SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
military-industrial complex
'Trillion Dollar War Machine': Understanding US Militarism and How to Dismantle It
William D. Hartung and Ben Freeman's extremely timely and necessary book explains how today's crises are the predictable consequence of an entrenched system of militarism, a politics captured by lobbies, and elite self-dealing.
Nov 19, 2025
At this very second, Washington is pouring billions into escalations toward a potential invasion of Venezuela that would set Latin America on fire, escalate tensions with neighbors, and trap US troops in another undefined quagmire. It has already conducted about a dozen strikes on unproven “drug boats” in the Caribbean, without congressional approval, a trial, or even demonstrated intelligence, killing innumerable Venezuelan and foreign civilians, while it has moved Naval strike groups and carriers near Venezuela’s shores. This is one of the disastrous and preventable results of American militarism, exceptionalism, and the military-industrial complex that fuels them.
Such is the context in which The Trillion Dollar War Machine lands on bookshelves. William D. Hartung and Ben Freeman's extremely timely and necessary book explains how these crises are not a series of isolated events, but the predictable consequence of an entrenched system of militarism, a politics captured by lobbies, and elite self-dealing that traces its lineage back to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the military-industrial complex.
Their diagnosis offers a map of the structural forces that continuously push America toward war, even when the public wants peace and even when national security (and economics) is the pretext rather than the driver. America engineers itself into these wars for elite interests.
As Hartung and Freeman detail, more than half of the Pentagon budget now goes to private contractors. These corporations, especially the “Big Five” of Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman, have together absorbed more than $2.1 trillion in Pentagon contracts in the post-9/11 era. The book opens by reminding us that $8 trillion were wasted by the war machine on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The end of the world and MAD could be ushered in because Lockheed Martin and Congress can’t stop obsessing over their stocks and profits.
That sum alone could have fully decarbonized the US electrical grid; paid off every student loan in the country; and still had trillions left for climate resilience, healthcare, and democratic infrastructure. Even just maintaining the system as it is costs billions—America’s 750 military bases in 80 countries cost $55 billion a year to maintain. A lot of them, like in Guam, have also destroyed the environment, caused irreparable health effects, and stalled the local economy and democracy.
When Jamal Khashoggi was murdered, and Congress briefly considered blocking US weapons transfers to Saudi Arabia, lobbyists went to work behind the scenes to “derail the initiative.” In the same week they lobbied lawmakers, they donated to the same lawmakers’ campaigns. Everything about that should look like bribery. But because the military-industrial complex is woven into the legal, regulatory, and cultural DNA of Washington, it is perfectly legal. In fact, it’s just a regular Tuesday. This is the machinery that powers nearly every war the United States engages in.
Hartung and Freeman document how 945 lobbyists work directly for Pentagon contractors; how dozens of them are simultaneously registered as foreign agents; and how former members of Congress, Pentagon staffers, and even chiefs of staff for the nation’s most powerful leaders pass seamlessly through the revolving door to sell weapons to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other authoritarian regimes. American foreign policy is shaped in lobbying offices, overpriced dinners, and backdoor negotiations with firms that openly expect “business benefits” from new wars. The consequences of this model are catastrophic for human life.
The book recounts how US weapons have fueled atrocities in Yemen, the Philippines, Nigeria, Egypt, and now Gaza, where the authors confirm what most of us progressives already knew; that most of the people killed “have nothing to do with Hamas.” They cite updated reporting that the Biden administration concluded more than 100 separate arms transfers to Israel in the first months of the war, without even informing Congress.
More than half of the conflicts on Earth involve US weapons on at least one side. The United States continues to arm regimes that Freedom House classifies as “not free,” even when those regimes commit torture, disappearances, mass detentions, and extrajudicial murders. Even this week, there has been reporting into Egypt’s continued use of torture and crimes against humanity in its “counterterrorism” efforts, with US weapons and taxpayer money. Wherever there is repression, inequality, or mass death, US weapons are often close by. The results do not make the US, or the world, safer, freer, or more prosperous; in fact, they do quite the opposite.
Hartung and Freeman trace how an arms industry that began as an adjunct to US defense has transformed into a permanent, profit-seeking entity that requires conflict to justify its existence. They revisit the “last supper” of the 1990s, when defense mergers consolidated the industry into a small cluster of giants, and the Pentagon volunteered billions in taxpayer dollars to subsidize those mergers, even giving executives multimillion-dollar “golden parachutes,” funded by tax money.
They revisit how the highly dangerous nuclear triad was shaped not by strategy but by “turf wars” between the Air Force and Navy, each desperate to preserve its slice of the budget. That’s right, the end of the world and MAD could be ushered in because Lockheed Martin and Congress can’t stop obsessing over their stocks and profits. Hartung and Freeman also revisit the disastrous Littoral Combat Ship program, the “Little Crappy Ship,” which was pushed through political pressure even after the Navy warned it was unfit for combat. M1 Abrams tanks were also sold to Ukraine, after being pushed by think tanks funded by defense contractors, even as the tanks resulted in catastrophic casualties for Ukrainian fighters. In every case, the logic is identical. Weapons are built because there is profit in building them, not because there is security in possessing them. Don’t fall for the tired arguments about “job creation” and “American manufacturing,” either; Hartung and Freeman show other, non-military economic sectors are much better at creating jobs, for cheaper. Most MIC jobs aren’t even unionized.
One of the book’s most disturbing contributions is its detailed exploration of how the war machine’s surplus equipment, tactics, and political culture flowed into policing. The authors describe a country where protesting can be met with military-grade rifles, armored vehicles, acoustic weapons, and tear gas developed for counterinsurgency. They note that more than 6,500 police departments have received $7 billion worth of Pentagon equipment through the 1033 Program. They argue that “it’s not the police, it’s a paramilitary force.” It’s simply the domestic mirror of the foreign policy problem (also called the Imperial Boomerang). Now, American communities live under the terror and oppression that much of the world has suffered through, in Washington’s own wars.
The authors argue for a “new peace network,” a coalition of movements that understand militarism as a unifying force behind poverty, racial injustice, surveillance, climate destruction, and authoritarianism.
The authors also underline the economic argument for dismantling the war machine. Military spending has become one of the least efficient job creators in the entire US economy. Investments in healthcare, education, climate resilience, and clean energy create far more jobs than investments in defense. Pentagon contractors, they show, are shedding union jobs at historic rates. Corporations like Lockheed Martin spend billions on stock buybacks rather than innovation. Automation will soon cut even more jobs. The economic bargain that once tied militarism to employment is dissolving. The authors argue that a just transition away from militarism is not just possible. It is necessary.
The authors also expose how deeply media culture is implicated in sustaining this system. Hartung and Freeman recount how Hollywood rewrites scripts at the Pentagon’s request in exchange for access to hardware. How think tanks funded by weapons manufacturers produce reports that conveniently recommend more weapons purchases. How television networks turn war planners into celebrities, how the Iraq War was sold through manufactured narratives, and how even major news organizations were swept up in the 9/11 wave of militarism. They highlight the “artificial consensus” that emerges when the same small circle of MIC-funded think tanks supply the experts for congressional hearings, television panels, and academic publications. This is why dissent is always framed as fringe, because it goes against an entire manufactured apparatus of propaganda and warfare, funded by taxpayer money and corporations.
The book is chock-full of these stories, each more infuriating than the other, but compiled in a way that could drive someone numb. However, do not despair; the authors, as they should, propose a successful path forward.
Every chapter offers a form of resistance, however small. They emphasize the importance of organizations like the Project on Government Oversight (or POGO), which, though it started out mostly getting attention from conspiracists and sci-fi enthusiasts, has defended whistleblowers and exposed fraud. They highlight reporting from independent outlets like ProPublica and FAIR that refuse to act as stenographers for the war machine, and progressive fighters in Congress like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who have pushed back from the inside.
They recount moments when insiders resisted corruption, when whistleblowers forced accountability, and when activists successfully shut down harmful programs. Public opinion overwhelmingly opposes new nuclear weapons, endless wars, and blank-check aid to repressive allies. The machine can be broken, but it takes an “all-hands-on-deck approach,” as the authors hammer home.
The book’s most hopeful chapter focuses on the much-needed peace movement. The authors argue for a “new peace network,” a coalition of movements that understand militarism as a unifying force behind poverty, racial injustice, surveillance, climate destruction, and authoritarianism. They highlight the Poor People’s Campaign, built on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision, which brings veterans, workers, and marginalized communities into a shared struggle against economic exploitation and war. They emphasize that any new peace movement must bridge ideological divides, drawing support from libertarians, populists, progressives, veterans, and communities directly harmed by war and militarization. They warn against grifters and extremists who exploit anti-war sentiment to push bigotry or authoritarian agendas (one could maybe think of examples, like Tucker Carlson, Matt Walsh, Nick Fuentes, or even Donald Trump). They insist that a principled peace movement must be rooted in solidarity, democracy, and human dignity.
This is where Hartung and Freeman’s credibility matters. Both authors have spent years inside Washington, fighting the very system they describe. Freeman’s landmark investigations at the Project on Government Oversight reshaped our understanding of foreign influence, and his current work at the Quincy Institute, including with the Think Tank Funding Tracker, continues to expose the financial pipelines between authoritarian regimes and corporations, and US policymaking.
Their blueprint also includes campaign finance reform to sever the link between money and militarism. It includes transparency laws to expose think-tank conflicts of interest, robust whistleblower protections for insiders willing to confront corruption, new priorities for federal spending that center human needs rather than endless war, and, most importantly, reimagining foreign policy around genuine defense rather than global weapons distribution. They, for instance, point to arming Ukraine against Russia’s imperialistic invasion as a noble cause (with caveats of course, which they get into), but warn against arming Israel, whose wars in the Middle East are not defensive. But this can’t happen without people pushing relentlessly.
The book ends with a warning and a call to action. The war machine is everywhere. It exists in budgets; in lobby shops; in universities; in movies; in police departments; in political campaigns; at sports games; and in the language we use to talk about our politics, society, culture, and life. But monsters can be tamed. They can be disrupted, defunded, delegitimized, and replaced.
We must get informed (first by reading this book!), pressure our representatives, support whistleblowers, follow and strengthen genuine independent media, create and join movements fighting militarism, and refuse to accept that endless war is the price of life, freedom, and citizenship. We all have agency, power, and responsibility to stop the war machine. Time to organize.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump's Golden Dome Will Fail at Everything But Enriching Arms Contractors
Job number one in rolling back the Golden Dome boondoggle is simply making it clear that no missile defense system will protect us in the event of a nuclear attack.
Nov 17, 2025
Kathryn Bigelow’s new nuclear thriller, A House of Dynamite, has been criticized by some experts for being unrealistic, most notably because it portrays an unlikely scenario in which an adversary chooses to attack the United States with just a single nuclear-armed missile. Such a move would, of course, leave the vast American nuclear arsenal largely intact and so invite a devastating response that would undoubtedly largely destroy the attacker’s nation. But the film is strikingly on target when it comes to one thing: its portrayal of the way one US missile interceptor after another misses its target, despite the confidence of most American war planners that they would be able to destroy any incoming nuclear warhead and save the day.
At one point in the film, a junior official points out that US interceptors have failed almost half their tests, and the secretary of defense responds by bellowing: “That’s what $50 billion buys us?”
In fact, the situation is far worse than that. We taxpayers, whether we know it or not, are betting on a house of dynamite, gambling on the idea that technology will save us in the event of a nuclear attack. The United States has, in fact, spent more than $350 billion on missile defenses since, more than four decades ago, President Ronald Reagan promised to create a leak-proof defense against incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Believe it or not, the Pentagon has yet to even conduct a realistic test of the system, which would involve attempting to intercept hundreds of warheads traveling at 1,500 miles per hour, surrounded by realistic decoys that would make it hard to even know which objects to target.
Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists has pointed out that the dream of a perfect missile defense—the very thing President Donald Trump has promised that his cherished new “Golden Dome” system will be—is a “fantasy” of the first order, and that “missile defenses are not a useful or long-term strategy for defending the United States from nuclear weapons.”
Trump’s pledge to fund contractors to build a viable Golden Dome system in three years is PR or perhaps PF (presidential fantasy), not realistic planning.
Grego is hardly alone in her assessment. A March 2025 report by the American Physical Society found that “creating a reliable and effective defense against even [a] small number of relatively unsophisticated nuclear-armed ICBMs remains a daunting challenge.” Its report also notes that “few of the main challenges involved in developing and deploying a reliable and effective missile defense have been solved, and… many of the hard problems we identified are likely to remain so during and probably beyond” the 15-year time horizon envisioned in their study.
Despite the evidence that it will do next to nothing to defend us, President Trump remains all in on the Golden Dome project. Perhaps what he really has in mind, however, has little to do with actually defending us. So far, Golden Dome seems like a marketing concept designed to enrich arms contractors and burnish Trump’s image rather than a carefully thought-out defense program.
Contrary to both logic and history, Trump has claimed that his supposedly leak-proof system can be produced in a mere three years for $175 billion. While that’s a serious chunk of change, analysts in the field suggest that the cost is likely to be astronomically higher and that the president’s proposed timeline is, politely put, wildly optimistic. Todd Harrison, a respected Pentagon budget analyst currently based at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, estimates that such a system would cost somewhere between $252 billion and $3.6 trillion over 20 years, depending on its design. Harrison’s high-end estimate is more than 20 times the off-hand price tossed out by President Trump.
As for the president’s proposed timeline of three years, it’s wildly out of line with the Pentagon’s experience with other major systems it’s developed. More than three decades after it was proposed as a possible next-generation fighter jet (under the moniker Joint Strike Fighter, or JSF), for example, the F-35, once touted as a “revolution in military procurement,” is still plagued by hundreds of defects, and the planes spend almost half their time in hangars for repair and maintenance.
Proponents of the Golden Dome project argue that it’s now feasible because of new technologies being developed in Silicon Valley, from artificial intelligence to quantum computing. Those claims are, of course, unproven, and past experience suggests that there is no miracle technological solution to complex security threats. AI-driven weapons may be quicker to locate and destroy targets and capable of coordinating complex responses like swarms of drones. But there is no evidence that AI can help solve the problem of blocking hundreds of fast-flying warheads embedded in a cloud of decoys. Worse yet, a missile defense system needs to work perfectly each and every time if it is to provide leak-proof protection against a nuclear catastrophe, an inconceivable standard in the real world of weaponry and defensive systems.
Of course, the weapons contractors salivating at the prospect of a monstrous payday tied to the development of Golden Dome are well aware that the president’s timeline will be quite literally unmeetable. Lockheed Martin has optimistically suggested that it should be able to perform the first test of a space-based interceptor in 2028, three years from now. And such space-based interceptors have been suggested as a central element of the Golden Dome system. In other words, Trump’s pledge to fund contractors to build a viable Golden Dome system in three years is PR or perhaps PF (presidential fantasy), not realistic planning.
Who Will Benefit from the Golden Dome?
The major contractors for Golden Dome may not be revealed for a few months, but we already know enough to be able to take an educated guess about which companies are likely to play central roles in the program.
The administration has said that Golden Dome will be built on existing hardware and the biggest current producers of missile defense hardware are Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon (a major part of RTX Corporation). So, count on at least two of the three of them. Emerging military tech firms like SpaceX and Anduril have also been mentioned as possible system integrators. In other words, one or more of them would help coordinate development of the Golden Dome and provide detection and targeting software for it. The final choice for such an extremely lucrative role is less than certain, but as of now Anduril seems to have an inside track.
Even after the breakup of the Donald Trump-Elon Musk bromance, the tech industry still has a strong influence over the administration, starting with Vice President JD Vance. He was, after all, employed and mentored by Peter Thiel of Palantir, the godfather of the recent surge of military research and financing in Silicon Valley. Thiel was also a major donor to his successful 2022 Senate campaign, and Vance was charged with fundraising in Silicon Valley during the 2024 presidential campaign. Emerging military tech moguls like Thiel and Palmer Luckey, along with their financiers like Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, view Vance as their man in the White House.
Should the Golden Dome system indeed be launched (at a staggering cost to the American taxpayer), its “gold” would further enrich already well-heeled weapons contractors, give us a false sense of security, and let Donald Trump pose as this country’s greatest defender ever.
Other military tech supporters in the Trump administration include Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg, whose company, Cerberus Capital, has a long history of investing in military contractors and is already pressing to reduce regulations on weapons firms in line with Silicon Valley’s wish list; Michael Obadal, a senior director at the military tech firm Anduril, who is now deputy secretary of the Army; Gregory Barbaccia, the former head of intelligence and investigations at Palantir, who is now the federal government’s chief information officer; Undersecretary of State Jacob Helberg, a former executive at Palantir; and numerous key members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which took a wrecking ball to civilian bodies like the US Agency for International Development while sparing the Pentagon significant cuts.
Some analysts foresee a funding fight in the offing between those Silicon Valley military tech firms and the Big Five firms (Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and RTX) that now dominate Pentagon contracting. But the Golden Dome project will have room for major players from both factions and may prove one area where the old guard and the Silicon Valley military tech crew join hands to lobby for maximum funding.
The nation’s premier defense firms and missile manufacturers will likely enjoy direct access to Golden Dome, since the project is expected to be headquartered in Huntsville, Alabama, the “Pentagon of the South.” That self-described “Rocket City” houses the US Missile Defense Agency and a myriad of defense firms (including Lockheed Martin, RTX, General Dynamics, and Boeing). It will also soon host the new Space Force headquarters.
While Huntsville has been a hub for missile defense since President Ronald Reagan’s failed ICBM defense efforts, what makes this placement particularly likely is the significance of Huntsville’s Republican representatives in Congress, particularly Rep. Dale Strong. “North Alabama has played a key role in every former and current US missile defense program and will undoubtedly be pivotal to the success of Golden Dome,” he explained, having received $337,600 in campaign contributions from the defense sector during the 2023-2024 election cycle and cofounded the House Golden Dome Caucus.
His advocacy for the project dovetails well with the power vested in House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (also from Alabama), who received $535,000 from the defense sector during the 2024 campaign. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Katie Boyd Britt, a member of the Senate Golden Dome Caucus, round out Alabama’s Republican Senate delegation.
Many of the leading boosters of the Golden Dome represent states like Alabama or districts that stand to benefit from the program. The bicameral congressional Golden Dome caucuses include numerous members from states already enmeshed in missile production, including North Dakota and Montana, which house ICBMs built and maintained by Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, among other companies.
Those same weapons companies have long been donating generously to political campaigns. And only recently, to curry favor and prove themselves worthy of Golden Dome’s lucrative contracts, Palantir and Booz Allen Hamilton joined Lockheed Martin in donating millions of dollars to President Trump’s new ballroom that is to replace the White House’s devastated East Wing. And expect further public displays of financial affection from arms companies awaiting the administration’s final verdict on Golden Dome contracts, which will likely be announced in early 2026.
The Gold of the Golden Dome
Golden Dome is already slated to receive nearly $40 billion in the next year when funds from President Trump’s “big beautiful bill” and the administration’s budget request for Fiscal Year 2026 are taken into account. The 2026 request for Golden Dome is more than twice the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and three times the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, essential pillars of any effort to prevent new pandemics or address the challenges of the climate crisis. In addition, Golden Dome will undoubtedly siphon into the military sector significant numbers of scientists and engineers who might otherwise be trying to solve environmental and public health problems, undermining this country’s ability to deal with the greatest threats to our lives and livelihoods to fund a defense system that will never actually be able to defend us.
Worse yet, Golden Dome is likely to be more than just a waste of money. It could also accelerate the nuclear arms race between the US, Russia, and China. If, as is often the case, US adversaries prepare for worst-case scenarios, they are likely to make their plans based on the idea that Golden Dome just might work, which means they’ll increase their offensive forces to ensure that, in a nuclear confrontation, they are able to overwhelm any new missile defense network. It was precisely this sort of offensive-defensive arms race that the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of the era of President Richard Nixon was designed to prevent. That agreement was, however, abandoned by President George W. Bush.
A no less dangerous aspect of any future involving the Golden Dome would be the creation of a new set of space-based interceptors as an integral part of the system. An interceptor in space may not actually be able to block a barrage of nuclear warheads, but it would definitely be capable of taking out civilian and military satellites, which travel in predictable orbits. If the unspoken agreement not to attack such satellites were ever to be lifted, basic functions of the global economy (not to speak of the US military) would be at risk. Not only could attacks on satellites bring the global economy to a grinding halt, but they could also spark a spiral of escalation that might, in the end, lead to the use of nuclear weapons.
Should the Golden Dome system indeed be launched (at a staggering cost to the American taxpayer), its “gold” would further enrich already well-heeled weapons contractors, give us a false sense of security, and let Donald Trump pose as this country’s greatest defender ever. Sadly, fantasies die hard, so job number one in rolling back the Golden Dome boondoggle is simply making it clear that no missile defense system will protect us in the event of a nuclear attack, a point made well by A House of Dynamite. The question is: Can our policymakers be as realistic in their assessment of missile defense as the makers of a major Hollywood movie? Or is that simply too much to ask?
Keep ReadingShow Less
Taking Stock of America's Violent Century
US hegemony, however frayed at the edges, continues to be taken for granted in ruling circles. What do we make of it these days?
Oct 13, 2025
[This essay is adapted from “Measuring Violence,” the first chapter of John Dower’s new book, The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War Two.]
On February 17, 1941, almost 10 months before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Life magazine carried a lengthy essay by its publisher, Henry Luce, entitled “The American Century.” The son of Presbyterian missionaries, born in China in 1898 and raised there until the age of 15, Luce essentially transposed the certainty of religious dogma into the certainty of a nationalistic mission couched in the name of internationalism.
Luce acknowledged that the United States could not police the whole world or attempt to impose democratic institutions on all of mankind. Nonetheless, “the world of the 20th century,” he wrote, “if it is to come to life in any nobility of health and vigor, must be to a significant degree an American Century.” The essay called on all Americans “to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such measures as we see fit.”
Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor propelled the United States wholeheartedly onto the international stage Luce believed it was destined to dominate, and the ringing title of his cri de coeur became a staple of patriotic Cold War and post-Cold War rhetoric. Central to this appeal was the affirmation of a virtuous calling. Luce’s essay singled out almost every professed ideal that would become a staple of wartime and Cold War propaganda: freedom, democracy, equality of opportunity, self-reliance and independence, cooperation, justice, charity—all coupled with a vision of economic abundance inspired by “our magnificent industrial products, our technical skills.” In present-day patriotic incantations, this is referred to as “American exceptionalism.”
Clearly, the number and deadliness of global conflicts have indeed declined since World War II. This so-called postwar peace was, and still is, however, saturated in blood and wracked with suffering.
The other, harder side of America’s manifest destiny was, of course, muscularity. Power. Possessing absolute and never-ending superiority in developing and deploying the world’s most advanced and destructive arsenal of war. Luce did not dwell on this dimension of “internationalism” in his famous essay, but once the world war had been entered and won, he became its fervent apostle—an outspoken advocate of “liberating” China from its new communist rulers, taking over from the beleaguered French colonial military in Vietnam, turning both the Korean and Vietnam conflicts from “limited wars” into opportunities for a wider virtuous war against and in China, and pursuing the rollback of the Iron Curtain with “tactical atomic weapons.” As Luce’s incisive biographer Alan Brinkley documents, at one point Luce even mulled the possibility of “plastering Russia with 500 (or 1,000) A bombs”—a terrifying scenario, but one that the keepers of the US nuclear arsenal actually mapped out in expansive and appalling detail in the 1950s and 1960s, before Luce’s death in 1967.
The “American Century” catchphrase is hyperbole, the slogan never more than a myth, a fantasy, a delusion. Military victory in any traditional sense was largely a chimera after World War II. The so-called Pax Americana itself was riddled with conflict and oppression and egregious betrayals of the professed catechism of American values. At the same time, postwar US hegemony obviously never extended to more than a portion of the globe. Much that took place in the world, including disorder and mayhem, was beyond America’s control.
Yet, not unreasonably, Luce’s catchphrase persists. The 21st-century world may be chaotic, with violence erupting from innumerable sources and causes, but the United States does remain the planet’s “sole superpower.” The myth of exceptionalism still holds most Americans in its thrall. US hegemony, however frayed at the edges, continues to be taken for granted in ruling circles, and not only in Washington. And Pentagon planners still emphatically define their mission as “full-spectrum dominance” globally.
Washington’s commitment to modernizing its nuclear arsenal rather than focusing on achieving the thoroughgoing abolition of nuclear weapons has proven unshakable. So has the country’s almost religious devotion to leading the way in developing and deploying ever more “smart” and sophisticated conventional weapons of mass destruction.
Welcome to Henry Luce’s—and America’s—violent century, even if thus far it’s lasted only 75 years. The question is just what to make of it these days.
Counting the Dead
We live in times of bewildering violence. In 2013, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told a Senate committee that the world is “more dangerous than it has ever been.” Statisticians, however, tell a different story: that war and lethal conflict have declined steadily, significantly, even precipitously since World War II.
Much mainstream scholarship now endorses the declinists. In his influential 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker adopted the labels “the Long Peace” for the four-plus decades of the Cold War (1945-1991), and “the New Peace” for the post-Cold War years to the present. In that book, as well as in post-publication articles, postings, and interviews, he has taken the doomsayers to task. The statistics suggest, he declares, that “today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’s existence.”
Clearly, the number and deadliness of global conflicts have indeed declined since World War II. This so-called postwar peace was, and still is, however, saturated in blood and wracked with suffering.
It is reasonable to argue that total war-related fatalities during the Cold War decades were lower than in the six years of World War II (1939-1945) and certainly far less than the toll for the 20th century’s two world wars combined. It is also undeniable that overall death tolls have declined further since then. The five most devastating intrastate or interstate conflicts of the postwar decades—in China, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and between Iran and Iraq—took place during the Cold War. So did a majority of the most deadly politicides, or political mass killings, and genocides: in the Soviet Union, China (again), Yugoslavia, North Korea, North Vietnam, Sudan, Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan-Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, and Cambodia, among other countries. The end of the Cold War certainly did not signal the end of such atrocities (as witness Rwanda, the Congo, and the implosion of Syria). As with major wars, however, the trajectory has been downward.
Unsurprisingly, the declinist argument celebrates the Cold War as less violent than the global conflicts that preceded it, and the decades that followed as statistically less violent than the Cold War. But what motivates the sanitizing of these years, now amounting to three-quarters of a century, with the label “peace”? The answer lies largely in a fixation on major powers. The great Cold War antagonists, the United States and the Soviet Union, bristling with their nuclear arsenals, never came to blows. Indeed, wars between major powers or developed states have become (in Pinker’s words) “all but obsolete.” There has been no World War III, nor is there likely to be.
Such upbeat quantification invites complacent forms of self-congratulation. (How comparatively virtuous we mortals have become!) In the United States, where we-won-the-Cold-War sentiment still runs strong, the relative decline in global violence after 1945 is commonly attributed to the wisdom, virtue, and firepower of US “peacekeeping.” In hawkish circles, nuclear deterrence—the Cold War’s MAD (mutually assured destruction) doctrine that was described early on as a “delicate balance of terror”—is still canonized as an enlightened policy that prevented catastrophic global conflict.
What Doesn’t Get Counted
Branding the long postwar era as an epoch of relative peace is disingenuous, and not just because it deflects attention from the significant death and agony that actually did occur and still does. It also obscures the degree to which the United States bears responsibility for contributing to, rather than impeding, militarization and mayhem after 1945. Ceaseless US-led transformations of the instruments of mass destruction—and the provocative global impact of this technological obsession—are by and large ignored.
Continuities in American-style “warfighting” (a popular Pentagon word) such as heavy reliance on airpower and other forms of brute force are downplayed. So is US support for repressive foreign regimes, as well as the destabilizing impact of many of the nation’s overt and covert overseas interventions. The more subtle and insidious dimension of postwar US militarization—namely, the violence done to civil society by funneling resources into a gargantuan, intrusive, and ever-expanding national security state—goes largely unaddressed in arguments fixated on numerical declines in violence since World War II.
Beyond this, trying to quantify war, conflict, and devastation poses daunting methodological challenges. Data advanced in support of the decline-of-violence argument is dense and often compelling, and derives from a range of respectable sources. Still, it must be kept in mind that the precise quantification of death and violence is almost always impossible. When a source offers fairly exact estimates of something like “war-related excess deaths,” you usually are dealing with investigators deficient in humility and imagination.
If the overall incidence of violence, including 21st-century terrorism, is relatively low compared to earlier global threats and conflicts, why has the United States responded by becoming an increasingly militarized, secretive, unaccountable, and intrusive “national security state”?
Take, for example, World War II, about which countless tens of thousands of studies have been written. Estimates of total “war-related” deaths from that global conflict range from roughly 50 million to more than 80 million. One explanation for such variation is the sheer chaos of armed violence. Another is what the counters choose to count and how they count it. Battle deaths of uniformed combatants are easiest to determine, especially on the winning side. Military bureaucrats can be relied upon to keep careful records of their own killed-in-action—but not, of course, of the enemy they kill. War-related civilian fatalities are even more difficult to assess, although—as in World War II—they commonly are far greater than deaths in combat.
Does the data source go beyond so-called battle-related collateral damage to include deaths caused by war-related famine and disease? Does it take into account deaths that may have occurred long after the conflict itself was over (as from radiation poisoning after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or from the US use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War)? The difficulty of assessing the toll of civil, tribal, ethnic, and religious conflicts with any exactitude is obvious.
Concentrating on fatalities and their averred downward trajectory also draws attention away from broader humanitarian catastrophes. In mid-2015, for instance, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that the number of individuals “forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, generalized violence, or human rights violations” had surpassed 60 million and was the highest level recorded since World War II and its immediate aftermath. Roughly two-thirds of these men, women, and children were displaced inside their own countries. The remainder were refugees, and over half of these refugees were children.
Here, then, is a trend line intimately connected to global violence that is not heading downward. In 1996, the UN’s estimate was that there were 37.3 million forcibly displaced individuals on the planet. Twenty years later, as 2015 ended, this had risen to 65.3 million—a 75% increase over the last two post-Cold War decades that the declinist literature refers to as the “new peace.”
Other disasters inflicted on civilians are less visible than uprooted populations. Harsh conflict-related economic sanctions, which often cripple hygiene and healthcare systems and may precipitate a sharp spike in infant mortality, usually do not find a place in itemizations of military violence. US-led UN sanctions imposed against Iraq for 13 years beginning in 1990 in conjunction with the first Gulf War are a stark example of this. An account published in the New York Times Magazine in July 2003 accepted the fact that “at least several hundred thousand children who could reasonably have been expected to live died before their fifth birthday.” And after all-out wars, who counts the maimed, or the orphans and widows, or those the Japanese in the wake of World War II referred to as the “elderly orphaned”—parents bereft of their children?
Figures and tables, moreover, can only hint at the psychological and social violence suffered by combatants and noncombatants alike. It has been suggested, for instance, that 1 in 6 people in areas afflicted by war may suffer from mental disorder (as opposed to 1 in 10 in normal times). Even where American military personnel are concerned, trauma did not become a serious focus of concern until 1980, seven years after the US retreat from Vietnam, when post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was officially recognized as a mental-health issue.
In 2008, a massive sampling study of 1.64 million US troops deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq between October 2001 and October 2007 estimated “that approximately 300,000 individuals currently suffer from PTSD or major depression and that 320,000 individuals experienced a probable TBI [traumatic brain injury] during deployment.” As these wars dragged on, the numbers naturally increased. To extend the ramifications of such data to wider circles of family and community—or, indeed, to populations traumatized by violence worldwide—defies statistical enumeration.
Terror Counts and Terror Fears
Largely unmeasurable, too, is violence in a different register: the damage that war, conflict, militarization, and plain existential fear inflict upon civil society and democratic practice. This is true everywhere but has been especially conspicuous in the United States since Washington launched its “global war on terror” in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Here, numbers are perversely provocative, for the lives claimed in 21st-century terrorist incidents can be interpreted as confirming the decline-in-violence argument. From 2000 through 2014, according to the widely cited Global Terrorism Index, “more than 61,000 incidents of terrorism claiming over 140,000 lives have been recorded.” Including September 11th, countries in the West experienced less than 5% of these incidents and 3% of the deaths. The Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, another minutely documented tabulation based on combing global media reports in many languages, puts the number of suicide bombings from 2000 through 2015 at 4,787 attacks in more than 40 countries, resulting in 47,274 deaths.
These atrocities are incontestably horrendous and alarming. Grim as they are, however, the numbers themselves are comparatively low when set against earlier conflicts. For specialists in World War II, the “140,000 lives” estimate carries an almost eerie resonance, since this is the rough figure usually accepted for the death toll from a single act of terror bombing, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The tally is also low compared to contemporary deaths from other causes. Globally, for example, more than 400,000 people are murdered annually. In the United States, the danger of being killed by falling objects or lightning is at least as great as the threat from Islamist militants.
This leaves us with a perplexing question: If the overall incidence of violence, including 21st-century terrorism, is relatively low compared to earlier global threats and conflicts, why has the United States responded by becoming an increasingly militarized, secretive, unaccountable, and intrusive “national security state”? Is it really possible that a patchwork of non-state adversaries that do not possess massive firepower or follow traditional rules of engagement has, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared in 2013, made the world more threatening than ever?
For those who do not believe this to be the case, possible explanations for the accelerating militarization of the United States come from many directions. Paranoia may be part of the American DNA—or, indeed, hardwired into the human species. Or perhaps the anticommunist hysteria of the Cold War simply metastasized into a post-9/11 pathological fear of terrorism. Machiavellian fear-mongering certainly enters the picture, led by conservative and neoconservative civilian and military officials of the national security state, along with opportunistic politicians and war profiteers of the usual sort. Cultural critics predictably point an accusing finger as well at the mass media’s addiction to sensationalism and catastrophe, now intensified by the proliferation of digital social media.
To all this must be added the peculiar psychological burden of being a “superpower” and, from the 1990s on, the planet’s “sole superpower”—a situation in which “credibility” is measured mainly in terms of massive cutting-edge military might. It might be argued that this mindset helped “contain Communism” during the Cold War and provides a sense of security to US allies. What it has not done is ensure victory in actual war, although not for want of trying. With some exceptions (Grenada, Panama, the brief 1991 Gulf War, and the Balkans), the US military has not tasted victory since World War II—Korea, Vietnam, and recent and current conflicts in the Greater Middle East being boldface examples of this failure. This, however, has had no impact on the hubris attached to superpower status. Brute force remains the ultimate measure of credibility.
The traditional American way of war has tended to emphasize the “three Ds” (defeat, destroy, devastate). Since 1996, the Pentagon’s proclaimed mission is to maintain “full-spectrum dominance” in every domain (land, sea, air, space, and information) and, in practice, in every accessible part of the world. The Air Force Global Strike Command, activated in 2009 and responsible for managing two-thirds of the US nuclear arsenal, typically publicizes its readiness for “Global Strike… Any Target, Any Time.”
In 2015, the Department of Defense acknowledged maintaining 4,855 physical “sites”—meaning bases ranging in size from huge contained communities to tiny installations—of which 587 were located overseas in 42 foreign countries. An unofficial investigation that includes small and sometimes impermanent facilities puts the number at around 800 in 80 countries. Over the course of 2015, to cite yet another example of the overwhelming nature of America’s global presence, elite US special operations forces were deployed to around 150 countries, and Washington provided assistance in arming and training security forces in an even larger number of nations.
America’s overseas bases reflect, in part, an enduring inheritance from World War II and the Korean War. The majority of these sites are located in Germany (181), Japan (122), and South Korea (83) and were retained after their original mission of containing communism disappeared with the end of the Cold War. Deployment of elite special operations forces is also a Cold War legacy (exemplified most famously by the Army’s “Green Berets” in Vietnam) that expanded after the demise of the Soviet Union. Dispatching covert missions to three-quarters of the world’s nations, however, is largely a product of the war on terror.
Many of these present-day undertakings require maintaining overseas “lily pad” facilities that are small, temporary, and unpublicized. And many, moreover, are integrated with covert CIA “black operations.” Combating terror involves practicing terror—including, since 2002, an expanding campaign of targeted assassinations by unmanned drones. For the moment, this latest mode of killing remains dominated by the CIA and the US military (with the United Kingdom and Israel following some distance behind).
Counting Nukes
The “delicate balance of terror” that characterized nuclear strategy during the Cold War has not disappeared. Rather, it has been reconfigured. The US and Soviet arsenals that reached a peak of insanity in the 1980s have been reduced by about two-thirds—a praiseworthy accomplishment but one that still leaves the world with around 15,400 nuclear weapons as of January 2016, 93% of them in US and Russian hands. Close to 2,000 of the latter on each side are still actively deployed on missiles or at bases with operational forces.
This downsizing, in other words, has not removed the wherewithal to destroy the Earth as we know it many times over. Such destruction could come about indirectly as well as directly, with even a relatively “modest” nuclear exchange between, say, India and Pakistan triggering a cataclysmic climate shift—a “nuclear winter”—that could result in massive global starvation and death. Nor does the fact that seven additional nations now possess nuclear weapons (and more than 40 others are deemed “nuclear weapons capable”) mean that “deterrence” has been enhanced. The future use of nuclear weapons, whether by deliberate decision or by accident, remains an ominous possibility. That threat is intensified by the possibility that nonstate terrorists may somehow obtain and use nuclear devices.
What is striking at this moment in history is that paranoia couched as strategic realism continues to guide US nuclear policy and, following America’s lead, that of the other nuclear powers. As announced by the Obama administration in 2014, the potential for nuclear violence is to be “modernized.” In concrete terms, this translates as a 30-year project that will cost the United States an estimated $1 trillion (not including the usual future cost overruns for producing such weapons), perfect a new arsenal of “smart” and smaller nuclear weapons, and extensively refurbish the existing delivery “triad” of long-range manned bombers, nuclear-armed submarines, and land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads.
Creating a capacity for violence greater than the world has ever seen is costly—and remunerative.
Nuclear modernization, of course, is but a small portion of the full spectrum of American might—a military machine so massive that it inspired President Barack Obama to speak with unusual emphasis in his State of the Union address in January 2016. “The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth,” he declared. “Period. Period. It’s not even close. It’s not even close. It’s not even close. We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined.”
Official budgetary expenditures and projections provide a snapshot of this enormous military machine, but here again numbers can be misleading. Thus, the “base budget” for defense announced in early 2016 for fiscal year 2017 amounts to roughly $600 billion, but this falls far short of what the actual outlay will be. When all other discretionary military- and defense-related costs are taken into account—nuclear maintenance and modernization, the “war budget” that pays for so-called overseas contingency operations like military engagements in the Greater Middle East, “black budgets” that fund intelligence operations by agencies including the CIA and the National Security Agency, appropriations for secret high-tech military activities, “veterans affairs” costs (including disability payments), military aid to other countries, huge interest costs on the military-related part of the national debt, and so on—the actual total annual expenditure is close to $1 trillion.
Such stratospheric numbers defy easy comprehension, but one does not need training in statistics to bring them closer to home. Simple arithmetic suffices. The projected bill for just the 30-year nuclear modernization agenda comes to over $90 million a day, or almost $4 million an hour. The $1 trillion price tag for maintaining the nation’s status as “the most powerful nation on Earth” for a single year amounts to roughly $2.74 billion a day, over $114 million an hour.
Creating a capacity for violence greater than the world has ever seen is costly—and remunerative.
So an era of a “new peace”? Think again. We’re only three-quarters of the way through America’s violent century and there’s more to come.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular