Rise of the MIC Part 2

War Without End in the Age of Permanent Crisis

Introduction to The Anatomy of Empire

We are living through a global conflict of connected crises—in Ukraine, Gaza, the South China Sea, Palestine, Iran, and Venezuela—and within the fraying social fabric of Western nations themselves. These are not isolated eruptions but the convulsions of an Empire consuming itself, driven by internal contradictions it can no longer hide.

Soaring national debt, decaying domestic infrastructure amidst unparalleled military expenditure, dependence on force to secure an economic order that long since lost its legitimacy—this crisis is the inevitable culmination of centuries of capital accumulation fused with the unbridled application of raw military power.

The Anatomy of Empire, tries to shed light on the path led us to this precipice. It is a history not of chance, but of design; not of isolated events, but of a systemic logic pursued with relentless determination. From the global collaboration with fascism to the architectural pillars of the neoliberal order, we trace the myriad secrets and open secrets that have propelled us forward.

In part one of Rise of the MIC we followed the conception, birth and rise to global dominance of the military industrial complex’ economic model of industrial destruction. Now, in the second part we will trace how the system mutated and metastasized; from emergence of neoconservatism as the militant voice of the MIC; to the cultural arsenal of Hollywood and the 24-hour news cycle manufacturing consent; to the outsourcing, privatization and financialization of organized destruction and its corollary—the conflict reconstruction complex.

1 The Political Vanguard: Neoconservatism as the Militant Voice of the MIC

The military-industrial complex is not a passive structure; it is a dynamic political force that cultivates and promotes its own intellectual and political representatives. The rise of the neoconservative movement from the mid-1970s onward starting in earnest in the Ford administration represents the MIC’s conscious development of a vocal and ideological vanguard within the sphere of bourgeois democracy.

As a member of the Warren Commission, Gerald Ford had personally championed the absurd ‘magic bullet” theory, a deliberate fabrication designed to obscure the facts of President Kennedy’s assassination. President Gerald Ford, having circuitously replaced Nixon, now presided over an administration that welcomed figures like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who set about systematically infiltrating the national security apparatus. Their most consequential act was the “Team B” exercise of 1976, where Rumsfeld and his panel of hardliners willfully produced an alternative intelligence assessment that flatly contradicted the CIA’s own findings, inventing a myth of Soviet superiority and aggressive intent.

The timing of this emergence was not an accident but engineered as a direct counterbalance to a dangerous trend of détente pursued by presidents of both parties. The neocons provide the militant, moralistic, and uncompromising ideology necessary to counteract the pragmatism of arms control and diplomatic engagement, which threatened the complex’s economic and strategic rationale in the 1960’s and 70s.

This function explains the movement’s relentless hostility toward any leader who sought to de-escalate Cold War tensions. President John F. Kennedy, for example, was guilty of unforgivable betrayals: failure to provide air support for the Bay of Pigs invasion; back-channel diplomacy with Khrushchev to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis without invasion; and a secret plan to withdraw from Vietnam represented existential threats to the engine of perpetual conflict. His assassination by the security state removed a president whose policies endangered its existence.

Similarly, President Richard Nixon, despite his anti-communist credentials, was ultimately targeted by a security-state-orchestrated palace coup in the form of Watergate. Not for petty crimes, but for the strategic sin of pursuing détente with the Soviet Union and, most profoundly, recognizing Communist China. Actions aimed at creating a more stable co-existence between the superpowers directly undermined the MIC’s existential need for a monolithic, enduring enemy.

The neoconservatives, with their doctrine of American exceptionalism, unilateralism, military supremacy, and democratic imperialism, are a political vehicle with one goal: to ensure no president can deviate from the path of permanent mobilization. They are a new clergy preaching the gospel of MIC economic imperatives as a crusading national ideology.

2 Manufacturing Consent: The Cultural Arsenal of Hollywood and the 24-Hour News Cycle

While the national security state developed legal and coercive tools to manage dissent, a more subtle and pervasive system operated in the cultural sphere: the manufacturing of consent for a permanently militarized society. The institutions of mass media—from the myth-making machinery of Hollywood to the relentless churn of the 24-hour news cycle—generate an indispensable cultural arsenal for the military-industrial complex; glamorizing its tools, sanitizing its violence, and naturalizing its existence.

Hollywood has long been a willing partner in this project. Through a symbiotic relationship with the Pentagon, which offers access to expensive military hardware in exchange for script approval, filmmakers have produced decades of content that frames American military power as a righteous, if sometimes tragically applied, force for good.

Beyond these direct collaborations, a deeper narrative archetype dominates the cinematic landscape: the heroic outsider, a retired special force operative or a rogue agent, who is forced to operate outside of “politicized” or “bureaucratic” norms to redress moral injustice through the unilateral application of violence. From the vigilante tropes of the 1970s to the modern superhero genre, this narrative reinforces the idea that complex geopolitical problems have simple, violent solutions, and that true justice bypasses tedious democratic accountability, where the most virtuous actor is the one unencumbered by rules.

On a deeper level, there is a potent and recurring dogma: the theology of redemptive violence. This narrative gospel preaches that the physical act of controlled destruction is not a tragic necessity, but a sacred rite of purification. Through it, the flawed individual—the alienated, the traumatized, the wronged—is elevated to a state of grace. Characters like Dirty Harry, Rambo, and Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle are not merely solving problems; they are undergoing a spiritual transformation where the application of overwhelming, extralegal, force becomes their path to personal and moral resolution. Their violence is not condemned but celebrated, presented as the only authentic response to a corrupt and decaying world. This cultural trope serves a vital function for the militarized state: it conditions the public to see organized violence not as a failure of politics, but as its ultimate, and most honorable expression—a necessary, even righteous, cleansing fire.

Simultaneously, the rise of the 24-hour cable news network created a powerful engine for what has been termed “war porn.” During conflicts, particularly the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, news broadcasts became spectacles of sterilized violence. Viewers were treated to grainy green footage from “smart” bombs, video game-like animations of surgical strikes, and breathless commentary from retired generals—many of whom were paid network analysts with financial ties to defense contractors. This coverage divorced war from its human cost, presenting it as a clean, technological, thrilling affair. The constant drumbeat of alarmism—be it about terrorists, rogue states, or emerging peer competitors—feeds the public a steady diet of fear, ensuring a baseline of anxiety that makes massive defense budgets and preemptive military action seem like common-sense necessities.

Together, these cultural forces perform a critical function: they prepare the psychological and moral ground for perpetual war. By glamorizing the warrior, sanitizing the weapons, and framing the world as an eternally threatening place, they make the application of overwhelming military force seem not just inevitable, but noble. This cultural conditioning ensures that when the state decides to act, a significant portion of the population has been primed to accept, even cheer, the decision. It is the ideological complement to the revolving door and the lobbying network—a soft-power apparatus that makes the hard power of the military-industrial complex politically palatable and culturally resonant.

3 L. Paul Bremmer and the Seamless Transition: From Red Menace to Axis of Evil

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 presented an existential crisis for the military-industrial complex. The foundational threat that had justified its existence, its budgets, and its global posture for half a century suddenly vanished. A fleeting “peace dividend” was debated, promising a reallocation of resources from the Pentagon to domestic needs. Yet, this potential recalibration was stillborn. The institutions, corporate interests, and ideological frameworks of the MIC were too deeply embedded to be dismantled; they simply required a new enemy.

The transformation was not a rupture but a recalibration, a process that began gaining momentum even before the Berlin Wall fell. The man chosen to front this shift was L. Paul Bremer II, who, as Ambassador-at-Large for Counterterrorism from 1986 to 1989, worked to elevate terrorism to the status of a primary national security threat. In a 1989 New York Times op-ed, Bremer explicitly argued that with the Cold War waning, terrorism offered a new, durable justification for permanent mobilization, warning that “the terrorist threat will be with us for many years, long after the threat of communist expansionism is only a historical memory.” This was not merely an analysis of emerging dangers; it was a strategic blueprint for continuity.

In the first of a series of grim historical ironies, the public face of this strategy was intimately intwined in the events that would activate the blueprint. On the morning of September 11^th, 2001, American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon, destroying the office Bremer had once occupied as counterterrorism czar. The same day, another jet crashed into the head office of Marsh and McClennan – Bremmer’s employer at the time—in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Just hours after the attacks, Bremer—unharmed and his pre-existing framework now tragically validated—appeared on national television to authoritatively name Osama bin Laden as the mastermind. The swift, certain narrative he provided was a powerful demonstration of a pre-positioned system snapping into gear. The “War on Terror” did not begin on September 11, 2001; its conceptual foundations were laid in the final years of the Cold War, ensuring that the vast infrastructure of the national security state would remain funded, relevant, and powerful.

As the Twin Towers fell, this new national security paradigm solidified with terrifying efficiency. The abstract “terrorist” seamlessly replaced the abstract “communist.” The ubiquitous, shadowy, and ideologically-driven enemy necessary to sustain the cycle of threat perception, military spending, and global intervention. The Cold War doctrine of containment gave way to the War on Terror’s doctrine of preemption, but the result was the same: a mandate for a global military presence, a booming arms trade with allied states, and a budget-friendly pretext for the continued fusion of capital and coercion. The enemy had changed, but the business model of the Military-Industrial Complex remained triumphantly, and terrifyingly, the same.

President George W. Bush later appointed Bremer Presidential Envoy to Iraq, the effective head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) governing post-invasion Iraq. In this role, Bremmer liquidated the secular Iraqi state creating a void that sectarian militias filled, culminating in birth of ISIS. Later, in Syria and Libya, the U.S. funneled arms to Salafi-jihadist elements to topple undesirable governments. The result was regional devastation, unimaginable human suffering, and a strengthening of the extremist forces Bremmer claimed justified perpetual war.

4 The Geopolitical Chessboard: Brzezinski’s Blueprint for Proxy War

NATO’s post-Cold War imperial strategy was articulated with chilling clarity by figures like George Soros and strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski in the 1990s. In the wake of the Soviet collapse, they argued NATO’s new purpose should be proactive enlargement and the cultivation of proxy forces. This strategy, laid bare in articles for Foreign Affairs and Soros’ Toward a New World Order: The Future of NATO, was to use the nations of Eastern Europe as a geopolitical buffer—and potential battlefield—equipped with NATO weapons but manned by local armies. NATO would adopt the grand strategic vision that underpinned weapon-sales in the Middle East and Latin America: a global division of labor in warfare where the United States, through the MIC, supplies the advanced technology, intelligence, and financing, while its allies and clients supply the blood and territory.

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s strategy

This model has become a primary mode of U.S. imperial engagement in the 21st century. It minimizes American casualties and thus domestic political blowback, while simultaneously creating a perpetual, lucrative market for the military-industrial complex. From the Kurdish Peshmerga to the Syrian Democratic Forces, and most prominently in Ukraine, this strategy has been implemented on a massive scale. It allows the U.S. to project decisive power and cripple its adversaries without the political and financial cost of a full-scale mobilization. For the MIC, it is the perfect business model: conflicts are funded by U.S. taxpayers, fought by foreign soldiers, and generate continuous demand for the replenishment of expended munitions, all while insulating the American public from the true human horror of empire.

George Soros Toward a New World Order: The Future of NATO

5 Privatizing War: From Contractors to War-as-Service Sector Industry

The neoliberal revolution of the late 20th century, with its dogma of deregulation, privatization, and market efficiency, inevitably reached the heart of the war machine. The result was the explosive growth of Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs), marking a fundamental shift in how war was conducted and profited from.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan served as the great laboratory for this transformation. At their peak, the number of contractors in Iraq rivaled or even exceeded uniformed troops. Companies like Blackwater (now Academi), DynCorp, and Kellogg, Brown & Root (a Halliburton subsidiary) took over functions once considered the core responsibility of the state: logistics, base support, security details, and even training of local forces. This was the birth of “war-as-a-service,” a business model where conflict became a suite of outsourced, billable functions.

This privatization offered political and military leaders a seductive flexibility: it allowed for the deployment of massive force without the political cost of a draft or the scrutiny of large-scale troop deployments. However, it also created a massive accountability vacuum. Contractors operated in a legal gray zone, often immune from both military justice and local law. Their actions, such as the 2007 Nisour Square massacre involving Blackwater, caused immense strategic damage with little consequence.

Economically, this shift further embedded the profit motive into warfare. A publicly traded company has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to grow and generate returns. When its business is war, its interest lies in the perpetuation and expansion of conflict. The line between supporting troops and instigating demand for one’s services becomes dangerously thin. The neoliberal MIC had evolved into a self-propelling entity, where the state’s monopoly on violence was increasingly ceded to corporate actors whose bottom line depended on its continued exercise.

6 The New Face of Intervention: From ‘Shock and Awe’ to (Barely) ‘Managed Chaos’

The staggering costs and strategic failures of direct military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan forced a recalibration of Western strategy. The model of deploying hundreds of thousands of troops for nation-building—a politically and financially exhausting endeavor—was deemed unsustainable. In its place, a more agile and deniable form of power projection emerged, one that leveraged local grievances, social media manipulation and covertly-armed proxy forces to achieve geopolitical objectives—a shift that found its highest profile expression in the Arab Spring. As analyst Fadi Lama argues in “Why The West Can’t Win”, this new approach was not about creating stability but about engineering “managed chaos.” The goal was to dismantle resistant states and recalcitrant regimes not with its own armies, but by weaponizing civil society, funding opposition groups, and providing logistical and media support for uprisings that could be framed as organic ‘pro-democracy’ movements.

This strategy, however, contained the seeds of its own failure, as the West’s pyrrhic victory in Libya starkly demonstrated. The NATO-led intervention in 2011, which began under the humanitarian banner of protecting civilians, swiftly morphed into a regime-change operation that actively empowered a disparate coalition of local militias. Once the Gaddafi regime was toppled, the West lost all control over these fragmented proxy forces. The result was not a pliable allay managed by a comprador class, but a failed-state hellscape; a nation torn apart by warring factions that became a breeding ground for terrorism and a hub for human trafficking across the Mediterranean. Libya stands as a brutal testament to the inherent unpredictability of the proxy war model. It revealed that while the West could, with relative ease, destroy a state it found inconvenient, it possessed neither the will, the understanding, nor the control to manage the aftermath. The weapons, funding, and legitimacy provided to topple a regime ultimately fueled a perpetual conflict that dashed any hope for stability, exposing the new intervention model as an anarchic, nihilistic, destructive force.

7 The Final Frontier: Post-Conflict Reconstruction as MIC Revenue Stream

The business model of the military-industrial complex does not conclude with the last shot fired; it merely pivots. The destruction wrought by war creates the ultimate market opportunity: the obligation to rebuild. This phase, often framed as humanitarian reconstruction, adds a powerful and perverse revenue stream to the war economy, directly incentivizing the maximization of destruction to capitalize on the subsequent peace. The promise of rebuilding becomes a guaranteed, multi-billion-dollar payday for the same corporate ecosystems that profited from the fighting, creating a vicious cycle where devastation is a prerequisite for development.

The looming reconstruction of Ukraine serves as a stark contemporary case study. Even as the conflict rages, U.S. corporate giants—from engineering and construction behemoths like Bechtel and Black & Veatch to financial institutions and agricultural conglomerates—jostle for position at the trough of future reconstruction funds. The U.S. government, in partnership with the World Bank, is orchestrating a funding mechanism poised to direct hundreds of billions of dollars to these private contractors. This process completes the brutal logic of modern conflict: first, the MIC profits from supplying the weapons that reduce cities to rubble; then, it profits again from contracts to rebuild them. The system is thus incentivized not only to prolong conflict but to ensure that the peace is as profitable as the war. The pursuit of a swift, negotiated settlement is counter to this financial imperative; a comprehensively destroyed nation requires a more extensive—and expensive—rebuild. In this grim calculus, the complete obliteration of infrastructure is not a tragedy to be mourned, but a market to be captured.

This reconstruction frenzy is always and invariably a feeding ground for corruption and staggering waste, as the Iraq experience brutally demonstrated. There, billions of dollars in reconstruction funds vanished into a sinkhole of no-bid contracts, phantom projects, and outright fraud, with corporate giants like Halliburton and its former subsidiary KBR becoming synonymous with profiteering in a war zone. When rebuilding does occur, it is not to restore a sovereign nation but to construct a neo-liberal free market hellscape. The captured state is forced to adopt shock therapy—privatizing its national assets, slashing public services, and rewriting its laws to favor foreign capital and outlaw labor movements. The local population, stripped of their economic sovereignty and political agency, is reduced to a disenfranchised, disempowered class in what was once their own country, living as neo-feudal subjects in a system designed to extract wealth for international corporations and their local compradors, thereby completing the cycle of imperial domination.

8 The Illusion of Invincibility: Ukraine and the Unmasking of a Bloated System

The military-industrial complex has long sustained its political and economic dominance by cultivating an aura of technological and strategic invincibility, a narrative built primarily upon victories over vastly outgunned and outmatched opponents. From the aerial bombardment of Iraq in 1991 to the counter-insurgency campaigns of the early 2000s, the system grew fat on a diet of corruption and low-risk conflict, its prowess seemingly validated by the swift defeat of weaker states. However, the protracted, high-intensity war in Ukraine has acted as a brutal and unforgiving audit, revealing critical weaknesses that years of cost-plus contracts and speculative threat assessments had obscured. The much-vaunted “game-changer” weapons systems, hyped by corporate marketing and Pentagon briefings, have been comprehensively defeated by cheaper, simpler, and often asymmetric countermeasures on the battlefield.

This performance gap is not accidental; it is the direct result of a bloated and perversely incentivized system. The prevalence of “no-bid” and “cost-plus” contracts has eroded accountability, rewarding contractors for delays and cost overruns; it has allowed the production of systems that require constant maintenance and upgradesrather than for delivering effective, resilient, and cost-efficient weapons. The result is a generation of high-maintenance, high-profit platforms—exemplified by the F-35’s legendary logistical headaches and astronomical lifetime costs—that provide minimal effectiveness when divorced from the total air and information dominance guaranteed only against inferior forces.

In Ukraine, systems touted as revolutionary have been neutralized by Soviet-era equipment upgraded with modern electronics, or overwhelmed by the sheer volume of affordable drones. This lays bare a fundamental flaw: a system optimized for extracting profit from the public treasury, rather than for winning peer-level conflicts, has produced a force that is magnificent in PowerPoint presentations but brittle in the face of determined, adaptive resistance.

This fundamental misalignment stems from a corporate model that is structurally incapable of meeting the demands of a protracted, high-intensity industrial war. The for-profit, shareholder-value-driven paradigm excels at producing exquisite, high-margin systems in limited production runs. Building a small batch of F-35s, where each unit represents immense profit, is the ideal business scenario. However, it is wholly unsuited for the rapid, mass production of affordable, durable, and replaceable weapons—the artillery shells, armored vehicles, and basic drones that form the brutal, consumptive backbone of high intensity, kinetic warfare against a peer opponent.

Ramping up such production slashes profit margins and contradicts the just-in-time, supply-chain-efficient model designed to maximize return on investment rather than ensure national survival. The system is therefore caught in a fatal contradiction: it is optimized to sell a handful of gold-plated hammers for a fortune, but is ill-equipped to provide the million simple nails needed to actually win a real war. The battlefield in Ukraine is not just a contest between nations; it is a stark indictment of a military-industrial complex that has prioritized shareholder value over battlefield utility.

9 Conclusion: War Without End in the Age of Permanent Crisis

The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned of has not merely persisted; it has metastasized. It has evolved from a Cold War-era American institution into a structural necessity of a global capitalist system defined by perpetual crisis. The “War on Terror” seamlessly replaced the Soviet Union as its justifying narrative, and today, great-power competition with China and Russia provides a new, open-ended mandate for expansion.

The fusion of capital and coercion is so complete it is impossible to imagine a modern American economy without the engine of destruction. War, and the permanent preparation for it, is no longer an aberration but a business model. The U.S. empire is maintained through a trinity of power: economic coercion, ideological framing, and the ever-present, market-driven capacity for organized violence.

As this complex continues to shape global politics, questions for the future become ever more urgent. Can this system be dismantled when it woven into the very fabric of the US economy and so many are economically dependent on it? What ultimately happens when the irresistible force of capitalism’s militarized expansion is forced to directly confront the immovable object of a nuclear armed peer-competitor like Russia or China? And, as more and more citizens in the imperial core recognize the MIC for the genocidal, geopolitical racket that it is, what level of domestic repression will be necessary to maintain it?

The next article will tackle that very question: the Panopticon, the rise of domestic repression industry.