How War Economies Depend On The Maintenance Of Othering

When Dwight Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex in his 1961 farewell address, he was not speaking abstractly. He was describing a specific structural problem that he had watched develop during his presidency: the emergence of a permanent peacetime defense industry with its own economic logic, its own political constituency, and its own interest in perpetuating the conditions that justify its existence.

The term has become a cliche, which is convenient for the complex. Cliches stop people from thinking. So let's be specific.

The modern defense industry is not a collection of companies that wait for wars to happen and then supply weapons. It is a proactive economic ecosystem that shapes policy, funds research, employs lobbyists, contributes to political campaigns, places former executives in government positions, hires former government officials, and actively participates in the definition of national security threats. The revolving door between the Pentagon and defense contractors is so well-documented it barely qualifies as news.

In the United States alone, the defense industry spent $247 million on lobbying in 2023. Defense PACs and executives contributed over $50 million to political campaigns. The top five defense contractors employ over 600,000 people directly, with millions more in the broader supply chain. In many congressional districts, the local defense contractor is the largest employer. Voting to cut the defense budget in those districts is voting to eliminate your constituents' jobs.

This creates a political dynamic that is nearly impossible to disrupt through normal democratic processes. A senator who proposes cutting a weapons program is not just opposing a line item — they are threatening the livelihoods of thousands of workers in their state, alienating the donors who fund their campaigns, and giving their political opponents an easy "soft on defense" attack line. The rational self-interest of nearly every political actor in the system points toward maintaining or increasing military spending, regardless of the actual threat environment.

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The defense industry does not need actual wars to thrive. It needs threats. Threats justify procurement, procurement generates revenue, revenue funds lobbying, lobbying shapes threat assessment, and the cycle continues.

This is worth understanding structurally because it explains why the world spends $2.4 trillion on military capacity despite the fact that the overall trend in interstate warfare has been declining for decades. Steven Pinker and others have documented the long-term decline in deaths from interstate war. If the threat environment were actually driving spending, budgets would have declined with the threats. They haven't. In fact, global military spending hit an all-time high in 2023.

The disconnect between declining interstate conflict and rising military spending is explained by the economics of threat maintenance. Here is how it works:

Threat inflation. Defense establishments have a structural incentive to overestimate threats. An intelligence assessment that says "this country is not actually a serious threat" produces budget cuts. An assessment that says "this country could become a threat under certain conditions" produces procurement programs. The incentive is always toward worst-case analysis, not accurate analysis.

Threat substitution. When one threat diminishes, the system generates a new one. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Within a decade, "terrorism" had become the organizing threat. As the War on Terror wound down, "great power competition" with China emerged. Each threat transition was accompanied by new weapons programs, new basing requirements, and new budget justifications. The specifics change. The spending doesn't.

Technology as threat generation. New military technologies — hypersonic missiles, autonomous drones, cyber weapons, space-based systems — create threats by their mere existence. If one country develops a capability, other countries must respond, which in turn justifies further development by the first country. This arms race dynamic is self-generating and self-sustaining. It does not require an actual enemy. It only requires the possibility of one.

Geographic threat distribution. The US maintains approximately 750 military bases in at least 80 countries. Each base creates a local economic dependency (base workers, support services, nearby businesses) and a strategic justification for continued presence. Closing a base means economic disruption for the host community and a "strategic retreat" narrative for political opponents. The bases justify themselves.

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None of this works without othering. And this is the critical link to Law 1.

A defense budget is, at its core, an expression of fear. It says: there are people out there who might hurt us, and we need to spend this much to prevent it. The size of the budget is proportional to the intensity of the fear, which is proportional to the perceived otherness of the threat.

Dehumanization in military training. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman's research, published in "On Killing," documents the systematic processes by which military training overcomes the natural human reluctance to kill. The core mechanism is dehumanization — training soldiers to see enemy combatants as something other than fully human. Slurs, euphemisms ("targets" instead of "people"), distancing technologies (drones, long-range weapons) — all serve to create psychological distance between the person pulling the trigger and the person being killed. This works because the reluctance to kill is, at its root, a function of seeing the other as human. Remove that perception and the reluctance diminishes.

Media as othering infrastructure. The relationship between defense industries and media is not incidental. In the leadup to the 2003 Iraq War, major US news networks employed retired military officers — many of them with financial ties to defense contractors — as expert commentators. A 2008 investigation found that many of these analysts had been briefed by the Pentagon and had financial interests in the war they were promoting on television. The othering of Iraqis — "weapons of mass destruction," "axis of evil," the consistent framing of Iraqi people as threats rather than persons — was not organic. It was produced, and the production served economic interests.

Think tanks and threat narratives. Washington, DC is home to dozens of think tanks that produce research on national security. Many of them receive substantial funding from defense contractors. The research they produce tends to emphasize threats, advocate for military solutions, and frame international relations in terms of competition rather than cooperation. This is not necessarily because the researchers are corrupt — many are sincere. But the funding environment selects for threat-oriented analysis and marginalizes scholars who argue for diplomacy, cooperation, or threat reduction.

Political rhetoric as othering. Politicians who support high defense spending need a domestic audience that fears an external enemy. This creates an incentive to describe foreign powers in dehumanizing terms — as irrational, barbaric, inherently aggressive, culturally incompatible. The political rhetoric of othering is not separate from the economics of defense spending. It is its marketing department.

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The $2.4 trillion spent on global military capacity in 2023 represents a choice. Not an inevitable choice. A choice. And the opportunity cost of that choice is calculable.

What $2.4 trillion could fund annually: - Ending world hunger: ~$45 billion (Ceres2030 estimate) - Universal clean water and sanitation: ~$28 billion (WHO/UNICEF estimate) - Universal basic education globally: ~$40 billion (UNESCO estimate) - Eliminating malaria: ~$10 billion (WHO estimate) - Universal renewable energy transition (annual investment needed): ~$500 billion (IRENA estimate) - Total: ~$623 billion. Roughly one-quarter of current military spending.

This means the world could end hunger, provide clean water to everyone, educate every child, eliminate malaria, and fund a complete energy transition — and still have $1.8 trillion left over for defense spending that would dwarf any realistic threat.

The reason this does not happen is not resource scarcity. It is political will. And political will is shaped by who you see as human. If the billion people who go to bed hungry were seen, viscerally and consistently, as fellow humans whose suffering is as real as your own family's, the political calculus changes. But the othering infrastructure keeps them abstract — statistics at best, threats at worst.

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The war economy depends on othering. Othering depends on ignorance, distance, and manufactured fear. Breaking the cycle requires disrupting those dependencies.

Contact and exchange. The most robust finding in the psychology of prejudice reduction is the contact hypothesis — that meaningful contact between members of different groups, under conditions of equal status and common goals, reduces prejudice. International exchange programs, cultural immersion, and sustained cross-cultural relationships all work. They don't work perfectly or for everyone, but they work reliably at the population level. Every person who has a genuine relationship with someone in the "enemy" country is a person who is harder to mobilize for war.

Economic conversion. Defense workers are not villains. They are people with mortgages, families, and skills. The transition away from a war economy requires providing them with alternatives. The concept of economic conversion — systematically transitioning defense industry capacity to civilian production — has been studied since the 1960s. The technical feasibility is established. The political feasibility is the obstacle, because conversion requires admitting that the current allocation is a choice, not a necessity.

Transparency in defense economics. Most citizens do not understand where their tax money goes or who profits from it. Making the economics of defense spending — the contracts, the lobbying, the revolving door, the opportunity costs — legible and accessible to ordinary citizens would change the political conversation. It is easier to support $916 billion in defense spending when you don't know what else that money could do.

Narrative disruption. The othering narratives that sustain war economies are maintained through media, education, and political rhetoric. Disrupting those narratives — through journalism that humanizes the "enemy," through education that teaches the economics of war alongside the politics, through cultural products that complicate rather than simplify — is slow work, but it is the work that changes what populations will tolerate.

Redefining security. The deepest shift required is a redefinition of what security means. Currently, security is framed almost entirely in military terms — the ability to project force and deter attack. But the threats that actually kill the most people — pandemic disease, climate change, economic instability, mental health collapse — are not addressable through military spending. Redefining security to include human security — health, education, food, shelter, social connection, environmental stability — would redirect resources toward the things that actually make humans safer.

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Here is why this matters for this manual.

If "We Are Human" is only a feeling — a warm sentiment about connection and empathy — it is easy to contain. You can feel it on a retreat, share it on social media, and go back to a world organized around othering without contradiction.

But if "We Are Human" is an economic proposition — if it means that the $2.4 trillion currently spent on maintaining the capacity to kill each other should be redirected toward the things that actually sustain human life — then it is radical. It threatens specific interests. It requires specific changes. It has specific opponents.

The defense industry is not going to dismantle itself because people feel connected. It will only change when the political conditions that sustain it change. And those political conditions are, at their root, conditions of othering. The day a critical mass of people in any country look at the designated enemy and say "those are people, not threats," the political foundation of war spending cracks.

That is not naive. It is the actual mechanism by which every previous reduction in organized violence has occurred. The abolition of slavery, the end of apartheid, the peace processes in Northern Ireland and Colombia — all of them required a critical mass of people to stop seeing the other side as other. The economics followed the perception shift, not the other way around.

War economies depend on the maintenance of othering. The maintenance of othering depends on the prevention of recognition. And recognition — the simple, devastating act of seeing another human being as human — is what Law 1 is about.

Follow the money far enough and you always end up at the same question: who counts as a person?

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``` Threat Perception | v Defense Spending <----> Defense Industry Revenue | | v v Political Incentives Lobbying & Media | | v v Othering Narratives <----- Think Tanks & Commentary | v Public Fear | v Threat Perception (loop continues) ```

Every node in this loop reinforces every other node. Breaking the loop requires intervention at multiple points simultaneously. No single action is sufficient. But every action that reduces othering weakens the entire system.

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1. The budget exercise. Look up your country's military spending. Then look up what the same amount could fund in healthcare, education, or poverty reduction. Sit with the comparison. Not to make yourself angry — anger is easy and cheap. To make yourself literate about the choice being made on your behalf.

2. The enemy humanization practice. Pick a country that your government currently frames as a threat. Spend one hour learning about ordinary life in that country — not the politics, not the military, but what people eat, how they raise their children, what they worry about, what makes them laugh. Notice what happens to the threat narrative when you do this. It doesn't survive contact with specificity.

3. The "who profits" question. Next time you hear a political argument for increased military spending, ask: who profits from this specific expenditure? Not in a conspiratorial way. In a factual way. Which companies hold the contracts? What are their revenues? Who are their lobbyists? This is public information. Use it.

4. The alternative security exercise. Write down the five biggest threats to your safety and your family's safety. Then ask: how many of them are addressable through military spending? For most people, the honest answer is zero or one. The real threats — illness, economic instability, climate change, loneliness, mental health — require different kinds of spending. The exercise makes the mismatch visible.

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