War Is a Racket is a speech and a 1935 short book by Smedley D. Butler, a retired United States Marine Corps major general and two-time Medal of Honor recipient.

[2][3] Based on his career military experience, Butler discusses how business interests commercially benefit from warfare.

After Butler retired from the US Marine Corps in October 1931, he made a nationwide tour in the early 1930s giving his speech "War Is a Racket".

I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.

[…] Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our steel companies and our munitions makers and our ship-builders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted — to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.