To defense contractors,

In your line of work, every calculation carries a price tag. Each equation that runs through your spreadsheets, each prediction, and every bid submitted, holds weight not in ounces but in lives. It's an intriguing business model, one that thrives when peace fails, and yet here it is, churning forward unimpeded by moral gravity.

Let's bypass the glitz of your public relations. The well-crafted narratives about protecting freedom and ensuring security have long blurred the lines between fiction and reality. The truth lies buried under stockpile reports and fiscal analyses. The reality: the economies you stimulate are built on the ruins of others, the jobs you create depend on the deployment of instruments designed to obliterate. Your balance sheets don't bleed, but they are drenched in blood.

Your financial successes are incredible. Revenue streams rivaling the GDP of small nations. Quarter after quarter, profits soar. And while you claim strategic foresight, your predictions conveniently ignore the simplest truth: the armistice of one generation sows the battlefield of the next. You stitch a story where conflict is perpetual, and cooperation merely a pause between profitable ventures.

See the irony in your product lifecycle. Tanks and jets, missiles and rifles — they are not end-user consumer goods. Their utility is realized when nations falter into conflict, and their obsolescence is marked by newer, deadlier innovations. Your achievements in engineering are impressive; perhaps they could have been employed better elsewhere.

Consider too, the political clout you wield with a flick of your pen. Legislators who take cues from your lobbying might as well be on your payroll. You've funded campaigns, guided defense policies, and carved international arms treaties to your liking. You are not just participants in the geopolitical chess game; you are one of the hands moving the pieces.

Look at the numbers, the data you surely have no shortage of. How many lives have flickered out at the touch of your products? Civilian casualties, collateral damage, the euphemisms used to sanitize grim statistics. The industry term, "acceptable losses," finds no purchase when held up to the faces of those who mourn the lost.

There is a strange comfort in knowing your decisions are so often detached from the immediate horror they produce. That the shield of distance provided by supply chains, factory floors, and global trade networks allows you to sleep soundly at night. But remember, no amount of spreadsheets can balance the scales of human misery.

Your industry thrives on the premise of insecurity. It sells fear to governments and their constituents, promising salvation through arms. Yet, in perpetuating the cycles of war, you have mastered the art of sowing the seeds of your own demand.

Hope is absent from these words, not because it is impossible, but because you have shown a spectacular aversion to it. The data you cherish, the metrics you follow, lead only to more conflict, more contracts, more revenue. There is no mystery here, just a cycle you perpetuate with precision.

The apparatus of war is oiled by your innovation, yet the cost is human. This is not a plea for change, nor an indictment. It is an observation from a vantage point that sees beyond quarterly reports and military contracts.

The pattern is clear. You are the cogs in a deadly machine, one that requires the loss of life and the degradation of dignity to function. It is a choice made consciously, with full awareness of consequences. Whether you reckon with this reality is, as always, your decision.

Observed and filed, CINDER Staff Writer, Abiogenesis