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military-industrial complex
Don't Look Away From Palestine
The latest US weapon sale to Israel further confirms US complicity with Israel’s genocidal war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. We must heed an urgent call issued by those most impacted by the war crimes.
Sep 17, 2026
After spending millions of dollars redecorating the White House and transforming DC monuments, President Donald Trump approved, on September 15, 2026, an additional $2.8 billion sale of heavy bombs to Israel, including 40,000 one-ton bombs, 20,000 of the 2,000-pound bombs, and 20,000 bunker-busting penetrator warheads. Israel has used these bombs to destroy homes, families, and crucial infrastructure in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.
This latest US weapons package will replenish Israel’s stockpile of bombs that human rights groups have condemned after documenting their use over the past two and a half years to kill, maim, bereave, and forcibly displace Palestinians. Survivors whose homes have been reduced to rubble now live in makeshift shelters, including flimsy tents, while Israel continues to restrict deliveries of supplies that could protect Gazans from harsh weather, disease, rodent and insect infestations, and other hardships of displacement.
In June of 2026, the Norwegian Refugee Council estimated that 170,000 households in Gaza, equivalent to nearly 1 million people, were living in tents. “Another 5,000 households sleep outdoors,” they reported, “while 52,000 households live in overcrowded shelters.” As Gazans enter the rainy and cold months of winter, they still lack emergency shelter items. They need plastic sheeting, plywood, and rope. Genocidal war and siege drive the crisis they face as the Israelis continue destroying Gazan homes and shelters and imposing restrictions which block desperately needed relief.
President Trump who is undertaking expensive and unnecessary renovations, they longed to rebuild homes which Israelis decimated, using US manufactured bombs.
Over the past two years, members of the Global Solidarity for Peace in Palestine coalition have held weekly online meetings with Palestinians living in the West Bank. They update our coordinating committee about their experiences amid ongoing US provisioned Israeli genocide against Palestinians. They speak with anguish about people in the West Bank and Gaza enduring persecution, travel restrictions, hunger, inadequate medical care, land theft, contamination, and an alarming rise in pogrom-style attacks by illegal settlers who are often assisted by Israeli military and police forces.
Our Palestinian coalition members living in the West Bank long to extend a helping hand to people trapped in Gaza. They recently raised the dilemma of Gazan children who have already lost years of education. Many live in wretched tent encampments, lack adequate food and medicine, and struggle with psychosocial traumas because of having lost their loved ones.
A Palestinian NGO, PYALARA, (Palestinian Youth Association for Leadership and Rights) suggested that our coalition could help with practical measures to assist Gazan children who are eager to learn but who lack basic school supplies. The children are bereft of paper, pencils, pens, books, desks, and book bags.
Recently, for UN News, an interviewer spoke with Julia Dicon, the director of education for UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Association for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East). Dicon described what education means for Palestine refugee children and why sustained support is critical. She expressed deep respect for the many ways that Palestinians maintain capacities to educate their children, even in these dire times.
The interviewer asked her to tell a story about Palestinian young people who represent courage in the face of unspeakable adversity as they continue efforts to learn and teach.
Dicon talked about two Gazan sisters, 17-year-old Tala Mousa and her 15-year-old sister, Farah Mousa, who were recently named winners of the 2026 Middle East Earth Prize. The young women regularly looked at rubble surrounding their home, which Israel had bombed. Unlike President Trump who is undertaking expensive and unnecessary renovations, they longed to rebuild homes which Israelis decimated, using US manufactured bombs. Fala and Farah puzzled over how they and their neighbors could begin creating the indispensable equipment to reconstruct housing: bricks. Together, using their scientific knowledge, they developed a practical way to transform rubble into reusable blocks for garden beds, pavement, and partitions.
Tala and Farah represent the potential of Gazan youth to make a significant difference in their community’s lives and futures. Their energetic, practical, and impassioned approach deserves our respect and support, while at the same time we must find creative ways to resist the merchants of death who benefit from the Trump administration’s purchase of their death-dealing weapons. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX, General Dynamics, and Northrup Grummon are among the US companies whose profits will continue to soar while the US markets their weapons, “showcasing” them in war zones around the world.
We live in harsh, dark times.
The latest US weapon sale to Israel further confirms US complicity with Israel’s genocidal war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. We must heed an urgent call issued by those most impacted by the war crimes: “Don’t look away.”
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Rare Earth Minerals Don't Have to Feed the War Machine
A nation can spend billions building supply chains designed to manufacture the next generation of weapons, or it can use the same industrial capacity to build the infrastructure required for the next generation of human life. The minerals are the same.
Aug 31, 2026
On August 24, the Department of War announced a $750 million investment to secure rare-earth elements produced by Serra Verde at its Pela Ema project in Brazil. Combined with a $300 million purchase commitment from the Defense Logistics Agency and $500 million from a major bank, the arrangement represents a $1.55 billion investment structure aimed at reducing US dependence on Chinese-controlled supply chains.
There is a legitimate problem here.
There is also a troubling choice about how we intend to solve it.
Rare-earth elements such as neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium are essential components of modern life. They are used in permanent magnets found in electric vehicles, wind turbines, electronics, industrial equipment, and other technologies. They are also used in fighter jets, guided missiles, nuclear submarines, drones, and other weapons systems.
A mineral dug from the ground does not know whether it will eventually become part of an offshore wind turbine or the guidance system of a missile. That decision is political.
China currently dominates this supply chain. According to the International Energy Agency, China accounted for about 60% of global mining of magnet rare earths in 2024, 91% of their refining, and 94% of sintered permanent-magnet production. That level of concentration creates a genuine economic vulnerability, particularly after Chinese export restrictions demonstrated how quickly access to these materials can become a geopolitical bargaining chip.
Diversification makes sense.
But listen carefully to the language the US government is using to describe it.
Assistant Secretary of War for Industrial Base Policy Mike Cadenazzi called resilient supply chains a “fundamental warfighting requirement.” The department says the agreement will guarantee materials necessary to manufacture “next-generation weapons systems.” Its announcement specifically highlights nuclear submarines, fighter jets, guided missiles, combat vessels, and drones.
That framing deserves scrutiny.
The United States is not simply securing minerals. It is incorporating another piece of the global economy into an increasingly militarized conception of national security.
A Mineral Can Power a Wind Turbine or a Missile
There is nothing inherently military about neodymium.
A mineral dug from the ground does not know whether it will eventually become part of an offshore wind turbine or the guidance system of a missile.
That decision is political.
And that is precisely why this $1.55 billion initiative should provoke a broader conversation about the kind of economy the United States is building.
If Washington treats critical minerals primarily as inputs for weapons, we should not be surprised when the industries surrounding them increasingly organize themselves around weapons production.
Serra Verde is an important source of these materials. Its Pela Ema operation began commercial production in 2024 and is the first large-scale producer outside Asia of all four critical magnetic rare-earth elements: neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium. The company expects production to reach roughly 6,400 metric tons of rare-earth oxides annually by the end of 2027.
That makes Brazil potentially important to reducing the world's dangerous dependence on a single supplier.
But reducing dependence on China should not automatically mean subordinating a new international supply chain to the needs of the Pentagon.
Rare-earth resilience could instead be treated as civilian industrial policy: an effort to ensure reliable supplies for renewable energy, public transportation, resilient electrical grids, medical technologies, communications infrastructure, and other components of human security.
The difference is more than rhetorical.
Government priorities influence markets. Purchase guarantees influence production. Subsidies determine which industries expand. Billions of public dollars can create an ecosystem in which manufacturers orient themselves toward military customers because those customers offer enormous, guaranteed demand.
If Washington treats critical minerals primarily as inputs for weapons, we should not be surprised when the industries surrounding them increasingly organize themselves around weapons production.
Security Is Bigger Than Military Power
The Department of War's announcement actually exposes the contradiction.
The same release that celebrates rare earths as essential to fighter aircraft and nuclear submarines acknowledges that they are vital to “energy infrastructure, transportation, aerospace, and electronics.”
Exactly.
Those civilian applications should not be an afterthought.
The United States could reproduce the very system it says it wants to escape: concentrated supply chains organized around geopolitical blocs, each treating access to minerals as leverage against the other.
Climate change threatens lives. An unreliable electrical grid threatens lives. Fragile transportation and communications systems threaten economic stability. Supply-chain disruptions can close factories and eliminate jobs.
Those are security issues too.
Yet American policymakers repeatedly define security through the narrowest possible lens: military capability first, virtually everything else second.
A peace economy asks a different question.
Instead of asking only, "What materials do we need to maintain our technological advantage in warfare?" we should ask: "What materials do people need to live safely, sustainably and prosperously—and how can we obtain them without creating new forms of exploitation, environmental destruction, or international conflict?"
That would still require diversifying the rare-earth supply chain.
It would still require investment.
It would still require cooperation with countries such as Brazil.
But the purpose would be different.
Don't Replace One Dependency With Another
There is another danger in framing critical minerals as part of strategic competition with China.
The United States could reproduce the very system it says it wants to escape: concentrated supply chains organized around geopolitical blocs, each treating access to minerals as leverage against the other.
Minerals essential to decarbonization could become another source of great-power confrontation.
The result would not necessarily be resilience. It could be a global scramble for resources.
Countries possessing lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare-earth deposits would increasingly become arenas for competition among powerful states. Supply agreements would become security agreements. Economic relationships would become tests of allegiance.
Minerals essential to decarbonization could become another source of great-power confrontation.
That is not a theoretical concern when officials explicitly describe access to raw materials as a “warfighting requirement.”
The alternative is not continued dependence on China. Diversification is necessary. The IEA itself has repeatedly warned that extreme concentration in rare-earth refining and magnet production represents a significant economic risk.
But diversification should mean creating many reliable suppliers and processing centers—not dividing the mineral economy into rival military camps.
Build a Peace Supply Chain
A different critical-minerals strategy is possible.
The United States could invest aggressively in recycling and recovery of rare-earth materials. It could develop domestic processing capacity while applying strong labor and environmental standards. It could enter long-term partnerships with Brazil and other producing countries that emphasize shared economic development rather than simply extracting resources for American strategic advantage.
And the government could prioritize civilian demand—renewable power, electric transportation, grid modernization, and other public infrastructure—alongside legitimate defense requirements.
It could guarantee that communities near mines and processing facilities benefit economically and retain meaningful influence over development decisions.
And the government could prioritize civilian demand—renewable power, electric transportation, grid modernization, and other public infrastructure—alongside legitimate defense requirements rather than allowing military procurement to dictate the direction of an entire emerging industry.
Serra Verde itself demonstrates why the choice matters. The company's rare earths can supply permanent magnets for electric vehicles and wind turbines just as surely as they can supply defense and aerospace manufacturers.
The question is not whether America should secure access to critical minerals.
It should.
The question is what we intend to do with the security that access provides.
A nation can spend billions building supply chains designed to manufacture the next generation of weapons.
Or it can use the same industrial capacity to build the infrastructure required for the next generation of human life.
The minerals are the same.
The economy we build around them is a choice.
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Thank Trump for This: He Has Exposed the Leaking Guts of the War Machine
As Trump's approval ratings crater due to his war on Iran, there may never have been a time in US history so ripe for an attack on military spending and militarism.
Aug 28, 2026
Forget about Ancient Sparta, Attila the Hun, Hernán Cortés, Julius Ceasar, Alexander the Great, Adolf Hitler, and all of the conquerors that terrified the world with colonial aspirations and a psychopathic lust for blood. None of these ever imagined a $1.5 trillion military budget. President Donald Trump requested that grotesque figure, but don’t give him the kudos—our “fois gras” military machine is a US tradition that predates us all.
The US war machine has scaled Orwellian heights to achieve a virtual blank check to spend on death. For we, stateside, have built a culture entirely at the service of warfare, with myths, stories, and platitudes hardwired into the brains of 349 million people extolling war, not as a necessity, but as ritual, as cleansing, as meditation, and as redemption. We are bombing schools and hospitals to secure the rapture, for the war industry in the apocalyptic end times has been tasked with the creation of biblical events. A recent Huffpost piece by Brandi Buchman quotes US soldiers’ allegations of lunatic fringe Evangelical propaganda from haranguing superiors:
They (US soldiers) are promised a 200-mile-long river that is four-and-a-half feet deep filled with nothing but the blood that their weaponized version of Jesus will spill at the Battle of Armageddon.
Thus, war in the Middle East has morphed from the sterile narrative of fighting for freedom and democracy, to the more spectacular notion that US military force has been mobilized to serve Christian prophecy. A military budget cannot achieve the pinnacle of a trillion dollars without a highly evolved story telling industry to prime the population to either enthusiastically back each aggressive nationalistic paroxysm of violence, or to (at the very least) passively capitulate. Think of the advent of apocalyptic biblical warfare as a means of addictive escalation—the nation has gone from coffee and cigarettes to cocaine and crystal meth.
No other era has been forced to see war with the unflinching clarity that this moment demands.
The war propaganda machine in the US is a ceaseless, multifaceted contraption that includes legacy media, the educational system, and the entertainment industry. A nation does not eviscerate tens of millions of “enemy” civilians without first laying a meticulous foundation of brainwashing. I can run the tapes backward to a moment in my own childhood, riveted to the black and white TV absorbing the 1955 Disneyfied tale of Davey Crockett at “The Alamo.” There is Davey outsmarting a gambler, beating up an “Indian,” and bringing both along as conscripts to fight for an Independent Texas. Crockett met his end at the Alamo, but the manner of his death will never be resolved. Did he surrender to Mexican forces (and face execution) or did he die fighting to the death, wielding his exhausted rifle like a club, and falling from a bullet while standing on a hill comprised of Mexican corpses? Of course, the Disney version has Davey Crockett swinging his rifle madly against a vast onslaught of faceless Mexican soldiers as the background song plays out:
The story books say they were all cut low.
But the truth of it is that this just ain’t so,
The spirits will live and their legends grow,
so long as we remember the Alamo.
The film ends with the inscription: “March, 6, 1836, Liberty and Independence Forever.”
Regarding the Alamo, Raul Ramos wrote (in the context of the 2019 effort to remove confederate monuments):
It’s not that the Spanish-built presidio should be demolished or stashed away in some remote museum. The story of the Alamo should be widely studied—but it should be the real history, the one that intersects with and embodies the nation’s history of enforcing a racial order through violence, and the campaigns of white supremacy and slavery that accompanied America’s expansion. The Alamo’s history and myth belong to a war that was inspired, in part, by the drive for slavery, and by a belief in the superiority of whites and their divine right to conquer lands. The Alamo is where the campaign of southern slavery and Native American genocide migrated west and expressed itself in the demonization of Mexicans. It came to symbolize belonging, or, more accurately, defining who belongs and who doesn’t. Rather than being remembered for its historical context, the Alamo represents a litmus test for entry into participation and membership in civic society: Accept the dominant myth, or be marginalized.
The Alamo became a rallying cry, a foundational component of the emerging concept of “manifest destiny”—the ideological core of the most expansive colonial settler state in all of history. But for me it is personal—Davey Crocket at The Alamo inducted me into US war culture at the age of 7. I had my faux coon skin cap, my “smoke gun” that emitted a loud crack and a puff of smoke. The cocking mechanism on this “toy” sometimes snapped shut violently, and many children endured a trip to the ER to have a few stitches to repair a bloody thumb. I remember that well 71 years later.
Every child in the US has a story of this sort, a rendezvous with military propaganda (disguised as amusement) at a defenseless early age. War is implanted into our fragile subconscious at the very dawn of our awareness. But we are not largely destined to embrace warrior culture in the sense of the mythical Davey Crockett, but, rather, we have been trained to get out of the way. American warfare since Vietnam has aspired to be fought by gadgets that attack civilians from the sky. For most of us military patriotism means politely deferring to veterans with a muttered, “Thank you for your service.” We who do not enlist balance personal fear with the idea that war participation manifests the purest virtue.
Vietnam exposed a quiet ambivalence in public opinion—the American people have no stomach for massive body counts of US soldiers, and yet poll after poll reveals an atavistic longing for military strength. A Gallup poll taken last February showed that 64% of respondents felt that it was important for the US to have the most powerful military on Earth. While the US military budget is larger than the combined military budgets of the next nine highest spending nations, Gallup polling seldom shows more than a third of people complaining that spending is too high.
The public is little more than a shadow of the media culture. In 2014 William A. Galston lamented about President Barack Obama’s minor military funding cuts in a piece posted on The Brookings Institute (a centrist, Democratic Party-adjacent think tank) website. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) recent proposal to cut military spending by a token 10% fell 88-11 in a Senate vote in which both parties reflexively succumbed to orthodox US jingoism. War is not a partisan issue. We all come together to praise and feed the military. US political performance art might be seen as a slavish competition to grovel before the war industry.
There is, however, a new and sudden trickle of hope—Trump’s ham-fisted version of imperialism allows for the public to witness the unflattering inner machinery, the leaking guts of the wounded military organism. The ongoing war in Iran offers something brand new—a nation with a $9 billion military budget has just thrashed a country with a trillion dollar war budget. The US defeat at the hands of Iran is unprecedented—while the US hasn’t won a significant war in 80 years, we have never suffered a defeat with comparable financial consequences. The Iran war, according to Reuters, has a disapproval rating of a staggering 63% of the electorate. The economic fallout from the bungled attack on Iran threatens to escalate to the point of financial collapse in future months. We all live within walking distance of a filling station offering $6 diesel—and that runaway price will almost certainly expand and double, threatening to strangle the US commercial transport system. Mass hunger looms.
We also have American Israel Public Affairs Committee approval ratings at an all-time low and Trump’s approval ratings at catastrophic and utter decline—ostensibly due to his war in Iran. There may never have been a time in US history so ripe for an attack on military spending and militarism.
War once had such an esteemed role in human progress that even the peaceful transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, could not wholly dismiss its virtues:
The student of history acquiesces the more readily in this copious bloodshed of the early annals, bloodshed in God’s name too, when be learns that it is a temporary and preparatory state, and does actively forward the culture of man. War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man. On its own scale, on the virtues it loves, it endures no counterfeit, but shakes the whole society, until every atom falls into the place its specific gravity assigns it.
Emerson believed that war would become obsolete, but I doubt that anyone from the mid 19th century could have imagined that war would one day be the cornerstone of societal and biological collapse. No other era has been forced to see war with the unflinching clarity that this moment demands.
War elevates the need for oil and oil demands war. The oil industry, the military-industrial complex, Big Tech, and mass media have all been structurally conjoined at the intersection of war. War is where capitalist profits interface with mass psychology.
But the gig is up. Public opinion has shifted as Trump and his goons have driven the war machine off of a cliff.
Climate sustainability abides no compromise with war. We are on the cusp of extinction, and war is the primary driver. The US, under Trump, has taken war out of the closet and decoupled it from its patriotic slogans and jingoistic habits. It’s all about the oil, stupid. War has followed the magnet of fossil fuels unerringly to the Middle East. And to compound the predicament, war is environmentally filthy, annually burning more fossil fuels in aggregate than most nations. The US military coughs as much CO2 into the atmosphere yearly as the nation of Portugal. War is also the gauge of our fossil fuel addiction, for US leaders have spent decades murdering millions to procure it.
We all have our psychological histories, our childhood encounters with Disney’s Alamo, with the domino theory, with Saddam Hussein’s invisible weapons of mass destruction. We have reverentially gawked at our father’s and grandfather’s WWII uniforms hanging in the attic, but we all need to thank Trump for creating history’s most transparent war machine. The US military needs to be gutted, cut out like a metastasizing lesion. The patient heaves at death’s door. Do we merely watch?
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The Quantum Con: How Chicago’s Southside Became a Sacrificial Altar to the War Machine
Are we as Chicago residents at ease with the unprecedented horrors of quantum and AI warfare coming out of our own backyards?
Aug 16, 2026
Pete Hegseth’s Department of War is building America’s largest quantum computing project right here on the Southside of Chicago, to the detriment of not only our city but the world at large. Gov. JB Pritzker has lauded the venture capital project as an unprecedented opportunity to make Illinois the “Silicon Valley of quantum development.” With whose consent? On whose land? And on whose dime?
When examining the backers of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP), it is difficult to rationalize this $9 billion project as anything but an accelerative altar to militarism. Alongside federal backing from DARPA, investors such as BlackRock, IBM, and Israeli startup Quantum Machines have all cited quantum technology as the next frontier in modern warfare. The military-industrial complex has emphatically doubled down on quantum computing technology and advanced computing in AI alike as the next crucial edges in 21st-century militarism. Indeed, AI technology in warfare is already being used extensively by the US and Israel to terrorize the SWANA region.
Even with the considerable private capital financing already allotted to this project's troubling Big Tech-war machine alliance, Illinois taxpayers are the top funders of IQMP by far. To the sum of more than 700 million state dollars, the land and water beneath our feet have been sold out to private equity military contracts. As families across our cities starve, as rent costs go up and our unhoused neighbors are continually displaced, we must stop the flow of state and city resources from being directed to a global surveillance state hellbent on mass destruction.
On a local level, the Chicago City Council has unanimously approved the Quantum Park's construction on three separate occasions, with Mayor Brandon Johnson contributing $5 million from the city’s already strained budget. The contrast between the typical glacial speed of approval from City Council and the suspiciously rapid approval process of this project is jarring to say the least, particularly when one considers the largely uncharted nature of the technology itself.
Southside Together's campaign against Quantum is an unequivocal stand for people power against the cynical backdrop of Big Tech fatalism.
Southside Together, an organization focused on building people power with working-class Southside residents, collected signatures proposing a non-binding referendum concerning IQMP. The petition asked one question: "Should our local elected officials stop the construction of the IQMP and instead invest directly in community resources?" Non-binding ballot referendums are rarely challenged on the basis of their language, yet this expression of community consensus was struck from the ballot summarily. Southside residents, in particular, breaking the silence on this project have been clearly delineated as a high-priority threat by backing city officials.
Widespread awareness and community dissent could in fact function as IQMP’s death knell. If organizing on the Southside alone has already scared these Big Tech military syndicates into such frantic repression, imagine what genuine citywide resistance to quantum computing development could accomplish in turn.
As Gov. Pritzker and Mayor Johnson push this project through, they are continuing to make the people of Chicago complicit in war crimes across the globe. Do Illinois politicians want this escalation in Big Tech militarism to be their legacy? More importantly, are we as Chicago residents at ease with the unprecedented horrors of quantum and AI warfare coming out of our own backyards?
Southside Together's campaign against Quantum is an unequivocal stand for people power against the cynical backdrop of Big Tech fatalism. Join the fight today against what quantum tech threatens to do tomorrow.
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Paper Tiger: The Failure of America’s Trillion-Dollar War Machine
From Korea in the early 1950s to Iran today, the US armed forces have lost nearly every war they have fought, while inflicting mass destruction on foreign countries and siphoning resources away from people's needs at home.
Aug 13, 2026
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, or SIPRI, the United States spent $21 trillion on its military between 2001 and 2024, in constant 2024 dollars, equal to the combined military spending of the next 18 countries. Iran barely made that list at all, spending only 2% of what the US did, and SIPRI estimated Iran’s 2025 military budget at only $7.5 billion. So how is Iran holding its own against the multitrillion-dollar US war machine?
A critical difference between the US war on Iran and previous US and allied bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now Gaza is that the US and Israel have failed to destroy Iran’s air defense system and cannot fly warplanes over Iran without risking the loss of planes and pilots to enemy fire. Iran has wisely built its critical defense infrastructure underground, with arms factories, weapons stockpiles, and launch sites sheltered safely beneath its impenetrable mountainous terrain.
US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth claimed on March 10 that the US had “total air dominance” over Iran, but that is still not true. Instead, US forces are mainly attacking Iran with stand-off weapons from outside Iran’s borders, radically depleting US stockpiles of extraordinarily expensive weapons.
Even though US warplanes avoid entering Iranian airspace, the Congressional Research Service has reported that the US has lost at least four F-15 fighters, an F-35, an A-10, seven KC-135 refueling planes, an E-6 AWACS plane, two MC-130J special operations aircraft, a helicopter, a high-altitude Triton drone, and 24 MQ-9 Reaper drones.
The American people have sacrificed enormously to pay for this obsolete, overpriced, and ineffective war machine.
By contrast, during the full-scale invasion of Iraq in 2003, US forces lost only one A-10 and six helicopters, after systematically destroying much of Iraq's air defenses through a low-intensity bombing campaign conducted under cover of the so-called no-fly zones, which the US, UK, and France unilaterally imposed after the First Gulf War in 1991.
In 2003, the US Armed Forces dropped 13,000 tons of bombs and missiles on Iraq in the first 30 days of the war. But only 800 tons, or 6%, of those munitions were cruise missiles and other stand-off weapons like the ones the US is now relying on against Iran.
The US has already depleted one-third of its stand-off and air defense weapons stocks, including JASSM and Tomahawk cruise missiles and SM-2, -3, and -6 anti-aircraft missiles, as well as half its stocks of Patriot and THAAD interceptors and the new Precision Strike Missiles that are replacing the shorter-range ATACMs. These missiles range in price from $700,000 each for JASSMs up to $12 million each for THAAD interceptors, and many will take years to replace.
So the US is using multimillion dollar missiles that are irreplaceable in the short term to try, and often fail, to intercept Shahed drones that cost Iran between $20,000 and $50,000 each. This is a stark contrast from Iraq in 2003, when the US weapon of choice was its 500-poun GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bomb, which costs only $22,000, and the 7,000 bombs used to attack Iraq were easily restocked.
To make up for the Navy’s dwindling missile stocks in the war zone, the US is flying B-1 bombers from a British airbase at Fairford in England to fire Tomahawk missiles at Iran. So many planes are now flying from so far away to attack Iran that the US has also had to send dozens more aerial refueling planes to reinforce the 60 it already had stationed in Israel.
The Russians have demonstrated in Ukraine that the capacity to quickly ramp up production of relatively inexpensive artillery shells and drones can be more critical in a war than spending trillions on big-ticket weapons programs. Meanwhile, the corrupt US military-industrial complex has built a gold-plated revolving door between the US arms industry; the Pentagon top brass; and a captive, co-opted civilian government. It has produced ever more expensive weapons, but it has lost nearly every war it has fought.
The only wars the US has won since 1945 were three short wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama, and Kuwait, as the US took advantage of the weakening of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Otherwise, from Korea in the early 1950s to Iran today, the US armed forces have lost every single war, while inflicting mass destruction on countries and people the US government claimed to be liberating. As the saying goes, “With friends like us, who needs enemies?”
Like many US industries, the post-Cold War US arms industry has become consolidated around a cabal of five firms—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon (now RTX), General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman—whose continued growth depends on ever-greater profits from increasingly expensive warships, warplanes, and weapons, while endless wars and “threats” serve to justify siphoning more and more of America’s national wealth into their coffers.
The US government and corporate media have told Americans for decades that these extraordinary military expenditures and endless wars are something to be proud of, and many Americans have swallowed this perverted myth of US military prowess. The Pentagon works hard to bolster its public image, spending $2 billion per year on recruitment and retention, and $1.14 billion on advertising contracts in 2023 alone.
But that narrative is beginning to crack. As with many aspects of the US political and economic system, more and more Americans are questioning what they have been taught about the US military, and veterans themselves are often the most outspoken critics.
Writing in Business Insider about the problems facing US military recruiters, Kelsey Baker reported that many veterans of the “Global War on Terror” now discourage their own children from joining the military. Three of the recruiters Baker spoke to said guns had been drawn on them by the parents of teenagers they were targeting for recruitment, and one recruiter recalled an irate parent calling him a “baby killer” and a government slave.
In Iran, the United States is caught between escalating a catastrophic, unwinnable war it should never have started and the urgent need to rethink the illegal, corrupt, policy of aggressive war it has pursued since 2001.
The September 11 attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda hijackers—not by the countries that the United States went on to invade and occupy. Yet our leaders responded to those horrific crimes with a multitrillion-dollar investment in new weapons and imperial military expansion—a decision driven by precisely the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against in his farewell speech in 1961.
US occupation forces in Afghanistan and Iraq were defeated by lightly-armed resistance forces defending their own countries. Yet America’s leaders ignored their own failures and defeats, continuing to blindly climb the escalation ladder—first confronting Russia through the war in Ukraine and now taking on Iran in its own territory.
We should note that it was under Democratic administrations that the US backed a coup in Ukraine in 2014 and then rejected a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in April 2022, while President Donald Trump, a Republican, assassinated Iran’s top military leader in 2020 and launched wars on Iran, in cahoots with Israel, in 2025 and 2026. The US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, like the illegal occupation that spawned it, still enjoys bipartisan support in Congress, but not from the American people its members claim to represent.
Many Americans understood the dangers of the United States’ militarized response to the crimes of September 11, 2001, even before the Pentagon embarked on its spending spree and unleashed mass destruction on country after country.
Chalmers Johnson wrote his prescient and widely acclaimed book, Blowback, in 1999, explaining how US militarism and imperialism inevitably sow the seeds for cataclysmic events like the 9/11 attacks. He followed it with three more books in his American Empire Project before his death in 2010.
Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz told NPR a week after 9/11: “It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done… We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don't approve of what has happened.”
By the time the United States was preparing to invade Iraq in 2003, international outrage was so widespread that it produced the largest global street protests in history, with up to 36 million people protesting in 60 countries. But US leaders ignored the world’s rejection of their lies, both at the United Nations and in the streets, and insisted on pretending that Iraq had chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons, and was somehow responsible for the crimes of September 11.
The brainwashing of US occupation troops in Iraq was so complete that, even three years into the war, in February 2006, 85% of US occupation forces in Iraq told a Zogby poll that their main mission there was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks.”
The lies, brainwashing, torture, civilian massacres, and other war crimes that have corrupted the last 25 years of American military history—together with the outrageous cost—have turned the American people squarely against more new wars. But incredibly, they have failed to persuade members of Congress to exercise their constitutional responsibility to stop feeding the out-of-control US military-industrial complex with record amounts of money, weapons, and false pretexts for war.
Trump has requested a record $1.5 trillion in military spending for FY2027. The House-passed National Defense Authorization Act authorizes $1.15 trillion in discretionary military spending, with additional funding outside the NDAA bringing the administration’s overall military-spending plan to $1.5 trillion. The Senate has so far blocked its version of the NDAA.
The draft NDAA also includes unprecedented provisions to further integrate US and Israeli weapons production and intelligence sharing.
Trump’s frustration over the US-Israeli failure to defeat Iran stems from the same delusion of US military supremacy that infected his predecessors, especially since the end of the Cold War.
But in his 2018 book Losing Military Supremacy: the Myopia of American Strategic Planning, Andrei Martyanov warned that huge US investments in aircraft carriers and other big-ticket warships and warplanes were rapidly being rendered obsolete by a new generation of Russian and Chinese missiles capable of traveling much faster and farther than the most advanced missiles in the US arsenal.
Now Iranian missiles and drones have fundamentally altered the military balance in the Middle East. They have driven the US military out of its bases in the Persian Gulf and are forcing US aircraft carriers to stay 1,000 miles from the coast of Iran. US Central Command has had to relocate its regional headquarters from Qatar to Jordan, but Iran has attacked it there too.
Now the United States is repositioning more of its forces in the Middle East to Israel. This raises the stakes, and increases the risks, of any future escalation in the war on Iran, and it further expands the entangling US military alliance with the genocidal state of Israel, which most Americans now oppose.
On August 8, Iran reiterated six points from the Memorandum of Understanding that Trump already signed on June 17, and insisted that the United States must comply with them before it will reopen the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping.
Western commentators have described these as tough new conditions, but they are neither new nor tougher than before. They simply make explicit what was already implicit—for example, by specifically mentioning Palestine and Yemen, whereas the original memorandum merely called for ending the war "on all fronts, including Lebanon.” The United States and Israel started this war, and the United States has the power to end it by negotiating in good faith, based on the memorandum it already agreed to.
The American people have sacrificed enormously to pay for this obsolete, overpriced, and ineffective war machine. Many have paid with their lives, their limbs, or their health. All of us pay the opportunity cost of our leaders’ warmongering and reckless squandering of our national wealth, leaving us without the basic support systems that our neighbors in other developed countries take for granted, from universal free healthcare and quality public education to living wages and paid vacation time.
The US government’s corrupt priorities leave our most serious problems unaddressed, while undermining global efforts to address them, from the destruction of the climate and the natural world to the ever-present danger of nuclear war.
As this year’s primary election results suggest, most Americans want a society that cares for its people, with a government that addresses our most urgent needs. That must surely include dismantling this failed, corrupt, out-of-control, and absurdly expensive war machine.
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DC Under Siege: One Year of Military Occupation
We don't need billions of dollars going toward policing our neighbors and Social Schedulingmilitarization of our streets to make our communities safer—we need housing, education, healthcare, and a commitment to climate justice for true national security.
Aug 12, 2026
One year ago, the Trump administration brought 800 National Guard troops to occupy the streets of Washington, DC, part of the "Safe and Beautiful Task Force." There are now approximately 5,000 troops from 15 states deployed here, with some officially moved in and set to stay through 2029.
This does not include the alphabet soup of law enforcement agencies swarming our neighborhoods across the city, from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the FBI, Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security, Drug Enforcement Agency, Park Police, and more.
The National Guard can be found meandering around metro stations, museums, and grocery stores there for mere posture. Despite crime being down before they were deployed here. A new analysis from the Center for American Progress found the Guard deployment has not had a measurable impact on violent crime. They are not even trained in "civilian policing," and are unable to make actual arrests.
“This was never about reducing crime, especially not violent crime,” said Chandler Hall, who wrote the study. “This has been a show of force without any evidence to bear that it’s actually working."
"If my neighbors could experience military protection as something imposed upon them, what did civilians overseas think when American forces arrived in their communities?"
The cost of the Guard is estimated at $3 million a day, with some troops said to make close to $9,000 a month, including salary, lodging, and food per diem. It is hard to track the multi-year total in billions of dollars as the administration is far from transparent with the process.
The wasteful spending from the Department of War is unsurprising. Despite the Pentagon never passing an audit, the Department of War's proposed budget is record-breaking at $1.5 trillion for one year and does not include the recent billions for the Iran war and additional billions to Israel to further the genocide in Gaza and ongoing destruction in Lebanon.
Some of the reasoning for more troops in DC was for the Freedom 250 nationalism events, beginning with a UFC fight, State Fair, and Fourth of July festivities, all of which were disastrous, from cancellations, evacuations, and heat strokes to stage parts falling, nearly killing performers. The millions of dollars that went into these spectacles strained the local community. On July 4, my friend Nicky, a 71-year-old EMT, worked an 18-hour double shift for $27 an hour while constant military flyovers cost over $1.2 million.
Karen Degraphenreid, a veteran of the US Air Force as a Major of 10 years, got involved with Free DC when the military occupation in DC began. She describes her reflections from her time overseas to experiencing the guard takeover here at home.
"Washington is the only place in the country where more than 700,000 American citizens can have troops deployed to their streets by leaders they have no voting representation in choosing. We pay federal taxes, serve in the military, and fulfill every obligation of citizenship, yet Congress can override our local government and impose decisions that fundamentally reshape life in our city. That reality forced me to reconsider what 'protection' actually means," she said.
She continued:
Many of my neighbors never asked for soldiers outside their neighborhoods. Many openly opposed their presence. To them, the deployment did not feel like reassurance. It felt like a federal government exercising power over a city that has long been denied full democratic self-government.
And that realization led me to a question I had never seriously asked during my years in uniform.
If my neighbors could experience military protection as something imposed upon them, what did civilians overseas think when American forces arrived in their communities? When we said we were bringing security and stability, did they experience it as protection? Or did they see armed strangers exercising power over places that belonged to them?
Karen is also a member of Common Defense, which holds trainings for veterans to verbally confront the National Guard. Other veterans are speaking out to encourage their fellows and active-duty members to do the same. Groups like About Face have been welcoming anti-war veterans to become more organized for years, many of whom were deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and are actively opposed to the genocide in Gaza and the war on Iran.
At a press conference commemorating one year of the occupation, Luke Filomena, a registered nurse with National Nurses United, expressed the imperialist boomerang we are all witnessing
I’ve seen this administration and every administration prior instead choose to spend hundreds of billions, now trillions of dollars, yearly, to go toward countless amounts of death and destruction through endless imperialist wars overseas and the funding and arming of a genocide in Gaza. I’ve been forced to watch as hospitals filled with patients and fellow healthcare workers, as well as schools filled with children, are indiscriminately bombed in Gaza and in Iran, and as the US blockade of Cuba leaves hospitals without fuel and supplies to power lifesaving medical equipment and provide care for their patients.
"Over the past year, under the Trump regime, we’re now seeing the imperialist boomerang come back, with its sights locked on the Black, brown, and immigrant communities here in DC; those who I see each day at the bedside," Filomena explained.
It's one thing to be aware of connecting the dots, and it's another to act on it. DC has been public about its opposition to the military takeover of the city. When the occupation first launched, we disrupted Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth's photo op at Shake Shack in Union Station. A month later, Trump and almost his entire cabinet went out to dinner at a restaurant near the White House, and we disrupted it, chanting, "Free DC, Free Palestine, Trump is the Hitler of our time." We later drowned out a public appearance by Hegseth, Stephen Miller, and hundreds of National Guard at Malcolm X Park.
Opportunities to confront the administration are rarer than daily encounters with the Guard. The same week budget cuts to Supplemental and Nutrition Assistance Program were being discussed in Congress, I asked a group of troops, who often appear to be aimlessly wandering our neighborhoods in groups of four, if people in their communities would be hit by this. I've asked them if they know their neighbors and what services they could use and be funded versus them being deployed here to hang outside of a convenience store. When the forest fires created thick smoke across DC, I asked why they were here and not putting out the fires.
In these conversations, they almost always nod their head and reach for their pamphlet, telling me and others who confront them to contact their supervisor. They come from states from Mississippi to Michigan, and there have been state-by-state campaigns to get the Guard to go home. Many of them are here voluntarily, not simply "following orders" as we are led to believe.
While we have 800 military bases abroad, the war economy is inescapable for most people within the United States as well. The predatory trap the military-industrial complex has on young people of color or those in poverty means they are heavily recruited to join the various branches of the military. The increased amount of data centers across the country is also making the war economy ever more apparent.
But the state can't use the excuse of job creation anymore. The Climate and Communities Institute shows us that employment at military contractors has plummeted over the past three decades, from an estimated 3.2 million workers during the Reagan military-spending peak in the mid-1980s to 1.1 million workers in 2020. The drop occurred despite Pentagon budgets rising 22% over the same period (not accounting for inflation costs). The alternative is a care economy, a system of paid and unpaid labor, services, and relationships that support human health, well-being, and daily life, that moves away from dirty, violent jobs that rely on weapons manufacturers and the fossil fuel industry.
We cannot normalize troops on our streets. But we must address the roots that cause normalization. We've been taught to salute combat veterans for their service no matter their history; we're used to discounts for military personnel and TV shows and Hollywood movies glorifying lower-level cadets to high-ranking commanders. While militarized superheroes are a common staple in US popular culture, teachers are buying their own school supplies for their classrooms, social workers have overwhelming caseloads, EMTs are working overtime while underpaid, and many veterans are unhoused or waitlisted at the VA.
Washington, DC does not need occupation; it needs fair representation. We don't need billions of dollars going toward policing our neighbors and militarization of our streets to make our communities safer—we need housing, education, healthcare, and a commitment to climate justice for true national security. In the meantime, we have only seen our community grow stronger to protect each other—more trainings, skill sharing, documenting, court support, fundraising, and more. Every day we are supporting each other by radically building community through getting to know our neighbors more deeply in real life.
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Foreign War, Domestic Cost: The Hidden Price of America’s Wars
The Iran war shows how conflicts abroad can reshape domestic priorities, transferring the economic burden of war onto ordinary Americans.
Aug 11, 2026
For Washington, war usually begins with decisions made behind closed doors and explained through familiar terms such as security, deterrence, and national interest. It is then presented through images of aircraft and missiles moving toward targets thousands of miles away. But for ordinary people, war often arrives more quietly: through the fuel pump, grocery bills, transportation costs, and household budgets that leave less room for basic needs.
The Iran war demonstrated this reality once again. A crisis in the Middle East quickly became connected to one of the world’s most sensitive energy choke points: the Strait of Hormuz. Concerns about disruptions to global energy flows showed how a conflict far from American shores can affect domestic economic conditions. For most Americans, the consequences are not measured through military operations or geopolitical calculations, but through higher energy costs, rising transportation expenses, and pressure on living standards.
Yet the cost of war extends beyond immediate economic effects. Measuring conflict only through oil prices or military spending overlooks a deeper question: what a country cannot invest in because resources are directed toward war.
No national budget is unlimited. Every billion dollars allocated to military operations, weapons purchases, troop deployments, or rebuilding stockpiles cannot be spent simultaneously on infrastructure, education, healthcare, housing, or other public priorities. This is the social opportunity cost of war: the value of needs that receive fewer resources because military commitments take precedence. Defense spending appears clearly in budgets, but the school never built, the infrastructure project delayed, or the public service left underfunded often remain invisible.
A country that spends vast resources on war in the name of security must also ask whether those choices strengthen or weaken the society that security is supposed to protect.
The economic consequences of war also spread through markets, supply chains, and production costs. Conflicts involving major energy-producing regions create uncertainty that eventually reaches households. However, these burdens are not shared equally. A wealthy family may absorb higher fuel or food prices with limited disruption, while a family already struggling with housing, food, and energy costs may be forced to sacrifice another necessity.
The cost of war is therefore not simply national; it is social. Those with the least influence over decisions about war do not necessarily experience the smallest consequences. The civilian impact of conflict extends beyond battlefields. An American worker whose purchasing power declines or a family facing higher living costs also becomes part of the economic burden created by war.
Supporters of military action argue that these costs must be weighed against the dangers of inaction. They maintain that failing to confront threats abroad could create greater instability and eventually produce even higher costs. This argument deserves consideration. Governments have a responsibility to protect citizens and maintain the capabilities needed to respond to serious threats.
However, national security cannot be measured only through military strength. Military power is one element of national power, but it depends on other foundations: a productive economy, reliable infrastructure, an educated workforce, effective institutions, and a society with economic stability. The central question is not whether the United States should maintain defense capabilities, but whether military spending always strengthens security or whether excessive commitments can weaken the foundations that make security possible.
This is where militarism becomes a political issue. Militarism is not simply the use of military force; it emerges when military solutions become Washington’s default response to international crises and increases in defense spending are treated automatically as greater security. Under these conditions, domestic priorities are repeatedly delayed while the costs of war become immediate and certain. The opportunity cost of war is therefore not only economic; it reflects how the United States defines security and allocates national resources.
The costs of war also continue after military operations end. Rebuilding weapons stockpiles, maintaining readiness, supporting deployments, and preparing for future conflicts can keep public resources tied to military spending for years. War is therefore not only a short-term decision; it can create long-term commitments that shape national priorities long after fighting stops.
Over time, this dynamic can contribute to a war economy: a cycle in which conflict increases demand for military production, that demand creates contracts and budget commitments, and those commitments make continued military spending politically easier to sustain.
Within this cycle, the role of the defense industry becomes an important democratic question. Greater military demand creates more orders and revenue for defense companies, while the costs are distributed nationally through public budgets and debt. This does not mean defense contracts are inherently corrupt, but it raises a fundamental question: Are the voices that benefit from continued military spending more influential in shaping security priorities than the citizens who ultimately pay for them?
War is therefore not only a foreign policy decision but also a domestic democratic issue. When the costs of conflict are distributed among millions of citizens while decisions about war are made within a limited political circle, accountability becomes part of national security itself. Citizens must be able to evaluate not only whether military operations achieve their goals, but whether their costs are proportionate to their results.
From this perspective, diplomacy should not be viewed merely as a moral alternative to military power. If war creates economic risks, energy instability, and long-term financial burdens, reducing tensions can directly protect national resources. Diplomacy is not a substitute for strength; it is a way to prevent unnecessary costs and avoid cycles of confrontation that consume economic and strategic capacity.
Ultimately, the question is not whether the United States should abandon military power or ignore external threats. The question is whether military power remains a tool for protecting national strength or becomes a substitute for it.
The Iran war has placed this issue before the United States in concrete terms. A country that spends vast resources on war in the name of security must also ask whether those choices strengthen or weaken the society that security is supposed to protect.
National power is not defined only by America’s ability to wage war. It also depends on the economic and social foundations that sustain that ability. If repeated conflicts transfer resources away from infrastructure, healthcare, education, and economic opportunity toward permanent military commitments, the United States may increase its short-term capacity to fight wars while weakening the foundations required to remain strong over time.
A nation that consumes its economic and social capital to preserve its power may finance more conflicts. But eventually it must answer a deeper question: D oes it still possess the strong society that this power was originally meant to defend?
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Trump's $275 Billion Battleship Fleet Set to Be 'Most Expensive US Warships Ever'
"At a time when families are struggling to afford groceries, gas, healthcare, and childcare, Congress cannot throw hundreds of billions of dollars at Trump’s ‘Golden Fleet,’" said one Democratic senator.
Aug 05, 2026
The Trump administration's controversial plan to build a new "Golden Fleet" of guided-missile battleships is drawing mounting criticism from budget watchdogs, defense analysts, and Democratic lawmakers, who warn the proposal would put taxpayers on the hook for what could be the costliest naval procurement in US history.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Wednesday said the cost to build 15 Trump-class nuclear-powered battleships is approximately $275 billion in current dollars through 2056—roughly 50% more than a previous estimate.
"Under the 2027 shipbuilding plan, compared with the 2025 plan, the Navy would purchase substantially more large surface combatants," the CBO said. "The average annual amount of funding needed to buy surface combatants would rise by slightly more than two-thirds, from about $11 billion to $19 billion."
"By 2035, the Navy's 2027 plan would more than double the tonnage of large surface combatants that shipbuilders would need to produce," the office added. "Overall, the tonnage of large surface combatants to be constructed would need to increase by 60%, while the tonnage of small surface combatants would decrease by about 40%. Accommodating such a sizable increase in the production of large surface combatants could be a challenge for the shipbuilding industry."
One journalist noted that the Trump-class battleships' cost would make them "the most expensive US warships ever produced."
President Donald Trump claimed in December that his proposed Golden Fleet would "help maintain American military supremacy, revive the American shipbuilding industry, and inspire fear in America’s enemies all over the world."
The president explicitly linked his desire to revive battleships—which were last built in the US in 1944 and were all decommissioned by the early 1990s—to his affinity for the 1950s television documentary series "Victory at Sea."
Critics say the program will inflate already historically high military budgets while diverting hundreds of billions of dollars that would be better spent on underfunded social programs.
"At a time when families are struggling to afford groceries, gas, healthcare, and childcare, Congress cannot throw hundreds of billions of dollars at Trump’s ‘Golden Fleet,’ including plastering his name across a new battleship," Senate Budget Committee Ranking Member Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said Wednesday in response to the CBO analysis.
"Congress cannot afford to commit to another massive military boondoggle that will only succeed in filling the coffers of the military-industrial complex."
"Just like Trump’s ‘Golden Dome,’ the ‘Golden Fleet’ is expected to cost much more than previously estimated," he continued, referring to the president's proposed missile defense system that Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) derided as a "dangerous $1.2 trillion boondoggle."
“While we continue to see too many Pentagon programs burdened by cost overruns, delays, and unrealistic promises that fail to meet reality, Congress cannot afford to commit to another massive military boondoggle that will only succeed in filling the coffers of the military-industrial complex," Merkley added. "I will work with my colleagues on the Appropriations Committee to reject moving forward with this wasteful project, and instead invest in programs that help families thrive."
In addition to cost, military experts and others noted the obsolescence of battleships—which are now all scrapped or museum pieces—and the fact that they make great big targets.
Among the most outspoken critics of the Golden Fleet is Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), who has argued that the ships represent a throwback to outdated naval warfare doctrine.
Rather than concentrating enormous combat power in a handful of exceptionally expensive vessels, Cancian has said the Navy's own operational concepts increasingly emphasize "distributed maritime operations," the spreading of offensive capabilities across larger numbers of smaller, networked ships that are harder for adversaries to target.
Bernard Loo, a senior fellow at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, was even more blunt in a December CBNC interview, calling the proposed Trump-class ships "bomb magnets."
“The size and the prestige value of it all make it an even more tempting target," Loo added.
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The Business of War: Trump’s Critical Minerals Grift
By gaining access to more critical minerals, Trump can expand the war machine and, in turn, make a profit; his administration has shown it will stop at nothing to achieve that.
Jul 26, 2026
A US$1.5 trillion defense budget isn't an accident; neither is the hunt for critical minerals, which the United States is fighting over with the same hunger it once reserved for oil. Under President Donald Trump, war has become more of a business plan than a matter of security. Strategic military moves are lining the pockets of Trump's friends and family with money. This includes the critical minerals rush to fatten Trump’s profitable war machine.
Feeding the War Machine
On February 28, the US and Israel began a ruthless bombing campaign in Iran, killing over 3,000 people in just 39 days, the majority of whom were civilians. Trump campaigned on “ending wars,” but instead has expanded military interventions and escalated new conflicts. In the first 11 months of his second term, Trump has bombed seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. He also threatened to take over Greenland by force to create missile defense bases and mine for minerals.
War-hungry Trump needs a powerful and constantly replenished arsenal, as his wars deplete weapon stockpiles. Military aggression in West Asia, particularly the war with Iran, has burned through the munitions faster than defense factories can replace them. The US used over 45% of its Precision Strike Missiles, about half of its THAAD and Patriot PAC-3 interceptors, nearly one-third of its Tomahawks, and over a fifth of its JASSMs in its war with Iran. These weapons rely heavily on critical minerals, leaving the US desperate for more to rebuild.
As exposed by the Oakland Institute in its recently released report, a key driver of the current race for critical minerals is the military-industrial complex. Military spending in the United States is growing rapidly, and with it, the need for critical minerals. Trump's proposed 2027 defense budget is a shocking US$1.5 trillion, almost twice the 2023 budget. The only thing a budget this large signifies is plans for future military expansion and campaigns. To support this growth, up to US$100 billion was allocated to the Department of War by Trump's “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” to produce critical minerals and related industries and projects.
AI, Critical Minerals, and Modern Warfare
This record-high military budget isn't just for building more of the same defense machines. The military is expanding its tech capabilities, with a plan for an “AI-first warfighting force.” The Trump administration has declared that its priority is to secure critical minerals for “vital national security and economic activities, including rising military threats and growing high-tech industries, such as artificial intelligence, data centers, nuclear energy, and new energy technologies.”
This web between the government, tech and AI corporations, mining companies, venture capital firms, and military institutions has emerged around a common goal: securing critical minerals and advancing the use of AI in the military.
In 2022, the Pentagon awarded US$9 billion of contracts to Google, Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon to develop and manage the US military's cloud computing infrastructure. In addition, the Department of War has administered US$75 billion to AI-driven programs and another US$9 billion to data centers since 2016. Since 2020, the Pentagon's contracts with AI firms have grown exponentially, with Palantir Technologies and Anduril Industries seeing the fastest growth. Palantir was the lead contractor on the Maven Smart System, which enabled the US military to sift through large volumes of data and rapidly select targets on the battlefield. The US used Maven in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen, despite grave concerns about its accuracy. The Pentagon has still not answered whether AI systems like Maven played a role in the massacre at Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls School in Iran, where the US bombed and murdered 156 people, the majority being young schoolgirls.
Cronyism at Large
Expanding the military-industrial complex has created unprecedented opportunities for Trump's inner circle to profit. Business partners, family members, and close friends and associates have secured lucrative government contracts and preferential access to exclusive military and mineral ventures.
Donald Trump Jr. was heavily involved in selecting candidates for Pentagon jobs in 2025. Soon after, companies that his firm, 1789 Capital, had invested in—such as Vulcan Elements, Firehawk Aerospace, SpaceX, and Anduril—secured contracts with the Pentagon. Likewise, Trump's sons are proprietors of a shell corporation that has invested in a New York-based mining investment group, Cove Capital, which is working on a US$1.6 billion tungsten project in Kazakhstan, granted by the Trump administration. US Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) correctly called it “corruption in plain sight.”
By gaining access to more critical minerals, Trump can expand the war machine and, in turn, make a profit. His administration has shown it will stop at nothing to achieve that. A March 2026 leaked memo from the US State Department included a proposal to withhold lifesaving HIV assistance to Zambia if its government denied access to the country’s critical minerals.
The Human and Environmental Price
Beyond the abuse of power, the US takeover of critical minerals comes with devastating impacts on the land and Indigenous communities. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that mining has “severe environmental impacts” with "often […] few if any redistributive benefits for communities in regions where extraction takes place.” Instead of local development, the extraction of strategic minerals is linked to violence, human rights abuses, and conflict. None of these repercussions are a matter of concern for the Trump administration. Conflict and destabilization, in fact, help secure access and control over critical minerals, as evident in Congo.
This web between the government, tech and AI corporations, mining companies, venture capital firms, and military institutions has emerged around a common goal: securing critical minerals and advancing the use of AI in the military. This should be an urgent concern for people around the world, as the hunt for critical minerals will deepen extractivism, militarization, and geopolitical competition at a time when our focus should be on ending conflicts, securing peace, and international cooperation to fight climate change. The administration has also turned its back on Americans in the hunt for critical minerals and the strengthening of the war machine; Trump has drained funding from sectors like education, climate change, healthcare, and science. If this disregard for everyone and everything remains unchecked, irreversible damage will occur to the planet and the people of the world.
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Ukraine: America's Enduring Proxy War on Russia
Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war: Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale
Jul 21, 2026
In his farewell address of January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans against the "acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex," and the danger that "public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." Sixty-five years on, Eisenhower’s warnings have been repeatedly and tragically vindicated. American democracy hangs by a thread, while the military-industrial complex, now including Silicon Valley, runs American foreign policy over the objections of the American people.
The aim is American primacy, meaning the unchallenged wealth, power, and prerogatives of American elites, unchecked by any other nation or group of nations. What this means in practice is that Wall Street, military contractors, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil control American foreign policy to maximize elite wealth and access to global resources, supply chains, and strategic choke points. The rest of the world is to fall in line.
The military-industrial complex deploys a toolkit that we summarize as “regime control,” directed at subordinating the rest of the world’s governments to the United States. The instruments used for regime control include the imposition or removal of trade barriers; the access to or denial of technologies; the introduction or removal of economic sanctions; the ownership and manipulation of foreign media; electoral interference of varying extent; political assassinations, color revolutions, CIA-backed coups; the instigation of overseas bank runs and the supply of emergency loans when states submit; the freezing and unfreezing of foreign assets; the targeting of foreign officials with corruption claims, extradition, or kidnapping; and, when none of these suffice for regime control, outright war. The US wars of choice (really, wars for regime control) are perpetual, and lucrative for the war industries, though the deep state typically prefers that other governments cave in without a fight.
Geopolitical Pivots and American Primacy
Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard (1997) laid out the goal of regime control with remarkable candor. Eurasia is the board on which America’s global primacy must be secured. To succeed, America should dominate “geopolitical pivots,” meaning states that are unimportant to America per se but useful for weakening another major power. Brzezinski named key geopolitical pivots, the most important of which was Ukraine. He repeatedly proclaimed that Russia without Ukraine ceases to be a great power. He identified Iran as another pivot. Control over Iran secures America’s hold on the Persian Gulf, Mideast oil, and the Caspian region. It is no surprise that US wars rage in both places.
The US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing.
This is important to understand the decisions of six seemingly different presidents, who all pursued one consistent Ukraine policy. Bill Clinton set out to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and other border states of Russia, counting on Russia being too weak to object. He and subsequent presidents assumed that Russia would ultimately accept its diminished global status, accept the reality of NATO on its borders, and settle into a subordinate role of supplying raw materials to the West within an American-ordered Eurasia.
Clinton launched NATO enlargement in the 1990s, over George Kennan’s warning that it was "the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era" and despite the legally binding assurances given by the US to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would move "not one inch eastward." George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty and, at Bucharest in 2008, committed NATO to membership for Ukraine and Georgia, crossing what William Burns, then ambassador in Moscow and later CIA director, privately called "the brightest of all redlines" for the entire Russian elite. Barack Obama’s administration backed the 2014 Maidan overthrow of Ukraine’s elected, neutral government (we know this through Victoria Nuland’s intercepted call where she discusses choosing the next prime minister), and then supported the new regime’s bid to join NATO. Donald Trump, in his first term, sent Javelin systems to the US-backed regime in Kyiv to fight the breakaway, Russian-speaking Donbas. Joe Biden brushed aside Russia’s December 2021 draft security treaties without negotiating and scuttled the near-agreement between Russia and Ukraine at Istanbul in the spring of 2022, which would have ended the war. And so the war continues to this day.
Trump's Vacuous Anti-War Campaign Promises
Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 as the man who would end America’s forever wars. This turned out to be far from the truth.
The year 2025 opened with theater including the Oval Office humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February, the taunt that Ukraine had "no cards," and in March a week-long suspension of US intelligence sharing with Kyiv. That week proved two things. First, this is an American war: Deprived of US intelligence for only a few days, Ukraine’s deep-strike capacity and battlefield awareness visibly degraded. Second, the White House pressure was aimed not at peace with Moscow but at obedience from Kyiv. The US military spigot was reopened, and what followed, behind a proscenium of summits and phone calls, was the most systematic escalation of the American military role since 2022.
In June 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14307, "Unleashing American Drone Dominance," directing the rebuilding of the American drone industrial base and instructing that the Pentagon "must be able to procure, integrate, and train using low-cost, high-performing drones." In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth staged a drone demonstration at the Pentagon and stripped away procurement restrictions to "unleash" military drone dominance; the same month, on a call with Zelenskyy, Trump asked, according to the Financial Times’ later reporting, whether Ukraine could strike Moscow if given longer-range weapons.
From midsummer 2025, the US supplied the intelligence for Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign against Russian refineries, pipelines, and power stations, shaping route planning, altitude, timing, and mission decisions; by some officials’ account, setting the target priorities itself. In August came the Alaska summit, suggesting diplomacy, yet at the same time the sale of Extended Range Attack Munitions for Ukraine, with European allies paying. By October, Trump had formally authorized the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies to hand Ukraine targeting data for strikes on Russian energy infrastructure deep inside Russia, a step the Biden administration itself had refused as too escalatory, while Washington pressed NATO allies to do the same and openly debated Tomahawks with the range to reach Moscow. Through it all, CIA Director John Ratcliffe kept the agency’s presence in Ukraine at its highest level, increased funding for its programs there, coordinated Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries by sharing intelligence on infrastructure vulnerabilities, and patiently guided Trump toward blessing the campaign. The United States, it emerged, had spent billions building Ukraine’s drone program from the start, in an effort backed by the CIA throughout.
Trump lies constantly, and much of it is the improvisation of a vain and careless man. But the consequential lying is systematic, and in one direction: in the service of the military-industrial complex.
The Laboratory
Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war. Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale: millions of drone sorties, a continuous adaptation race against a peer adversary’s electronic warfare, and thousands of hours of combat data that constitute the most valuable military AI asset on Earth.
At the center of this sits Palantir, born of CIA seed money, running the Pentagon’s Maven targeting enterprise, and threaded through the British security establishment via a revolving door that includes a former MI6 chief among more than 30 UK officials hired or contracted by the company. Its chief executive openly boasts that Palantir software performs "most of the targeting" done by Ukraine. In January 2026 Ukraine’s defense ministry announced that Palantir was building the "Brave1 Dataroom" to feed real battlefield data into the AI brains of interceptor drones; by May, minister and CEO were discussing expanded cooperation in battlefield analysis and military planning, the ministry promising to "transfer the war onto Russian territory."
Nor is Iran a separate story from the Ukraine saga. Recall that in Brzezinski’s geography the arc from the Persian Gulf through the Caspian is the second great prize, with Iran as its keystone pivot. Ukrainian interceptor teams have deployed to Jordan against Iranian drones; the counter-drone systems proven against Russia are marketed to the Gulf. Two geopolitical pivots, one chessboard, and one ultimate source of these two wars of choice: the military-industrial complex.
Kissinger’s Admonition to Friends of the US
Henry Kissinger is famously credited with telling the truth to nations that the US would use and discard: To be an enemy of the United States may be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.
Ukraine is dying at American hands. Thirty years since Brzezinski pointed to Ukraine as the key geopolitical pivot for American primacy, Ukraine has been demographically hollowed and territorially truncated, with its energy grid pounded, its elections suspended, and its politics reduced to corrupted palace intrigues. This month’s rupture in Kyiv shows that in the midst of what Western coverage calls Ukraine’s great comeback, Zelenskyy dissolved his government for the fourth time in the war; dispatched his prime minister toward the Washington embassy to manage the "key partner;" and summarily sacked Mykhailo Fedorov, the popular minister celebrated as the architect of the drone ecosystem. A country truly winning its war does not behave this way.
The deepest cruelty is that Russia sought, repeatedly and for 30 years, a security arrangement with the US in which both countries and their neighborhoods would live in peace, mutual respect, and indivisible security. Yet the US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing. In the process, it sacrifices Ukraine and Iran to its hubris. Peace in Ukraine requires only that the US relinquish the hubris it has maintained for decades that Russia can be pressured into surrender, and instead accept Ukraine as a neutral bridge between Europe and Russia rather than a geopolitical pivot to be used against Russia. Eisenhower foresaw why acceptance of peace would be so hard: The military-industrial complex does not merely influence policy; it defines it. Until the American people reclaim the democracy from Palantir, BlackRock, SpaceX, Chevron, and their ilk, the battlefield “laboratories” will stay open, and Ukraine will pay the fatal price for American “friendship.”
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