Charles Lewis Quotes

War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditures.

Of the top 10 companies who got contracts from the Iraq war, all of them had contributed to the Republicans and almost all had ex Pentagon admirals and generals on their staffs.

... a caricature of Mr. Military Industrial Complex.

Corruption is a greater danger to us in Afghanistan than the Taliban…. It starts with President Karzai and goes all the way down. It’s just rotten from top to bottom over there.

The defense budget is more than a piggy bank for people who want to get busy beating swords into pork barrels.

The military market is based on human folly, not normal market precepts. Human folly goes up and down, but it always exists. It's depths have never been plumbed.

The wonder of this month's military procurement scandal is that it can still scandalize us. The practices that are being exposed—the revolving door between government and industry, the mutual backscratching between the military and the companies that build the weapons—aren't abuses of the system. They are the system.

There are no straight line projections of cost in a war.

Were the expense of war to be defrayed always by a revenue raised within the year ... wars would in general be more speedily concluded, and less wantonly undertaken

Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.

… war is a matter not so much of arms as of money

It may safely be asserted that the art of war will soon be reduced to a simple question of expenditure and credit, and that the largest purse will be the strongest arm.

Like all wars, conflicts bring on great opportunities for business.

The military budget is simply an enormous pork barrel of special privilege, the privileges taking the form of windfall profits, of no-risk profits and, most importantly, of enormous outlays of capital supplied by the Pentagon to arms contractors.

The administration has a disturbing pattern of behavior when it comes to budgeting not only for the ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan but also for military requirements not directly related to these conflicts.

The U.S. army confirmed that it gave a lucrative fire fighting contract in Iraq to the firm once run by the Vice President Dick Cheney without any competitive bidding. When asked if this could be conceived as Cheney's friends profiting from the war, the spokesman said 'Yes.'

The thing that really struck me was how many firms that we think of as strictly civilian had ties to the Pentagon. Companies like Apple, Starbucks, Oakley the sunglasses manufacturer. Even Google, and a lot of big corporations like PepsiCo, Colgate-Palmolive, and Nestle, that you don't normally think of as defense contractors.

The old saying that war is a racket has taken on an even more shameful meaning.

The arms race is worse than it ever was, the dumping of creation down a military rat hole is worse than it ever was, the wars across the earth are worse than they ever were.

War has had a beneficial consequence for our industry.

War and preparation for war is not a matter of national honor and national defense, but a matter of profit for the few.

The arms race is one of the greatest curses on the human race and the harm it inflicts on the poor is more than can be endured

Endless money forms the sinews of war. Nervi belli pecunia infinita.

The ideal weapons system is built in 435 congressional districts, and it doesn't matter whether it works or not.

Generals know nothing about the economics of war.