That Smedley Butler sort of arrangement was definitely the idea through the 1950s (and arguably was less disgusting than the racist murder that previously motivated the USA military on "the frontier" and in Philippines), but more recently the resource extraction firms are often simply outbid by the war firms. After all, Chevron has to spend most of its money getting oil out of the ground and into a gas pump. Raytheon, on the other hand, doesn't have to produce weapons that perform well by any measure, (...which may be why our military since 1946 hasn't been fit to shine the shoes of our military just before then?) so they have a lot more to dole out to politicians, media firms, and think tanks. It's not as though we got any valuable contracts from the mess we made of Libya.
