The role of the military-industrial complex has dominated the organization of global capitalism throughout the 20th century. A few things need to be taken into account here.
First, the military-industrial complex is the recipient of vast amounts of financial resources that, to a large extent, operate completely outside any market dynamic of supply and demand, but also evade almost all acountability. Military spending is paid for by taxpayers, either directly or through state debt. In both cases, those who own shares in any aspect of the military-industrial complex (not limited to the manufacturing of weapons, bombs, and ammunition) are likely to also benefit from state debts, as they have the means to purchase government bonds and profit from the state having to pay interest on those loans. Hence, the military-industrial complex can certainly be understood as serving the interests of wealth accumulation for a very small segment of the population, precisely because it does not operate within a “free market” governed by supply and demand. it is therefore no wonder that many law-makers are also shareholders in this industry.
Second, however, we cannot simply restrict this analysis to the interests of wealth accumulation. Military force is also an essential component in securing the conditions under which wealth accumulation can take place. While these could all be summarized as “interests in reproducing power relations,” it makes sense to distinguish between the direct repressive aspects of military force—i.e., as the means of violence to secure territorial control under sovereign rule—and the indirect ideological aspects of manipulating desires and beliefs. Military warfare is not merely a matter of blowing things up; there is an ideological fetish associated with the exercise of violence that exceeds the pragmatic pursuits of strategy and tactics. It is thus not surprising that members of the IDF recorded themselves committing war crimes in Gaza, as these acts expressed a sadistic desire anchored in the libidinal infrastructure of military superiority. It is also for this reason that the symbolic gestures of the Israeli judiciary to prosecute a few prison guards for crimes against humanity triggered collective outrage among many Israeli citizens: the moral justification of their sadistic libidinal “truth” had been called into question, triggering a deep neurosis—the flip side of their self-valorized moral superiority.
Third, alongside this dual structure, which would fit perfectly within a traditional historical-materialist account, the expansion of the military-industrial complex now affects an ever-increasing number of aspects of everyday life. It colonizes all operations, for example, in the realms of medicine and virology, biochemistry and agriculture, and digitalization and artificial intelligence. Every operation is reappropriated. This is the movement of pure war: it does not retract; it expands and absorbs everything into what it is. This is the movement of the war machine within the state apparatus.
As Deleuze and Guattari have argued, the war machine and the state apparatus may be described as opposites, but it is very clear that they can also amplify each other. The state apparatus would never be able to establish durable territorial sovereignty without invoking a war machine to assert the limits of immunitas. However, the war machine is never merely instrumental; it has its own conatus, and that is to infiltrate and expand. The war machine is a virulent, parasitical force that feeds off the state: it requires cheap resources—energy, raw materials, information, libidinal desire. When the state apparatus invokes the war machine, it has to pay a price.
The price currently being paid is the loss of control over the war machine itself. The use of AI in developing cybernetic systems of self-regulation has now at least potentially enabled fully automated military operations capable of identifying and selecting their own targets. The war machine expands by reducing the ability of the state apparatus to rein it in. AI-supported drones do not follow constitutional laws; they have no problem exposing the fundamental denial of human rights and obliterating any remnants of checks and balances in the name of the sanctity of human life. The lies of the state apparatus are now becoming the means by which it is being undone by the war machine.
The war machine may soon cease entirely to obey the obscene masters of the kakistocratic state apparatus. Then the question of what rich white men want will become obsolete; the only question that matters will be what the war machine wants: more resources, more energy, more libidinal desire, more power, etc. The war machine will capitalize on the tendencies of deterritorialization embedded in the desires for wealth, power, and admiration and use them to destroy everything that stands in its way—including the state apparatus itself.
This is what is currently unfolding in the USA, Ukraine, Yemen, and the small pieces of land formerly known as Palestine, as well as in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is what NATO wants to happen to Europe, as it extorts its people to sacrifice their needs and interests for the sake of the war machine.
Just as the world might have taken climate change seriously, the war machine struck against the international state apparatus—first with COVID-19, then with the exacerbation of warfare and genocide, and finally with the electoral victories of Trump, Musk, and similar parasites (such as the Labour Party in the UK and the “Christian” Union in Germany). Nobody is talking about climate change anymore as we accelerate toward the destruction of planetary life as we know it. This is exactly what the war machine needs: an onslaught not only on every mechanism of control within the state apparatus, but on the whole of human life itself.
Disaffected Sociology 
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