war explained

the wallstreetpapi journal

Good morning squad,

I never really fully understood war. Sure I played Call of Duty when I was a kid and I can name you the big wars —> WW1, WW2, Vietnam. But it always felt like a never ending list of events with no logic connecting them. So I wanted to go back to the actual origin and understand what is really driving it.

At its core war is about resources. In 2026 that looks like oil, semiconductor chips, territory with access to ports, fertile land. But it has always been about resources. The specific prize changes every era. The logic never does.

And that resource logic shows up in three forms.

Greed. Survival. Fear. →

Greed looks like King Joffrey from Game of Thrones. That kid terrorized everyone around him, started conflicts for no real reason, and inflicted damage that always outweighed any actual benefit. He killed Ned Stark over a power trip dressed up as treason. Pure greed. The calculation was never about winning something worth having. It was about domination for its own sake.

Survival is simpler. If your village is starving and there is a village two miles away sitting next to a river with fresh water and full crop fields, you might make a decision that is hard to defend morally but easy to understand logically. You are not evil. You are desperate. And desperate people do math differently.

Fear is trickier because the threat is not always directly on your doorstep yet. This is why people always ask why the US seems to be involved in every conflict around the world. A big part of that answer is fear, specifically the fear of what happens if a Nazi gains enough power and nobody stops them early. You send Brad Pitt and the Inglorious Basterds every single time to stop the evil before it reaches your front door.

And there will never be a full kumbaya moment between everyone on earth where this stops. Different ideologies, different religions, different interests, conflict is permanent. Unless aliens show up. Because then we are automatically on the same team.

war is not new→

War is also not a new concept. It has been around for over 13,000 years. There is actual physical evidence in the Nile Valley, mass graves of skeletons with arrowheads lodged in bones and blade marks on skulls. The reason? Access to a fertile stretch of land along the river. The prize was food and water. The logic was survival.

Before agriculture humans were hunter-gatherers with limited resources and no fixed location. Conflict existed but it stayed small. Think about it like this, if you have your squad and I have my squad and neither of us has much, the math of fighting each other does not really work. Five versus five over almost nothing. The stakes are too low.

Then agriculture happened. Humans figured out how to grow food, settled down, and built cities. That created surplus. And surplus means the prize got bigger. Now if you come into my village and take everything, crops, location, workers, infrastructure, that is not a small score anymore. That is the Powerball. The math of conflict completely changes when the prize changes.

Once you understand the fight for resources, war really breaks down into those three forms. And once you see it you cannot unsee it.

history of war →

I started reading about Rome and kept waiting for a different answer. Never came. Same math, bigger army. Every new territory meant more grain, more tax revenue, more slaves, more resources flowing back to Rome. Expansion paid. The moment it stopped paying the empire started dying. Every emperor knew it. So they kept going. Greed and survival wearing the same uniform across five centuries.

Then I got to the Mongols and thought okay this one has to be different. Genghis Khan builds the largest contiguous empire in human history, it has to be about something deeper right. Then I found out the Silk Road ran directly through all of it. Every good moving between East and West, spices, silk, gold, passed through Mongol territory. They were not warriors. They were the most aggressive toll booth operators in human history. Same math.

The British Empire is where it really clicked. Because Britain had a sophisticated justification, civilization, Christianity, the white man’s burden. Real ideology. Real belief. And underneath all of it was cotton from India, tea from China, sugar from the Caribbean, diamonds from Africa.

Every colony was a resource extraction operation dressed in a flag. And here is the part that got me, when the resources stopped being worth the cost of maintaining control, the empire dissolved. Not because Britain found morality. Because the math changed.

The ideology is always real. And it is always sitting on top of a resource calculation that was there first.

Now watch the same logic run through the last hundred years of American history.

American war stories→

World War I was not started by an assassination. That was the match. The gunpowder was decades of European empires colliding over trade routes, colonies, and economic dominance. Germany was industrializing too fast and threatening Britain’s grip on global commerce.

Somebody was always going to pull that trigger. America entered late but learned something permanent, war at scale needs financing at scale. They borrowed directly from the American public through Liberty Bonds.

Schoolchildren bought bonds. Neighborhoods competed over who raised more. The government had successfully turned an entire generation into creditors of the war. That psychology never left.

World War II underneath all the ideology was a resource war. Japan had no domestic oil. Their entire Pacific expansion was about securing oil fields and raw materials. When the US cut off their supply in 1941 Japan had one real choice, retreat or escalate. They escalated.

Germany’s push into Russia was the same logic, grain in Ukraine, oil in the Caucasus. The ideology was real. So was the math underneath it. And when it ended, Bretton Woods made the dollar the world’s reserve currency. America did not just win the war. They won the financial architecture of the planet.

But that architecture needed protecting. In 1971 Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard and for a moment the whole system looked shaky. So the US made a deal with Saudi Arabia. Price oil in dollars globally and America provides military protection in return. That became the petrodollar system.

Overnight every country on earth that needed oil had to hold dollars to buy it. Which meant demand for the dollar was permanently baked into the global economy. Which meant America could run deficits that would have broken any other country.

Every time you see the US military involved in the Middle East, that is at least partially what is being protected. Not just oil. The system that requires the world to use your currency to buy it.

Vietnam cost $840 billion in today’s dollars, financed almost entirely through deficit spending. Fifty-eight thousand Americans died over a theory, that if one country fell to communism the whole region would follow.

The war ended. The debt did not. It became the inflation of the 1970s. The soldiers came home. The financial hangover lasted a decade.

The Gulf War was about oil. Iraq in 2003 sits on the fifth largest proven reserves on the planet. I will not tell you what to think. I will just tell you those are the facts.

Now here is the part nobody teaches.

Somebody always profits.

war economics→

World War II pulled America out of the Great Depression. Ford, GM, and Boeing converted to war production. GDP surged. Unemployment vanished. The sacrifice was real and so was the economic engine running underneath it.

When Eisenhower left office in 1961 he warned the country about the military-industrial complex, the financial relationship between the defense industry, the Pentagon, and Congress. He was not being paranoid. He was describing an incentive structure. Who profits also has influence over whether wars start and how long they run.

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics. Hundreds of billions in annual revenue. Stock prices that historically climb when conflict escalates. All publicly traded. You can look it up yourself tonight.

And remember that generation the government trained to buy Liberty Bonds out of patriotic duty. After WWII that habit did not disappear. It became the foundation of the modern bond market. It became the psychology that government debt is the safest asset in the world.

Today that idea lives inside your money market fund, your Roth IRA, your 401k. You are probably holding US treasuries right now. Which means when the government funds a war through deficit spending and issues debt to pay for it, you are the bondholder.

You are on both sides of this trade simultaneously. Your paycheck gets eroded by the inflation the spending creates and your portfolio holds the instrument they used to create it.

Every war gets funded through debt. Bonds. Deficit spending. Money printing. That debt does not disappear. It becomes inflation. It becomes your rent going up. It becomes your paycheck not stretching the way it should. I think about my parents working constantly and never quite getting ahead. Part of that answer has a very long history behind it.

The soldier pays with their body. The taxpayer pays with their wallet. The bondholder gets paid.

Now look at today.

final take→

Ukraine. Taiwan. The South China Sea. US defense budgets hitting record highs. Europe rearming for the first time in a generation. The framework is not history. It is the news you scrolled past this morning. Russia moves on Ukraine and you are watching a land war over grain fields, ports, and NATO’s eastern boundary, the same geography that has triggered conflict in that region for centuries.

China circles Taiwan and you are watching a technology and trade war wearing a military uniform. Taiwan produces the majority of the world’s advanced semiconductors. Whoever controls that island has leverage over the entire global economy. This is not a territorial dispute. It is a resource war for the 21st century. The resource just changed from oil to chips.

Same three drivers. Every single time.

Greed. Survival. Fear.

From two groups throwing hands over a river in Egypt 13,000 years ago to superpowers circling a semiconductor island in the Pacific today, the prize changes every era. The logic running underneath it never does.

Strip everything back and the structure is always the same. Wars start over resources. They are funded through debt that lands on regular people years later. And somewhere in every conflict someone’s balance sheet is getting better while the bombs are falling.

One generation’s unfinished business. Next generation’s problem. Every single time.

The math never changes. Only the weapons and the balance sheets do.

LFG.

Love you squad,

Gabriel | wallstreetpapi