alt Hacker NewsThis gives me sickening vibes of the "War is a racket" take.
Both side's agreeing to enable each other's massacre of their own country's downtrodden young masses, while all sorts of profiteering going on at the back no doubt.
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GolfPopper • today at 4:40 PM
When you have time, you might wish to track down the history of Krupp[1]. A German company, they sold arms to all sides in WWI, having gained the the freedom to do so by previously threatening the Kaiser with moving their operations to Russia.
My recollection is that Krupp was paid a premium based on the effectiveness of their artillery shells - which, again, were being sold to both sides. Said effectiveness was calculated based on casualty numbers... so the more soldiers died (on both sides) the more Krupp was paid.
Very much a two-way street, that.
The "economist" faction in the British government (that is, those who wanted to fight a limited war, sparing men and materiel) semi-deliberately failed to ramp up domestic production as part of their campaign to constrain the extent of any conflict. Their opponents did the opposite, exaggerating the lack of production as part of their campaign to move the economy much more completely onto a war footing.
It came to the head with the "shell crisis" in 1915 when Lloyd George (previously chief amongst the economists) switched sides and, with the aid of a coordinated series of attacks in the press, caused the fall of the government and its replacement by a coalition.
The coalition massively increased war production by borrowing heavily and taking over huge swathes of the economy. Conscription was introduced, and millions were shipped off to the trenches. Lloyd George soon became prime minister, the military expanded massively, the economy grew, and the war was won.
On the other hand, hundreds of thousands more lives were lost, the increased industrial capacity was largely destroyed in the economic retrenchment of the 1920s, and the unsustainable levels of borrowing almost bankrupted the country (and the Empire in general - with Egypt and India bearing much of the burden).
Of course, Germany also followed the "total war" model and suffered terribly for it too. In both cases, it's hard to say who was driving who - the politicians, the industrialists, or the military. The first stirrings of the Military Industrial Complex, half a century before Eisenhower talked about it.