Recently, Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes reported to his shareholders, “[W]e are seeing, I would say, opportunities for international sales. We just have to look to last week where we saw the drone attack in the UAE, which have attacked some of their other facilities. And of course, the tensions in Eastern Europe, the tensions in the South China Sea, all of those things are putting pressure on some of the defense spending over there. So I fully expect we’re going to see some benefit from it.” While lauded in the press for his comments, Hayes’ thinking embodies structures established by government and private industry for over a hundred years.
Listen in: https://apple.co/34cn5KZ
The weapons pouring into Ukraine are part of a long legacy of the U.S. and other powers arming the world, for profit and power. Scott and Bob provide a nice backgrounder on the U.S. military-industrial complex from the times of Alfred T. Mahan to today. They talk about World War I and the creation of government-private bureaucracies to organize the economics of mass destruction. We discuss the ways military spending ended the depression and created the U.S. as a global power. We talked about the evolution of military Keynesianism as the U.S. economic policy in the Cold War, the Global War on Terror and more…..
The benefits that Hayes expects to see from conflict in the Ukraine and in other parts of the world are not an abnormality, nor a deep state conspiracy, it’s merely policy and politics practiced on a daily basis.
