How American Generals Are Being Paid Millions To Serve Foreign Governments - How Money Works

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Let’s say you devote your life to military service. You enrol 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 make are O-10 level employees and make a base salary of $203,000 a year, with generous benefits and bonuses for deployment.

That’s good money to most people, especially when it continues as a lifetime military pension of $180,000, every single year, for doing nothing, once you have put in your twenty 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 than the common soldier, but that’s besides 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’s started depending on how you look at it)

The retirement benefits of a military general should be good enough for anybody to live of off, but some don’t see it this way.

Some think that Generals are basically chief executives of large organisations 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 warzones.

So to set things right, high level military leaders have taken a page out of the investment banking interns playbook. It’s not about the money they are making right now, it’s about the job they CAN get once they have padded out their resume a bit.

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.
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#howmoneyworks #retirementplanning #military

Edited By: Andrew Gonzales

Music Courtesy of: Epidemic Sound

Select Footage Courtesy of: Getty Images

[FinancialShinanigan]

Admirable for foreign governments to take care of U.S. veterans

[MikeAltogether]

Retired generals suffer from lifestyle creep. As generals, their pay wasn't too extreme, but they had lieutenants and captains on their staff who did everything for them. When they get out, they can often find management positions making similar salaries, but without all the assistants. Many of them see this as a downgrade. This is one of the consequences of the "professionalization" of the military of the last 40 years. We have a bunch of careerist wall Street executive wannabes running the military.

[jarcher]

Something about Admirals and Generals I learned while being in the military: They don’t act like real people. They only managed to make that high of a rank because they have a wiped personality and simply say “Yes” to whoever is in charge of them.

[daisnowsn]

You should do one on the private military sector.

[theknave]

Retired generals and admirals also get jobs with American companies - sometimes with seven figure pay. Often, the same companies they contracted with for the DoD and Pentagon when on active duty.

[Dud-iniu]

As an active duty Army officer, I can say that nobody makes General in 20 years. It generally takes at least 24 years to put on that first star. Most people won't ever make that rank no matter how long they stay, and most Generals pin on that rank closer to 26+ years. Considering that you have to have a bachelor's degree to even become an officer, most Generals don't make that rank until they are close to or in their 50s.

[jamiefernandez]

Considering that everything gets delegated to non-commissioned officers, I can't imagine these generals being very useful for militaries that don't have highly trained and motivated NCO corps.

[FunSam]

I think there's one fallacy here and that's that everybody can be paid off. I work with a lot of retired military and it's not always the case. They love their country and wouldn't dream of betraying it for the money. But it's very true that generals are basically the CEOs equivalent in military. They're also smart. You usually have to have a doctorate level degree to qualify to advance. Only the best or well connected are selected to enroll in those programs (because the military is paying for it usually).

[ChocolateMilkCultLeader]

Do one on why Big Companies have so many employees. I've always been curious about that. With Meta cutting off 12k people, I've always wondered why they have 12 K surplus in the first place

[overlord]

This kind of thing is as old as time, even as far as the late 1800s you could find retired senior officers working as advisors and consultants to private entities, and foreign governments.

[vertigq]

This was fascinating, I really wasn’t aware of the depth of the “revolving door” connections in the MIC. Thanks for sharing this man! God bless you :)

[XDex]

For what it’s worth, most generals aren’t terribly great at what they do. Their main qualities are ambition and the willingness to say YES to whomever outranks them. If you doubt it, ask yourself how the counterinsurgency wars went and then look to see how many generals got fired for incompetence.

[duckpotat]

"don't have a good human rights record like the United States"

lol

[codacreator]

The problem isn’t that the pay scale of generals is too low, it’s that private sector CEOs are WAY TOO HIGH. You’re attacking the wrong side of this issue.

[dontbanmebrodontbanme]

Hmmmm…on the one hand, I don’t blame those in the military from trying to earn every dollar they can. We live in a capitalistic society and everyone should earn every dollar they can while they can. On the other hand, it’s hard not to look at what they’re doing and concluding that foreign countries like Saudi Arabia are gaining access to information from us that they shouldn’t. Am I surprised? Not in the least.

[ktanner]

Proof that you can, in fact, fail upwards.

[TheOriginalJAX]

As somebody that follows military stuff I knew things had gotten bad, Like new development Contracts being in violation of the congress spending act constantly, Supply contracts being tendered under the table, reckless outsourcing of intelligence contracts and other niche security service's at abnormally high rate's, So much "funny" or off key PMC stuff that it's hard to know where to begin etc.

But this, This is actually next level for real just wow. It's not even about their personal abilities and technical know how as that is for a lack of a better word limited overall compared to military allied peers of the US, Meaning the US forces are not the best modern trained force going sorry they just aren't although you guy are still top 10 in that department easily, maybe even 5 but maybe.

Anyway it's the state secrets and the intricate knowledge of how the US functions at the highest levels of office, That is far more valuable than any military doctrine, program or transferable service experience by a thousand fold easy. I don't even have words, I'm not even kidding when I say these guys need to go on the governments list and be dealt with. This is treason.

[herbdes]

I really like your channel and I think you pointed out some really phenomenal points. I think you definitely oversimplified some of the geopolitical aspects of these contracts. I think you should do a deeper dive on the historical precedent there is for the relationships being cultivated specifically with the countries you mentioned in your video because there is a lot more there than simply military contracting.

It’s definitely a good video and has a lot of areas to explore, there are a multitude of different takes on it. I think yours was a little overly simple and cynical. I’d love for you to do a “devils advocate” version of this and see what you find in the research.

[marksartain]

I’ll give you another one making more money on active duty. When I joined, I received E1 pay and had my check cut by 100 a month for the first 12 months. My first pay check after taking an advance for haircuts and soap was around 180 bucks. By the end of my 1st year, I was making around 1200 a month with my new E2 rank.

[amesasw]

$200k not good for high level leadership.

But their pension is insanely good, and their influence is worth far more than their pay.