Ironmongers are also a much smaller - less important - share of the US economic pie than they used to be, back when US manufacturing was a much larger share of the economy. Now, granted, even with their lessened share of economy, they still of course carry outsized influence politically as proxy arms of the Pentagon.
As recently as the first Gulf War, Microsoft (for example) was a tiny speck compared to the military industrial complex. In five years or so, Microsoft's annual sales will be equal to about 25% of the annual US military budget (not meant to be apples to apples, it merely points out the massively increased scale of big tech vs eg 1990; Microsoft's sales for fiscal 1990 were... $1.18 billion).
To put it into tangible dollar terms:
Apple, by itself, generates approximately twice the annual operating profit of all US defense contractors combined.
Apple benefits from calm globalization, not war.
Big tech humiliates the military industrial complex on generating profits. And big tech is still expanding, whereas most major sectors are not. Which is to say, big tech money looks like it's going to double in size again in the next ten years (7% * 10 years).
AAPL + MSFT + GOOGL + FB + INTC + AMZN = ~$220-$230 billion in annual operating profit for 2020.
There are three trillion dollar corporations in there (Amazon is just shy of it; and FB will join them in that club within a few years). The rest of the world has one, which isn't really a corporation, in Aramco. It's $5.5 trillion in combined market cap. The Tokyo stock exchange is the third most valuable exchange by total market cap in the world, at about $5.5 to $5.7 trillion (the next two are US exchanges).
So digital giants have more lobbyist potential (in financial terms only, they cannot compete in massive 'job creation' in a districts all around the US, especially blue collar jobs) than the whole MIC, and the incentives to use it to counter lobbyist potential of warmongers. Why don't they use it for actual lobbying-for-global-piece?
The "Arab Spring" was just another power projection project, you only need to examine how many so-called NGOs that ran the social media campaigns were directly or indirectly funded by intelligence agencies.
But more to the point of the GP, to think that only the military industrial complex profits from American global dominance is incredibly naive. All the U.S. interventionism in South America for the last century (i.e. armed insurrection against democracies to install fascist dictatorships) was about opening markets and resources for exploitation by American (civil) corporations.
You have a good point about tech getting bigger. What worries me is that tech starting to profit more from war. Surveillance , GIS, AI, chips, robotics... are already a huge area and expanding. It is not a stretch to imagine a scenario like facebook signing a deal to provide intelligence, google or amazon providing infrastructure.
War is still highly profitable for oil companies (like Aramco) as long as they can get oil fields for cheap, set the price for oil and poor people (central banks) pay for the costs.
In the next 20 years both oil companies and central banks are getting distrupted, at the same time a brave new world is coming...
As recently as the first Gulf War, Microsoft (for example) was a tiny speck compared to the military industrial complex. In five years or so, Microsoft's annual sales will be equal to about 25% of the annual US military budget (not meant to be apples to apples, it merely points out the massively increased scale of big tech vs eg 1990; Microsoft's sales for fiscal 1990 were... $1.18 billion).
To put it into tangible dollar terms:
Apple, by itself, generates approximately twice the annual operating profit of all US defense contractors combined.
Apple benefits from calm globalization, not war.
Big tech humiliates the military industrial complex on generating profits. And big tech is still expanding, whereas most major sectors are not. Which is to say, big tech money looks like it's going to double in size again in the next ten years (7% * 10 years).
AAPL + MSFT + GOOGL + FB + INTC + AMZN = ~$220-$230 billion in annual operating profit for 2020.
There are three trillion dollar corporations in there (Amazon is just shy of it; and FB will join them in that club within a few years). The rest of the world has one, which isn't really a corporation, in Aramco. It's $5.5 trillion in combined market cap. The Tokyo stock exchange is the third most valuable exchange by total market cap in the world, at about $5.5 to $5.7 trillion (the next two are US exchanges).