I have read through the comments, and it strikes me that I dont see more combat vets on here. I knew some really smark hackers while I was in the Marine Corps, even though I was just a bullet sponge grunt in OIF/OEF.

It also gladens my heart just to see my favorite Marine, Smedley Butler, get some "air time". It does dissapoint me that so many in the comments are making escuses for war as a profit or r&d center, or for war crimes prosecutions of what are essentially pawns on a grander chessboard.

In the Marine Corps, a lot of people have a hardon for Chesty Puller, but the phrase I used to use is "If you like Chest more than Smedley you do the country and the Corps a disservice." Why? Because not only did Smedley Butler wake up and realize the true nature of the part he played, but he spoke out against it, and beyond that, something I havent seen mentioned yet but something I think is of the utmost importance is his thwarting of the business plot. His convressional hearing testimony is vital to understanding the modern racket of war, and now we have the unredacted version, (though still not his full testimony, because it was heavily edited before even entering the record). If you havent read the unredacted testimony, I highly suggest it.

All that being said, war indeed is a racket, and it continues to be. The WFA (waste fraud and abuse) I saw in Iraq by contractors is barely the icing on the racket cake. There is a reason that something like the richest three counties in the US are in Virginia. The true racket though, is much larger than the contractor world, and primarily involves banking and resource oriented interests.

I spent a long time voraciously reading anything I thought could help me understand the bigger geostrategic/political chessboard, and my primary conclusion about the wars were that resource wars are on the horizon, and the wars were destabilizing measures designed to contain China and Russia by prevention of resource pipelines being built to them. Take a look at the maps of resources and their pipelines...

The other factor is that the traditional nation state actor threat model is being upended by texhnology, to the point that the military industrial congressional complex isadjusting very quickly.

My primary problem with this is how much the people of the US have been lied to and misled. If the United States has some interest in destabilizing an area, I would prefer that this just be said and the case be made outright, instead of sending young dumb warriors like myself to die for causes they dont understand and are lied to about. You want to know where I feel like the primary failure lies at? Every O-5 and above officer who just went along with it and didnt pushback against the Cheney, Bremer, Wolfowitz, Rumsfield bunch of Chicago school Straussian neocons backed by Kissinger and Brezenski. When you cant tell me what my fucking objective is, how can I be expected to accomplish it?

In truth, where we are headed currently is a return to the tripolar world, but in this move, I think we will never fully understand the almost complete subversion of our government that has happened at the behest of the globalists. Smedley Butler caught a glimpse of the beast and had the courage to fight against it openly. He will continue to be my favorite Marine until I die.

Oh, and for any of you touting the economic benefits of war, I hope you never are on the ground on either side when that benefit is being extracted by blood and corruption...