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War Profiteering

The War Profiteering Prevention Act of 2007 was introduced first on April 25, 2007, but was never enacted into law.

Oil Companies

Since the United States' invasion of Iraq, the largest oil companies have increased their profits to $132 billion dollars in revenue. Former Vice president Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, amassed a total of $2.5 billion by financing the construction of military bases and infrastructure rebuilding.

Weapons Manufacturing
With ease of massive manufacturing in the Industrial Revolution, the foundations for creating weapons on a massive scale was introduced. The introduction of interchangeable parts and pre-manufactured models was popularized to assemble muskets, making it easier for unskilled workers to produce larger numbers of weapons at a much lower cost. Before the industrial revolution, gun-making was considered a skilled craft as most weapons were handmade, thus making it hard to repair and replace parts.

In 1798, American inventor Eli Whitney received a government contract to manufacture 10,000 muskets in less than two years. After failing to produce a single musket, he was called to Washington to defend his expenditure of the treasury funds before a committee that included both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Believing to demonstrate the ingenuity of interchangeable parts, Whitney earned widespread support and has been incorrectly credited with inventing the idea of interchangeable parts. However Merritt Roe Smith concluded that this demonstration was staged by marking the parts beforehand, so they were not as interchangeable as he made them seem. Eventually Whitney was able to accomplish his goal of 10,000 muskets with interchangeable parts at a relatively low cost in the next 8 years, and later produced more than 15,000 in the following 4 years.

Worlds largest arms exporters - Atomic Age
 * Additive Manufacturing and its Implications for Military Ethics
 * Worker leadership: America's secret weapon in the battle for industrial competitiveness
 * Arms production in the Third World
 * The atomic bomb
 * Nuclear Arms Race