War for Fun and Profit in Literature.
- In book 48 of Animorphs, Visser Three tried to start a war between America and China to weaken the Earth so that the Yeerks could win in all-out war.
- Comrade Death features an Arms Dealer who successfully merges the world's arms suppliers into a single corporation, one specializing in chemical weapons. He doesn't start any wars himself—they come along without his help—but fear of his gasses and the need for his gas masks to counter them help spread paranoia and militarization and lead to more sales.
- The Draco Tavern: In "War Movie", Rick Schumann and a female soldier encounter an alien Drowning My Sorrows before returning to his homeworld as a bankrupt failure. Apparently a spacecraft from his species came to Earth in the middle of World War II. Amazed at what they were seeing, they filmed as much of the action as they could from orbit and returned to their world to sell it for a modest profit. They then raised capital to finance a First Contact mission and returned to Earth, planting secret cameras on the ground to get even better footage when World War III broke out. It never did — worse, the psychological and material changes caused by First Contact meant that humans no longer had any major conflicts other than an occasional riot or act of terrorism. Afterwards the soldier asks whether they should tell people about this. Schumann advises her to keep quiet, otherwise some unscrupulous dictatorship might get the idea of starting a war in exchange for a percentage of the profits.
- In The Fallen World, Elkisian Senator Charles Neumen's family money is almost depleted. In order to refill his family's coffers, he starts harassing the Asarian Kingdom's newest border city to ignite a war between the Kingdom and the Republic. This threatens to drag the whole continent into it but as long as he can make a profit off of it he doesn't care.
- The Order seeks to plunge the world into a massive war or several simultaneous wars so they can take over in the resulting power vacuum and restore humanity to how they think it should be. They manipulate Senator Charles to provide the spark while they prepare to assassinate world leaders.
- Forest Kingdom: In the Hawk & Fisher spinoff series' book 5 (Guard Against Dishonor), the lead villain of the book plans to use the super-chacal drug to create a war between his country and others, all so he can make money off the drug and other things in the war.
- Several novels by Frederick Forsyth:
- In The Negotiator, the 1989 novel unrelated to the film, the villains attempt to restart the Cold War because their weapons contracts are being canceled because the USA doesn't need them anymore.
- The Fourth Protocol, though in that case the plan was to allow the head of the British Labour Party to avert the crisis at the last minute; the resulting popularity would enable him to win the election, whereupon he would be toppled by a Soviet-controlled communist faction inside his own party.
- The Dogs of War is quite anvilicious about the role big business had in inciting warfare. The plot itself has a Corrupt Corporate Executive funding the overthrow of a small African state in order to get sole control of a mountain of platinum.
- The Castigator from the Grey Knights novel Dark Adeptus claims that war is its sole purpose and one it enjoys, thus leading it to ally with Chaos.
- The People's Republic of Haven in Honor Harrington are serial warmongers by virtue of their dysfunctional economy, which no one knows how to prop up except to conquer neighboring systems and drain them dry. When a revolution deposes the despotic government and restores a (tentatively) functional democracy, the end of their decades-long war with Manticore finally looks to be within reach. Unfortunately, there are strawman politicals on both sides who end up sabotaging the peace talks for their own power-hungry ends. For Manticore, it's Prime Minister High Ridge and his cronies, who want to delay the peace treaty to take advantage of their wartime powers to consolidate their popular support. For Haven, it's Secretary of State Arnold Giancola, who wants to undermine the president of the new republic to better his chances at taking the office from her in the next election. Neither side actually wants to start a new war, but they take things too far and cause one anyway.
- Interstellar Gunrunner: Bodhi's business model depends on finding where the insurgency is about to be cracked down on by the Hegemony and then selling to both sides whatever counteracts the other side's weapons. Usually, the Hegemony wins because they can pay more.
- From the Jack Ryan series:
- A borderline example in Clear and Present Danger. The Cartel didn't cause the war between the Colombian government and the Marxist guerrillas, nor is it doing anything to prolong it. However, it has both sides so thoroughly penetrated that it's able to manipulate the war for its own ends as needed. Halfway through the novel, the Cartel manages to direct members of a guerrilla group to assassinate the U.S. ambassador and visiting FBI director, without the shooters knowing much about why they're doing it or where their orders are coming from. Later on, they incite another guerrilla uprising in order to distract the Colombian troops in the Medellin region, leaving their own men with a free hand to go on the offensive against the American special ops forces that've been giving them trouble.
- The Sum of All Fears had terrorists detonate a nuke in the US, in the hopes of provoking a retaliatory strike against Russia, and ultimately an all-out nuclear exchange with the idea of wiping out the "Greater" and "Lesser Satan". They also have a backup plan: when captured, they claim to have been acting on behalf of the Iranian government, hoping to provoke an American nuclear strike on Iran which, while less impressive than a Russian-American war, would still accomplish their goal of plunging the Middle East into chaos and sending anti-American sentiment to new heights.
- Senior Chinese minister Zhang Han San has this as his MO in Debt of Honor and Executive Orders: in both books, he acts behind the scenes to encourage a medium range power (Japan in the first one, Iran in the second) into making a bid for superpower status, attacking America with an eye to later attacking Russia. The ultimate goal is to open up Siberia's oil and mineral riches to Chinese control, but without the Chinese having to do most of the work or take much of the risk. Unfortunately for him, both plans are stillborn when the Americans successfully smack his proxy back into place before it's had a chance to get very far. In The Bear and the Dragon, the Chinese are therefore forced to try and seize Siberia themselves and without allies, which goes very badly for them.
- Debt of Honor: In Jack Ryan's worldview, this is how all wars work. Counts as Author Filibuster, as Tom Clancy has repeatedly argued the exact same thing in interviews:Jack Ryan: War is the ultimate criminal act, an armed robbery writ large. And it's always about greed. It's always a nation that wants something another nation has. And you defeat that nation by recognizing what it wants and denying it to them.
- In Dead or Alive, the Emir was hoping to frame the Pakistani government for his acts of terrorism, inspiring the US to occupy Pakistan and get embroiled in another highly unpopular decade-long nation-building exercise like post-9/11 Afghanistan and Iraq.
- James Bond: As in the movies, this will occasionally take place in the series, though not so much in the original Ian Fleming novels.
- Colonel Sun: The titular villain is trying to sabotage a conference for peace in the Middle East being hosted by the Soviet Union, and frame Bond and MI6 for it.
- Devil May Care: The villain, Julius Gorner, has a lifelong grudge against the British, and is trying to frame them for a terrorist attack on the USSR in the knowledge that the Soviet retaliation would completely obliterate the U.K.
- Carte Blanche
involves the villains being paid by the Chinese government to incite a war in East Africa, where the Sudanese government and several neighboring countries will crush a burgeoning separatist movement in the east of the country, ensuring that Sudan will continue to sell the region's oil to the Chinese (and not the West as the separatists were considering doing). - In the Young Bond novel Blood Fever, Count Carnifex is going to foment another great war in Europe, and while everyone is busy fighting each other, he'll create an underground empire which will be controlling things behind the scenes in the future. He gives a nod to the real-life history of this trope, crediting the Roman Empire, and the way it played Gaulish and Germanic tribes against each other to keep them subjugated, as his inspiration. The similarities between his Millennaria organization and how SPECTRE will operate later in James Bond's life are probably not accidental, either.
- The avian-serpiente war in the Kiesha'ra series doesn't initially look like one of these, but we learn in the first book that falcons have separated from the other avians to form their own society, and that the avians have only survived as long as they have by buying falcons' superior weaponry, at grievous prices. We're not initially told how the war started in the first place, and later books start putting the pieces together...
- In Loic Henry's Loar, two neutral factions are selling their services to the different warring powers. One merely wished for war to continue lest they likely starve to death, the other actively makes it continue because in times of peace they'd be hunted down and exterminated.
- The idea behind Richard Morgan's 2004 sci-fi novel Market Forces. It's referred to as Conflict Investment, where multinational corporations invest in either the government or a rebel faction in exchange for a percentage of the country's resources.
- In "The Mark of Kane", from Angels of Music, the villain is a newspaper magnate who made a fortune selling newspaper headlines about the Spanish-American war, so he plots to start a sequel of sorts: a crisis involving the Suez Canal.
- The first work of fiction by Andy McNab (or at least the first one he sold as fiction) had a slightly more plausible variant: Various defense contractors were conspiring to prolong The Troubles so that they'd have a convenient proving ground for their new products, with a faction of the British government getting some sort of kickback.
- The Mouse That Roared by Leonard Wibberley has the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, a tiny, impoverished, European country that declares war on the United States of America, planning to lose quickly, and then profit from the Americans coming in to rebuild their economy, just as they'd done for Germany and Japan after WW-II. Then they win, and are at a loss for what to do next.
- In Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Book explains how Oceania keeps industries working and public sentiment worked up by a state of constant warfare.
- In The President Vanishes by Rex Stout, written in 1934, a consortium of business leaders is actively pressing Congress and the President to join the war in Europe, simply because of the business opportunities it will provide.
- Vizzini in The Princess Bride was hired to kidnap Buttercup and place the blame on Guilder, the sworn enemy of Florin. This would have triggered a war, if the Dread Pirate Roberts had not intervened. Her royal fiancé had much the same plan. Who do you think hired Vizzini? Strangulation on the wedding night was the back-up plan.
- Red Storm Rising:
- When the Soviet Defense Council initially meets to discuss solutions to the energy crisis, the KGB Chairman is absent for health reasons, so intelligence estimates are delivered by his deputy Josef Larionov - an ambitious, crowd-pleasing, social climber who's been after his job for years. When Larionov sees that the Soviet leaders are leaning towards warnote , he decides to tell them what they want to hear by feeding them the best-case-scenario intelligence estimates about NATO strength and Soviet preparedness rather than the more realistic estimates. This reassures the Politburo that they can safely go forward with their war preparations, and puts him in their good graces. In other words, the entire Third World War happened (or at least was ensured) because a bureaucrat wanted a promotion.
- The basic premise behind the war is also an example of this: the Soviets are trying to destroy NATO so that they can seize the oil fields of the Middle East at their leisure. It's a downplayed example in that the Soviets are acting out of desperation (their own oil industry having just been seriously wrecked by a terrorist attack) rather than pure greed. However, the Supreme Commander of NATO forces later points out that this was hardly their only option; they could have negotiated with the West for some kind of relief, and while the West would certainly have wrung some concessions out of them in the process, that would still have been far less costly for everyone involved than starting a world war.
- Sharpe: Two examples of this in Sharpe's Devil, set in the Chilean War of Independence. Emphasis on "profit" in the first case, and "fun" in the second case:
- On the one side, Capitan-General Bautista, Spain's military governor in Chile. Despite his job, he only does the bare minimum to fight the rebellion, never going on the offensive and constantly complaining that he needs more weapons from Spain. Sharpe realizes quickly that he has no interest in winning the war, only in using it as a launching pad for a political career back in Spain. The war allows him to pillage the country and skim off of government funds, making him rich enough to finance his political rise. It also allows him to build an image as a war hero. The constant requests for supplies from Spain are meant to set up a narrative in which Bautista was a betrayed soldier, who only lost his campaigns because the politicians at home (his future opponents) wouldn't give him what he needed to win.
- On the other side, Lord Thomas Cochrane, the leader of the Chilean fleet. He's fighting for independence against the Spaniards, but he doesn't much care for the cause or its leaders; he's a Blood Knight who relishes war for its own sake and has nothing but contempt for the "government of lawyers" the movement is trying to set up. Which is why he's secretly planning to start a much bigger war by freeing Napoleon from his Saint Helena prison, taking him back to Chile, and helping him build a new empire in the Americas. More darkly, Cochrane (and Napoleon earlier in the novel) both claim that thanks to the Napoleonic Wars, the world is littered with men like them, former soldiers just waiting for another great war, and all its opportunities for glory, to fulfill them.
- In the world of The Quantum Thief, war is literally a game to the Gun Club Zoku, because Zokus see all life as a series of games and pick their specialization based on their personal interests. Uncommonly for this trope they are for the most part decent (post) human beings; they just love to see stuff blowing up in new and exotic ways. If they lack an actual enemy, they arrange harmless miniature play-wars among themselves. With lovingly handcrafted nuclear weapons.
- The Saint's foe Doctor Rayt Marius attempted to start warfare for profit. Later, the Saint used Marius' records to blackmail his accomplices to start a fund for the families of the wounded and casualties of war.
- In Scarecrow by Matthew Reilly, a cabal of businessmen tries to start a new Cold War by using nukes with falsified signatures that'll convince the targets that someone else attacked them, increasing the value of their defence contracts. However, one of the businessmen secretly changes some things around so that instead of a Cold War, there's a series of red-hot ones (for example, one of his nukes is set to destroy Mecca and has the signatures of an American weapon). Why? Well... he's kinda big on anarchy.
- Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish from A Song of Ice and Fire pretty much engineered the War of the Five Kings for his own nefarious (and mysterious!) purposes, which include (presumably as a prelude to other things) placing himself in an easily-defensible position at the titular head of one of the few significant military forces thus far untouched by the war, with the attractive, newly-legal (by the standards of the setting) daughter of the only woman he ever loved (and his niece by marriage) close at hand.
- Star Wars Legends:
- The Star Wars prequel movies (see the film section) revolve largely around Palpatine orchestrating the Clone Wars with the ultimate goal of having himself proclaimed Emperor. As such, any book set in this era will consist heavily of this.
- Star Wars: Kenobi: The villain, Orrin Gault, is a Tatooine moisture farmer who's been staging Tusken raids in order to keep his neighbors paying into his civil defense fund... from which he's been embezzling money in order to pay off his own debts to Jabba the Hutt. While his false flag raids against his neighbors are kept non-lethal, his "retaliatory" attacks on the Tuskens are not. The similarities between his conspiracy and the one Palpatine just pulled on a galactic scale with the Clone Wars are probably not accidental, highlighting the fact that even when there are no Sith Lords in the equation, there'll always be schemers playing on people's fears to elevate themselves no matter who gets hurt. (And, one can only hope, people like Ben Kenobi around to stop them).
- The Corellian Trilogy: The ultimate villains of the novel are the Saccorian Triad, a criminal element encouraging human, Selonian, and Drall nationalists alike (the three races in the Corellian System) to fight each other and the New Republic, in order to throw the system into chaos and leave them ultimately in charge.
- Hand of Thrawn: Much of the book revolves around Imperial undercover agents attempting to stir up conflict between member worlds of the New Republic in order to unravel it. The immediate issue is the Caamas Document, which proves that a group of Bothan infiltrators were responsible for enabling the destruction of Caamas by the Empire years ago, and leaves many worlds in the galaxy clamoring for reparations from the Bothans and threatening war if they don't get them. This trope is downplayed in that it's made clear that this is at best a pretext, with many member worlds in the New Republic lining up on opposite sides of the issue simply so they can reopen their ancestral conflicts with each other: several characters even caution that blaming Imperial agitators for everything is taking the easy way out, since they never would have had to much success if there weren't real tensions for them to play on.
- New Jedi Order: While the Yuuzhan Vong War was largely a straightforward invasion, their infiltrator Nom Anor wasn't above stirring up conflicts on a smaller scale in order to cause unrest in the New Republic and prepare the ground for the invasion. The first few chapters of the series see him setting himself up as a charismatic leader demanding justice for a long-exploited planet, culminating in him faking his death and causing a full-blown nuclear exchange between the planets of Osarian and Rhoommamool.
- The Stormlight Archive: By the main plot of the first book, this is what the Alethi armies have been reduced to. They originally were fighting for revenge against the Parshendi, but the War of Reckoning has become little more than a contest between the different highprinces over who can gather the most gems from gemhearts, with actual revenge being at best a secondary concern for the vast majority of them, barring Dalinar Kholin and his family.
- In a flashback chapter, a pre-Character Development Dalinar says that the reason for most wars boils down to "'These guys have stuff. Why don't we have this stuff?' So we beat them up and take their stuff". Given that he was a Blood Knight at the time rather than The Wise Prince he became in middle age, he didn't see anything wrong with wars of this nature.
- The Warlord Chronicles gives us a view of how this might have worked in Dark Ages England, with numerous examples. First, war is both a source of fun and profit for many of the lords and kings, who view it as the most direct means of expanding their territory. Second, you have various different societies, warbands, and mercenaries who raid from other sides (or even kingdoms ostensibly allied to them) for extra food, plunder, or renown. Lastly, one instance in particular nearly exemplifies the trope: Prince Cadwy of Isca hires Owain to take his warband and slaughter tin miners from Kernow. In an attempt to deflect suspicion, Owain disguises his men as the mercenary Irish group the Blackshields while he does so. Since the raid threatens to shatter the fragile alliance holding the Briton Kingdoms together against the Saxons, it seriously pisses off Arthur, who quickly tries to get to the bottom of it.
- War: What is it Good For? by Ian Morris: according to the author, war has made us all safer (fun) and richer (profit). How is this? Archaeologists and anthropologists are in general agreement that stone age/tribal societies have very high rates of violent death, frequently between 10 and 20%. Societies that are sufficiently large and well organised to wage war on their neighbours ("Leviathans") enforce peace within their borders, because dead people pay no taxes. As the Leviathans conquer their neighbours the internal zone of peace and prosperity grows, and the number of nations able to wage war shrinks. And so, in the long run, (sometimes the very long run), we arrived at the twentieth century, where no more than 2% of people died a violent death note . Hooray for war!
- Used in a less "evil" way in Will Save the Galaxy for Food. The Malmind Horde picks up a Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job of invading planets who pay them to, basically becoming a LARP troupe. Usually, they're hired by Proud Warrior Races looking to satisfy their hunger for combat. There's a war, the Malmind profit, and the Proud Warrior Race has fun.
- Discussed in Wyatt's Hurricane by Desmond Bagley. The mercenary helping the rebel forces angrily rejects Wyatt's comment that the war is being fought just so a fruit company can make money. He points out the rebels have to overthrow a dictator who's banned any legitimate means of replacing him, and the multinational concerned had the money they needed to fund the purchasing of arms and mercenaries.
- The Zones of Thought novel A Deepness in the Sky plays this pretty straight... and then exaggerates the hell out of it. A large part of the book is dedicated to exploring the inevitable patterns that always arise in intelligent civilizations; namely, that they self-destruct, especially when they develop nuclear weaponry for the first time, so when the Exiled fleet in secret orbit around the Spider planet almost annihilate themselves in space warfare, they decide that they'll need to conserve their remaining resources until the Spiders inevitably start a nuclear war amongst themselves. Then they can Save the World and use that act to foster positive relations with the Spiders, to trade, and to rebuild their own technology as well as improve that of the Spiders. Things get complicated when it is revealed that Manipulative Bastard Tomas Nau's actual plan is to wait for the war to start, then black out communications across the planet, hijack and redirect the nukes to cause as much damage as possible to population centers and seats of government, nearly annihilate the Spiders and blast their technology back to the Stone Age, then enslave the survivors.
