Talk to people who work there a little higher up in the hierarchy. It’s a super sweet gig with very good money. And while making good money you can wrap yourself in patriotism.

Profiteering from the military industrial complex is a much more subtle art than that. There are many sophisticated (and readable) studies about it which you can read.

Sometimes it is not even that subtle. Just take a few minutes to read about Blackwater.

There is profiteering, as with any large industry, especially government-backed ones with near-guaranteed payouts.

But what’s the scale of it? Is it enough to bring down the whole US?

My answer is not even close.

See my other comment. There is no way to get a scale of it since it is not audited. All we see is the public debt ballooning while infrastructure around us is decaying. Where is the money going?

The deficit since October is roughly the same as all defense expenditures: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio... So even if they went to zero and didn’t have any effect on revenue, we’d still end up the year with debt ballooning. The lion share of expenditures are non-discretionary, and public debt increase is largely determined by demographics and interest rates.

But we can look at the audited public filings of the defense contractors. And their numbers are really kind of reasonable.

> There is no way to get a scale of it since it is not audited.

Pretty boring talking point, since it's mostly audited - the various secret programs are very small in comparison to public ones.

> Where is the money going?

Giant majority goes to various social and medical programs, that only baloon from aging of society and prolonged lifespans without extending workspan.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/2023_US_...

So, in short - pensioners eat all the money.

Why would they give the money to you as a retail investor?

They keep it.

There’s a group of like 2000 people or so and they all change jobs every couple years and split the profits and buy houses in Maclean.

It’s distributed via consulting deals, retainer agreements, acquisitions, and so on.

This is conspiratorial thinking which rarely coincides with clear thinking.

You’re describing an incredibly dangerous and unstable game on their part. All it would take is one activist shareholder to blow that whole thing apart.

It really is not conspiratorial thinking to say there is a huge amount of waste in the defence industry. We are talking tons of cash which absolutely nobody knows where it went.

The Pentagon has failed 6 straight audits. If you ever worked in corporate finance you know how epically dysfunctional financially a corporation must be to fail a single audit.

It has approx 4 trillion in assets. If only 5 -10 % of this is due to some kind of direct or indirect corruption we are talking about hundreds of billion in "waste".

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pentagon-fails-audit-sixth-...

Waste - of course.

Systematically making a huge (remember, we’re talking big enough to cause the downfall of the States) and then hiding the profits from retail investors? Different story.

Imagine the political windfall someone like Gary Gensler (SEC chair) or a Democrat could get from exposing that? The whole notion is very unstable.

It is indeed very unstable. This is exactly why Eisenhower (who was one of the most hawkish presidents) used his farewell address to warn the public about the growing malign influence of the military-industrial complex (when he coined the term) and which you somehow want to characterise as conspiratorial thinking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower%27s_farewell_addres...

Yes, I know all about Eisenhower and his warnings.

That doesn’t mean a conspiracy as described is feasible.

How could such a group steal enough money to ruin the US? Skimming a little bit off the top, sure, but large-scale, systematic diversion of so much public money that it ends Pax Americana… no.

There are records of where the money comes from, and where it goes. There are far too many people who could become instant public darlings by exposing it. It’s unstable.

> How could such a group steal enough money to ruin the US?

Some remedial reading for you:

https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Broke-Capitalism-America/dp/1...

Is this some kind of joke? Do you really think it's strange or unusual to suggest that there's a conflict of interest between professional manager and shareholders, and that the managers routinely rig things for their own personal benefit? We're both talking about the same country, the United States right? Have you ever heard of Jack Welch?

I grew up in the DC suburbs. I literally know these people, played with their kids when I was a kid. Like I'm really sure.

It's not super complicated. This is basically how the country is run and to some extent has always been run.

Government contract fraud of this kind on the order of couple of million up to a couple of hundred million here and there is terrible and people should go to prison.

It’s enough money to an enormous amount for an individual - ie, your DC friends could buy half a dozen really nice mansions or something.

This is kind of corruption should never be tolerated, but neither should it be mythologized and feared.

What the hell are you talking about?

Like you don't understand that if you're a senior executive at a massive defense contractor you can hire former generals who just signed off on your bid to lucrative consulting agreements, you can put politicians on your board of directors (ie Nikki Haley @ Boeing) and employ their children's PR firms and "strategy consultancies" and so on.

It's not fraud in the legal sense, it's just disgusting and I agree it shouldn't happen. But it's all right out in the open and how the system works.

I'm not really asking if you agree, I'm describing something I have seen first hand.

First of all calm down please. I’m trying to have a factual and calm conversation.

Second of all OK nice and where is all that money going? Sure, generals as directors, politicians making killer stock investments. But I don’t see these trillions in the form of corporate profits, or missing tax money. The money is almost entirely accounted for (ie audited) and the numbers are reasonable.

The US pissed away a ton of money in the middle east, but that money is hardly missing - we know where it went.

> The US pissed away a ton of money in the middle east, but that money is hardly missing - we know where it went.

lmfao

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1

I lived in northern VA for a while and have met these people too. The non profit sector there is a similar insider circle.

>All it would take is one activist shareholder to blow that whole thing apart.

The following fascinating story about stealing money from Pacific fleet operations mentions 27 (twenty seven) whistleblowers whose reports were ignored:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/navy-repeatedl...