GHALEB CACHALIA | Wars persist when profit trumps shared sacrifice

In Gaza, entire neighbourhoods are erased in weeks. In Ukraine, artillery consumption outpaces production across Europe. In the Red Sea, commercial shipping routes are militarised while insurance premiums surge. War today is not only a geopolitical event. It’s a functioning market.

This raises an important question. Are wars still fought to achieve political ends, or have they become systems that sustain themselves, with people as inputs rather than the purpose?

Modern conflict appears to run on two parallel economies. The first is an economy of sacrifice, paid in blood, trauma and broken societies, overwhelmingly by those with the least political power. The second is an economy of extraction, available to those with proximity to capital, contracts and decision-making.

These structural systems operate simultaneously, and with less friction than at any point in modern history. The pattern is not new. From JP Morgan financing Allied procurement during the World War 1 to the vast contractor networks that followed 9/11, war has always created opportunities for those positioned closest to its financial architecture.

What has changed is the sophistication of extraction and the diminishing visibility of sacrifice. And, the class composition of who fights, how long wars are sustained, how profits are captured, and who actually feels the cost.

In earlier eras war imposed itself broadly: conscription, rationing, shared loss. That distribution of pain acted as a political brake. Today that brake has disappeared. The burden of fighting is concentrated among a narrow, disproportionately working-class cohort for whom military service remains one of the only viable ladders of mobility.

Meanwhile, the professional and political classes, who authorise and narrate these conflicts, remain structurally insulated from their consequences. That separation is not incidental; it is what allows wars to persist.

This dislocation produces a deeper political irony. In the US figures like President Donald Trump have drawn durable support from precisely those communities most likely to supply the soldiers, promising restoration, protection and national strength. Yet the architecture within which these wars — tax structures, contracting regimes, financial markets — continue to reward those already closest to capital and power.

The result is a cycle in which the same constituencies are asked to bear the human cost of conflict while remaining largely excluded from its economic upside. When the experience of war is no longer shared but hierarchically stratified, the political pressure to end it weakens. Extraction, in turn, accelerates without friction.

In earlier wars that visibility imposed limits. World War 1 dragged entire societies into its machinery; the cost was immediate and inescapable. By the time of the Vietnam war, the burden had already begun to narrow, falling disproportionately on those without access to education or deferment. The anger that followed was not only about the war itself, but about who was made to fight it.

Today that pressure has largely disappeared. The shift to all-volunteer forces in the US and its allies has transformed the political economy of war. Conflict is now fought by a narrow demographic, while the broader public experiences it at a distance, through screens, markets and political rhetoric rather than shared sacrifice. There is no draft, no rationing, no universal disruption. The last democratic constraint on war has weakened, except for the proxies.

At the same time the mechanisms of extraction have expanded and become more opaque. Private contractors such as Halliburton and Blackwater operated at enormous scale in Iraq and Afghanistan, frequently under no-bid contracts. That model has not disappeared; it has evolved. Today the beneficiaries of conflict are as likely to be embedded in supply chains, logistics, intelligence or financial positioning as in munitions manufacturing itself.

The modern war economy does not require proximity to the battlefield. It requires proximity to information, policy, and capital. This is why contemporary conflicts can persist with such limited domestic resistance in the countries that enable or sustain them.

In Gaza, the human cost is immediate and devastating, yet politically distant for many of the states most materially involved. In Ukraine, vast financial commitments are made with broad public support, but without the kind of shared sacrifice that historically forced political reckoning. Across the Middle East, proxy dynamics allow states to engage in prolonged confrontation without always absorbing the full cost of direct war.

The modern war economy does not require proximity to the battlefield. It requires proximity to information, policy, and capital. This is why contemporary conflicts can persist with such limited domestic resistance in the countries that enable or sustain them.

Wars persist more easily when their costs are outsourced and when the two economies, sacrifice and extraction, no longer check each other but reinforce one another.

In earlier empires, from the campaigns of Genghis Khan to the Mughal territorial expansions of Akbar, those who decided on war were far closer to its execution and its risks. Extraction existed, often brutally, but it remained tied to land, stability and the immediate survival of the ruling order. By contrast, modern war allows a far greater distance between decision, profit and consequence.

There are, of course, moments when war retains clear moral purpose. The fight against fascism in World War 2 remains the most obvious example. But even there the co-existence of public sacrifice and private gain was not absent, only less visible. The US emerged from the war in dominant market positions that structured decades of American capitalism.

While GM was making military vehicles for the Allies, its German subsidiary Opel was making trucks for the Wehrmacht. As IBM was assisting the US military with its own needs, its German subsidiary sold punch-card systems for Nazi logistics. This was not the marginal setup of little firms but the very essence of transnational capital in a world at war with itself.

Literature and film have long understood this, often more clearly than policy. From All Quiet on the Western Front to Catch-22 the recurring insight is not simply that war is brutal, but that institutions preserve themselves and render individuals expendable. Wilfred Owen stripped away the language of honour to reveal industrialised slaughter; Slaughterhouse-Five dissolved heroism into absurdity and inevitability.

On screen, Paths of Glory exposes a command structure that sacrifices men to protect its own reputation, while Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket depict war less as strategy than as a system that consumes meaning and manufactures dehumanisation. Even The Deer Hunter shows how the costs of war settle far from the battlefield in the lives that must continue afterwards.

Across a century of work the diagnosis barely changes. The rhetoric evolves, the technology advances, but the underlying logic endures. What once read as critique now reads, at times, like description.

War is no longer only a clash of nations or ideologies. It is also a structure that distributes risk downward and concentrates reward upward. The further these two dynamics drift apart, the easier it becomes for conflict to endure.

The question is no longer simply why wars begin. It is why, under these conditions, they would be expected to end.

• Cachalia, a businessman and management consultant, is a former DA MP and shadow public enterprises minister, and chaired De Beers Namibia.