In 1935, the most decorated Marine in American history at the time, Major General Smedley D. Butler, published a short book with a title that said everything: War Is a Racket. His thesis was brutal and simple. "War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious… It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives."
Ninety years later, Butler's confession reads less like history and more like a real-time Sydney Harbour Bridge terminal ticker.
Lockheed Martin's stock is up 42 % since Russia entered Ukraine. Raytheon (RTX) is up 61 %. Northrop Grumman, 58 %. General Dynamics, 71 %. While those numbers climbed, the combined market cap of the top five Western defense primes has surged past $900 billion – more than the entire Russian military budget for the next decade.
Every ATACMS fired into Kursk, every Storm Shadow into Crimea, every Patriot battery rushed to Kiev is a direct transfer of taxpayer wealth into the dividend accounts of the same funds that own Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street. The same funds that own the media companies telling you the war must go on. The same funds that own the think-tanks explaining why "strategic ambiguity" is wise and "escalation management" is an exact science. International finance already masters of this world, are made richer.
It is the cleanest/dirtiest business model ever devised: sovereign nations borrow money from private banks to buy weapons from private corporations owned by the same funds that own the banks. The debt is serviced forever. The corporations buy back their own shares. The fund managers collect 1–2 % on trillions. No one ever has to build anything useful again.
And for three decades this model worked perfectly. Yugoslavia, Iraq I, Iraq II, Libya, Syria – profitable little wars, far away, low risk, high margin. The dead were mostly brown, Muslim, and poor. The profits went to the globalist financial warlocks.
Then came Ukraine – the first war where the target can actually fight back at scale, and the first war where the escalation ladder has publicly visible rungs labelled "tactical nuclear weapon" and "strategic nuclear exchange."
Here the racket meets reality.
The financial elites who grew fat on the post-1991 unipolar moment suddenly discover that the racket has a hard stop: the moment the first hypersonic arrives over Warsaw, London or Washington, their gated compounds in Aspen and the Hamptons become indistinguishable from the rubble in Bakhmut.
There is no BlackRock continuity bunker rated for 20 megatons. There is no Vanguard server farm that survives the EMP. Klaus Schwab's children will glow in the dark exactly like yours and mine.
This is the dirty secret no one at Davos or Jackson Hole dares to say out loud: the profit curve on industrial-scale warfare is exponential right up to the last minute — and then it goes vertically negative forever.
Every additional $100 billion "aid package" to Kiev is another entry on a ledger that ends the same way for the owner of that ledger: vapourised, irradiated, or (in the luckiest case) reduced to fighting feral post-apocalyptic teenagers for canned goods in a dark forest.
Butler saw the racket when the ceiling was a few hundred thousand dead and a couple of ruined European cities. Today the ceiling is eight billion dead and a planet plunged into nuclear winter (arguable), in an all-out war. The multiple has changed; the game has not.
The globalist financial class is not stupid enough to believe it can keep cashing the cheques until the very last second and then helicopter to some hardened New Zealand bolt-hole that doesn't exist. They will keep escalating because quarterly earnings literally depend on it. They will keep lying because their net worth literally depends on it.
And one morning, very soon, Vladimir Putin, or some terrified colonel with the launch codes, will decide that losing Crimea or Kursk or the Black Sea Fleet is preferable to losing Mother Russia herself. At that moment the entire edifice – the funds, the dividends, the think-tanks, the NGOs, the private jets, the vineyards in Tuscany – turns into plasma brighter than a thousand suns.
Smedley Butler closed his book with a plea: "To hell with war!"
He was ignored then. He is being ignored now. But physics is not a lobbyist. Physics cannot be bought off with campaign contributions. Physics does not care about your ESG score.
When the final margin call arrives, it will be delivered at 27 times the speed of sound.
And on that day, every billionaire who ever shorted peace to go long on Raytheon will finally discover the one asset that truly compounds forever: radioactive ash.
War is still a racket. It just added a new clause to the contract:
Profits payable in full – until suddenly, and for all eternity, they are not.