Oh, and those people who think the Megacorporations don’t use hard or soft power are likely forgetting history as this snippet would show:
These elites began to associate themselves with the Caldari megacorporations, who slowly grew in power and stature as a result. The influence of these megacorporations began to permeate the Caldari democracies, with many states simply becoming puppets of the corporate CEOs once the novelty of regime change had dwindled. The presence of lobbying within these democratic systems made it easier for the corporations to encroach their influence, to the point that they were able to do so even in Gallente states, though to a far more limited degree. [1]
Caldari corporations have been meddling in democracies since about the day they were formed centuries ago. When someone like Mentas Blaque talks about the traitors in the midst, and collusion with Caldari, he’s not chasing shadows and figments of imagination, he’s a student of history and knows what Caldari have done and will do.
The Caldari conception of war is that it is not binary, there is no peace, because you are always at war with everyone else and that warfare exists on a broad spectrum. The true goal is to achieve political goals with the minimal expenditure of effort and cost – and that requires a broad spectrum of strategies to achieve.
Sometimes it requires Lawfare, and the use of a constant barrage of litigation to press a claim. Maybe you want to go into an competitors territorial enclave, so you surround it with anti-access missile systems making direct intervention for them costly, while cutting all power and access routes in to it. Then you coerce them to negotiate on the grounds of “legitimate” claims.
Maybe you want to hit a foreign information data vault, so you send in your proxies to negotiate with some criminal cartel and get some low level guys the higher ups want to get rid off to hit something like a bank or commodities cache. Then you get a sniper to off a police officer nearby that you called in for a routine check on something innocuous. Given most response scenarios that will draw all nearby police into the area giving your assault team enough time to hit the vault and get out.
Or you just want leverage, so you dump a whole bunch of capital on things like infrastructure deals to build roads and hospitals. This creates strong incentives that such people won’t act against you.
There’s a reason why independent mercenary companies in the State are practically a revolving door for former official corporate security personnel. They’re useful proxies to deny in the games the corporations play with each other every single day. It’s such a part of daily life that most don’t even notice it all that much unless it gets into an actual official shooting match like between Lai Dai and SuVee back in the day.