Mar 10
3
Some Thoughts On The Economics Of War
The current war in Iraq has been going on longer than World War II.
It was 2003 when the US and its allies invaded Iraq. It is now 2010. WWII went from 1939 to 1945 – 6 years. The Iraq war is now over 7 years old.
The current government in Australia and the current government in the US were both elected on a platform that was in no small part about two things, as I recall: Getting out of the war in Iraq and addressing Climate Change.
Seems like both of the new(ish) administrations have met with a singular failure to actually do very much at all about either.
But maybe that is because of the economics of both challenges…
The economics of Climate Change are really the economics of carbon emissions. And to significantly reduce carbon emissions will require a massive change in the way that we live – and will mean reduced consumption – of any goods that require energy, so long as the energy is generated by the burning of hydrocarbons. Reduced consumption would mean reduced living standards and reduced industrial output… The reality is that people generally may want something that they can verbalize, but they don't want to have to sacrifice their perceived standard of living to get there…
Looking at the war I come to a wholly different conclusion.
The war continues because it actually suits a lot of interests to keep fighting. It occurs to me that one of the main drivers for waging a war in the current environment is that technology is moving so fast that unless the current inventory of supplies is used up, it is hard to argue for replacement and upgrading.
If you keep on expending rounds, on the other hand, then you get to re-order new rounds that are version 2.0 that have greater penetration capacity, you get to retire old aircraft and re-order drones, you get to replace uniforms with new, bullet proof fabric versions…
In other words, there has to a war happening somewhere so that the armed forces can justify upgrading. And there is so much stuff to upgrade to that they have to find a way to do it.
Now you could also argue that the reason that we are at war is that there is so much oil in Iraq. Now that is probably true too. But if you took all the money that has been invested in war and put that for instance into research into green tech, don't you think that there would be an extremely strong probability that we would have already found a solution that would make the exploration for oil a totally redundant exercise?