It’s a colossal cop-out to cite pure profit as a motivation for the supremacy of the military-industrial complex, as I see some Flutherers have done above. In fact, it’s flawed reasoning, if only in that it’s incomplete.
Certainly, the executives of defense contractors the world over stand to benefit from endless war, and it is certain that they exercise what influence they do have to ensure that they will remain employed in the service of this dubious cause. But to ascribe a kind of bottomless malice to the world’s military structures is a mistake.
The argument goes like this: “We won’t be able to protect the Earth if we aren’t here to protect it”... having been killed off by Communists, Islamofascists, the Chinese, whatever. The U.S.‘s massive defense budget doesn’t run simply off the influence of the executives in charge. In runs off the unfalsifiable hypothesis that all other privileges and responsibilities come second to the U.S.‘s continued survival. And, in fact, there is something to that. If the U.S., for example, didn’t have an army, we would be at the mercy of any number of expansionist, fascist, theocratic or otherwise perfidious powers. Our geographical advantages would be of little use were we not to have an army. Now imagine the position of the world’s less blessed nations—those countries boxed in on all sides by hostile powers, or living in the shadow of a fledgling hyperpower. Short-term survival, for nations, is the first priority—just as it is for solitary human beings.