As many have observed since Obama launched his own personal Iraq war, there is something rather farcical about the latest US intervention in the middile east, namely that US weapons are being used to destroy US weapons, captured by and in possession of ISIS jihadists. As Reuters summarizes the situation, rather poetically, "Islamic State’s captured an enormous amount of U.S. weaponry, originally intended for the rebuilt Iraqi Army. You know — the one that collapsed in terror in front of the Islamic State, back when they were just ISIL? The ones who dropped their uniforms, and rifles and ran away?They left behind the bigger equipment, too, including M1 Abrams tanks (about $6 million each), 52 M198 Howitzer cannons ($527,337), and MRAPs (about $1 million) similar to the ones in use in Ferguson."
In other words US taxpayers are now paying for military missions, in which US taxpayer paid-for warplans and missiles are used to blow up other US taxpayer paid-for tanks, artillery, MRAPs, and various other weapons of death.
Here is a closer look at the method behind the Keynesian madness from Reuters [8]:
U.S. warplanes are flying sorties, at a cost somewhere between $22,000 to 30,000 per hour for the F-16s, to drop bombs that cost at least $20,000 each, to destroy this captured equipment.
That means if an F-16 were to take off from Incirclik Air Force Base in Turkey and fly two hours to Erbil, Iraq, and successfully drop both of its bombs on one target each, it costs the United States somewhere between $84,000 to $104,000 for the sortie and destroys a minimum of $1 million and a maximum of $12 million in U.S.-made equipment.
Lest the US appears alone in this silliness, Reuters is quick to remind readers that the very same situation can be encountered several hundred miles north, in the proxy civil war being waged in East Ukraine:
The Russians and Ukrainians are also facing off with tanks and guns and bombs and planes and uniforms all made in the same factories. They were the same country a mere 23 years ago. And even after they weren’t any more, they maintained close military ties until very recently.
Before Russia decided it couldn’t stand losing its friend in Kiev, Viktor Yanukovich, Russian President Vladimir Putin was happy to keep most of his navy in what was then Ukrainian territory: Crimea.
I guess that’s the thing about weapons. Once you make them, you never know who’s going to end up pointing them at whom.
You do know one thing, though: the only real beneficiary is the US military-industrial complex which built the weapons being used for both sides, and which are now being put into "accelerated obsolescence", meaning an upgrade cycle is imminent as one or both sides are eager to restock. And who provides the funding for such "restocking"? Why the same banks that the US DOJ is "punshing" with vicious wristslaps of million dollar fines here, and multi-million dollar settlements there such as HSBC and JPM, thereby reducing the total profit on funding global warfare by "money-laundering" institutions to only tens of billions.
Rinse. Repeat.
For more on how the cycle of war works when all other conventional means of boosting GDP or generating bank profits when Net Interest Margins are record low, please watch the film the International, which summarizes all of the above in a tidy package.
