The Trillion Dollar War Machine

A Disturbing Primer on the Military-Industrial Complex

BILL ASTORE

JAN 27, 2026

Wow. Just wow. That was my response after reading “The Trillion Dollar War Machine” by Bill Hartung and Ben Freeman. The book’s subtitle captures the “wow” part succinctly: “How runaway military spending drives America into foreign wars and bankrupts us at home.” And now, naturally, President Trump wants even more money for that runaway war machine: an almost unimaginable $500 billion more for FY2027. Egads! How did America’s so-called elites come to embrace war and weapons so wholeheartedly, so lustily, so greedily?

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Many of the answers to that question are provided by Hartung and Freeman. They cite and explore President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famous warning from 1961 about an emerging military-industrial complex. They explain how Congress is complicit in the growing power (and dangers) of the MIC, funding incessant warfare overseas and explosive spending on (often overpriced and largely ineffective) weaponry like the F-35 fighter and the Littoral Combat Ship (known colloquially as “little crappy ships”). Corruption, they show, is baked into the system: the corruption of the revolving door that spins so easily between the military, think tanks, the government, and weapons makers like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. It’s all thoroughly shocking as well as depressing.

Hartung and Freeman, both experienced researchers, know the MIC well. They also know it’s more than the MIC: it’s more like the MICIMATTSHG, or the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academe-think-tank-sports-Hollywood-gaming complex, so thoroughly has profiteering through militarism and war permeated American culture and society. Military and weapons funding is so colossal it’s seemingly everywhere even as it adds inexorably to the U.S. debt while contributing to military adventurism that further deepens that same debt. Small wonder that our national debt clock is fast approaching $39 trillion. It’s a golden dome of debt!

Reading this book made me think back to another classic account of the MIC and its many follies: James Fallows’s “National Defense.” That book came out in 1981, just as the “defense” buildup under President Ronald Reagan began. Timely as that book was, the Pentagon and its many camp followers were and are rarely forced to retreat when confronted by sensible and logical analysts. I fear this latest effort by Hartung and Freeman, much needed as it is, will similarly be ignored by a purblind Pentagon always in pursuit of power irrespective of the cost.

That would truly be a shame, not only for Americans in general but for the Pentagon as well. Hartung and Freeman aren’t anti-military: they’re pro-defense when defense is smart, effective, thrifty, and focused on upholding the U.S. Constitution. Everyone in uniform, indeed everyone without a uniform, should read this book. You really should know where so much of your taxpayer dollars go—and how much of that money is being wasted by a system that is not only burning your money but weakening America as a democracy. (Indeed, when it comes to money, the Pentagon may be the ultimate burn pit.)

Buy it, study it, absorb it. As Sun Tzu said, it’s smart to know your opponent. Far too often, the military-industrial complex is exactly that.