through Walker’s Wall Street investment house, G.H. Walker & Co., found this out the hard way. Adding insult to injury, after the war, Bush had the pleasure of being dragged through an FBI and US Senate investigations under the charge of assisting the enemy during wartime. But there is no doubt that there are fortunes to be made from war.

@elbanditoroso About that speech. Evidently, Eisenhower had much more to say, but decided against it:

In the spring of 1961, I was part of a small group of undergraduates who met with the president’s brother, Milton Eisenhower, who was then president of Johns Hopkins University. Milton Eisenhower and a Johns Hopkins professor of political science, Malcolm Moos, played major roles in the drafting and editing of the farewell speech of January 1961.

The actual drafter of the speech, Ralph E. Williams, relied on guidance from Professor Moos. Milton Eisenhower explained that one of the drafts of the speech referred to the ‘military-industrial-_Congressional complex’ and said that the president himself inserted the reference to the role of the Congress, an element that did not appear in the delivery of the farewell address._

When the president’s brother asked about the dropped reference to Congress, the president replied: ‘It was more than enough to take on the military and private industry. I couldn’t take on the Congress as well.’”

In addition to the Congress reference, an entire section was dropped from the speech that dealt with the creation of a ‘permanent, war-based industry,’ with ‘flag and general officers retiring at an early age [to] take positions in the war-based industrial complex shaping its decisions and guiding the direction of its tremendous thrust.’”

The president warned that steps needed to be taken to ‘insure that the “merchants of death” do not come to dictate national policy.’”

The section also warned against any belief that some ‘spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.’ ”
—Eisenhower’s Neglected Warning, by former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman
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Complete text to Eisenhower’s Farewell Speech (aka Military-Industrial Complex Speech) as delivered to the Nation via television on 17 January, 1961.

I’ve read War Is a Racket and for what it’s worth, Maj. Gen. Butler was speaking from a specific point of view as a 30 year veteran of the American military (and it’s close ties to business/industry) and his experiences therein. Therefor his statements may not necessarily applicable outside of that specific context.

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents. ”

@elbanditoroso

Glib.

Me?

War is a racket only in the sense that many people have figured out how to profit from wars. Wars are inevitable until humans develop a different approach to their disagreements.

Primarily, no.

SHAME on my military contractor parents for not doing their job for free.

I didn’t really need dinner or pants.

No. As any soldier will tell you, no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.

People who are adept at making vast sums of money generally like to avoid wars, since they are too unpredictable for business to flourish. Spending people’s lives killing each other also reduces productivity. The military-industrial complex makes far more money selling weapons in peace time, when the budgets allow for more overspending.

I don’t know that i agree with Mr. Butler that war is a racket. While certainly some people have exploited it in that manner, there are always two sides in a war (at least) and in almost all cases, one side is fighting in their own defense. That could hardly be described as a racket, especially if your territory has been invaded. (Not all wars involve invasion, although the overwhelming majority do. Naval wars do not necessarily involve invasion. The so-called War of Jenkins’ Ear was a naval war, and the only invasion involved was the landing of troops to take a port or to plunder a city.)

But wars cannot be fought for free. Short lived wars, such as the seasonal and almost annual wars between the allegedly Christian Franks and the Saxons, so-called Pagans, described by Einhard in his life of Charlemagne, usually only involved some plunder. But there has to be a motive, and there has to be some way to pay the troops. Danish raiders who invaded Ireland and England in the 9th and 10th centuries would distribute silver to ships’ captains, who would then pass some of it to their crews. Even then, there had to be an ongoing pay-off in plunder, or an eventual pay-off in land. There is a good example of this in the invasion of northern England by the Ragnarsson brothers, begun in 866. Many of their followers took what booty they could amass and left. But many more took land and brought their families over in the following year.

But war needs money, both as an incentive and as the most basic form of logistics. Innocent III was only able to get a crusade going against the Cathars in the early 13th century after promising that the estates of “heretic” lords would be forfeit, and would be handed out to noblemen taking the cross. Catholic France, effectively ruled by Cardinal Richelieu in the 17th century, kept Protestant Sweden in the war against the Catholic Imperialists with heavy subsidies paid in cold hard cash. France didn’t expect to invade and conquer Germany—but they didn’t intend to stand by while the Austrian Imperialists did that, either.

Just about any large scale human activity can be and usually will be exploited by people whose only interest is self-interest. That doesn’t make those activities rackets. To me, that is a facile and over-simplistic view which ignores the enormous complexities of war.

I assumed the question meant business as in the movie Catch-22.