But what about studying a war as a business model? As I was coming home with my wife from errands this afternoon, I posed this question, because it was randomly on my mind at that time:"Would you consider the Army (or the military as a whole) and the Taliban to be co-workers?"
My wife didn't say anything for a minute. Then she broke the silence with "where did that come from?"
I explained that my line of thinking was this: both organizations are in the business of changing (by mostly force) the ideologies of a populace. The Taliban will roam your neighborhood streets and beat you with a tire iron if you don't grow a beard (ladies too) whereas, if you don't think Democracy is the cat's balls, the US military will either send some black-clad men with machine guns to your hut in the middle of the night or just drop a two-ton bomb on you from a mile in the sky.
With this, my wife, smartly asserted that the US Military (henceforth "military") and the Taliban are competition in the same market, similar to Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Both soft drink companies are trying to get their product into your home, and spend tons of money to do so, and while they operate in the same market, they do not "work together" towards their common goal. The Military and the Taliban both want to change the hearts and minds of people... by putting their "product" in their homes, but the product is slightly different. Both Coke and Pepsi are similar products (soft drinks) as is the "product" of both opposing forces in the War on Terror; an ideology, oppose to a sugary soft drink.
As we rounded the last corner to come home, my wife quipped "talk about cut-throat business...." ...and that folks, is why I married her.
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