I have an old friend who retired from a Lockheed Martin about 10 years ago. He says that, if he had to do it again, he would have gone into civilian electronics in late 1991, after Gorbachev was ousted from power.

He remembers asking again and again during the 1990s: the Soviets are gone, why are they coming after us with all these huge projects? Who is the big enemy now?

As H.L. Mencken once put it: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and thus clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

To quote the Dire Straits tune “Industrial Disease”: “They wanna have a war to keep us on our knees. They wanna have a war to keep their factories.”

Our overlords are always dreaming up new enemies. There’s big money in it. And what better way to control people than to keep them perpetually in fear over totally imaginary threats.

Great article by Michael Rozeff.