War & Peace Quote by David Hackworth

Hackworth’s line lands like a field report stripped of euphemism: the problem isn’t just that war is brutal, it’s that it’s become legible as business. By invoking the well-worn phrase "war is a racket", he’s deliberately borrowing moral authority from Smedley Butler’s famous denunciation of profiteering. The twist is the escalation: "even more shameful". That comparative doesn’t argue; it accuses. It implies a baseline disgrace everyone already recognizes, then suggests we’ve managed to sink lower anyway.

The intent is surgical. Hackworth isn’t speaking as an antiwar theorist but as a soldier who has watched institutions talk about honor while running on incentives that reward churn: contracts, promotions, body counts, "success" metrics that translate human lives into sortable data. The subtext is betrayal. If war is framed as racket, soldiers become labor, not heroes; civilians become externalities; patriotism becomes the marketing copy that keeps the machine funded.

Context matters because Hackworth’s credibility was forged inside the apparatus he’s indicting. His public criticism of Vietnam-era leadership and the bureaucratization of combat gave him a vantage point that civilians rarely have: the view of war as policy theater plus procurement pipeline. "Shameful" signals not only moral disgust but a kind of professional grief. It’s the voice of someone who believes in service and is furious that the system sells that belief back to him at a markup.