I woke to the news of a “blue wave” as Democrats regained control of the House and Senate by margins that few predicted. It was a resounding rebuke to the Trump and MAGA crowd, which can’t be a bad thing. But it isn’t a moment where, as the saying goes, we can all go back to brunch and let a Democrat-controlled Congress handle things. We have to stay involved, for the mess in Washington is very much a bipartisan one.
The “new” House and Senate majority leaders will be Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, corporate Democrats who support Zionist Israel and gleefully accept money and marching orders from AIPAC. That is unlikely to change much, as the power exercised by these men isn’t easy to challenge since they control the money and the perks for their party.
Still, there are more populists/progressives elected this time around, so perhaps Hakeem and Chuck will discover new masks to don. These are men who are flexible like Gumby when it comes to principles, so it’s up to the newly elected Members of Congress, as well as people like us, to demand real change rather than the cosmetic version they’re most comfortable at selling.
Americans are most certainly tired of war; will Democrats finally act to end Trump’s unconstitutional and disastrous war against Iran? What about support of Zionist Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza? Will Democrats finally stop all the U.S. military equipment flowing to Israel even if it hurts American manufacturers of the same?
Trump, of course, has already promised to veto anything a Democratic-led Congress tries to do for a saner and safer world. I saw today that Trump says he will accept the election results, as the New York Times put it. How generous and gracious of him! It’s like accepting that the sun came up this morning.
If Trump really does veto everything, a friend suggested that Democrats should force him to “veto a wealth tax for billionaires, veto a pause on data center construction, veto a restoration of healthcare to millions, veto a cut off of military aid to Israel and other authoritarian regimes, etc. This would set up [Democrats] for a 2028 victory.” That’s a sensible strategy, but whether Democrats have the discipline and commitment to follow it is questionable.
Still, as another friend put it this morning, let’s enjoy the rebuke of Trump and MAGA before Democrats start gathering their usual circular firing squad. Seriously, yesterday’s election sent a clear message that Americans are fed up and want a government that actually serves them rather than the usual suspects at the top. Now, we have to push our new “leaders” to govern in that spirit.
It’s not time to go back to brunch. It’s time to keep pushing politicians to serve the public rather than the plutocrats and the powerful.
Readers, what did you take from the election results? Are you more hopeful today? Remember, however, that “hope is not a plan.”
I recently came across the expression “minimally invasive” to describe an internal medical procedure that seemed anything but. I immediately thought of the Pentagon and its various “operations,” which always start with great enthusiasm and promises of decisive results with minimal trouble. “Invasive” operations like Vietnam in 1965, Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003, all promising quick and decisive results, all instead leading to further escalation, serious “collateral damage,” and profound debilitation of both the foreign patient and the American doctor (though the doctor, or perhaps the hospital, always got paid).
Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq: they were all “operations” that were supposed to be over and done with in a matter of a few weeks or months, tops. They all lasted at least a decade, sometimes two, always doing harm to the invader and especially extreme harm to the invaded.
I know, of course, that medical terminology shouldn’t be applied to war, but tell that to the Pentagon, which loves to speak of “surgical strikes,” and which also speaks of terrorism as a metastasizing cancer. It would be interesting indeed if the U.S. military was guided by the Hippocratic Oath of first doing no harm as it planned its various “operations” around the world. (Strictly speaking, “First do no harm” isn’t in the oath, but it’s a Hippocratic sentiment that captures the essence of that oath.)
And now we have war with Iran, yet another war started with the promise of a quick victory, a war we were told that would last no longer than eight weeks, tops. A war sold as helping the Iranian people win their freedom, though that BS rhetoric is no longer used.
If we judged America’s military operations like we judged medical procedures, surely we’d fire all the “doctors” at the top for malpractice and incompetence, wouldn’t we? When “minimally invasive” medical procedures lead to 20-year struggles that end in abject failure and prodigious debt, we don’t buy happy-talk of, well, the doctors tried, but “mistakes were made,” and the patient wasn’t really worth saving to begin with because he just didn’t cooperate with his freedom-bringing American “doctors.”
Surely an “exceptional” nation like the United States should be helping others—or, at least, not harming others. How about that for a foreign policy goal? It sure beats a “warrior ethos” of punching others when they’re down.
Yesterday, I was on “Judging Freedom” with Judge Napolitano to discuss America’s state of permanent war and the fantasy of our leaders that America remains the world’s hegemon:
America had its hegemonic moment in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. For a decade, Pentagon spending was curbed and the Clinton administration produced budgetary surpluses at the tail end of the 1990s. (With U.S. national debt soaring above $40 trillion this year, those budgetary surpluses seem fantastical, a unicorn and rainbow moment.)
How did America throw away its moment of triumph? Hegemonic vainglory was one reason. Mistaking military might for being morally in the right was another. Seeking vengeance after 9/11 in 2001 by declaring an unbounded “war on terror” globally was a third. Meanwhile, no matter how poorly wars went in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran, and no matter how wasteful the Pentagon proved to be in that war (eight failed audits and counting), no one was held accountable for lost wars, wasteful spending and wanton corruption. In fact, those who were punished were patriotic whistleblowers who tried to shed light on what became a massive system of theft from American citizens.
That said, let us not forget all those on the receiving end of U.S. military power—all those killed, maimed, and displaced by America’s state of permanent war across the globe.
And let us not forget as well that U.S. security doesn’t come from vast “investments” in wars and weapons—quite the reverse. Our security comes from the exercise of our constitutional rights and freedoms, our collective wisdom, our willingness to stand for what is right and true.
War isn’t security. War certainly isn’t peace. And a state of permanent war isn’t healthy; in fact, it’s the most insidious threat we face to our way of life, if by “way of life” we mean a people committed to liberty and justice for all, especially the weak and the vulnerable.
Yet more U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran may be imminent, which is truly a sad manifestation of America’s state of permanent war and its normalization of violence. Sadly, it’s an old topic for me, as a reader recently referenced an essay I wrote for TomDispatch back in 2015: “War is the new normal.”
Here in America, military marches have become the elevator muzak to our lives. When we’re not at war with Iraq or Afghanistan or Iran or even with an abstract concept like “terror,” we’re making trillion-dollar preparations for the same. What is abnormal, even aberrant, in America today is serious efforts at peace. Peace consistently makes the news only when Donald Trump complains about his failure to win a Nobel Peace Prize.
Here’s my essay from 2015, more relevant now than ever.
It was launched immediately after the 9/11 attacks, when I was still in the military, and almost immediately became known as the Global War on Terror, or GWOT. Pentagon insiders called it “the long war,” an open-ended, perhaps unending, conflict against nations and terror networks mainly of a radical Islamist bent. It saw the revival of counterinsurgency doctrine, buried in the aftermath of defeat in Vietnam, and a reinterpretation of that disaster as well. Over the years, its chief characteristic became ever clearer: a “Groundhog Day” kind of repetition. Just when you thought it was over (Iraq, Afghanistan), just after victory (of a sort) was declared, it began again.
Now, as we find ourselves enmeshed in Iraq War 3.0, what better way to memorialize the post-9/11 American way of war than through repetition. Back in July 2010, I wrote an article for TomDispatch on the seven reasons why America can’t stop making war. More than four years later, with the war on terror still ongoing, with the mission eternally unaccomplished, here’s a fresh take on the top seven reasons why never-ending war is the new normal in America. In this sequel, I make only one promise: no declarations of victory (and mark it on your calendars, I’m planning to be back with seven new reasons in 2019).
1. The privatization of war: The U.S. military’s recourse to private contractors has strengthened the profit motive for war-making and prolonged wars as well. Unlike the citizen-soldiers of past eras, the mobilized warrior corporations of America’s new mercenary moment — the Halliburton/KBRs (nearly $40 billion in contracts for the Iraq War alone), the DynCorps ($4.1 billion to train 150,000 Iraqi police), and the Blackwater/Xe/Academis ($1.3 billion in Iraq, along with boatloads of controversy) — have no incentive to demobilize. Like most corporations, their business model is based on profit through growth, and growth is most rapid when wars and preparations for more of them are the favored options in Washington.
“Freedom isn’t free,” as a popular conservative bumper sticker puts it, and neither is war. My father liked the saying, “He who pays the piper calls the tune,” and today’s mercenary corporations have been calling for a lot of military marches piping in $138 billion in contracts for Iraq alone, according to the Financial Times. And if you think that the privatization of war must at least reduce government waste, think again: the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimated in 2011 that fraud, waste, and abuse accounted for up to $60 billion of the money spent in Iraq alone.
To corral American-style war, the mercenaries must be defanged or deflated. European rulers learned this the hard way during the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century. At that time, powerful mercenary captains like Albrecht von Wallenstein ran amok. Only Wallenstein’s assassination and the assertion of near absolutist powers by monarchs bent on curbing war before they went bankrupt finally brought the mercenaries to heel, a victory as hard won as it was essential to Europe’s survival and eventual expansion. (Europeans then exported their wars to foreign shores, but that’s another story.)
2. The embrace of the national security state by both major parties: Jimmy Carter was the last president to attempt to exercise any kind of control over the national security state. A former Navy nuclear engineer who had served under the demanding Admiral Hyman Rickover, Carter cancelled the B-1 bomber and fought for a U.S. foreign policy based on human rights. Widely pilloried for talking about nuclear war with his young daughter Amy, Carter was further attacked for being “weak” on defense. His defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980 inaugurated 12 years of dominance by Republican presidents that opened the financial floodgates for the Department of Defense. That taught Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council a lesson when it came to the wisdom of wrapping the national security state in a welcoming embrace, which they did, however uncomfortably. This expedient turn to the right by the Democrats in the Clinton years served as a temporary booster shot when it came to charges of being “soft” on defense — until Republicans upped the ante by going “all-in” on military crusades in the aftermath of 9/11.
Since his election in 2008, Barack Obama has done little to alter the course set by his predecessors. He, too, has chosen not to challenge Washington’s prevailing catechism of war. Republicans have responded, however, not by muting their criticism, but by upping the ante yet again. How else to explain House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress in March? That address promises to be a pep talk for the Republicans, as well as a smack down of the Obama administration and its “appeasenik” policies toward Iran and Islamic radicalism.
Serious oversight, let alone opposition to the national security state by Congress or a mainstream political party, has been missing in action for years and must now, in the wake of the Senate Torture Report fiasco (from which the CIA emerged stronger, not weaker), be presumed dead. The recent midterm election triumph of Republican war hawks and the prospective lineup of candidates for president in 2016 does not bode well when it comes to reining in the national security state in any foreseeable future.
3. “Support Our Troops” as a substitute for thought. You’ve seen them everywhere: “Support Our Troops” stickers. In fact, the “support” in that slogan generally means acquiescence when it comes to American-style war. The truth is that we’ve turned the all-volunteer military into something like a foreign legion, deploying it again and again to our distant battle zones and driving it into the ground in wars that amount to strategic folly. Instead of admitting their mistakes, America’s leaders have worked to obscure them by endlessly overpraising our “warriors” as so many universal heroes. This may salve our collective national conscience, but it’s a form of cheap grace that saves no lives — and wins no wars.
Instead, this country needs to listen more carefully to its troops, especially the war critics who have risked their lives while fighting overseas. Organizations like Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace are good places to start.
4. Fighting a redacted war. War, like the recent Senate torture report, is redacted in America. Its horrors and mistakes are suppressed, its patriotic whistleblowers punished, even as the American people are kept in a demobilized state. The act of going to war no longer represents the will of the people, as represented by formal Congressional declarations of war as the U.S. Constitution demands. Instead, in these years, Americans were told to go to Disney World (as George W. Bush suggested in the wake of 9/11) and keep shopping. They’re encouraged not to pay too much attention to war’s casualties and costs, especially when those costs involve foreigners with funny-sounding names (after all, they are, as American sniper Chris Kyle so indelicately put it in his book, just “savages”).
Redacted war hides the true cost of a permanent state of killing from the American people, if not from foreign observers. Ignorance and apathy reign, even as a national security state that is essentially a shadow government equates its growth with your safety.
5. Threat inflation: There’s nothing new about threat inflation. We saw plenty of it during the Cold War (nonexistent missile and bomber gaps, for example). Fear sells and we’ve had quite a dose of it in the twenty-first century, from ISIS to Ebola. But a more important truth is that fear is a mind-killer, a debate-stifler.
Back in September, for example, Senator Lindsey Graham warned that ISIS and its radical Islamic army was coming to America to kill us all. ISIS, of course, is a regional power with no ability to mount significant operations against the United States. But fear is so commonplace, so effectively stoked in this country that Americans routinely and wildly exaggerate the threat posed by al-Qaeda or ISIS or the bogeyman du jour.
Decades ago, as a young lieutenant in the Air Force, I was hunkered down in Cheyenne Mountain during the Cold War. It was the ultimate citadel-cum-bomb-shelter, and those in it were believed to have a 70% likelihood of surviving a five-megaton nuclear blast. There, not surprisingly, I found myself contemplating the very real possibility of a thermonuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, a war that would have annihilated life as we knew it, indeed much of life on our planet thanks to the phenomenon of nuclear winter. You’ll excuse me for not shaking in my boots at the threat of ISIS coming to get me. Or of Sharia Law coming to my local town hall. With respect to such fears, America needs, as Hillary Clinton said in an admittedly different context, to “grow a pair.”
6. Defining the world as a global battlefield: In fortress America, all realms have by now become battle spheres. Not only much of the planet, the seas, air, and space, as well as the country’s borders and its increasingly up-armored police forces, but the world of thought, the insides of our minds. Think of the 17 intertwined intelligence outfits in “the U.S. Intelligence Community” and their ongoing “surge” for information dominance across every mode of human communication, as well as the surveillance of everything. And don’t forget the national security state’s leading role in making cyberwar a reality. (Indeed, Washington launched the first cyberwar in history by deploying the Stuxnet computer worm against Iran.)
Think of all this as a global matrix that rests on war, empowering disaster capitalismand the corporate complexes that have formed around the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, and that intelligence community. A militarized matrix doesn’t blink at $1.45 trillion dollars devoted to the F-35, a single under-performing jet fighter, nor at projections of $355 billion over the next decade for “modernizing” the U.S. nuclear arsenal, weapons that Barack Obama vowed to abolish in 2009.
7. The new “normal” in America is war: The 9/11 attacks happened more than 13 years ago, which means that no teenagers in America can truly remember a time when the country was at peace. ”War time” is their normal; peace, a fairy tale.
What’s truly “exceptional” in twenty-first-century America is any articulated vision of what a land at peace with itself and other nations might be like. Instead, war, backed by a diet of fear, is the backdrop against which the young have grown to adulthood. It’s the background noise of their world, so much a part of their lives that they hardly recognize it for what it is. And that’s the most insidious danger of them all.
How do we inoculate our children against such a permanent state of war and the war state itself? I have one simple suggestion: just stop it. All of it. Stop making war a never-ending part of our lives and stop celebrating it, too. War should be the realm of the extreme, of the abnormal. It should be the death of normalcy, not the dreary norm.
It’s never too soon, America, to enlist in that good fight!
Mission Accomplished in Iraq in 2003! Why, then, did U.S. troops stay until 2026?
Postscript (2026): Today, America’s Department of Defense has been rebranded as the Department of War. It’s led by a wannabe warlord who revels in attacking without mercy. Even worse, America’s commander-in-chief has threatened the total obliteration of Iran while going all-in on a Pentagon budget of $1.5 trillion in FY2027. A feckless Congress does nothing to stop Trump’s wars and has from day one facilitated Israel’s genocide against Gaza.
America’s leaders say they want peace, but that the only language they—the enemy of that day—understand is murderous violence. What if that language is the only one ourleaders understand? Even worse, why have we allowed them to preach and act as if war truly is peace?
Today, I talked about the decline and fall of the citizen-soldier ideal in America with Judge Napolitano on “Judging Freedom.”
The judge asked me a powerful question about “Thou shalt not kill” and the pursuit of killing in war. Is killing ever truly justified by wartime imperatives? There are no easy answers to that question, nor should there be.
You can fall back on Just War theory, but I wasn’t mentally prepared to discuss that complex subject in detail.
There are times, I believe, when killing in war is justifiable, such as a defensive war against implacable enemies bent on destruction. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan come to mind from World War II. Of course, war is always awful, always barbarous, and those caught up in war are degraded by it. Nevertheless, U.S. citizen-soldiers of World War II behaved less atrociously and generally stood for higher ideals than their counterparts in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
Again, when you read combat accounts written by U.S. troops, such as E.B. Sledge’s “With the Old Breed” about his service in the Marine Corps fighting the Japanese, you quickly realize both sides fought viciously, both sides committed atrocities, because that is the nature of brutal combat. But the Japanese were more fanatical and more prone to barbarous actions than U.S. troops, though Americans learned quickly to return the favor.
All war is awful, all war is murderous, therefore it should be avoided whenever possible. Still, no one need submit to a dictatorship like that of Nazi Germany or the militaristic rule of imperial Japan. There is nobility in defending kith and kin and for defending as well ideals that serve liberty, freedom, and justice.
High-minded displays of non-violent resistance are admirable, as are mindful appeals to compassion, but they would not have stopped the work of Hitler’s Panzers or his death camps.
The problem is that since World War II, America hasn’t waged defensive or just wars. Its wars, whether in Southeast Asia or the Middle East, have been undeclared wars driven by imperial designs and reasons that do not in any way justify deadly use of force, especially the wanton use of such force. The American people increasingly recognize this. So too do those in command, which is why they’re working so hard to recruit obedient “warriors” to the ranks today, instead of citizen-soldiers capable of thinking for themselves.
Today’s leaders, men like Pete Hegseth, want to turn war into a guiltless exercise in killing, as if victory always goes to the most ruthless and brutal side in war. History teaches us the opposite is often true. And, assuming that America “won” by being utterly ruthless and annihilatory, would we not have lost our humanity in the process?
The bottom line is that we in America must work for peace while resisting our “leaders” who are so eager to embroil this nation in immoral, incessant, and murderous wars.
Pete Hegseth, self-styled Secretary of War, doesn’t think of himself as a civilian. No—a warrior-chieftain is his preferred identity. A macho tough guy. An alpha male and a crusader. He is the culmination of mindless militarism and warfighter nonsense that has infected the U.S. military beginning in the Reagan years and associated often with fictional avatars like Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo. (Interestingly, at the age of 80, Stallone recently disavowed his warrior-Rambo archetype and confessed he now hates war, a change of heart that is better late than never, I suppose.)
Civilians may still exercise nominal control over the U.S. military, but in practice Hegseth and Trump are wildly enthusiastic about killing, bombing, even threatening civilizational annihilation again and again. Meanwhile, U.S. troops are encouraged to think of themselves as mindless warriors, obedient to the dictates of their fanatical leaders. N weirdos or beardos or woke-types need apply to this macho man’s military.
Back in 2008, now almost 20 years ago, I wrote about this exaltation of “warfighters” within the U.S. military. Here’s that article, posted originally at TomDispatch.com.
Having the “Best Military” Is Not Always a Good Thing Reclaiming Our Citizen-Soldier Heritage By William J. Astore
When did American troops become “warfighters” — members of “Generation Kill” — instead of citizen-soldiers? And when did we become so proud of declaring our military to be “the world’s best”? These are neither frivolous nor rhetorical questions. Open up any national defense publication today and you can’t miss the ads from defense contractors, all eagerly touting the ways they “serve” America’s “warfighters.” Listen to the politicians, and you’ll hear the obligatory incantation about our military being “the world’s best.”
All this is, by now, so often repeated — so eagerly accepted — that few of us seem to recall how against the American grain it really is. If anything — and I saw this in studying German military history — it’s far more in keeping with the bellicose traditions and bumptious rhetoric of Imperial Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II than of an American republic that began its march to independence with patriotic Minutemen in revolt against King George.
So consider this a modest proposal from a retired citizen-airman: A small but meaningful act against the creeping militarism of the Bush years would be to collectively repudiate our “world’s best warfighter” rhetoric and re-embrace instead a tradition of reluctant but resolute citizen-soldiers.
Becoming Warfighters
I first noticed the term “warfighter” in 2002. Like many a field-grade staff officer, I spent a lot of time crafting PowerPoint briefings, trying to sell senior officers and the Pentagon on my particular unit’s importance to the President’s new Global War on Terrorism. The more briefings I saw, the more often I came across references to “serving the warfighter.” It was, I suppose, an obvious selling point, once we were at war in Afghanistan and gearing up for “regime-change” in Iraq. And I was probably typical in that I, too, grabbed the term for my briefings. After all, who wants to be left behind when it comes to supporting the troops “at the pointy end of the spear” (to borrow another military trope)?
But I wasn’t comfortable with the term then, and today it tastes bitter in my mouth. Until recent times, the American military was justly proud of being a force of citizen-soldiers. It didn’t matter whether you were talking about those famed Revolutionary War Minutemen, courageous Civil War volunteers, or the “Greatest Generation” conscripts of World War II. After all, Americans had a long tradition of being distrustful of the very idea of a large, permanent army, as well as of giving potentially disruptive authority to generals.
Our tradition of citizen-soldiery was (and could still be) one of the great strengths of this country. Let me give you two examples of such citizen-soldiers, well known within military circles because they wrote especially powerful memoirs. Eugene B. Sledge served in the U.S. Marines during World War II, surviving two unimaginably brutal campaigns on the islands of Peleliu and Okinawa. His memoir With the Old Breed is arguably the best account of ground warfare in the Pacific. After three years of selfless, heroic service to his country, Sledge gladly returned to civilian life, eventually becoming a professor of biology. His conclusion — that “war is brutish, inglorious, and a terrible waste” — is one seconded by many a combat veteran.
Richard (Dick) Winters is better known because his exploits were captured in the HBO series Band of Brothers. He rose from platoon commander to battalion commander, serving in the elite 101st Airborne Division during World War II. A hero beloved by his men, Winters wanted nothing more than to quit the military and return to the civilian world. After the war, he lived a quiet life as a businessman in Pennsylvania, rarely mentioning his service and refusing to use his military rank for personal gratification. In Beyond Band of Brothers, he recounts both his service and his ideas on leadership. It’s a book to put in the hands of any young American who wishes to understand the noble ideas of service and sacrifice.
Sledge and Winters were regular guys who answered their country’s call. What comes across in their memoirs, as well as in the many letters I’ve read from World War II soldiers, was the desire of the average dogface to win the war, return home, hang up the uniform, and never again fire a shot in anger. These men were war-enders, not warfighters. Indeed, they would’ve been sickened by the very idea of being “warfighters.”
The term “warfighter” — a combination, I suppose, of “warrior” and “war fighting” — suggests a person who lives for war, who spoils for a fight. Certainly, the United States has fought its share of ruthless wars. But traditionally our soldiers have thought of themselves as civilians first, soldiers second. Equally as important, the American people thought of their troops that way.
Why are we now, with so little debate, casting aside an ethos that served us well for two centuries for one that straightforwardly embraces war and killing? Possibly because we’ve invented a distinctly American product: sanitized militarism. I bumped into it last week at a most unlikely place.
Visiting Gettysburg
Last week, I finally made it to Gettysburg, site of the great three-day battle between Union and Confederate forces in July 1863 that ended with the defeat of General Robert E. Lee’s army. Walking the battlefield was a sobering experience. I found myself on Little Round Topat 5:00 PM, just about the time of day that Union generals rushed men to reinforce the hill against a determined Confederate assault at the close of the battle’s second day. Earlier, I was at the Angle, just when, almost a century and a half ago, Pickett’s Charge failed to pierce the Union center, sealing Lee’s fate on the third day.
As these events played through my mind, I marveled that I had the battlefield largely to myself. Not that I was alone, mind you. Tour buses circled; cars, trucks, and SUVs whizzed about, but many, perhaps most, Americans who visit Gettysburg get surprisingly little tactile or sensory experience of its difficult topography. Yes, a few kids (and fewer adults) joined me in clambering about the huge, claustrophobically placed boulders of Devil’s Den, and I did spy a couple of guided tour groups on foot. But at the site of a bloodcurdling, distinctly septic nineteenth century battle, most visitors were clearly having a distinctly bloodless, even antiseptic, twenty-first century experience.
That day, I learned a lot about Gettysburg the battle — and maybe a little about us as well. As surely as my fellow tourists were staying in their cars and buses, we, as a people, are distancing ourselves from the realities of war. As we seal ourselves away from war’s horrors, we’re correspondingly finding it easier to speak of “warfighters” and to boast of having the world’s best military.
As we catch a glimpse, from the comfort of our living rooms, of a suicide bombing in Iraq or an American outpost attacked, then abandoned, in Afghanistan, are we not like those tourists in buses at Gettysburg, listening to sanitized recordings telling us what to see and think about the (expurgated) reality in front of us? And who dares challenge the “expert” commentary? Who dares turn off the canned talking heads and stare into the face of war?
But if we are to end our militaristic, yet curiously sanitized, “warfighter” moment, if we are ever to return to our citizen-soldier ethos and heritage, this is just what we must do.
After all, it’s later than you think. Our military now relies not only on a volunteer (if, at times, “stop-lossed”) Army, but increasingly on tens of thousands of hired guns, consultants, interrogators, interpreters, and other paramilitary camp followers. Private, for-profit “security contractors” — companies like Blackwater and Triple Canopy — give a disturbing new meaning to our “warfighter” terminology and the rhetoric that marches in step with it. As even casual students of history will recall, a clear sign of the Roman Empire’s decline was its shift from citizen-soldiers motivated by duty to mercenaries motivated by profit.
Replacing “warfighters” with true citizen-soldiers in the mold of Sledge and Winters would hardly be a solve-all solution at this late date, but it might be a step in the right direction — however unlikely it is to happen. For when we look at our troops, if we don’t see ourselves, then we see aliens or, worse yet, superiors (“warfighters”) in need of “support.” And that’s a clear sign of trouble for the republic.
Want to Be in the “World’s Best Military”? Ask German Veterans
It may come as a shock to some, but the American army wasn’t the best in the field in World War I, or World War II either. And thank heavens for that.
The distinction falls to the Kaiser Wilhelm’s army in 1914, and to Hitler’s Wehrmacht in 1941. Even toward the end of World War II, the American army was still often outmaneuvered and outclassed by its German foe. Because victory has a way of papering over faults and altering memories, few but professional historians today recall the many shortcomings of our military in both world wars.
But that’s precisely the point: The American military made mistakes because it was often ill-trained, rushed into combat too quickly, and handled by officers lacking in experience. Put simply, in both World Wars it lacked the tactical virtuosity of its German counterpart.
But here’s the question to ponder: At what price virtuosity? In World War I and World War II, the Germans were the best soldiers because they had trained and fought the most, because their societies were geared, mentally and in most other ways, for war, because they celebrated and valued feats of arms above all other contributions one could make to society and culture.
Being “the best soldiers” meant that senior German leaders — whether the Kaiser, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, that Teutonic titan of World War I, or Hitler — always expected them to prevail. The mentality was: “We’re number one. How can we possibly lose unless we quit — or those [fill in your civilian quislings of choice] stab us in the back?”
If this mentality sounds increasingly familiar, it’s because it’s the one we ourselves have internalized in these last years. German warfighters and their leaders knew no limitations until it was too late for them to recover from ceaseless combat, imperial overstretch, and economic collapse.
Today, the U.S. military, and by extension American culture, is caught in a similar bind. After all, if we truly believe ours to be “the world’s best military” (and, judging by how often the claim is repeated in the echo chamber of our media, we evidently do), how can we possibly be losing in Iraq or Afghanistan? And, if the “impossible” somehow happens, how can our military be to blame? If our “warfighters” are indeed “the best,” someone else must have betrayed them — appeasing politicians, lily-livered liberals, duplicitous and weak-willed allies like the increasingly recalcitrant Iraqis, you name it.
Today, our military is arguably the world’s best. Certainly, it’s the world’s most powerful in its advanced armaments and its ability to destroy. But what does it say about our leaders that they are so taken with this form of power? And why exactly is it so good to be the “best” at this? Just ask a German military veteran — among the few who survived, that is — in a warrior-state that went berserk in a febrile quest for “full spectrum dominance.”
Fighting to End Wars
Words matter. Let’s start by banishing the word “warfighter,” and, while we’re at it, let’s toss out that “world’s best” boast as well. Boasting about military prowess is more Spartan than Athenian, more Second and Third Reich Germany than republican and democratic America.
Indeed, imagine, for a moment, a world in which the U.S. is no longer “number one” in military might (and, at the same time, no longer fighting endless wars in the Middle East and Central Asia). Would we then be weak and vulnerable? Or would we become stronger precisely because we stopped boasting about our ability as “warfighters” to dominate far from our shores and instead redirected our resources to developing alternative energy, bolstering our education system, reviving American industry, and focusing on other “soft power” alternatives to weapons and warriors? In other words, alternatives we can actually boast about with the pride of accomplishment.
Think about it: Must our military forever remain “second to none” for you to feel safe? Our national traditions suggest otherwise. In fact, if we no longer had the world’s strongest military, perhaps we would be more reluctant to tap its strength — and more hesitant to send our citizen-soldiers into harm’s way. And while we’re at it, perhaps we’d also learn to boast about a new kind of “warfighter” — not one who fights our wars, but one who fights against them.
Postscript (2026): Sadly, the warrior cult is even stronger today, led as it is by enthusiasts like Hegseth and promoted by people who should really know better (but who prefer “to go along to get along” in their bid for promotions and power).
The Trump administration plans to give 40 kilotons of “conventional” bombs to Israel. Put differently, that’s 40,000 bombs, each with a ton of HE or high explosive. Naturally, it’s the American taxpayer who foots the bill as it’s labeled as aid to Israel.
Forty kilotons is a little more than the combined yield of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima (15 kilotons) and Nagasaki (21 kilotons) in 1945.
2000-pound bombs are not precision weapons. They flatten entire city blocks. Israel doesn’t need them for self-defense; it “needs” them to erase Gaza and its people from the map. (Or perhaps to attack Iran with in conjunction with U.S. forces. Or both.)
The other “Made in America” product that Israel orders in bulk is giant bulldozers. They’re in high demand to move the rubble around and entomb the bodies of the dead. A few of these bulldozers are now driverless or robodozers.
Mega-bombs and giant robodozers: all this death and destruction is explained away as “Israel’s right to exist.”
I went on “Judging Freedom” today to discuss the many dark legacies of 9/11. This video is especially worth watching for Judge Napolitano’s summary of the PATRIOT Act and how it degraded our fourth amendment protections under the U.S. Constitution. Unlike him, I have not read all of the PATRIOT Act.
I had many thoughts both before and after my interview with the Judge. Perhaps the most disturbing to me is the sense of how much my country has embraced war as a creative act, as a force for good, as equivalent to freedom. Hence names like “Operation Iraqi Freedom” and “Operation Enduring Freedom” for the Iraqi and Afghan Wars. Barack Obama had his “good” war (Afghanistan) and his “bad” one (Iraq), even as Hillary Clinton chortled and gloated over the death of Gaddafi in Libya when she was Obama’s Secretary of State.
There was a time when Americans saw war as corruption—as the most insidious threat to democracy (James Madison), as brutal, stupid, and often futile (General Dwight D. Eisenhower). Ever since 9/11, if not before, too many Americans (especially those who don’t have to fight) have come to embrace war as positive, even “good.” This is among the most worrisome signs of creeping fascism—the identification of war with freedom, with patriotism, openly adopted and supported by both political parties in America.
Militarized madness, if left uncorrected and unopposed, will destroy freedom and liberty.
The Judge and I also briefly discussed Islamophobia and the death toll in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. The harsh reality of hundreds of thousands killed, and millions displaced, during the War on Terror is rarely mentioned in the mainstream media here, and usually goes unacknowledged in 9/11 memorial ceremonies.
The chief legacy of 9/11 is as obvious as it is tragic: a state of permanent warfare in the United States, both abroad and in the “homeland” (a term not used in normal discourse before the 9/11 attacks), with millions dead and displaced for no defensible reason.
If you’re 25 years old or younger in America, you’ve never known a time when your country wasn’t at war. “Peace” is no longer seen as desirable, let alone possible. War is seen as America’s natural state; a land of warriors are we, imbued with a “warrior ethos” that applauds kicking other countries when their down and beating the snot out of them just because we can.
Meanwhile, in the “homeland,” surveillance grows ever more intrusive by the day as agents of ICE kick down doors and haul people away to detention centers that are being rapidly expanded. Personal privacy is increasingly a thing of the past as the government wraps itself in a shroud of secrecy that makes oversight and accountability well-nigh impossible.
The global war on terror has become a war of terror. War begets more war, with no end in sight.
Re-reading the Atlantic Monthly 150th anniversary issue from November 2007, I came across this gem of a quote from America’s 9/11 mayor, Rudolph Giuliani:
We’ve got to be patient and committed [in Iraq], but we’ve got to multitask … We’ve got to talk about Iran—Iran is more dangerous than Iraq—and we have got to get the job done in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.
That was Giuliani in July of 2007 when he ran as a Republican presidential candidate. In America, that’s how you get treated as a “serious” candidate for the presidency—by urging for war not just with Iraq and Afghanistan but with Pakistan and Iran as well. We can “multitask” our wars! Truly a sign of American greatness.
Well, Giuliani’s dream has come true—we are talking a lot about Iran today.
Back in 2007, Ron Paul had a different take on 9/11 and America’s state of forever war, but he was roundly booed for asking Americans to exercise just a bit of empathy by asking why “they” hate us:
That “crazy” Ron Paul, talking about blowback for America’s wars in the Middle East. He obviously didn’t know about America’s peace-making bombs and freedom-bringing missiles. Didn’t he know as well that “they” hate us for our freedoms?
Wars are protean and dangerous beasts. Even when necessary, which is rare, it is well that we remember the horrifying costs of them.
The Russia-Ukraine War is in its fifth year with no clear end in sight. Suffering on both sides has been extreme. Trump’s war with Iran is in its sixth month with no clear end in sight. Hopes of a quick and low-cost regime-change war, encouraged by Israeli propaganda directed at Trump, have proven illusory. With Trump refusing to admit defeat, further escalation and dramatic economic consequences seem likely.
Certainly, Ukraine could not have sustained its military efforts without massive support from the U.S., NATO, and the EU. From the Russian perspective, they likely see this as a Ukraine/US/NATO/EU effort to weaken Russia. I blame Russia for invading. I blame the USA for exploiting that invasion for its own purposes (the Nordstream pipelines didn’t blow themselves up). I continue to worry that this war could widen leading to the use of nuclear weapons. I favor diplomatic efforts to end the war on terms Ukraine and Russia can accept.
The costs of war (Western Front, 1917)
I lament the costs of war, all the dead and wounded on both sides, and the continued destruction of Ukraine’s environment. I lament the damage war does to liberty, freedom, and truth. War always exacts a toll.
Whether the toll of the war is “worth it” for Ukraine or Russia to pay is not my decision. Only the people of Ukraine and Russia can say. Many have voted with their feet, leaving their respective countries, or the affluent pay bribes to avoid military service. This is hardly surprising. Affluent Americans paid bribes in the U.S. Civil War to avoid military service, or they hired substitutes to serve in their place.
Too often, wars are fought by the poor for the rich. Inequities in demands are obscured when wars are glorified as national wars of liberation.
Though not a pacifist, I’m strongly antiwar and very skeptical of justifications for the same, especially by “our” government. Just think of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and so on. I’m not an isolationist (an impossibility given how the world is interlinked, along with America’s 750-800 foreign military bases). But we’ve got to downsize the empire and make major cuts to Pentagon spending.
A major problem with war is that it fosters authoritarianism and abridgments of liberty. Even wars allegedly for liberation can be contrary to liberty. War also fosters the most Orwellian language. I’ve run across “justifiable repression” to explain away the authoritarianism of the Zelensky government in Ukraine. Forced conscription in Ukraine is explained away as “a regrettable but justifiable limitation of personal freedom.”
War is intoxicating and a powerful disturber of clear thinking. It corrodes intellectual honesty — while killing lots of people and destroying the earth.
As a retired military officer, I come back to Ike and his charge that we must be alert and knowledgeable citizens committed to democracy and individual liberties. Yet we seem immersed in a system designed to keep us somnolent and ignorant, or, put more plainly, lazy and dumb.
Ike said he hated war as only a soldier could hate it with all its waste and brutality. We would all do well to hate war and find ways to settle differences through diplomacy. The problem is that too many powerful entities actually love war because it makes them money and because it supports authoritarian agendas and because there are always megalomaniacs willing to sacrifice others for power.
