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costs of war project
Trump's Iran War Has Already Cost Americans Over $40 Billion Extra on Gas and Diesel
"This data shows that energy price shocks function as an economy-wide, unacknowledged tax on households, with costs comparable to large federal programs and policies," said the Climate Solutions Lab director.
May 18, 2026
An analysis released Monday by Brown University researchers shows President Donald Trump's illegal war on Iran has cost American consumers over $40 billion more at the fuel pump since late February.
Iran has responded to the US-Israeli aggression by restricting ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which has limited the trading of fertilizer and fuel. The International Energy Agency's executive director warned Monday that the world only has weeks' worth of oil reserves left.
With the trade route largely closed, including during the current ceasefire, fuel prices around the world have soared. As of Monday, the average price for a gallon of gasoline in the United States was $4.515. Brown's Climate Solutions Lab and Costs of War Project have launched an online tool to track the rising costs for US consumers.
So far, according to the tool, price hikes tied to the war have cost Americans over $41.9 billion extra for diesel ($18.66 billion) and gas ($23.28 billion), based on prewar data, or an average of more than $320 per US household.
"This data shows that energy price shocks function as an economy-wide, unacknowledged tax on households, with costs comparable to large federal programs and policies," said Jeff Colgan, director of the Climate Solutions Lab, in a statement.
The new research brief from Brown highlights how that money could have been spent to improve Americans' lives. For example, that $40 billion "could pay for the entire federal Bridge Investment Program announced in 2024 to repair, restore, and modernize over 10,200 of the nation's bridges."
The full figure also exceeds "the estimated cost of completely redoing the US air traffic control system ($31.5 billion)," the brief states. It's also two times the cost of the Biden administration's proposed electric vehicle charging and electrification programs ($18.9 billion).
"Rising fuel costs are just one of the many financial costs of this war," noted Costs of War director Stephanie Savell. "Official estimates of Iran War costs are just scratching the surface of the actual burdens Americans will face because of it."
Researchers, policymakers, and other critics have been sounding the alarm about the various costs of Trump's war—including human lives lost, infrastructure damage in the Middle East, and rising prices around the world—throughout the conflict.
Earlier this month, a report from the office of US Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) projected that if gas prices remain at their current level, it will cost Americans an extra $73.06 per month, or $876 per year, to fill up just one vehicle.
An analysis published Friday from the liberal think tank Center for American Progress stressed that the increased fuel and fertilizer prices are hitting rural families and farmers—which are key to Trump's base—particularly hard.
Globally, during the first month of the war, consumers and businesses lost up to $111.6 billion due to rising fuel prices, according to the climate group 350.org—which emphasized that its estimate did not account for "wider knock-on effects, such as rising fertilizer and food costs, declines in economic output and employment, or broader inflation driven by fossil fuel price volatility."
"Over $100 billion has gone straight into the pockets of fossil fuel companies," 350.org chief executive Anne Jellema said at the time, "while families struggle to afford energy and basic necessities."
In his public comments, the president has repeatedly made clear that he does not care about how his war impacts the public. Last week, when asked about how much "Americans' financial situations" were on his mind as he tries to negotiate an end to the conflict, Trump said, "Not even a little bit."
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Hegseth Drops New Ad for Proposed $1.5 Trillion Pentagon Budget as Poll Shows 60% Opposed
"What we're seeing is the public experience how more spending does not actually keep them safe," said a researcher at Brown University's Costs of War Project.
May 14, 2026
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday released yet another ad pitching President Donald Trump's proposed $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget, as new polling showed major skepticism over the idea.
In his latest pitch for the record-breaking defense budget, the former Fox News host insists that "America is not in decline," even though the US has been unable to compel Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz despite having spent nearly $1 trillion on defense in 2025.
"We remain the strongest military power on Earth," Hegseth continued. "But that power requires renewal. And with global threats that are constantly evolving, it's time to make a $1.5 trillion investment."
The $1.5 trillion investment is a GENERATIONAL DOWN PAYMENT on America’s national defense.
This investment guarantees the United States maintains overwhelming strength and unmatched deterrence against any adversary for generations to come. pic.twitter.com/2zOSlZkzNr
— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) May 14, 2026
A $1.5 trillion military budget would be over 50% more than the 2025 US defense budget and more than four times the money spent on defense by China, the world’s second-biggest defense spender.
Among other things, Hegseth said that the budget would invest $18 billion into Trump's proposed "Golden Dome" missile defense shield, which the Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday estimated would cost $1.2 trillion to create, deploy, and operate over the first 20 years of its existence.
Hegseth also said that the Pentagon would be increasing its investment in artificial intelligence by "800%," although it's not at the moment clear how well AI helps militaries effectively fight wars.
The defense secretary concluded his video by insisting that "we are expanding our strength, we are restoring our deterrence, and we are putting America first."
USA Today reported on Thursday that a new poll conducted by ReThink Media and the Costs of War Project at Brown University finds that nearly 60% of Americans think the proposed Trump Pentagon budget is too large, including 40% who say $1.5 trillion is "much too high" to spend on defense.
Breaking the figures down by party, 87% of Democrats said the defense budget was too high, along with 54% of independents, and even 30% of Republicans.
Jennifer Greenburg, a researcher with Brown's Costs of War Project, told USA Today that Americans were broadly skeptical that plunging more taxpayer money into the Pentagon is really necessary given that the US already doles out more for defense than the next four biggest spenders—China, Russia, Germany, and India—combined.
"In real time, I think what we're seeing," said Greenberg, "is the public experience how more spending does not actually keep them safe."
In a column published by The New York Times on Wednesday, longtime national security reporter Noah Shachtman argued that Hegseth's $1.5 trillion proposal was "less like a budget and more like a trip to an endless casino buffet" in which the Pentagon spends money in "gut-busting proportions."
Shachtman also noted that the proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget comes at a time when the Trump administration has wrecked traditional oversight mechanisms, thus making waste and fraud far more likely at a Pentagon that's never passed an audit.
"One of their early actions was to fire and replace the Pentagon’s inspector general, whose office looks into claims of fraud and abuse in military contracting," Shachtman explained. "The independent office that tests whether our weapons actually work has been gutted."
Ben Freeman, director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, argued in an analysis published on Tuesday that Hegseth's budget pitch at congressional hearings this week was particularly baffling because there is really no imperative behind it on par with the Cold War or the post-9/11 defense buildup.
"Despite presenting no strategic necessity for the largest year-over-year Pentagon spending increase since World War II," Freeman wrote, "Hegseth repeatedly claimed the $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget was a sound financial decision, arguing in the Senate hearing that 'at every level we have made it a fiscally responsible budget.' Yet, the fact is that the entirety of this proposed increase in Pentagon spending would be deficit financed, effectively going on Uncle Sam’s credit card."
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Report Details How Post-9/11 Legal Policies Laid Groundwork for Trump 'Terrorizing Migrants'
A legal expert explores how the administration is "weaponizing the law... to effectuate a widespread harassment and mass deportation campaign that is more akin to ethnic cleansing than routine immigration enforcement."
May 05, 2026
President Donald Trump's taxpayer-funded mass deportation campaign has tormented communities across the country with militarized federal agents, killed immigrants and US citizens alike, abused demonstrators and detainees of all ages, and sparked fears of an expansive effort to strip citizenship from Americans.
The "Terrorizing Migrants" report released Tuesday by the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson School of International and Public Affairs details how Trump's xenophobic campaign reflects "specific law and policy options created and strengthened among all three branches of the US government, on a bipartisan basis, since 9/11."
"These law and policy options place heightened unchecked discretionary authority within the administration, and are particularly ripe for abuse against noncitizen persons of color by immigration authorities, law enforcement agents, and other executive branch officials," wrote Widener University Delaware Law School assistant professor Elizabeth Beavers, author of the report.
The publication focuses on five key post-9/11 precedents borrowed from the "War on Terror," though it acknowledges that "the Trump administration is relying on laws and policies far beyond those described in this paper to effectuate its broader anti-immigrant agenda, and justifying much of it in national security language."
The first of the five precedents is "conflation of immigration enforcement and counterterrorism." The report recalls that after the 2001 terrorist attacks, the Federal Bureau of Investigation "orchestrated a mass investigation" that "exclusively targeted Arab, Muslim, and South Asian immigrants in a dragnet roundup, subjecting them to secretive detention at locations inside the US," and holding many of them "for weeks or even months without any charges at all."
Beavers also pointed to the George W. Bush administration's launch of the National Security Entry and Exit Registration System, as well as the creation of the US Department of Homeland Security and the placement of Immigration and Customs Enforcement within DHS. ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents have been key to Trump's campaign.
The Muslim ban from Trump's first term "built upon the structures that came before it, but greatly expanded legal presumptions that people of particular races, religions, and nationalities carry inherent danger," Beavers wrote. His second term policies have "extended this precedent to its logical conclusion by framing migration itself as terrorism. And nearly 25 years after its post-9/11 creation, ICE has been unleashed and empowered to roam American streets, snatching and disappearing people they perceive as unlawfully present, often based solely on race, and often without verifying their immigration status."
The second precedent Beavers explored is "expanded and politicized 'terrorist' designation lists." She noted Trump's invasion of Venezuela and abduction of its president, Nicolás Maduro, as well as his boat-bombing spree allegedly targeting drug traffickers in international waters.
The expert also dove into "deporting people as 'terrorists' without proving actual violent conduct," flagging Trump's "reverse migration" pledge after an Afghan man allegedly shot two National Guard members in Washington, DC, along with the administration's decision to "hold and review" asylum applications for people from "high-risk" countries.
That review, she warned, "could result in mass removal from the country of 'terrorist' noncitizens who involuntarily paid money to cartels at some point in their lives, whose family remittances have crossed hands with cartel-controlled actors, who have family members or other connections to a designated cartel but no involvement themselves, or who have unwillingly been pressed into service of a cartel at some point."
Much gratitude to @costsofwar.bsky.social for publishing my newest paper, highlighting how legal tools that started as post-9/11 counterterrorism abuses are now being weaponized further for Trump's anti-immigrant agenda:
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— Elizabeth Beavers (@elizabethrb.bsky.social) May 5, 2026 at 10:49 AM
The fourth precedent examined in the analysis is "indefinite detention, torture, and rendition of noncitizens." Beavers began the section with the detention camp at US Naval Station Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, which she called "perhaps one of the most notorious features of the US government's post-9/11 'War on Terror.'"
"It is both a place where every post-9/11 president has detained Muslim men in connection with the post-9/11 counterterrorism wars, but it is also a place where unauthorized migrants are sometimes held," she wrote. "More than 700 migrants have been sent to and from Guantánamo in President Trump's second term, detained there by ICE with support from the military."
The expert also highlighted Trump's deportation of hundreds of men to El Salvador's infamous Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT)—based on often dubious claims that they belonged to the gang Tren de Aragua, which the president designated as a terrorist organization—as well as the "practice of disappearing people into secretive immigration detention" within the United States, and reports indicating that "abusive treatment in those facilities may amount to unlawful torture."
The final precedent Beavers explored is the "anti-democratic concentration of executive national security powers." She wrote that "the second Trump administration has made prompt use of this latitude" from federal courts since 9/11.
"This has included: manipulating the 'terrorist' designation lists in novel ways to include drug cartels without needing court approval, which has expanded the scope of people who can be deported as 'terrorists'; claiming a maximalist version of its immigration powers, daring courts to intervene; invoking the state secrets privilege to avoid accountability in cases challenging its deportation orders; and indefinitely detaining and torturing migrants," Beavers continued. "They have taken each of these actions without fear they will be meaningfully held accountable in court."
Based on her review, the professor concluded that "indisputably, administration officials are weaponizing the law in new and particularly indefensible ways to effectuate a widespread harassment and mass deportation campaign that is more akin to ethnic cleansing than routine immigration enforcement."
"Neither Congress nor the courts have meaningfully checked presidents or held them accountable for their expansive and spurious claims of war authorities, national security powers, and counterterrorism mechanisms to justify harmful and discriminatory practices against noncitizens and especially against people of color," she stressed. "In these and many other ways, US policymakers on a bipartisan basis built and sharpened the legal weapons that President Trump is now utilizing against immigrants."
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From Boat Murders to Kidnapping Maduro, Trump Spending Billions on 'Donroe Doctrine' Militarism
“Across the country people are going bankrupt and dying prematurely because of lack of healthcare, but the US government has billions to spend on imperialist violence to enrich corporations," said one researcher.
Apr 23, 2026
As the basic needs of millions of Americans are sacrificed upon the altar of waning US global domination, an analysis unveiled Thursday revealss that the Trump administration has spent billions of dollars on illegal military aggression against Venezuela and civilian boats alleged without evidence to be smuggling drugs off the coast of Latin America.
The Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson School of International and Public Affairs published an analysis by a pair of researchers who "found that spending on Operation Southern Spear and Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela, the Caribbean, and the Eastern Pacific cost at least $4.7 billion from August 1, 2025 to March 31, 2026."
The researchers—Hanna Homestead of the Institute for Policy Studies' National Priorities Project and Jennifer Kavanagh of the think tank Defense Priorities—also found that "costs will continue to mount as some naval assets and aircraft remain in the region and strikes continue."
"This estimate is only partial due to lack of information, and does not include long-term budgetary costs such as veterans benefits," an introduction to the analysis states.
BREAKING: Since August 2025, the U.S. has spent at least $4.7 billion on operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, including the operation to oust Maduro. [THREAD, 1/11]
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— The Costs of War Project (@costsofwar.bsky.social) April 23, 2026 at 8:41 AM
In addition to the financial burden, the analysis notes the human costs of enforcing the so-called "Donroe Doctrine."
"While not the topic of this paper, they are essential to note at the outset," the publication states. "The raid and capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro during Operation Absolute Resolve resulted in approximately 75 known fatalities. These include 32 Cuban personnel killed, at least 23 Venezuelan security officers killed, and at least two civilian deaths."
US strikes "against unarmed vessels in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific between September 2, 2025 and March 31, 2026 have killed at least 163 people," the authors added. "In addition, at least one American service member died while deployed to the Caribbean in February 2026 when two US ships collided."
The toll from Trump's boat-bombing spree has since risen to more than 180 following additional reported strikes. Survivors of somemi bombings allege they were tortured by their US captors. The US military and Trump administration have provided no solid evidence to support their claims that the boats were transporting illicit narcotics.
Homestead and Kavanagh noted in their analysis that "to date, Congress has not authorized the use of force in the Caribbean or Eastern Pacific and the Pentagon has not provided information about costs of Venezuela-related operations, even as they continue to mount."
There have been more than 50 boat bombings since Trump launched his campaign last September. Relatives of people killed in or missing after the strikes insist their loved ones were fishers with no links to the drug trade, an assertion echoed by leaders in Venezuela, Colombia, and some Caribbean island nations.
Multiple war powers resolutions aimed at reining in Trump's ability to wage war on Venezuela or bomb boats on the high seas without congressional authorization have been rejected by the Republican-controlled Congress.
In addition to the bombing and invasion of Venezuela and the boat strikes, the Trump administration has deployed troops to Ecuador as part of a joint campaign against alleged drug gangs dubbed Operation Total Extermination. Trump has also ordered the military to plan an invasion to seize the Panama Canal, threatened to "take" Cuba, possibly attack Mexico and Colombia, invade and annex Greenland, and somehow make Canada the "51st state."
That's just in the Western Hemisphere. Overall, Trump has bombed seven countries around the world since returning to the White House and 10 nations over the course of his two terms—including Iran, where he launched an illegal war with Israel.
The Costs of War Project rose to prominence by tracking the human and financial price of the so-called US War on Terror, which since September 2001 has resulted in over 940,000 direct deaths, including at least 432,000 civilians, in five studied countries, at a monetary cost of around $8 trillion.
Homestead and Kavanagh wrote in their analysis that the $4.7 billion figure "is a conservative estimate, and the greatest costs may yet be to come," as "operations do not have a clear end date and are actively expanding."
"They carry significant human, financial, and strategic costs and risk," the researchers contended. "American taxpayers, who are increasingly unable to afford basic needs, have a right to know how their tax dollars are spent."
Homestead told The Intercept on Thursday that "across the country people are going bankrupt and dying prematurely because of lack of healthcare, but the US government has billions to spend on imperialist violence to enrich corporations—from Venezuela to Iran—without any regard for human rights, life, or rule of law."
“This situation illustrates why greater restraint on Pentagon spending—which primarily benefits private contractors—is so necessary," she added.
This, as Trump seeks a record $1.5 trillion allocation for military spending in the next federal budget—despite the national debt approaching a staggering $40 trillion—while proposing billions of dollars in cuts to vital social programs.
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At Least 12 Somali Civilians—Including 8 Children—Killed in Suspected US Airstrikes
The US has carried out nearly 100 strikes in Somalia this year alone, with scant coverage by the corporate media.
Nov 17, 2025
At least a dozen civilians—eight children, three women, and an elderly man—were killed in weekend bombings that local sources claimed were the latest of nearly 100 US airstrikes in the Horn of Africa nation this year alone.
The Somali Guardian reported that the strikes occurred near the southern Somali town of Jamame in the Lower Juba region. In addition to the 12 civilians killed, nine others were reportedly wounded in the attack.
While no one has claimed responsibility for the bombing, US Africa Command (AFRICOM) acknowledged carrying out weekend "airstrikes targeting al-Shabaab," an al-Qaeda-affiliated militant group, near Jamame.
“Specific details about units and assets will not be released to ensure continued operations security,” added AFRICOM—which earlier this year stopped sharing information about civilian harm caused by US attacks.
Somali Guardian reported that Danab, a US-trained Somali special forces unit, was also conducting operations in villages around Jamame. Danab often receives US air support while carrying out such missions.
The weekend strikes follow a Danab raid in Balcad district last week in which children were reportedly killed.
"Three were murdered including 2- and 3-year-olds," Somali activist Adan Abdulle said on Sunday. "This is not the first time that US or US-trained forces have murdered innocent civilians in cold blood. What makes these murders stand out is the callousness with which pressure was exerted on grieving families to keep quiet."
The latest strikes came amid a surge in US bombings targeting Somalia-based militants during US President Donald Trump's second term. Antiwar.com's Dave DeCamp has counted 96 US airstrikes on Somalia this year alone, based on AFRICOM data.
"President Trump has shattered the annual record for US airstrikes in Somalia, which he previously set at 63 during his first term in 2019," DeCamp noted Sunday. "For context, President [Joe] Biden launched a total of 51 airstrikes in Somalia throughout his four years in office, and President [Barack] Obama launched 48 over eight years."
Trump's record bombardment of Somalia has received almost no coverage in the US corporate media.
According to the UK-based watchdog Airwars, US forces have killed at least 92 and as many as 167 civilians in Somalia since 2007, when then-President George W. Bush ordered strikes on the country as part of the War on Terror.
The Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson School for International and Public Affairs says that the open-ended US-led war has left more than 940,000 people dead, upward of 432,000 of them civilians, in at least seven countries, since shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
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How to Research Your Way to a Better World
In the midst of the torrent of lies and repressive practices emanating from Washington, the use of research to guide strategy and support organizing is more important than ever.
Sep 03, 2025
I have spent the bulk of my career—on and off since the late Carter administration—following the money that drives war and repression. What I have finally learned after so many decades of doing research on the war machine is that while research is critical, it must be in the service of a smart strategy backed by a lot of hard work by organizers from all walks of life.
My interest in using research to promote social change was sparked by my years at Columbia University in the 1970s, when I was a researcher and advocate in the divestment movement targeting the apartheid regime of South Africa and a participant in other social justice movements like the boycott in support of the United Farmworkers Union and the opposition to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.
Henry Kissinger’s justification for the US-backed coup in Chile that put Augusto Pinochet in power still sticks in my mind: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”
So much for the land of the free and the beacon of global democracy.
The US role in the coup was eventually recounted by many media outlets, but for me the first and most important was the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), which devoted several issues of its magazine, then called The Latin America and Empire Report, to the origins of the coup, including the role of US corporations. I was so impressed with their research and commitment that I applied to work at NACLA after graduating from Columbia in January 1978. They wisely demurred, since my background on Latin America was largely limited to what I had read in their own reports. Still, their skill in deploying detailed research to debunk the official lies that surrounded the coup stuck with me.
Research Against Apartheid
My real schooling in research, however, came in the anti-apartheid movement, starting with the divestment campaign at Columbia and expanding into my work with national anti-apartheid organizations like the American Committee on Africa (ACOA). Again, research was front and center. In order to make effective demands for divestment, we needed to know which companies were supporting the apartheid regime, and which of those companies our universities held stock in. ACOA was of great help in this, including through Richard Knight, who worked in a back room of their offices at 198 Broadway and had what may well have been the messiest desk in the history of progressive politics. But if my memory serves me correctly, he seemed to be able to remember exactly where he put a given document in one of the many piles of paper that obscured his desktop. The work he did, along with colleagues at ACOA, helped fuel the student divestment movement, along with research by students on campuses around the country.
Another key group at that time was Corporate Data Exchange (CDE). Tina Simcich, who worked at CDE and was also part of the New York Committee to Oppose Bank Loans to South Africa (COBLSA), did the definitive research on which banks were lending to the apartheid regime.
At Columbia, we made an interesting discovery that put the lie to the university’s position on divestment. In response to demands to divest from firms involved with the apartheid regime, university leaders argued that, if there were objections to the actions of companies they were invested in, they felt it would be more productive to support shareholder resolutions seeking to change their conduct than to divest from those companies’ stocks.
if there were not people organizing for change, my research would be little more than a peculiar hobby.
But after digging around in past Columbia University documents, we found a memo from a prior year in which the university had responded to a request to support a shareholder resolution on behalf of trade unionists in Chile, some of whom had been murdered by the Pinochet regime. The university’s position then proved to be precisely the opposite of what it said just a few years later when asked to divest from companies involved in South Africa: They didn’t think it was productive to engage in shareholder resolutions. If there was an ethical issue with one of their holdings, their preference was to divest from the stock of that company.
Although it was a small instance of hypocrisy, it was nonetheless revealing. At that point, the university had been determined to do absolutely nothing to hold companies that were complicit in repression accountable. Our divestment campaign of the mid-1970s did not succeed, but in 1985, another cohort of student activists did finally persuade Columbia to divest. The next year, in 1986, Congress passed comprehensive sanctions on South Africa, overriding a veto attempt by President Ronald Reagan.
Obviously, research was only partly responsible for our success. It was research in the service of organizing and sound strategy that won the day. The fact that the liberation movements in South Africa, including the African National Congress and the Black Consciousness Movement, were calling for divestment greatly strengthened our case. And inspiring organizers and speakers like the incomparable Prexy Nesbitt and the late Dumisani Kumalo, a South African exile who went on to be liberated South Africa’s first representative to the United Nations, played a huge role, as did thousands of campus activists, religious leaders, trade unionists, state and local officials, and heads of pension funds.
Eight years later, in 1994, Nelson Mandela was sworn in as the first president of a free South Africa. The vast bulk of the credit for that historic change goes to the people of South Africa, but the divestment campaign and the larger global boycott of the apartheid regime played an important supporting role, a role much appreciated by activists in South Africa.
As for me, my work in the anti-apartheid movement shaped my career. I worked for a while as part of the collective that put out Southern Africa magazine, an independent journal that supported the anti-apartheid movement and the liberation movements in Southern Africa. The original editor was Jennifer Davis, the brilliant exiled South African economist who went on to direct ACOA. I wrote articles about the divestment campaign, violations of the arms embargo on South Africa, and the role of US firms in propping up the apartheid regime. The skills and values I learned there were far more important to my career than my philosophy degree from Columbia, an institution whose leaders have now covered themselves in shame by cracking down on students speaking out against US-financed Israeli genocide in Gaza.
The Impact of ‘68
Our work against apartheid was inspired in part by the generation of 1968, whose research exposed the role of companies fueling the war in Vietnam, including Dow Chemical, which produced napalm that was used to kill and maim untold numbers of people. We were also influenced by publications like “Who Rules Columbia,” as well as a handy publication on how to research the corporate ties of one’s university, published by the ever-relevant and crucial NACLA. And groups like National Action Research on the Military-Industrial Complex (NARMIC) were invaluable for peace activists from the anti-Vietnam War period onward.
Other influences on me from that generation of researchers and analysts included Michael Klare, whose reports and books like Supplying Repression, War Without End: American Planning for the Next Vietnams, and Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws: America’s Search for a New Foreign Policy were foundational in forming my understanding of US military spending and strategy. And my perspective on the domestic factors driving Pentagon spending began with The Iron Triangle, written by my friend and mentor Gordon Adams (now Abby Ross).
The Corporate Role in Fueling Genocide in Gaza
Activists pushing universities to divest from companies profiting from Israel’s war in Gaza have made connections with the earlier generation of researchers described above, from webinars with members of NARMIC to essays that link to documents like “Who Rules Columbia?”
A key organization in the middle of current efforts is Little Sis—a powerful research organization whose name is based on the idea that they are the opposite of Big Brother. They facilitate research and make connections on a wide range of issues, but at this moment one of their most important products is a webinar they did with Dissenters, a youth anti-militarism group based in Chicago, on how to research the corporate ties of universities. It’s a tutorial on researching university ties to war profiteers, going well beyond the issue of stock holdings in arms makers to look at the connections of trustees, financial institutions, and other relevant ties to weapons makers.
As the Trump administration stops collecting some kinds of data and destroys other kinds altogether, the job of research will be ever more difficult.
Groups of dedicated students within the ceasefire and anti-genocide movements on US campuses have done excellent work in researching the corporate ties of their own universities. I appeared on Santita Jackson’s radio show in February 2025 and connected with Bryce Greene, a student at the University of Indiana involved in the ceasefire-Gaza movement there. He and his fellow students were researching the military ties of the university, and they wanted me to review their research to see if they were missing anything. As it happened, they had dug up far more information than I would have, in part because of local connections. Their biggest find was related to the university’s ties to the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC), Crane Division, which provides technical support for everything from missile defense systems to Special Operations Forces. University professors had gone back and forth between Crane and campus, and Crane had a direct presence at the school. Students then started a “keep Crane off campus” campaign.
Researchers focused specifically on Israel and Gaza include the American Friends Service Committee, which has a web page on “Companies Profiting from the Gaza Genocide,” and No Tech for Apartheid, which, among other things, reaches out to workers at Google and Amazon to encourage them to take a stand against technology from tech firms going to support the Israeli war effort. One of the most valuable current resources is the United Nations report, From the Economy of Occupation to the Economy of Genocide, produced under the supervision of Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, which describes its purpose this way:
This report investigates the corporate machinery sustaining Israel’s settler-colonial project of displacement and replacement of the Palestinians in the occupied territory. While political leaders and governments shirk their obligations, far too many corporate entities have profited from Israel’s economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and now, genocide. The complicity exposed by this report is just the tip of the iceberg; ending it will not happen without holding the private sector accountable, including its executives.
Models of Research and Strategy
The most effective current model for using data to shape the debate on security issues is the Costs of War Project at Brown University. Their work on the costs of America’s post-9/11 wars ($8 trillion and counting), the number of overseas US counterterror missions, the cost of US military aid and military operations in support of Israel (over $22 billion in the first year of the war in Gaza) is routinely cited in the press and by political leaders, and provides fuel for activists in their writing and public education efforts.
The best current example of merging research, organizing, and strategy is the new Poor People’s Campaign, cochaired by Reverend William Barber of Repairers of the Breach and Reverend Liz Theoharis of the Kairos Center. Their campaign was inspired by the effort of the same name announced by Martin Luther King Jr. in November 1967. King was assassinated before his campaign came to fruition, but the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) and other groups picked up the work of making its signature event, The Poor People’s March on Washington, happen.
One of the bedrock principles of the current Poor People’s Campaign is that the people most impacted by poverty should lead the movement. But cultivating such leadership, especially among those who have been excluded from the halls of power and influence for so long, requires an ongoing process of research, education, and training. Theoharis, director of the Kairos Center and cochair of the Poor People’s Campaign, underscores this point in her new book on the history of poor people’s organizing, coauthored with Noam Sandweiss-Back:
Without a continual process of learning, reflecting, and growing intellectually, our organizing is reduced to mobilizing, an exercise in moving bodies without supporting existing leaders and developing new ones... mobilizing people is important, but when it becomes our sole focus, we sacrifice long-term power for short-term action.
As Theoharis notes, King made a similar point in Where Do We Go From Here?:
Education without social action is a one-sided value because it has no true power potential. Social action without education is a weak expression of pure energy… Our policies should have the strength of deep analysis beneath them to be able to challenge the clever sophistries of our opponents.
In the midst of the torrent of lies and repressive practices emanating from Washington, the use of research to guide strategy and support organizing is more important than ever. But as the Trump administration stops collecting some kinds of data and destroys other kinds altogether, the job of research will be ever more difficult. That can be partially compensated for by drawing on the collective knowledge of researchers, organizers, and community members alike, taking our lead from people who are on the front lines of dealing with repressive policies.
Occasionally, when I am giving a talk on how to reduce the influence of the war machine, I point out that, if there were not people organizing for change, my research would be little more than a peculiar hobby. That is only a slight exaggeration. We need to bring together researchers, organizers, and strategists, taking our lead from members of impacted communities, to work in partnership against the challenges we now face on a daily, at times hourly, basis.
This means the content of our work may take different forms. Rather than reports and briefings, we may need to rely on music, storytelling, art, and ritual to share insights on the political terrain and tales of resistance and revival in these times of escalating crisis. This may become even more to the point as traditional forms of protest continue to be criminalized.
We have a rich history to guide and inspire us, but the task is ours.
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From Guernica to Gaza, Air War Is a Horror That Lets Its Perpetrators off the Hook
An idea has emerged among US leaders that it’s not really a war if Americans are above it all and aren’t dying. But what is it to the civilians below?
Aug 29, 2025
Killing from the sky has long offered the sort of detachment that warfare on the ground can’t match. Far from its victims, air power remains the height of modernity. And yet, as the monk Thomas Merton concluded in a poem, using the voice of a Nazi commandant, “Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.”
Nine decades have passed since aerial technology first began notably assisting warmakers. Midway through the 1930s, when Benito Mussolini sent Italy’s air force into action during the invasion of Ethiopia, hospitals were among its main targets. Soon afterward, in April 1937, the fascist militaries of Germany and Italy dropped bombs on a Spanish town with a name that quickly became a synonym for the slaughter of civilians: Guernica.
Within weeks, Pablo Picasso’s painting “Guernica” was on public display, boosting global revulsion at such barbarism. When World War II began in September 1939, the default assumption was that bombing population centers—terrorizing and killing civilians—was beyond the pale. But during the next several years, such bombing became standard operating procedure.
Dispensed from the air, systematic cruelty only escalated with time. The blitz by Germany’s Luftwaffe took more than 43,500 civilian lives in Britain. As the Allies gained the upper hand, the names of certain cities went into history for their bomb-generated firestorms and then radioactive infernos. In Germany: Hamburg, Cologne, and Dresden. In Japan: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.
“Between 300,000-600,000 German civilians and over 200,000 Japanese civilians were killed by allied bombing during the Second World War, most as a result of raids intentionally targeted against civilians themselves,” according to the documentation of scholar Alex J. Bellamy. Contrary to traditional narratives, “the British and American governments were clearly intent on targeting civilians,” but “they refused to admit that this was their purpose and devised elaborate arguments to claim that they were not targeting civilians.”
Past Atrocities Excusing New Ones
As the New York Times reported in October 2023, three weeks into the war in Gaza, “It became evident to US officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign. In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II—including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—to try to defeat those countries.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told then-US President Joe Biden much the same thing, while shrugging off concerns about Israel’s merciless killing of civilians in Gaza. “Well,” Biden recalled him saying, “you carpet-bombed Germany. You dropped the atom bomb. A lot of civilians died.”
Routine reverence for America’s high-tech arsenal of air power has remained in sync with the assumption that, in the hands of Uncle Sam, the world’s greatest aerospace technologies would be used for the greatest good.
Apologists for Israel’s genocide in Gaza have continued to invoke just such a rationale. Weeks ago, for instance, Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, responded derisively to a statement by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer that “the Israeli government’s decision to further escalate its offensive in Gaza is wrong.” Citing the US-British air onslaught on Dresden in February 1945 that set off a huge firestorm, Huckabee tweeted: “Ever heard of Dresden, PM Starmer?”
Appearing on Fox & Friends, Huckabee said: “You have got the Brits out there complaining about humanitarian aid and the fact that they don’t like the way Israel is prosecuting the war. I would remind the British to go back and look at their own history. At the end of World War II they weren’t dropping food into Germany, they were dropping massive bombs. Just remember Dresden—over 25,000 civilians were killed in that bombing alone.”
The United Nations has reported that women and children account for nearly 70% of the verified deaths of Palestinians in Gaza. The capacity to keep massacring civilians there mainly depends on the Israeli Air Force (well supplied with planes and weaponry by the United States), which proudly declares that “it is often due to the IAF’s aerial superiority and advancement that its squadrons are able to conduct a large portion” of the Israeli military’s “operational activities.”
The “Grace and Panache” of the “Indispensable Nation”
The benefactor making possible Israel’s military prowess, the US government, has compiled a gruesome record of its own in this century. An ominous undertone, foreshadowing the unchecked slaughter to come, could be heard on October 8, 2023, the day after the Hamas attack on Israel resulted in close to 1,200 deaths. “This is Israel’s 9-11,” the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations said outside the chambers of the Security Council, while the country’s ambassador to the United States told PBS viewers that “this is, as someone said, our 9-11.”
Loyal to the “war on terror” brand, the American media establishment gave remarkably short shrift to concerns about civilian deaths and suffering. The official pretense was that (of course!) the very latest weaponry meshed with high moral purpose. When the US launched its “shock and awe” air assault on Baghdad to begin the Iraq War in March 2003, “it was a breathtaking display of firepower,” anchor Tom Brokaw told NBC viewers with unintended irony. Another network correspondent reported “a tremendous light show here, just a tremendous light show.”
As the US occupation of Iraq took hold later that year, New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins (who now covers military matters for The New Yorker) was laudatory on the newspaper’s front page as he reported on the Black Hawk and Apache helicopter gunships flying over Baghdad “with such grace and panache.” Routine reverence for America’s high-tech arsenal of air power has remained in sync with the assumption that, in the hands of Uncle Sam, the world’s greatest aerospace technologies would be used for the greatest good.
In a 2014 commencement speech at West Point, then-US President Barack Obama proclaimed: “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come.”
After launching two major invasions and occupations in this century, the United States was hardly on high moral ground when it condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and frequent bombing of that country’s major cities. Seven months after the invasion began, Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to justify his reckless nuclear threats by alarmingly insisting that the atomic bombings of Japan had established a “precedent.”
Whoever Doesn’t Count Goes Uncounted
Journalist Anand Gopal, author of the brilliant book No Good Men Among the Living, spent years in Afghanistan after the US invasion of that country, often venturing into remote rural areas unvisited by Western reporters. While US media outlets were transfixed with debating the wisdom of finally withdrawing troops from that country in August 2021 and the flaws in the execution of the departure, Gopal was rendering a verdict that few in power showed the slightest interest in hearing: The US war effort in Afghanistan had involved the large-scale killing of civilians from the air, and civilian deaths had been “grossly undercounted.”
In Helmand Province (“really the epicenter of the violence for the last two decades”), Gopal investigated what had happened to the family of a housewife named Shakira, who lived in the small village of Pan Killay. As he explained during a DemocracyNow! interview, she had lost 16 members of her family. “What was remarkable or astonishing about this was that this wasn’t in one airstrike or in one mass casualty incident,” he pointed out. “This was in 14 or 15 different incidents over 20 years.” He added:
So, people were living—reliving tragedy again and again. And it wasn’t just Shakira, because I was interested, after interviewing her, to see how representative this was. So, I managed to talk to over a dozen families. I got the names of the people who were killed. I tried to triangulate that information with death certificates and other eyewitnesses. And so, the level of human loss is really extraordinary. And most of these deaths were never recorded. It’s usually the big airstrikes that make the media, because in these areas there’s not a lot of internet penetration, there’s not—there’s no media there. And so, a lot of the smaller deaths of ones and twos don’t get recorded. And so, I think we’ve grossly undercounted the number of civilians who died in this war.
Citing a UN study of casualties during the first half of 2019, the BBC summed up the findings this way: “Some 717 civilians were killed by Afghan and US forces, compared to 531 by militants… Air strikes, mostly carried out by American warplanes, killed 363 people, including 89 children, in the first six months of the year.”
During my brief trip to Afghanistan 10 years earlier, I had visited the Helmand Refugee Camp District 5 on the outskirts of Kabul, where I met a 7-year-old girl named Guljumma. She told me about what had happened one morning the previous year when she was sleeping at her home in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley. At about 5:00 am local time, the US Air Force dropped bombs. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.
As Guljumma spoke, several hundred people were living under makeshift tents in the refugee camp. Basics like food arrived only sporadically. Her father, Wakil Tawos Khan, told me that the sparse incoming donations were from Afghan businessmen, while little help came from the government of Afghanistan. And the United States was offering no help whatsoever. The last time Guljumma and her father had meaningful contact with the US government was when its air force bombed them.
Normal and Lethal
When Shakira and Guljumma lost relatives to bombs that arrived courtesy of the US taxpayer, their loved ones were not even numbers to the Pentagon. Instead, meticulous estimates have come from the Costs of War project at Brown University, which puts “the number of people killed directly in the violence of the post-9-11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere” at upwards of 905,000—with 45% of them civilians. “Several times as many more have been killed as a reverberating effect of the wars—because, for example, of water loss, sewage and other infrastructural issues, and war-related disease.”
The increasing American reliance on air power rather than combat troops has shifted the concept of what it means to be “at war.” After three months of leading NATO’s bombing of Libya in 2011, for instance, the US government had already spent $1 billion on the effort, with far more to come. But the Obama administration insisted that congressional approval was unnecessary since the United States wasn’t actually engaged in military “hostilities”—because no Americans were dying in the process.
The daily horrors in Gaza still echo the day when bombs fell on Guernica.
The State Department’s legal adviser, former Yale Law School dean Harold H. Koh, testified at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the nation’s actions targeting Libya involved “no US ground presence or, to this point, US casualties.” Nor was there “a threat of significant US casualties.” The idea was that it’s not really a war if Americans are above it all and aren’t dying. In support of Koh, a former colleague at the Yale Law School, Akhil Reed Amar, claimed that the United States truly wasn’t engaged in “hostilities” in Libya because “there are no body bags” of American soldiers.
Ten years later, in a September 2021 speech at the United Nations soon after the last American troops had left Afghanistan, President Biden said: “I stand here today, for the first time in 20 years, with the United States not at war.” In other words, American troops weren’t dying in noticeable numbers. Costs of War project codirector Catherine Lutz pointed out in the same month that US engagement in military actions “continues in over 80 countries.”
Seeking to reassure Americans that the Afghanistan withdrawal was a matter of repositioning rather than a retreat from the use of military might, Biden touted an “over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on any direct threats to the United States in the region and to act quickly and decisively if needed.” During the four years since then, the Biden and Trump administrations have directly sent bombers and missiles over quite a few horizons, including in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and Iran.
Less directly, but with horrific ongoing consequences, stepped-up US military aid to Israel has enabled its air power to systematically kill Palestinian children, women, and men with the kind of industrial efficiency that fascist leaders of the 1930s and 1940s might have admired. The daily horrors in Gaza still echo the day when bombs fell on Guernica. But the scale of the carnage is much bigger and unrelenting in Gaza, where atrocities continue without letup, while the world looks on.
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Under Trump, War Profiteers Are Entering a New Golden Age
The "garrison state" Eisenhower warned of has arrived, with negative consequences for nearly everyone but giant weapons conglomerates and their competitors in the emerging military-tech sector.
Jul 28, 2025
When, in his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the unwarranted influence wielded by a partnership between the military and a growing cohort of U.S. weapons contractors and came up with the ominous term “military-industrial complex,” he could never have imagined quite how large and powerful that complex would become. In fact, in recent years, one firm — Lockheed Martin — has normally gotten more Pentagon funding than the entire U.S. State Department. And mind you, that was before the Trump administration moved to sharply slash spending on diplomacy and jack up the Pentagon budget to an astonishing $1 trillion per year.
In a new study issued by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the Costs of War Project at Brown University, Stephen Semler and I lay out just how powerful those arms makers and their allies have become, as Pentagon budgets simply never stop rising. And consider this: in the five years from 2020 to 2024, 54% of the Pentagon’s $4.4 trillion in discretionary spending went to private firms and $791 billion went to just five companies: Lockheed Martin ($313 billion), RTX (formerly Raytheon, $145 billion), Boeing ($115 billion), General Dynamics ($116 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($81 billion). And mind you, that was before Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Budget bill landed on planet Earth, drastically slashing spending on diplomacy and domestic programs to make room for major tax cuts and near-record Pentagon outlays.
In short, the “garrison state” Eisenhower warned of has arrived, with negative consequences for nearly everyone but the executives and shareholders of those giant weapons conglomerates and their competitors in the emerging military tech sector who are now hot on their trail. High-tech militarists like Peter Thiel of Palantir, Elon Musk of SpaceX, and Palmer Luckey of Anduril have promised a new, more affordable, more nimble, and supposedly more effective version of the military-industrial complex, as set out in Anduril’s “Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy,” an ode to the supposed value of those emerging tech firms.
Curiously enough, that Anduril essay is actually a remarkably apt critique of the Big Five contractors and their allies in Congress and the Pentagon, pointing out their unswerving penchant for cost overruns, delays in scheduling, and pork-barrel politics to preserve weapons systems that all too often no longer serve any useful military purpose. That document goes on to say that, while the Lockheed Martins of the world served a useful function in the ancient days of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, today they are incapable of building the next-generation of weaponry. The reason: their archaic business model and their inability to master the software at the heart of a coming new generation of semi-autonomous, pilotless weapons driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing. For their part, the new titans of tech boldly claim that they can provide exactly such a futuristic generation of weaponry far more effectively and at far less cost, and that their weapons systems will preserve or even extend American global military dominance into the distant future by outpacing China in the development of next-generation technologies.
War and a Possible Coming Techno-Autocracy
Could there indeed be a new, improved military-industrial complex just waiting in the wings, one aligned with this country’s actual defense needs that doesn’t gouge taxpayers in the process?
Don’t count on it, not at least if it’s premised on the development of “miracle weapons” that will cost so much less and do so much more than current systems. Such a notion, it seems, arises in every generation, only to routinely fall flat. From the “electronic battlefield” that was supposed to pinpoint and destroy Viet Cong forces in the jungles of Southeast Asia in the Vietnam War years to Ronald Reagan’s failed vision of an impenetrable “Star Wars” missile shield, to the failure of precision-guided munitions and networked warfare to bring victory in Iraq and Afghanistan during this country’s Global War on Terror, the notion that superior military technology is the key to winning America’s wars and expanding U.S. power and influence has been routinely marked by failure. And that’s been true even if the weapons work as advertised (which all too often they don’t).
And while you’re at it, don’t forget, for example, that, nearly 30 years later, the highly touted, high-tech F-35 combat aircraft — once hailed as a technological marvel-in-the-making that would usher in a revolution in both warfare and military procurement — still isn’t ready for prime time. Designed for multiple war-fighting tasks, including winning aerial dogfights, supporting troops on the ground, and bombing enemy targets, the F-35 has turned out to be able to do none of those things particularly well. And to add insult to injury, the plane is so complex that it spends almost as much time being maintained or repaired as being ready to do battle.
That history of technological hubris and strategic failure should be kept in mind when listening to the — so far unproven — claims of the leaders of this country’s military-tech sector about the value of their latest gadgets. For one thing, everything they propose to build — from swarms of drones to unpiloted aircraft, land vehicles, and ships — will rely on extremely complex software that is bound to fail somewhere along the way. And even if, by some miracle, their systems, including artificial intelligence, work as advertised, they may not only not prove decisive in the wars of the future but make wars of aggression that much more likely. After all, countries that master new technologies are tempted to go on the attack, putting fewer of their own people at immediate risk while doing devastating harm to targeted populations. The use of Palantir’s technology by the Israeli Defense Forces to increase the number of targets devastated in a given time frame in their campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza could foreshadow the new age of warfare if emerging military technologies aren’t brought under some system of control and accountability.
A further risk posed by AI-driven warfare is the possibility that the new weapons could choose their targets without human intervention. Current Pentagon policy promises to keep a human “in the loop” in the use of such systems, but military logic runs counter to such claims. As Anduril President and Chief Strategy Officer Christian Brose has written in his seminal book Kill Chain, the high-tech wars of the future will hinge on which side can identify and destroy its targets most quickly — an imperative that would ensure slow-moving humans were left out of the process.
In short, two possibilities arise if the U.S. military transitions to the “new improved” military-industrial complex espoused by the denizens of Silicon Valley: complex systems that don’t perform as advertised, or new capabilities that may make war both more likely and more deadly. And such dystopian outcomes will only be reinforced by the ideology of the new Silicon Valley militarists. They see themselves as both the “founders” of a new form of warfare and “the new patriots” poised to restore American greatness without the need for a democratic government in the war-making mix. Their ideal, in fact, would be to ensure that the government got out of the way and let them solve the myriad problems we face alone. Ayn Rand would be proud.
Such a techno-autocracy would be far more likely to serve the interests of a relatively small elite than aid the average American in any way. From Peter Thiel’s quest for a way to live forever to Elon Musk’s desire to enable the mass colonization of space, it’s not at all clear that, if such goals could even be achieved, they would be generally available. It’s more likely that such opportunities would be restricted to the species of superior beings that the techno-militarists see themselves as being.
The Ultimate Brawl Between the Big Five and the Emerging Tech Firms?
Still, the techno-militarists face serious obstacles in their quest to reach the top rungs of power and influence, not least among them, the continued clout of old-school weapons makers. After all, they still receive the vast bulk of Pentagon weapons spending, based in part on their millions of dollars in lobbying and campaign expenditures and their ability to spread jobs to almost every state and district in the country. These tools of influence give the Big Five far deeper roots in and influence over Congress than the new tech firms. These large, legacy companies also influence government policy through their funding of hawkish think tanks that help shape government policies designed to regulate their conduct, and so much more.
Of course, one way to prevent the ultimate brawl between the Big Five and the emerging tech firms would be to feed them both with ample funding — but that would require a Pentagon budget that would soar well beyond the present trillion-dollar mark. There are, of course, some projects that could benefit both factions, ranging from Donald Trump’s pet Golden Dome missile defense scheme, which could incorporate hardware from the Big Five with software from the emerging tech firms, to Boeing’s new F-47 combat aircraft program, which calls for unpiloted “wing men” likely to be produced by Anduril or another military tech firm. So, the question of confrontation versus cooperation between the new and old guard in the military sector has yet to be settled. If the rival firms end up turning their lobbying resources against each other and going for each other’s proverbial throats, it could weaken their grip on the rest of us and perhaps reveal useful information that might undermine the authority and credibility of both sides.
But count on one thing: neither sector has the best interests of the public in mind, so we need to prepare to fight back ourselves regardless of how their battle plays out.
Okay, then, what could we possibly do to head off the nightmare scenario of a world run by Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and crew? First, we’ll need the kind of “alert and knowledgeable” citizenry that Dwight D. Eisenhower pointed to so long ago as the only antidote to an ever more militarized society. That would mean concerted efforts by both the public and the government (which would, of course, have to be run by someone unlike Donald J. Trump — already a project in itself!).
At the moment, the tech sector is indeed increasingly embedded in the Trump administration and he owes a number of them a distinct debt of gratitude for helping him over the top in the 2024 election. Despite his very public and bitter falling out with fellow narcissist Elon Musk, the influence of the tech sector within his administration remains all too strong, starting with Vice President J.D. Vance, who owes his career to the employment, mentoring, and financial support of Silicon Valley militarist Peter Thiel. And don’t forget that a substantial cohort of former employees of Palantir and Anduril have already been given key posts in this administration.
Creating a counterweight to those new-age militarists will require a full-scale societal effort, including educators, scientists, and technologists, the labor movement, non-tech business leaders, and activists of all stripes. Silicon Valley workers did, in fact, organize a number of protests against the militarization of their handiwork before being beaten back. Now, a new wave of such activism is all too desperately needed.
Just as many of the scientists who helped build the atomic bomb spent their post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki lives trying to rein in or abolish nuclear weapons, a cohort of scientists and engineers in the tech sector needs to play a leading role in beginning to craft guardrails to limit the military uses of the technologies they helped develop. Meanwhile, the student movement against the use of U.S. weapons in Gaza has begun to expand its horizons to target the militarization of universities writ large. In addition, environmentalists need to double down on criticisms of the immense energy requirements needed to power AI and crypto, while labor leaders need to reckon with the consequences of AI destroying jobs in the military and civilian sectors alike. And all of this has to happen in the context of a far greater technological literacy, including among congressional representatives and workers in government agencies charged with regulating the suppliers of new military technologies.
None of that is, of course, likely to happen except in the context of a resurgence of democracy and a committed effort to fulfill the unmet rhetorical promises that undergird the myth of the American dream. And speaking of contexts, here’s one that anybody preparing to protest the further militarization of this society should take into account: contrary to the belief of many key figures from the Pentagon to Wall Street to Main Street, the peak of American military and economic power has indeed passed, never to return. The only rational course is to craft policies that maintain American influence in the context of a world where power has been defused and cooperation is all too essential.
Such a view, of course, is the polar opposite of the bombastic, bullying approach of the Trump administration, which, if it persists, will only accelerate American decline. And in that context, the key question is whether the widespread harm inherent in the new budget bill — which will only continue to wildly enrich the Pentagon and big arms firms of both kinds, while hitting the rest of us across the political spectrum — could prompt a new surge of public engagement and a genuine debate about what kind of world we want to live in and how this country could play a constructive (rather than destructive) role in bringing it about.
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'An Arsenal of Profiteering': Military Contractors Have Gotten Over Half of Pentagon Spending Since 2020
"These figures represent a continuing and massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to fund war and weapons manufacturing," said the project's director.
Jul 08, 2025
Less than a week after U.S. President Donald Trump signed a budget package that pushes annual military spending past $1 trillion, researchers on Tuesday published a report detailing how much major Pentagon contractors have raked in since 2020.
Sharing The Guardian's exclusive coverage of the paper on social media, U.K.-based climate scientist Bill McGuire wrote: "Are you a U.S. taxpayer? I am sure you will be delighted to know where $2.4 TRILLION of your money has gone."
The report from the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson School of International and Public Affairs and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft shows that from 2020-24 private firms received $2.4 trillion in Department of Defense contracts, or roughly 54% of DOD's $4.4 trillion in discretionary spending for that five-year period.
The publication highlights that "during those five years, $771 billion in Pentagon contracts went to just five firms: Lockheed Martin ($313 billion), RTX (formerly Raytheon, $145 billion), Boeing ($115 billion), General Dynamics ($116 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($81 billion)."
In a statement about the findings, Stephanie Savell, director of the Costs of War Project, said that "these figures represent a continuing and massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to fund war and weapons manufacturing."
"This is not an arsenal of democracy—it's an arsenal of profiteering," Savell added. "We should keep the enormous and growing power of the arms industry in mind as we assess the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S. and globally."
Between 2020 and 2024, $771 billion in Pentagon contracts went to just five firms: Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. By comparison, the total diplomacy, development, and humanitarian aid budget, excluding military aid, was $356 billion. [5/12]
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— The Costs of War Project (@costsofwar.bsky.social) July 8, 2025 at 2:43 PM
The paper points out that "by comparison, the total diplomacy, development, and humanitarian aid budget, excluding military aid, was $356 billion. In other words, the U.S. government invested over twice as much money in five weapons companies as in diplomacy and international assistance."
"Record arms transfers have further boosted the bottom lines of weapons firms," the document details. "These companies have benefited from tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Israel and Ukraine, paid for by U.S. taxpayers. U.S. military aid to Israel was over $18 billion in just the first year following October 2023; military aid to Ukraine totals $65 billion since the Russian invasion in 2022 through 2025."
"Additionally, a surge in foreign-funded arms sales to European allies, paid for by the recipient nations—over $170 billion in 2023 and 2024 alone—have provided additional revenue to arms contractors over and above the funds they receive directly from the Pentagon," the paper adds.
The 23-page report stresses that "annual U.S. military spending has grown significantly this century," as presidents from both major parties have waged a so-called Global War on Terror and the DOD has continuously failed to pass an audit.
Specifically, according to the paper, "the Pentagon's discretionary budget—the annual funding approved by Congress and the large majority of its overall budget—rose from $507 billion in 2000 to $843 billion in 2025 (in constant 2025 dollars), a 66% increase. Including military spending outside the Pentagon—primarily nuclear weapons programs at the Department of Energy, counterterrorism operations at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and other military activities officially classified under 'Budget Function 050'— total military spending grew from $531 billion in 2000 to $899 billion in 2025, a 69% increase."
Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed earlier this month "adds $156 billion to this year's total, pushing the 2025 military budget to $1.06 trillion," the document notes. "After taking into account this supplemental funding, the U.S. military budget has nearly doubled this century, increasing 99% since 2000."
Noting that "taxpayers are expected to fund a $1 trillion Pentagon budget," Security Policy Reform Institute co-founder Stephen Semler said the paper, which he co-authored, "illustrates what they'll be paying for: a historic redistribution of wealth from the public to private industry.”
Semler produced the report with William Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute. Hartung said that "high Pentagon budgets are often justified because the funds are 'for the troops.'"
"But as this paper shows, the majority of the department's budget goes to corporations, money that has as much to do with special interest lobbying as it does with any rational defense planning," he continued. "Much of this funding has been wasted on dysfunctional or overpriced weapons systems and extravagant compensation packages."
The arms industry has used an array of tools of influence to create an atmosphere where a Pentagon budget that is $1 trillion per year is deemed “not enough” by some members of Congress. [9/12]
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— The Costs of War Project (@costsofwar.bsky.social) July 8, 2025 at 2:43 PM
In addition to spotlighting how U.S. military budgets funnel billions of dollars to contractors each year, the report shines a light on the various ways the industry influences politics.
"The ongoing influence of the arms industry over Congress operates through tens of millions in campaign contributions and the employment of 950 lobbyists, as of 2024," the publication explains. "Military contractors also shape military policy and lobby to increase military spending by funding think tanks and serving on government commissions."
"Senior officials in government often go easy on major weapons companies so as not to ruin their chances of getting lucrative positions with them upon leaving government service," the report notes. "For its part, the emerging military tech sector has opened a new version of the revolving door—the movement of ex-military officers and senior Pentagon officials, not to arms companies per se, but to the venture capital firms that invest in Silicon Valley arms industry startups."
The paper concludes by arguing that "the U.S. needs stronger congressional and public scrutiny of both current and emerging weapons contractors to avoid wasteful spending and reckless decision-making on issues of war and peace. Profits should not drive policy."
"In particular," it adds, "the role of Silicon Valley startups and the venture capital firms that support them needs to be better understood and debated as the U.S. crafts a new foreign policy strategy that avoids unnecessary wars and prioritizes cooperation over confrontation."
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War No More: Veterans Reflect on the Meaning of Memorial Day
This Memorial Day, let us honor the memory of the dead by pledging to protect our precious planet, its people, and its environment.
May 26, 2025
This Memorial Day weekend, Veterans For Peace is calling on its members and friends to reflect on the gravity of the day, whose official purpose is to “honor all those who died in service to the U.S. during peacetime and war.” Veterans For Peace chooses to honor ALL who have died in wars, both combatants and civilians. Our hope is that a sober accounting of the casualties of war will mitigate against the tendency to turn Memorial Day—like Veterans Day—into a patriotic celebration of U.S. militarism.
We remember the words of President Dwight Eisenhower, who during World War II, was the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe:
“War is a grim, cruel business, a business justified only as a means of sustaining the forces of good against those of evil.” He also famously stated, “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”
Medal of Honor winner Marine Corps General Smedley Butler took it a bit further:
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the loss of lives.
Veterans For Peace is deeply familiar with the pain that emanates from the loss of those lives. We have lost too many friends in wars in foreign lands, and in their aftermath at home due to suicide and service-related diseases. We have spent countless hours with Gold Star families mourning the loss of their loved ones. We also recognize that the “enemy” killed by our bullets and bombs had family and friends who loved them too. Their pain is no different than ours.
Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that over 7,000 U.S. service members have died in the wars following 9/11. Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that more than 8,000 U.S. “contractors” have lost their lives in these conflicts. These hidden deaths reflect the U.S. government’s deception regarding these wars and its disregard for those who perish in them.
The more than 15,000 deaths mentioned above do not account for over 6,000 veterans who died by suicide each year between 2001 and 2022, totaling more than 145,000 people, as documented by the nonprofit Stop Soldier Suicide. Veterans face a 58% higher risk of suicide than non-veterans. While military contractors experience many of the same mental health challenges as veterans, reliable suicide and mental health statistics are not available.
We must help to build a peaceful world based on mutual respect for the human rights of all, as well as for the rights of nature.
Civilian casualties are much greater. We must acknowledge that in modern warfare, it is civilians who make up the bulk of the dead and wounded. The number of civilians killed by the violence in the post-9/11 wars is staggering. Brown University estimates the low end of opposition deaths at 288,923 and civilian deaths at 408,749. The total number of direct violence-related deaths is estimated to be 905,000 people. And even more people die after the wars ends.
A May 2023 Brown University study estimated that there are 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths, with a total death toll of 4.5 to 4.7 million people in post-9/11 war zones. As we mark 50 years since the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam, we will not forget that 3 million Vietnamese died in that unjust and unnecessary war, most of them civilians.
Endless war and suffering persists today, with tens of thousands dying in conflicts that are fueled by U.S.-supplied arms and “intelligence.” The U.S. was an instigator of the terrible war in Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands of young soldiers have perished. The U.S. continues to provide bombs and political cover for the unspeakable genocide in Gaza, where estimates of civilian death range from 50,000 to over 100,000, with an even greater number of life-altering wounds. A generation of young Palestinian amputees and double and triple amputees will be a sober reminder to the world for years to come.
Another victim of war is the U.S. economy, which is greatly distorted by the ever-ballooning military budget, now proposed to reach One Trillion Dollars ($1,000,000,000,000) a year, even as essential social programs vital to poor and working class families are being gutted.
The “modernization” of nuclear weapons is included in the budgets of both the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy, totaling an estimated $946 billion over the next decade, and harkening a no-holds-barred era that could too easily lead to a nuclear war. Eighty years after the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is high time to put an to end to war before it puts an end to human civilization. War must be universally deemed obsolete, illegal, and unacceptable.
Wars will not end, however—and nuclear war will not be averted—unless there is a sea change in the thinking of the U.S. people and our political leaders. We must abandon the military doctrine of seeking “full spectrum dominance” in every corner of the globe. We must embrace the emerging multipolar world and take our place as one nation among many. We must help to build a peaceful world based on mutual respect for the human rights of all, as well as for the rights of nature. As the Vietnam-era poster reads, “War is not good for children or other living things.”
This Memorial Day, let us honor the memory of the dead by pledging to protect our precious planet, its people and its environment. Rather than exalting war, we must come together to abolish war once and for all.
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