• The population in the US is extremely unwell due to the obesity epidemic, high prevalence of childhood diabetes and rampant drug use. As a result, only a third of young men is fit enough to serve in the military and many fewer than that are actually willing to do so. At the same time, the failing public education system makes it nearly impossible to find enough recruits that can operate modern, high-tech weapons systems.

This list can be continued, but these five bullet points should be enough to tell you that something is terribly wrong with the entire scheme: money spent on the US military is, quite clearly, misspent. Moreover, the financial position of the US is now a sad joke: interest payments on the federal debt outstrip spending on defense and the federal budget deficit is getting ready to top $2 trillion per year. Last I checked, the US federal debt stood at around $35.3 trillion and was growing by around $4 trillion a year. The interest on that debt was $1.1 trillion a year ($3 billion a day). Interest payments are roughly double what they were a couple of years ago and are bound to increase.

An eventual problem with continuous and accelerating debt accumulation seems inevitable. A game of musical chairs played with federal outlays is bound to ensue, with defense outlays taking part. But let us assume that the Pentagon and the US defense contractors will continue being funded — for now. The question is, What good will that do? Where has US military action resulted in anything resembling success? Let us not even consider World War II, which was won through the efforts of the Red Army in defeating both the Germany’s Third Reich, occupying Berlin on May 2, 1945, and Imperial Japan’s Kwantung Army, which surrendered to the Soviets on August 16 1945.

• Was the Korean War a victory? No, North Korea now has nuclear missiles that can hit not just Guam or California but most places in the continental US. Attempts to negotiate with the North Korean leadership during the Trump regime failed due to the failure of US leadership to make good on the promises it made.

• Was the Vietnam War a victory? No, the US was forced to pull out in a spectacular rout, all of Vietnam has remained under communist leadership ever since (along with neighboring China and Laos) and is now in a special partnership with Russia.

• Was the Afghanistan campaign a success? No, after the disastrous pullout from Kabul early during the Biden regime the Taliban, which the US intervened in order to destroy, came back into power and has made trade and development deals with China and Russia.

• Was the Iraq War (the second one) a success? Again, no, Iraq has been badly damaged by US involvement but what remains of it is aligned with Iran and with Syria and is working closely with Russia and China while its government has made repeated demands for the remaining US troops to leave.

These are the results of direct US military involvement. The situation is no better for US proxies:

• In the Ukraine, over $100 billion spent on equipping the Ukrainians to defeat Russia (a fool’s errand if there ever was one) has resulted in well over a million casualties and a loss of almost 40% of territory (from 603’500km2 in 1991 to 467’000km2 in the beginning of 2024; it has lost another 100’000km2 since then). With the attempted Ukrainian invasion of the Russian region of Kursk an unmitigated disaster and with the entire front along the Donbass receding in the direction of the Dniepr River at an accelerating pace, the Ukrainian project appears to be nearing its end.

• In Israel, a military operation against HAMAS that was supposed to take a couple of weeks has now taken nearly a year, has resulted in genocide (with over 10% of the civilian population killed) and with no end in sight. Moreover, it seems to be leading to an escalation by pulling neighboring countries into the conflict. Actions by Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement have forced the port of Eilat on the Red Sea into bankruptcy and have played havoc with shipments to and from Israel. As a result, Israeli GDP shrank by 19%. Israel is losing jobs and population and its businesses are going bankrupt at a high rate.

These can be seen as localized failures — costly and embarrassing, yes, but perhaps not quite fatal. The cost aspect can actually be viewed as a positive in the perverse system of economic incentives that is in place in the US: the high cost of failure drives up the profits of US defense contractors. This contradiction in terms — costs being viewed as benefits — is in line with the overall perverse economic strategy pursued by the US, which views private wealth as sacred and public wealth as something that needs to be privatized.

But what about control of sea lanes? Unlike all of the examples listed above, loss of control of sea lanes, and, in particular, strategic choke points such as the Suez Canal, poses a systemic problem for the US as a sea empire. And yet control of the Suez has been lost — to Yemen, of all the impoverished, wretched places in the world! The only ships that can now safely transit the Red Sea and the Suez Canal on their way to or from the Mediterranean are Russian and Chinese ships, while any ships that are suspected of trading with Israel are fired upon and sometimes sunk.

Can the US, with all of its military might, its aircraft carrier fleet and its military bases throughout the Middle East — in Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates — fix this problem? Well, it tried: in December 2023 it launched Operation Prosperity Guardian. Have you heard anything about it lately? No, you haven’t. Was it a success? No, it was a failure.

To solve this riddle, we’ll need to consider the situation through the prism of Moneybag Logic. Remember, the only real objective of moneybags is high stock market valuations and generous dividends paid out by US defense contractors; nothing else matters. Viewed from this angle, the inevitability of US failure becomes obvious.

Can the US armed forces destroy Yemen? Of course they can! But who will pay for it? The US government, of course. And where will the money go? To the corporations that make and service the weapons and outfit and supply the army, the navy and the air force.

These corporations are run by efficient financial managers — money whisperers, that is — and these efficient financial managers found it efficient have these corporations take on a lot of debt when interests rates were low, because that served the immediate purpose of paying out generous dividends and keeping stock prices high. But then a terrible thing happened: interest rates shot up and stayed there as the Federal Reserve struggled to contain high inflation. As a result, the revenue streams required to keep these defense contractors profitable are now quite outrageously high and a full-scale operation to defeat Ansar Allah lies far beyond what the US federal budget can spare.<

But the US is the richest country in the world; haven’t you heard that somewhere before? Well, where’s the money, then? Certainly not in the population at large, which is increasingly impoverished and indebted, with a third of it unable to afford everyday expenses, never mind planning for emergencies like a war against Yemen. Taking what money it does have from the population at large will prevent it from making payments to the corporations and the moneybags wouldn’t like that.

Speaking of corporations, they certainly do have money. But they have two peculiarities. First, they directly appoint the US government: the president, the head of CIA, the head of Federal Reserve are all working for a certain private corporate conglomerate. How could they possibly act against its interests? Second, the corporations have found numerous ways to play shell games with their money: tax havens, offshores and so on, all designed by representatives of that same private corporate conglomerate that were judiciously inserted into the US Congress and the various federal agencies.

And there we have it: war requires money; this money has to be paid by the government to the corporations; and this money can only come from the corporations because nobody else has any. Oh, and the government is being run by the corporations. Seems like a dead end, doesn’t it? No corporation would agree to rob itself to pay the government in order to get some of that money back eventually. That would be financially inefficient. Any moneybag whisperer would tell you that!

But lifting the Red Sea blockade would be in the interests of these same corporations, wouldn’t it? The US government is not particularly interested in the Suez Canal: what oil it needs can come directly from the Persian Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz, which is controlled by Iran, so peace with Iran is key, but that seems to be holding for now in spite of Israeli provocations. That oil doesn’t have to pass through the Suez on its way to the US. Europe is very much interested in the Suez because sending cargo around the Horn of Africa adds time and expense. But the answer to this problem is Victoria Nuland’s sacramental “Fuck the EU!”

But corporate interests are different from national interests: the EU is going into recession because of high cargo prices and inefficient logistics and this hurts corporate bottom lines. The US could intervene militarily to fix the logistics if the corporations paid it. But they can’t do that because it would be financially inefficient. And they can’t afford to be financially inefficient because that would hurt dividends, stock prices and executive bonuses. Like corporate automatons (which is what they are) they will maximize stockholder value (their sacred responsibility) all the way to bankruptcy, and then they will optimize reorganizations or liquidations for the benefit of the creditors.

If this is the case with little Yemen, then what about the idea of the US and its adjunct NATO going to war against Russia, which is the world’s fourth largest economy and sits on mother lodes of oil, natural gas, enriched uranium, titanium, nickel, gold, grain and much else, has rockets that nobody (except Russia itself) knows how to intercept including exotics like nuclear-powered cruise missiles with infinite range and tsunami-causing nuclear torpedoes?

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Via https://boosty.to/cluborlov/posts/9f7d7bfe-2f20-4c0e-993f-9815abfc6c3c