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In September 2007, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore emailed me out of the blue. He'd been reading articles at TomDispatch, the website I set up soon after the 9/11 attacks to deal with this country's Global War on Terror, especially the invasions of, and then never-ending conflicts in Afghanistan and later Iraq. As a former military man, he had been struck by the staggering rows of medals and ribbons our military commanders leading this country in those disastrous wars displayed on their uniforms. Unbelievably, they had significantly more of them than our victorious generals in World War II!
He commented on how those bemedaled losers reminded him of bemedaled Russian generals in the years before the Soviet Union collapsed and considered their Soviet-style chestfuls of medals and ribbons a sign of our military's self-delusion amid its disastrous wars. His note caught my attention and I did something rare for me when it came to over-the-transom requests to write for TomDispatch and instantly responded, urging him to consider doing a piece on the subject. He promptly did so, beginning it this way: "It's time to save the military from itself" -- a phrase that seems no less appropriate in 2025 than it did in 2007.
He then asked a question that was too seldom considered in the American mainstream media: "Why are we spilling blood and treasure with such reckless abandon?" And he was struck by another all-too-strange reality, considering how poorly America's wars were already going. He wrote: "In a country founded on civilian control of the military, it's disturbing indeed that, as a New York Times/CBS poll indicated recently, Americans trust their generals three times as much as Congress and 13 times as much as the president."
And so it's gone in these disastrous years of the never-quite-ending Global War on Terror. More than a decade and a half and 110 TomDispatch pieces later, Astore's new book of those articles, American Militarism on Steroids: The Military-Industrial Complex, Unbounded, Uncontained, and Undemocratic, explores what it meant for the Pentagon and the military to essentially run off the rails of history and take the rest of us with them.
Honestly, I suspect the age of Donald Trump would have been inconceivable had that military not run off just about every rail in sight at a cost, both literal and figurative, almost beyond imagining. In doing so, it devastated Afghanistan and Iraq -- and, in some strange fashion, this country, too. It's both a tale from hell and a hell of a tale, one that might have seemed like part of an outlandish science fiction novel, had it not actually happened. Tom
Ending Militarism in America
Taking on the MICIMATT(SH)
I read the news today, oh boy. About a lucky man named Elon Musk. But he lost out on one thing: he didn't get a top secret briefing on Pentagon war plans for China. And the news people breathed a sigh of relief.
With apologies to John Lennon and The Beatles, a day in the life is getting increasingly tough to take here in the land of the free. I'm meant to be reassured that Musk didn't get to see America's top-secret plans for -- yes! -- going to war with China, even as I'm meant to ignore the constant drumbeat of propaganda, the incessant military marches that form America's background music, conveying the message that America must have war plans for China, that indeed war in or around China is possible, even probable, in the next decade. Maybe in 2027?
My fellow Americans, we should be far more alarmed by such secret U.S. war plans, along with those "pivots" to Asia and the Indo-Pacific, and the military base-building efforts in the Philippines, than reassured by the "good news" that Comrade Billionaire Musk was denied access to the war room, meaning (for Dr. Strangelove fans) he didn't get to see "the big board."
It's war, war, everywhere in America. We do indeed have a strange love for it. I've been writing for TomDispatch for 18 years now -- this is my 111th essay (the other 110 are in a new book of mine) -- most of them focusing on militarism in this country, as well as our disastrous wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, the ruinous weapons systems we continue to fund (including new apocalyptic nuclear weapons), and the war song that seems to remain ever the same.
A few recent examples of what I mean: President Trump has already bombed Yemen more than once. He's already threatening Iran. He's sending Israel all the explosives, all the weaponry it needs to annihilate the Palestinians in Gaza (so too, of course, did Joe Biden). He's boasting of building new weapons systems like the Air Force's much-hyped F-47 fighter jet, the "47" designation being an apparent homage by its builder, Boeing, to Trump himself, the 47th president. He and his "defense" secretary, Pete Hegseth, continually boast of "peace through strength," an Orwellian construction that differs little from "war is peace." And I could, of course, go on and on and on and on"
Occasionally, Trump sounds a different note. When Tulsi Gabbard became the director of national intelligence, he sang a dissonant note about a "warmongering military-industrial complex." And however haphazardly, he does seem to be working for some form of peace with respect to the Russia-Ukraine War. He also talks about his fear of a cataclysmic nuclear war. Yet, if you judge him by deeds rather than words, he's just another U.S. commander-in-chief enamored of the military and military force (whatever the cost, human or financial).
Consider here the much-hyped Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by that lucky man Elon Musk. Even as it dismantles various government agencies like the Department of Education and USAID, it has -- no surprise here! -- barely touched the Pentagon and its vast, nearly trillion-dollar budget. In fact, if a Republican-controlled Congress has any say in the matter, the Pentagon budget will likely be boosted significantly for Fiscal Year 2026 and thereafter. As inefficient as the Pentagon may be (and we really don't know just how inefficient it is, since the bean counters there keep failing audit after audit, seven years running), targeted DOGE Pentagon cuts have been tiny. That means there's little incentive for the generals to change, streamline their operations, or even rethink in any significant fashion. It's just spend, spend, spend until the money runs out, which I suppose it will eventually, as the national debt soars toward $37 trillion and climbing.
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