While acknowledging his great evils, future strategists and historians will one day likely recognize Osama bin Laden’s strategic acumen. With minimal resources or technology, Osama bin Laden managed to create immense socioeconomic damage and nearly destroy both of his main enemies—the “godless” Communist Soviet Union and the Zionism-supporting United States. Bin Laden achieved this using only one simple weapon, a basic understanding of economics, and thus, the immense harm that military spending does.

A simple economic concept is all we need to understand why most military spending is so detrimental. Every living order—whether it’d be a single cell, or a collection of them like a human being, or a collection of humans like a community or a company—is in a constant cycle of the production and consumption of wealth. A surgeon produces wealth in terms of surgeries, which he exchanges for money, which he then exchanges for the wealth he consumes in terms of housing, energy, food, and so on.

Production increases the world’s economic pie of wealth and order, while consumption reduces it. If the government taxes people and uses the money to hire 100 laborers to work on digging holes, only to then refill them, the laborers have not produced or increased the economic pie in terms of useful wealth, yet they trade their wages for—and then consume—goods and services (civilian goods that lead to life, enjoyment, etc.). This leads to an overall net shrinking of the economic pie to the detriment of the taxpayers who were deprived of the wealth which they sacrificed a part of their lives to create. In order to realize overall economic growth, action and social cooperation must be coordinated to facilitate more production than consumption.