The Department of Empire

W.J. Astore

And Its Bloated Imperial War Budget

Language and repetition of the same is so important. We hear about the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Pentagon budget and we think little of it. The DoD, of course, used to be called the Department of War until 1947, a far more telling and accurate name, and there wasn’t a Pentagon until we built one during World War II. In the old days, the Army fought the Navy for which service would get more money in the War Budget, with the Navy usually winning as America sought to control the seas as a means of dominating trade and “intercourse” among nations.

Those were more honest times when retired generals like Smedley Butler wrote in the 1930s that he’d served as a “gangster” for capitalism. Butler was a Marine who was twice awarded the Medal of Honor, so it wasn’t easy for the imperialists to smear him, though they certainly tried (as they did to David M. Shoup, another Marine Corps general and Medal of Honor recipient who turned against the Vietnam War in the 1960s).

Anyhow, I just saw at Antiwar.com that President Trump is proposing a $1.01 trillion budget for the Pentagon for FY2026, a 13% increase in imperial spending. Trump, of course, is proud of reaching the Trillion Dollar threshold. Big numbers have always appealed to him.

It doesn’t seem to matter who is president, whether it’s Biden or Trump, Democrat or Republican, when it comes to the Department of Empire and its bloated imperial budget. For that is what it is, a budget that seeks to sustain and enlarge America’s imperial domain. If you add other costs related to imperial dominance, such as interest on the national debt due to war spending, VA costs, nuclear weapons, and the like, the true imperial budget soars toward $1.7 trillion yearly.

No matter. A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

The Pentagon tries to disguise the enormous waste of this imperial budget by speaking of it as an “investment,” but imagine an “investment” that you’re involved in which fails seven audits in a row. How likely would you be to see this as anything other than theft?

Dwight D. Eisenhower had it right in 1953 when he spoke of military spending as a theft from those who hunger. Ike’s words are almost never heard today inside the Washington Beltway. It’s worth reflecting upon them again as America’s leaders boast of trillion-dollar war budgets:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

America, I can’t improve upon that.

2 thoughts on “The Department of Empire”

  1. Thanks sooo much for reminding us so powerfully and concisely that war is an instrument of the Devil designed to destroy God’s creation.

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  2. I hadn’t realized Eisenhower had such intellectual capacity and the ability to communicate it with such eloquence. I mean, has any president since even approached the cadence, to say nothing of the correctness and courage of…

    “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist”?

    Now we are indeed seeing not only “a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” but also from those of us who are comfortably if not necessarily well-fed and clothed, by elimination of Head Start programs, reductions in Medicaid coverage, evisceration of the Social Security Administration, undoing of consumer protection laws and regulations, among others, by “the disastrous rise of misplaced power” whose incompetence is matched and underscored by its contempt for the very people whose general welfare was, at one time in our history, their obligation to provide.

    Now in their egomaniacal, hubristic, reckless wisdom, they are pressing for a $1.01 trillion Pentagon budget [N.B.: The 2025 National Defense Authorization Act allocation for Israel was $627 million for “U.S.-Israel cooperation,” in addition to a separate MOU calling for $3.5 billion in military aid to Israel annually through 2028]. As noted in the article, this represents a 13% in spending, and which does not include the VA.

    Paying for this staggering budget entails the aforementioned cuts, and ironically enough to the VA itself. Although a Trump administration budget proposal calls for a 4% increase to the VA, DOGE has already been at work, lately marking for “immediate termination” the contract with outside contractor maintaining the VA’s cancer registry database; laying off social workers assisting homeless veterans in finding temporary housing; dismissing a few thousand staff thus far this year, with at least 70,000 planned in coming months (https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-veterans-affairs-budget-staff-cuts-jeopardize-cancer-research); and continued privatization of the VA, a trend accelerated under George W. Bush when he wouldn’t increase funding for the VA just as physically and mentally injured and maimed service personnel were overwhelming the VA upon returning from Dumbya’s excellent adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    So now the trillion-dollar-plus Department of Empire budget may have reached a tipping point. No longer sated by engorging itself on the money that could have gone for the schools, hospitals, and homes that go unbuilt in the general population in order to build more guns, tanks, warships, and rockets for itself, the Department has now begun feeding on itself.

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