Ask any arms manufacturer what war is good for and they won’t hesitate to tell you.

It’s profit. Lots of it. Even during a pandemic year without any major wars going on anywhere, sales of weapons and military services hit a record $531 billion. It’s when a war starts that the real money gets made.

Start a war and demand, sales and profits skyrocket accordingly. Wars are essentially stocktake sales. After years of trade expos and billions of dollars of sales, governments end up with a backlog of weaponry, missiles, jets, bombs, tanks, guns, ammunition.

They can’t return them. Or recycle them. May as well use them on an internal or external enemy. May as well declare war. (Or announce special military operations.)

Arms manufacturers love war. Supply diminishes with a press of a button or squeeze of a trigger. And immediately needs to be replenished as the other side retaliates.

Let’s say you’re budgeting for a missile strike in a war. You don’t want to spend up big on hypersonic missiles so you settle for a bunch of medium to long-range subsonic Tomahawk cruise missiles at around $1.5 million a pop. You want to make a bit of an impact by firing off sixty at once. That’s $90 million literally up in smoke in a matter of minutes.

Then you’re going to need a lot more missiles (and the rest of it) because you’re in a war that history will prove will be a war of attrition. The longer you’re in, the more arms you’re going to need. Plus it will escalate. It always escalates.

Luckily you have a few arms manufacturers ready to help. Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Thales Group, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Leonardo, and more are primed and ready. Even Boeing and Airbus get in on the act when they’re not making and selling passenger jets. Booz Allen Hamilton are happy to kick in with consulting and analysis.

Governments and bankers are also keen to collude with a dizzying array of financing options for both sides of armed conflict. Foreign aid disguised as loans to purchase ever more weapons than will rain down and kill ever more people and wipe out cities and infrastructure. Foreign loans to rebuild cities and infrastructure with interest rates that will cripple economies for generations to come.

War has always been a racket for the corporate-military complex and the politicians who profit from it.