Those announcing with glee that Iran is using low-cost UAVs to exhaust very expensive air-defence ammunition, thereby driving up the costs of war for the USA-Israel coalition, need to answer one rather straightforward question: presuming you are correct, who do you think therefore benefits from those costs being driven up?
The military-industrial complex of the United States of America. That is who.
Do you genuinely imagine that the sound you hear is Americans collectively inhaling sharply, slapping their foreheads, and muttering “Dang it, they got us”? Or is it, rather, the sound of laughter and the clinking of glasses in the Capitol, and in the boardrooms of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and every other large American corporation whose quarterly results depend rather heavily on the world remaining an interestingly dangerous place?
Every US$20,000 drone that forces the deployment of a $4-million Patriot interceptor is not a blow against empire. It is a purchase order. It is a shareholder’s dividend. It is a lobbyist’s Christmas bonus, arriving slightly early.
The United States has never, in its entire 250-year history, been driven towards a cessation of hostilities by the escalating cost of those hostilities. Quite the opposite: it has historically treated such escalation as a funding justification. The more it costs, the more Congress allocates. The more Congress allocates, the more the defence contractors donate to the next campaign cycle. It is not a vicious circle so much as a very cheerful one, if you happen to be on the right side of it.
Americans love a good war. In fact, when they cannot find someone else to fight one with, they are perfectly content to fight amongst themselves. It would not be entirely amiss to observe that the Americans have been at war for more years than USA has been a country.
And yet, here we are. An entire ecosystem of anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist commentators, people who will explain to you at considerable length and with great passion how the system is rigged, how capital always wins, how empire always finds a way… these very same people have somehow convinced themselves that a chap in Tehran ordering cheap Chinese drones in bulk is, in fact, sticking it to The Man. That the military-industrial complex, which has survived and indeed thrived through two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and assorted other expensive adventures, has finally met its match in the form of a supply chain optimisation strategy.
The credulity is, I confess, rather breathtaking.
Which brings me to an offer I feel almost obliged to extend to this particular audience. If you genuinely believe that making America’s wars more expensive is a blow against American capitalism, I have some rather exciting news. I have available for immediate sale, at a very reasonable price, a slightly used, riverside, mid-17th-century, pristine white marble mausoleum, built on the plains of northern India by a loving but fratricidal billionaire with a noted penchant for tall pointy erections and large smooth domes, erected in memory of his second wife (of at least six), who died giving birth to her fourteenth child in nineteen years of what we must charitably assume to have been a fairly happy marriage. Motivated seller. Serious enquiries only. No tyre-kickers, please.
