This article was originally published by Michael Snyder at The End of the American Dream under the title: The Military Industrial Complex Is Making Hundreds Of Billions Of Dollars, And They Need A Military Draft In The U.S. To Take Things To The Next Level

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the Military Industrial Complex to our society.  It employs millions of people, and it brings in hundreds of billions of dollars each year.  The Military Industrial Complex has always been one of the central pillars of our economy, and these days business is booming thanks to the war in Ukraine and the possibility of a war with China.

Needless to say, those who run the Military Industrial Complex want the gravy train to continue, and so politicians who are pro-war are showered with campaign contributions.  In both major parties, politicians who are pro-war greatly outnumber those who are anti-war, and that is not likely to change any time soon.

Smedley D. Butler fought in four major conflicts, and in 1935 he astutely observed that “war is a racket”…

“WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”

Of course, the statements that he made back then are even more true today.

If the Military Industrial Complex suddenly disappeared, it would leave a giant, gaping hole in our economy that would be extremely difficult to fill.  In an excellent piece that he posted earlier this week, Richard C. Cook shared some numbers about the Military Industrial Complex that are absolutely astounding…

Today about 2.1 million people are employed by the defense industry. According to Acara Solutions, a major MIC recruiting firm, their average annual salary is $106,700, 40 percent higher than the national average. The companies they work for produced revenues in 2022 of $741 billion. How much of their production is high-priced junk, no one knows. The performance of U.S.-produced armaments in the Ukraine conflict does not seem impressive. No modern U.S. weapons have ever been tested in an industrial-type war against an equal adversary.

The MIC also includes active-duty uniformed personnel of 1.37 million and reserves of 849,000. There are 750 U.S. military bases in more than 80 countries outside of the U.S. More than 100,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed in Europe. Annual salary and benefits of the military are currently $146 billion per year, escalating with COLAs compounded at two to three percent annually, sometimes more. Some former U.S. military personnel are assumed to be fighting in Ukraine as mercenaries or helping direct the fighting from safe locations like Kiev or Lvov.

Then there are the civilian employees. According to the DoD, it employs more than 700,000 civilians “in an array of critical positions worldwide,” with compensation totaling about $70 billion. According to the Government Accountability Office, we may also add 560,000 contractor employees, whose compensation is typically higher than the career workforce.

We can also add hundreds of thousands of executives, managers, employees and contractors of the three-letter Deep State agencies, such as the CIA, NSA, DEA, FBI, and now DHS, etc., who interface with the MIC day in and day out and are part of the same fabric of state-sanctioned force and enemy identification and interdiction.

In the entire history of the world, we have never seen anything quite like this.

And the Military Industrial Complex absolutely loves Joe Biden, because he has promised to keep the war in Ukraine going “for as long as it takes”…

It is likely that billions of people around the world view the conflict in Ukraine as a proxy war being waged by the U.S. against Russia. US President Joe Biden has pledged to aid Ukraine’s pursuit of victory “for as long as it takes,” without defining what the end state might be. Russian President Vladimir Putin has interpreted U.S. intentions to mean a fight “to the last Ukrainian.”

Unfortunately, there is a problem.

The Ukrainians are running out of warm bodies.

They have literally been grabbing men off the streets and throwing them into vans, but we didn’t care because it wasn’t our sons who were being forced to go to war.

Many Americans cheered when the Ukrainians began their ill-fated “counter-offensive”, but it turned out to be a disaster.

A senior U.S. intel official recently admitted to journalist Seymour Hersh that Ukraine has suffered approximately 75,000 casualties during this counter-offensive…

“There is no discussion in his headquarters or in the Biden White House of a ceasefire and no interest in talks that could lead to an end to the slaughter,” Hersh said.

Speaking of the Ukrainian claims of slow progress in an offensive that has lost an estimated 75,000 casualties, the official told Hersh: “It’s all lies.”

On many battlefields in Ukraine, there are unburied dead bodies just lying around all over the place.

The Russians have been mowing down wave after wave of Ukrainian men, and Hersh was told that there “is no Ukrainian offensive anymore”…

As the anniversary of the purported Biden Regime sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline approaches Sept. 26, veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh blamed a ”secret disinformation operation“ by CIA and MI-6 for misleading the public about the disastrous state of the US-led war effort.

“The war is over. Russia has won. There is no Ukrainian offensive anymore, but the White House and the American media have to keep the lie going,“ a senior US intel official told Hersh. “The truth is if the Ukrainian army is ordered to continue the offensive, the army would mutiny. The soldiers aren’t willing to die any more, but this doesn’t fit the B.S. that is being authored by the Biden White House.”

Where do we go from here?

The Military Industrial Complex certainly does not want this conflict to end, and Joe Biden has no intention of backing down.

So more warm bodies will be needed.

That is one of the reasons why there has been so much chatter about bringing back the draft here in the United States.

Recruitment has been way down in recent years, but our leaders desperately want to win this war with Russia and they also want to be ready to fight a war with China over Taiwan.

And so the stage is being set to draft young American boys and young American girls into military service…

The most recent edition of the US Army War College’s academic journal includes a highly disturbing essay on what lessons the US military should take away from the continuing war in Ukraine. By far the most concerning and most relevant section for the average American citizen is a subsection entitled “Casualties, Replacements, and Reconstitutions” which, to cut right to the chase, directly states, “Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.”

The context for this supposed need to reinstate conscription is the estimate that were the US to enter into a large-scale conflict, every day it would likely suffer thirty-six hundred casualties and require eight hundred replacements, again per day. The report notes that over the course of twenty years in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US suffered fifty thousand casualties, a number which would likely be reached in merely two weeks of large-scale intensive combat.

The military is already facing an enormous recruiting shortfall. Last year the army alone fell short of its goal by fifteen thousand soldiers and is on track to be short an additional twenty thousand this year. On top of that, the report notes that the Individual Ready Reserve, which is composed of former service personnel who do not actively train and drill but may be called back into active service in the event they are needed, has dropped from seven hundred thousand in 1973 to seventy-six thousand now.

Do you want your children to be fed into a meat grinder on the other side of the globe?

If not, it is time to stand up and say something.

Even now, large numbers of Americans are getting hurt fighting in Ukraine, and many of them are being treated at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany…

The US Army is giving medical care to wounded American fighters who volunteered for Ukraine’s foreign legion and other militias at a hospital in Germany.

This is happening with increasing frequency at the US Army’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, a New York Times investigation found, which marks “a notable new step in the United States’ deepening involvement in the conflict,” as the report underscored.

It appears to be just a matter of time before we find ourselves in a full-blown shooting war with Russia because both sides just continue to escalate matters.

This week, it was reported that Russia will increase defense spending by nearly 70 percent in 2024…

Russia said Thursday that it plans to raise defence spending by almost 70 percent next year, funneling massive resources into its Ukraine offensive to fight what it calls a “hybrid war” unleashed by the West.

With Moscow’s “special military operation” now approaching another winter, both sides have been digging deep and procuring weapons from allies in preparation for a protracted conflict.

Many Americans consider the Russians to be just like the Nazis, but it turns out that the Russians also consider us to be just like the Nazis…

Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president, warned that this would lead to a third world war, which would have greater consequences than World War II.

The 58-year-old politician also accused NATO of being like Nazi Germany and the Axis powers.

‘It seems that Russia is being left with fewer and fewer options but to come into direct conflict on the ground with NATO,’ he said.

The 74-year-old alliance ‘has become an openly fascist bloc like Hitler’s Axis, only bigger’, he claimed.

If the Nazis were around today, what would we do to them?

Needless to say, our leaders would be determined to utterly destroy them.

Russian leaders would feel the same way.

And so this makes pace almost impossible.

Here in the Western world, our leaders will never be satisfied until Putin is gone and the nation of Russia is broken up into lots of little pieces.

On the other side, there is constant talk on Russian television about how the conflict in Ukraine will inevitably spark a global nuclear war.  So it should deeply alarm all of us that the Russians recently conducted large-scale nuclear combat drills…

World War 3 fears have erupted once more after Vladimir Putin ordered thousands of troops from Russia’s nuclear missile force to run “combat readiness” exercises.

The combat drills took place in the Sverdlovsk region on Thursday and saw 3,000 Tagil Rocket Division soldiers being trained on the “highest degrees of combat readiness”, according to RadarOnline.com.

Video footage of the nuclear missile division’s combat drills was shown on the Russian defense ministry TV channel, Zvezda.

The clip shows thousands of soldiers training and Yars thermonuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, feared throughout the world because of their massive 6,835-mile range.

We need to pull back from the brink before it is too late.

But our leaders won’t do that.

They don’t want to upset the Military Industrial Complex.

Unfortunately, we could also soon find ourselves in a war with China.

In fact, not too long ago a four-star general actually predicted that we would be at war with China in 2025…

The four-star general in charge of the US Air Force’s Air Mobility Command has defended a memo he sent to his officers earlier this year where he predicted the US would be at war with China in 2025.

“My assessment is that war is not inevitable, but the readiness I’m driving with that timeline is absolutely essential to deterrence and absolutely essential to the decisive victory,” Gen. Mike Minihan said last week when asked about his prediction, according to Defense One.

The moment that China invades Taiwan, there will be a war between our two nations.

So in the not-too-distant future, we could literally be fighting Russia and China at the same time.

And as I have been warning my readers for years, that is a really, really bad idea.

But it doesn’t matter what you or I think.

The Military Industrial Complex wants to make even more money, and our politicians want to keep the campaign contributions rolling in.

So we will continue to speed toward a date with the unthinkable as the fate of our society hangs in the balance.

Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.

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