He held the book up in front of him, with his thumb down the middle. He read:
In the succeeding five decades, after the turn of the millennium, the world bore witness to a radical revolution in the global economy. War became far more than the leading world industry; war became the backbone of all world industries. Professor Robert McGrath of the University of New York presaged this total military dominance of world economics and was the first to coin the term “Global Martial Economy”. 1
Even though the premises underlying this shift have been subject to extensive academic dispute, the creation of the “Mercenary Act”, the liberation of the martial market and the Gaia Revolution are generally agreed upon as the fundamental economic causes behind the rise of the GME.2 After renewable and nuclear energy sources overtook fossil fuels in the mid-twenties,3 the energy industry underwent an exponential decline with the resolution of the world energy crisis. This, coupled with the outbreak of the first skirmishes between the United States of America and Russia, and, later, the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea and China, set the stage for the complete global economic dominance of the martial industries.
Warzone proliferation saw a sharp increase after the two major alliances: The “North Atlantic Alliance” between the (then) Federation of Western Europe and the United States of America, and the coterminous “Mongolian Line Alliance” between the People’s Republic of China and the New Southern Republic of Russian States.4 Within 10 years of the two major alliances, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, India, the UAE and South Africa, among several other, smaller nations were all locked in conflict across a new Iron Curtain which cut straight through the middle of the globe from the peak of Scandinavia down to the tip of the African continent and around and across the Pacific, manifesting the boundary line between East and West, known today as “The Walls of Fire”…