The military contractors from the West, especially the United States of America and Western Europe, see the ongoing war as a big window of opportunity to reap huge profits from this war the same way they have benefited from other wars through the sale of arms.
NATO arms contractors are openly embracing the crisis in Ukraine as sound business. In January TruthOut Newsonline cited the CEO of Raytheon, Greg Hayes saying: “With tensions in Europe, I fully expect we are going to see some benefits”. In the same vein his counterpart at Lockheed Martin, Jim Taiclet highlighted the “great benefits of great power competition in Europe” to the shareholders of the company.
Mind you, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin form a part of the top 10 producers and suppliers of arms in the world. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia is characterised by pounding cities with ordnance and dispatching troops across the border.
The sonic boom of deadly fighter jets that has filled the air has led to the stock market value of the arms makers to soar. The spiralling conflict over Ukraine dramatises the power of militarism and the influence of defence contractors.
A ruthless drive for markets intertwined with imperialism has propelled NATO expansion, while inflaming wars from Eastern Europe to Yemen. Arms contractors, are the biggest beneficiaries of wars that have been going on in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and other regions of the world.
The current conflict with Russia began in the wake of the Cold War. After the Cold War ended, there was a decline in profits for the arms industry as there was a sharp decline in the arms race that characterised the deadly spirit of the Cold War. While domestic demand for arms shrunk, defence contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Ratitheon, Northrop Grumman and a host of others, rushed to secure new foreign markets. In particular, their focus was on the former Soviet Bloc, where they regarded Eastern Europe as a new frontier for accumulation.
Arms contractors started flooding through all those countries that were previously satellite states of the dissolved USSR. Along the way they also became the most aggressive lobbyists that called for NATO to expand into the whole of Eastern Europe.
The expansion of NATO would provide an opportunity for these arms makers with new and hugely lucrative markets for their deadly arms. This meant that if NATO gained new members the contractors would get new clients and NATO would literally require them to buy weapons from the West where they dominate the industry.
This post-Cold War expansion of NATO eastwards greatly benefited the arms contractors both by increasing their markets and reigniting conflict with Russia. Several warnings and sound advice from some leading security and strategic analysts, which included the likes of intellectual architect of the Cold War, George Kennan, a man renowned for coming up with US policy of containment of Russia, fell on deaf ears. Kennan rightly predicted that NATO expansion towards Russian borders would inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion. Within 20 years NATO had expanded to at least 14 Central and Eastern European countries.
The predicted tensions due to ambitions of NATO for expansionism and the resultant deadly reaction from Russia, reached new levels in 2009 when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and in 2014 when he annexed Crimea. By then those countries that have become NATO members had acquired close to $17 billion in US weapons.
The purchase of weapons was coupled with military installations and command posts, which ballooned across Eastern Europe. Those within NATO reasoned that the tension and associated crisis in countries such as Georgia and Ukraine was a justification for NATO to expand. The truth of the matter is that the expansion itself was the root source of the crisis.
Amid all these, the tension was a big boost to the arms industry as military spending in Europe hit record heights. The arms race is set to continue in earnest as the conflict between Russia and Ukraine has reached a deadly stage.
The more than 30 years of intense lobbying by the arms contractors has proved to be deadly effective as NATO has engulfed most of Eastern Europe and has succeeded in bringing Russia into war with Ukraine. This means more profits for the arms industry players as more arms will be purchased from their companies. Deadly conflicts are all they need for their markets to thrive.
In actual fact throughout the US history, its military-industrial complex, a mighty interest group, has repeatedly manipulated the country’s political decision-making and seen wars as a shortcut to profits, prompting the US government to cause one catastrophe after another in the world. War is a profitable business in the USA as Professor Peter Kuznick puts it sharply.
To create inelastic demand for arms trade, the US military-industrial complex has been bent on pushing US foreign policy toward wars and conflicts. The NATO expansion towards Russian borders, which triggered Putin to react with an invasion of Ukraine, is a strong case in point.
Elsewhere, the five biggest US defence contractors - Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, acquired as much as $2.02 trillion from the US government’s funding for the war in Afghanistan, according to the Security Policy Reform Institute, an independent think tank in the US.
The fact that US top weapon companies grabbed huge profits from the war in Afghanistan mirrors the age-old special existence of the military-industrial complex in the US. It is no secret that US military industry companies spend large sums of money on lobbying US politicians, donating money to their election campaigns and funding the so-called policy experts to ensure policies are in their favour.
Statistics suggest that more than 4,000 military-industrial complex lobbies are active in today’s US political arena. The military-industrial complex can not only make sure that its own interests are not affected by changes of government, but can often prevent government from making decisions that may shrink its slice of the cake, even if these decisions are in line with the public interest. To ensure strong demands for arms trade, the US military-industrial complex has continuously incited the government to create imaginary enemies, never hesitating to arouse people’s fear and stirring up trouble.
The US is searching for enemies around the world under the guise of safeguarding national security and promoting democracy and freedom, of which one of the drivers is the interests of the military-industrial complex, as many political observers noted.
Since the end of the Cold War, the US and its NATO allies in Europe has successively launched the Kosovo war, the war in Afghanistan, Libya and many other wars, in which American and European arms dealers have made a great fortune.
For a long time, the US military-industrial complex has repeatedly packaged wars as a proper option for US foreign policy in a bid to pursue its own benefit, which has caused endless pain for people in other countries and led to turmoil and unrest in the world.
