There's another fun angle to take: mundane waste on a massive scale.
There's a narrative that The Iraq War was the first big war to be majority-supplied by contractors. That it was an experiment to see whether a war could be manufactured not only on the usual premise of regime change, but in a way that overtly and obscenely lined the pockets of contractors through every step of the process. This narrative certainly jives with how it all went down.
This filtered into MSM coverage in the form of whistleblowers talking about overcharging dye to "a lack of oversight". Of course, the DoD et al would be easily capable of auditing their contractors, the war(s) are intentionally structured so that this doesn't happen. Everyone knows, nobody cares.
This seems to be an okay lib-friendly source for starting the discussion: https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2013/0319/A-lesson-from-Iraq-war-How-to-outsource-war-to-private-contractors
And just like the railgun, this shit didn't "work". The war failed to even accomplish its goal of neoliberalization and of making another Israel in the Middle East. Instead, it created a massive insurgency and a country that, even full of propaganda and bourgeois democracy, wants Americans to fuck off. Oh, and it caused the backlash that created ISIS, who we then funded as part of trying to destroy the Syrian government. Oh, and over a million people died.
There are few money pits larger than entire wars and that one was pure failure even per the sociopathic goals of its architects.
Edit: in case you can't use that I don't want to be entirely useless, lol. Look into spending on nukes. There is no arms race regarding nukes, the US has a pointlessly massive stockpile, yet it spends trillions on constantly upgrading and keeping those numbers up.
There's another fun angle to take: mundane waste on a massive scale.
There's a narrative that The Iraq War was the first big war to be majority-supplied by contractors. That it was an experiment to see whether a war could be manufactured not only on the usual premise of regime change, but in a way that overtly and obscenely lined the pockets of contractors through every step of the process. This narrative certainly jives with how it all went down.
This filtered into MSM coverage in the form of whistleblowers talking about overcharging dye to "a lack of oversight". Of course, the DoD et al would be easily capable of auditing their contractors, the war(s) are intentionally structured so that this doesn't happen. Everyone knows, nobody cares.
This seems to be an okay lib-friendly source for starting the discussion: https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2013/0319/A-lesson-from-Iraq-war-How-to-outsource-war-to-private-contractors
And just like the railgun, this shit didn't "work". The war failed to even accomplish its goal of neoliberalization and of making another Israel in the Middle East. Instead, it created a massive insurgency and a country that, even full of propaganda and bourgeois democracy, wants Americans to fuck off. Oh, and it caused the backlash that created ISIS, who we then funded as part of trying to destroy the Syrian government. Oh, and over a million people died.
There are few money pits larger than entire wars and that one was pure failure even per the sociopathic goals of its architects.
Edit: in case you can't use that I don't want to be entirely useless, lol. Look into spending on nukes. There is no arms race regarding nukes, the US has a pointlessly massive stockpile, yet it spends trillions on constantly upgrading and keeping those numbers up.
you know sometimes i think the aliens do control us
Shock Doctrine details this insane waste of privatizing nearly every aspect of war and “rebuilding.”