Could Mcdonalds invade a Country, If so, what size.

Factual Questions
1

Okay, ignoring all the legal implications and whoo ha, just assume that every other country just turned a blind eye and burnt all their treaties. Would a large Megacorp like Mcdonalds have the economic power to finance an invasion and governance of a small, out of the way country.

That is, could it sustain several years of out and out battle and then the economic rebuilding and rehabilitation of its populace while still having to deal with sporadic guerilla attacks.

Just for the sim, we will assume that the country is not going to be lucridiously hilly like Afganistan and that Mcdonalds can get pretty much any available miltary HW at street prices.

If so, approximatly what size country would it be able to take over without risking bankruptcy? Are we taking a Solomon Islad or maybe Madagascar or something closer to Mexico?

2

Therotically it might happen but theres no point in it

this sounds like a homemade shadowrun rpg module…

But one of the books based on the game says that techincally there would be no profit in a mega corp taking over the actual goverment unless it cut off all services ie how would it make a profit in trash pickup ect…

In the world of the game the goverment exists so the corps dont have to bother with such unpfrotiable details

Also youd have 2 classes of citizens the “corporate citizens” wiht all the perks of the corporate society and the great unwashed

The role of the civic goverment would be the taking care of the non corporate citizens

So there would be no reason why a company would want to take over a goverment

Now there has been a couple of cases where a company started a war but it was to protect their intrest

the dole pineapple company in hawaii is the first that springs to mind but it wasnt to rule per se it was to be come a us territory and stop the threathened nationalization of the sugar fields

3

I’m not saying that there would be any reason, I am asking whether it is ** feasible**.

ie, would a current megacorp have enough resources to start and win a open war.

Maybe they just need a country for tax reasons or something.

4

They already did invade just about every country on the map, brainwashing youth with the evil McDoctrine of Thou Shalt Eat Crap, and putting up statues to their vile clownic-idol all over the place.

Seriously, megacorps with their own armies has happened before. IIRC the East India Tea/Spice?? company had one a while back.

5

Sure. All Mickey D would have to do is hire a mercenary firm like the late, unlamented Executive Outcomes. It has been speculated that EO may have been somehow connected with DeBeers, which would imply that EO served as a de facto corporate paramilitary wing.

However, EO tried and failed to quell an insurrection on the remote secessionist island of Bouganville, for which EO was contracted for $34 million for 40 mercs and their hardware by Papua New Guinea. That probably means McDonalds would need to cough up more cash for a larger and more competent mercenary force if they want to take over anything larger than a South Pacific island.

6

Yup…with Russia probably being the largest or at the least the best armed behind the US.

7

Maybe you should look up the history of the East India Company.

I think their budget may have exceeded McDonalds! :eek:

8

What about personnel? Do you really trust the current staff of 15 year olds to handle artillery? I guess their food qualifies as experience with chemical and biological weapons but it mightn’t be enough. Entire regiments would be led by 19 year old managers and soldiers would have to fit atrocities and barbarism around school commitments and household chores.

The entire debacle would only encourage other fast food adventurism and competition for them. KFC would be better cut out for it as at least their figurehead had pretensions to militarism.

9

what a crazy question

Why not, MickeyD’s could definitely put together a couple billion dollars for a short military campaign. As for what size country they could successfully invade, i doubt they could handle anything fiercer than Aruba.

10

The streets with be red with the blood of the nonbelievers!

Or ketchup. Definitely one of the two.

11

If you want to read a fictional treatment of something like this, read Frederick Forsyth’s The Dogs of War or see the movie, with Christopher Walken. But the book’s better.

12

This isn’t correct.

Sandline was contracted by Chris Haiveta, Deputy Prime Minister in Julius Chan’s P-N-G government in 1997 for the recapture of the Bougainville Copper Mine, but the mercenaries were never deployed. Executive Outcomes was providing personnel and expertise for the contract. Operatives had started to arrive in P-N-G and there was revolt by the P-N-G Defence Force and the Government fell (though not in a coup).

AFAIK P-N-G still owes Sandline millions of dollars for an aborted contract to hire mercenaries to fight the Bougainville war.

13

I stand corrected. Thanks for the clarification, wooly.

14

According to McDonalds’ annual report at this site http://biz.yahoo.com/e/010323/mcd.html, McDonalds’ most recent annual net income was 1.997 billion US dollars.

Let’s assume that McDonalds stops paying dividends and devotes its income to producing an unholy army of conquest. (This would be a tricky sell to the shareholders. Perhaps if they promised to distribute the missing dividends as booty from the invasion…)

$2 billion a year compares pretty favorably to the annual defense spending of countries such as Jamaica ($30 million, FY95/96 est.), Nigeria ($360 million, FY00), or Indonesia ($1 billion, FY98/99) (Source: CIA Factbook at http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/) But I think we have to keep in mind that McDonald’s will be starting from scratch. As far as I know, it really doesn’t have much of a military infrastructure and it is, of course, a lot cheaper to maintain a fleet of strategic bombers than to buy new ones, for example.

On the other hand, military expenditures are notoriously wasteful and maybe a lean corporation like McDonalds–with it’s eye on the bottom line–could get more bang for its buck, so to speak, than a typical government.

The biggest unknown in the equation would be the question of military alliances. Although McDonalds might be able to put together a military juggernaut that could crush Jamaica, would Jamaica have to stand alone against the Golden (Arches) Horde? I think not. France is obviously spoiling for a fight against the Army of Ronald and I’m guessing that within hours of the commencement of hostilities, you’d see Legionnaires mobilized and on their way to stop the McArmy on the beaches. France’s annual military spending (39.831 billion, FY97) dwarfs what McDonalds can muster and its independent nuclear capability would certainly force McDonalds to think twice about its evil dreams of military conquest.

Perhaps, you wonder, McDonalds could attack a pariah state that even France couldn’t stomach defending? Good luck. Annual military expenditures in North Korea are estimated at between $3.7 billion to $4.9 billion (FY98) and Iraq is, obviously, a tough nut to crack.

My conclusion: Even with McDonalds immense financial muscle, it would be impractical for it to launch a full-out military assault against a sovereign nation. Wars of conquest are awfully difficult these days (witness Iraq) and I just don’t think McDonald’s could pull it off. Certainly not if it faced any opposition from the world’s major military powers (which I believe would be inevitable).

15

Well, Microsoft has something like 30 billion dollars hidden under the mattress, so they could probably fund a pretty decent battalion of geeks. But the biggest problem would be getting cannon fodder. You can’t pay soldiers minimum wage and expect them to be grim, steely-eyed machines of death. Typically a soldier is either conscripted (which a company can’t do), fighting for patriotism (not an option of MacD’s, possible for MS, given the religious nature of computer wars on the net), or is a mercenary. Mercenaries aren’t cheap and if you don’t pay them on schedule, they tend to desert, rape and pillage rather than fight. Further, it’s not clear where (outside of Montana) you’d find a large pool of well-armed nutcases who want to get shot at for money. Unless you hire your mercenaries from the same country, you tend to end up with an army that is internally divisive in terms of language and culture.
My guess – a large corporation would be more subtle than most governments. Rather than engaging in a protracted military action, you can expect a corporation to resort to blackmail, bribery, election rigging, and occasional acts of well-concealed assassination or intimidation for a mostly peaceful takeover of a country.

The other alternative would be ultra high-tech warfare – e.g., build a horde of tiny spider-like robots armed with potent neurotoxins and just enough sensors to attack anything military and let them rip. But the R&D alone for something like that would run into the billions.

16

Why rule out Montana? We are, after all, a major producer of beef.

17

You make an excellent point, Finagle. I pretty much ignored that in my previous post because I figured if McDonalds is able to get the people to work in their restaurants, recruiting an army would be a snap for them. I know a couple of guys who joined the U.S. armed services because, in their words, “it was better than flippin’ burgers.”

Still, to be practical, I wonder if McDonalds could do something similar to how the British recruit Gurkhas (there’s an interesting article on the process at http://www.reportage.org/2001/NepalGurkhas/PagesGhurkasFrames/Article.html ). Despite their status as quasi-mercenaries and the fact that the officers of the Gurkha regiments have to learn a second language to command them, the Gurkhas are still an extremely well-regarded fighting force.

18

As I recall, Jardine Matheson paid the British government the full cost of invading China in the first Opium War.
Previous to that, The British East India Company took over most of India.
So the answer is - yes it’s already been done. And about the size of India or China.

19

Wal-Mart, with over $219b in revenue and $6.6b in profits, has plenty of the requisite matériel already in its inventory, and I betcha some of their elderly door-greeters are war veterans, so they have a built-in pool of military advisors.

All they need to do is pull from stock any merchandise suitable for combat use as a deadly weapon (K-Bar type knives, rifles, pistols, hunting bows, baseball bats), buy a few hundred APC’s and Humvees, and send their 1.3 million employees to boot camp, and they would have a force that, while lacking in training, would more than compensate in expendable manpower.

Hell, Wal-Mart could probably easily convert their pharmacies ito produce crude but effective chemical weapons.

Let’s hope no-one pisses off the Walton family. . .

20

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) actually one battles against the Portuguese navy…

Anyway, check out this satirical article.