The military industrial complex is actually very simple. The entire shtick, the entire shenanigans of the military-industrial simpletons is nice world, shame if something happened to it. The mafia business model, known to blue-collar criminals as a bust-out and to white-collar criminals as an LBO (leverage buyout).

The Mafia Model

The blue-collar criminal Henry Hill explained it well enough in Goodfellas,

Alternately you can reference Anthony Soprano in his titular series.

A white-collar bust-out describes the military industrial complex from the imperial perspective. It's the art of the steal, looting the imperial treasury by losing imperial wars. They don't want the Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Ukrainian governments to succeed, they just want them to bleed (money) then move onto the next hypocrisy. It's ultimately the good faith and credit of the US Republic that's being busted out, used to fund a war machine that doesn't work except for laundering money back into the Beltway Mafia.

If you didn't watch the videos, I'll repeat. A bust-out works where the mafia takes control of your restaurant (say), runs up bills on the joints credit, steals or sells goods out the back, and never pays the debt back. When it all goes to shit, they burn the place down for the insurance money, or just leave. This is broadly what private-equity (La Cosa Nostra for less spicy whites) has done to the US as a whole, ever since Ike warned about the military industrial complex. They took control of the American Republic after World War II, ran up forever war bills on the joints credit, overcharge or just steal money out the unauditable Pentagon, and never pay the mounting debt back. Now it's all going shit and they're burning the place down, dumping and pumping the entire US economy in a last orgy of insider trading.

Cockleburs

But the bust-out metaphor only tells you what's happening from the perspective of the imperial core. What does the bust-out of the American military mean to the rest of the world, where the bombs fall? For that we'll use cockleburs.

For the angle on that angle, we can turn to the white-collar criminal O'Henry, whose short stories I devoured as a kid. In his short story Shoes, he describes a Central American town where no one wears shoes because they were unnecessary, and the American consul who makes them necessary with one telegram (spoiler alert). The telegram reads, in its entirety,

TO PINKNEY DAWSON, Dalesburg, Ala.

Draft for $100 comes to you next mail. Ship me immediately 500 pounds stiff, dry cockleburrs. New use here in arts. Market price twenty cents pound. Further orders likely. Rush.

The story ends here, but as with all O'Henry twists, you get the jist. The American Consul makes the town so uninhabitable without shoes (cockleburs hurt to step on) that they have to buy the shoes he just happens to produce to reduce the pain he introduced. In the same way America spreads chaos across the world in order to sell more arms. The more chaos the better. They're not bothered by this at all, cockleburs is the business model.

America acts so troubled by the problems in the world, but that's like a soap company acting troubled by dirt. It's just advertising, and CNN and BBC get their cut of the blood money accordingly. America is the world's biggest arms dealer and they create the world's biggest problems and embiggen them through privatized propaganda. They create both supply and demand, forming a vicious circle that drives their business cycle. America wants to have its hands full, and they don't care if the blood washes off, that's for bleeding hearts like Lady Macbeth, who should go kill themselves. The more blood the better, blood money is the business model.

Marketing

From this perspective, all the Autocrats™, Terrorists®, and Conflicts©, are not ‘problems to be solved’ any more than dirtiness is a problem to be solved for Dove. The ‘threats’ are, in fact, the center of the whole marketing campaign, and the threats themselves are manufactured. There's always been ‘oriental despots’ everywhere, but what does that have to do with someone in America, whose treasury you're trying to loot? Nothing really, unless marketing puts them on the mental map before the bombs do. The more problems the better when you're in the ‘solutions’ business. Luckily both demand and supply can be manufactured, if you're a terrible human.

It's also much better if your solutions don't actually work. The bombs just need to look like they work, so the suckers keep buying more. Thus America creates more terrorism everywhere they go to ‘eliminate terrorism’ (like in AFRICOM). Why the fuck would they want to eliminate terrorism? This would be like Dove eliminating dirt. They're homicidal, not suicidal.

America loses repeatedly to nouns (terrorism, drugs, poverty) because they're ultimately about numbers, everything else is just marketing. There is no sincerity in the American news any more than during the commercials. They are no more sincere about human rights and democracy than Coke is sincere about you having a good time with your friends. They're just trying to sell you something, death in different dosages.

It's really blood simple, a term Joel Coen used for a movie I didn't watch, based on a book I haven't read. Coen told Time Out, “It’s an expression he used to describe what happens to somebody psychologically once they’ve committed murder. They go ‘blood simple’ in the slang sense of ‘simple,’ meaning crazy. But it’s left up to the audience to ponder the implications; they’re never spelled out in the film itself.” America was founded on murder, they live and die by murder, and when they inherited the British ‘license to kill’ post WWII, they went fully blood simple.

What undoes the military industrial complex is not the blood, however, but the simple. American weapons, once honed on actual adversaries in World Wars have been unhoned massacring defenseless civilians. They've gotten really good at bombing people without air defenses and now find themselves losing to actual peers in Russia, actual badasses in Yemen, and actually unable to face Iran and China directly. The military industrial complex never had to work (as mentioned, it's better if it doesn't) but it had to appear to work, and now appearances are no longer deceiving. The White Empire (NATO, all those bitches) has lost a huge land battle to Russia, a huge naval battle to Yemen, and no longer has air superiority over its most superior colony, 'Israel'.

Whereas it took America decades to lose in Vietnam and Afghanistan, they're losing in years to Russia and Iran, far too little time to run the scam. Now it actually looks like a scam and, worst of all, they're expending too many munitions to even resupply them. The thing with a bust-out is that you actually cannibalize the business, which is what America has done to the military industrial complex. Whereas they used to actually manufacture shells and ships, now they barely manufacture shit. They got fat on 10 year contracts delivering million dollar missiles that don't work and are stuck when facing skinny Yemen in a hot war.

Even if anyone was buying the bullshit of American military superiority anymore, they're not selling it. The stocks might go up for a bit, but they don't have stock. They are at, as discussed, the end of the bust-out. America can still print money but they can't print bullets, and now their credit's looking shaky also. What was once a manufactured fraud has become a pure financial fraud. The deranged demand for war is still there, but Empire can no longer arrange the production to complete the vicious loop, they were losing wars forever, but now they're losing them too fast. They can't keep up the illusion. Thus the vicious circle becomes a death spiral. They're going down more ugly than ever, but make no mistake, America is in the midst of a long retreat, not a resurgence.

All that's left is the dénouement of every bust-out. As Henry Hill said, “and then finally, when there's nothing left, and when you can't borrow another buck from the bank [coming] or buy another case of booze, you bust the joint out. You light a match.” And thus finally, from this perspective, Trump is not some aberration. He is the historical arsonist, arriving right on schedule.