Economic war games: The Pentagon says we're not ready to rumble

According to Politico, the Pentagon recently hosted a set of economic war games. Headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, the exercises employed hedge fund managers, college professors and business executives to help explore the ways in which America's opponents could use the tools of business to conduct warfare. Unsurprisingly, the participants determined that China was the power best situated to emerge victorious from a global economic conflict.

While the cross-breeding of armed combat and economic conflict sounds like the plot of a John Grisham thriller, one could argue that many of the twentieth-century's real-life wars were based in the struggle for economic dominance. The 1956 Arab-Israeli war, for example, could easily be seen as an attempt by France and Great Britain to seize control of the Suez Canal. Similarly, many people forget that Saddam Hussein's original justification for invading Kuwait was that they were "slant drilling" across his border, tapping into oil deposits that belonged to Iraq.