we found that more than 500 retired U.S military personnel since 2015 have gone to work for foreign
governments or foreign owned companies the vast majority of those are in the Middle East let's
say you devote your life to military service you enroll in officer training and work up the
ranks until one day you are a general with combat experience in whichever country the states decided
had too much oil American generals and Admirals are o-10 Level employees and make the base salary
of two hundred and three thousand dollars a year with generous benefits and bonuses for deployment
everybody thanks people in the military are broke but actually active duty military pays better
than most civilian jobs that's good money to most people especially when it continues as a lifetime
military pension of a hundred and eighty thousand dollars every single year for doing nothing once
you have put in your 20 years of service service men and women earn every last cent of this money
and people who have dedicated their lives to serving in our Armed Forces should be looked
after the system is much better at looking after the top brass in the common Soldier so with that
I want to once again personally thank Jim for his outstanding service and offer the mic then to say
a few words but that's beside the point I could never do this job and I respect anybody that can
at least I did until the world started learning about what they do after their career comes to
an end or just get started depending on how you look at it the government just said this they
didn't think there was much of a public interest in knowing that retired generals and Admirals had
these high-paying jobs with foreign governments we of course disagree the retirement benefits of
a military General should be good enough for anybody to live off of but some don't see it
this way something that generals are basically Chief Executives of large organizations with
tens of thousands of employees handling billions of dollars and working on the most challenging
projects in the world when you put it like that the public service pay scale starts to look a
bit mediocre leaders in the private sector are making millions of dollars a year for the same
level of work and they don't spend their time in active War zones so let's set things right
high-level military leaders have taken a page out of the investment banking interns Playbook it's
not about how much money they are making right now it's about the job they can get once they
have padded out their resume a bit if you're a retired U.S military personnel in particular
if you were high-ranking general or Admiral do you really want to go work for a government with
not very good human rights records or governments that aren't democracies like the United States so
it's time to learn how money Works to find out how America's top military leadership are using their
careers to score obscenely lucrative contracts with some not so friendly governments this week's
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becoming a top military leader is not easy recruits have to be accepted into officer
training and then show exceptional leadership as they work their way up the commissioned ranks
officers will spend at minimum 20 years in the service before they can become a
general level officer and most will never make it once they do make it though they will start
to notice that their career is very narrow the only progression they can make is upward
within the military because a lot of their combat expertise doesn't translate to the private sector
at least not yet give Bezos a few more years of horizontal integration and maybe we will
have the Amazon Army the higher the ranks the more time officers will start to spend behind
a desk working on Logistics Administration and procurement procurement is the process of the
military buying their supplies for military contractors it's an important job to keep the
military equipped with everything they need to wage war from rations to fighter jets there are
dozens of checks and balances on this process but designated Military Officers get the final
sign off on everything the military purchases because their boots on the ground experience is
essential to ensuring that the equipment the military is getting is going to hold up in the
field military Contracting is a lucrative game and the big players know that Military Officers are
the final Gatekeepers standing between them and a fat government contract if we take the capitals
away and just say private military Contracting has always happened and will always happen
that is why they are always on the lookout to hired retired military leaders to come and work
for them usually on salaries two to three times greater than they were making in the military and
that's in addition to the military pension that they get to keep the public relations department
of Raytheon Lockheed and Halliburton will say that these former military officers are hired
for their experience and that they work with Engineers to build better tools for soldiers
I am sure they do great work there but they do better work talking with their old friends
still in the service and working out what would push their contract proposals over the line to
secure multi-billion dollar industry contracts this gets worse when you remember that most
Military Officers don't have many career options outside of the military so they want to keep these
companies happy while they're in procurement to make sure that they get one of these cushy exit
opportunities too once they have put in their 20 years to qualify for a military pension this is
called the revolving door and no matter how hard the military tries to stop it it's always going
to exist it's a new revolving door and it can be very lucrative for retired US military personnel
but we already knew that this was going on and as long as the equipment being procured is still
going to hold up in the field the only people that this really harms are the taxpayers and who cares
about them right but what if I told you that Military Officers have started taking advantage
of a new exit opportunity that has potential to not only do damage to the National budget
but also do real damage to National Security this is James L Jones a retired four-star general with
40 Years of military service under his belt since retiring he's been keeping himself busy with other
projects like Consulting for the government of Saudi Arabia and Libya or former Army Lieutenant
General Michael Barbaro who served for 38 years and then started privately Consulting for the
same two governments as well as the government of Kuwait Freedom of Information requests submitted
by The Washington Post as a part of an ongoing investigation found that since 2015 about 450
retired officers are doing similar work for other governments located mostly in the Middle East in
North Africa the actual roles these men and women go into and the service they perform is very vague
the reports often said little more than technical Consulting but what exactly are they Consulting on
giving military information to foreign governments even if their allies is treason so obviously it
couldn't be that but then again why else would these governments be paying such high prices a
consulting firm co-owned by six retired Pentagon officers recently negotiated a 23.6 million dollar
Consulting contract with the state of Qatar the deal later fell through but had it not what would
the government be paying all this money for Army generals are very talented in their one area of
expertise which is military strategy but we have already worked out that this isn't what they are
selling but 23.6 million can get you world-class Consulting from much more established outfits like
MacKenzie Bain or BCG so why go with a no-name firm run by just six guys maybe Qatar just really
wanted to support the troops you might think that it can't get much worse than this retired military
generals suing the military knowledge they gained from years of serving their country to governments
with atrocious human rights records but it does the worst part is how they're getting away with
it there is government oversight measures in place that are supposed to stop this kind of work from
being possible at all the foreign emoluments Clause of the Constitution prohibits federal
office holders from accepting gifts jobs or titles from any King Prince or foreign State without
the consent of Congress now even though they are retired the law still applies to former military
generals because it can technically be recalled to duty at any time and because they have knowledge
of sensitive military information the military pension exists in part to compensate these
officers for the limitations that will be placed on them for their life after their retirement the
law does not apply to Junior military personnel that don't receive a pension and that is why
they are free to go and join private military contractors like Academy where they can earn up
to half a million dollars a year working private security for the highest bidder but that's grunt
work compared to the paychecks demanded by top former military brass but is Congress really
giving these men permission to go and work in the roles that will obviously hurt National Security
in the long term well no they are not actually these men are giving themselves permission to
go and do it Congress decided that they were too busy to decide what jobs former Military Officers
could do once they left service so in 1977 they delegated the Constitutional responsibility to the
Pentagon so now before these men can start working on their million dollar Consulting contracts they
need to get permission from their old colleagues at the Pentagon the armed services can deny these
applications for any reason especially if they think the work would jeopardize National Security
or adversely affect the Foreign Relations of the United States these applications also come with a
strict background check and counterintelligence review so it sounds like the process is pretty
airtight but investigators from The Washington Post found that in their words approval was
almost automatic with 95 percent of applicants being approved without further questioning we
really deduced here is that nobody in the US government is really paying much attention to
the human rights issues or other foreign policy complications that might ensue once you have
hundreds of people going to work for another country most applicants didn't even bother
to officially apply because the Pentagon rarely follows up on these postings and even when they
do the punishment is rarely more severe than a military pension getting cut off until the
appropriate paperwork is submitted the reason they get away with this goes back to the same
revolving door that senior military officials have with military contractors if a military officer at
the Pentagon denies an application for a retired General to work for a foreign government then they
will only make it harder for themselves if they ever wanted to cash out on their military service
even if the officer in charge of the review has the best intentions they know that the retired
military officer can just appeal the decision and get it passed up to a more senior officer who is a
little closer to retirement in that seven-figure Consulting payday a record of overturned appeals
and a bad reputation amongst their military peers makes it very hard for officers to try to do the
right thing to get ahead it's easier and more lucrative to keep the system going while waiting
their turn to make a small fortune and if you think this is as bad as it gets prepare to be
disappointed remember former General James L Jones from earlier well it was begrudgingly
revealed that his work with the Saudi government was advising them on how they could get better
military capabilities without spending more money the people Jones employed to carry out this work
how much he paid them and the details of their work were all sealed by the state department the
state department claimed that it wasn't anybody's right to know how much a private citizen gets paid
or the nature of their work so long as it isn't breaking any laws that argument is particularly
unconvincing since these men received public information salaries all of their lives and
while they were no longer serving they are still technically military personnel and not private
civilians I get that the right to privacy should be protected but since this information can only
be obtained by taking the Department of Defense to court to sue them for Freedom of Information
I'm starting to think that this was more likely the seven-figure salaries and the combat adjacent
roles would just make the wrong people look bad if the government does eventually learn that you
can't rely on organizations to police themselves then this revolving door will likely be closed
which means that people will have to go back to making obscenely large paychecks the old-fashioned
way by creating something that people value and then marketing it for a profit I'm just
kidding it's by clawing their way up to the top of the corporate ladder go and watch my video
on the steps that you need to take to become a corporate CEO at a Fortune 500 company to
see the path that you need to take to get there a big thanks again to brilliant for making it
possible for everybody to keep on learning how money works because of exciting current events
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