Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– More than three years have passed since US troops left Afghanistan in August 2021, putting an end to an occupation that lasted two decades. With the Taliban back in power, the rights of women and girls have suffered a severe setback. Under the Taliban’s rule, they are no longer allowed to attend public secondary schools and universities. Last September, the fundamentalist group issued a religious code banning women from raising their voices or reciting the Quran in public.

Political and media freedoms have also been severely restricted, and poverty and unemployment have increased amid a massive withdrawal of foreign aid. The war’s end has brought public security and access to rural areas has improved, but these benefits are often denied to the female half of society. Women are forbidden to travel long distances without a male chaperone.

Amin Saikal, an emeritus professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies at the Australian National University (ANU), is the author of “How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan”. The US, explains Saikal, had traditionally paid limited attention to Afghanistan. This changed with the Soviet invasion of the country in 1979, after which the Carter administration approached Afghanistan as having ‘strategic importance’. Under Carter’s successor, Reagan, the US lavished Pakistan and the Mujahideen fighting the Soviets with military and financial assistance.

The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 gave way to a period of profound internal strife that culminated with the Taliban’s takeover of the country in 1996. Saikal defines the Clinton administration’s approach to the Taliban as “full of ambiguity.”[1] On the one hand, it maintained informal contact with the group. On the other hand, it feared the Taliban’s alliance with Al-Qaeda, founded by former mujahidin Osama bin Laden. The 9/11 terrorist attacks, organized by bin Laden’s terrorist organization, would put an end to this era of ambiguity.

According to Saikal, the Bush administration’s decision to invade Afghanistan following 9/11 assumed that the Taliban and al-Qaeda could be defeated, and Afghanistan changed, with limited combat and economic investment. The ‘light footprint’ approach, however, soon morphed into a ‘heavy footprint’ one. Saikal lists several reasons for this. First, the US underestimated the complexity of intervening in Afghanistan. Second, the failure to capture or kill bin Laden at the beginning of the war led to an obsession with finding him. Third, the Bush administration greatly expanded its priorities in Afghanistan, where it now wanted to engage in ‘democracy promotion’ and a ‘war on terror.’

Reflecting on two decades of war in Afghanistan, former Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt noted that after the Taliban were overthrown, there would have been a theoretical possibility for a political settlement including the fundamentalist group. But the US would not have accepted this, nor the Northern Alliance armed groups the US had supported to depose the Taliban, remarks Bildt.

It is highly doubtful that the US ever had a real chance at achieving its declared objectives in Afghanistan. Saikal, however, believes this was possible. According to him, a key problem was that “Afghanistan’s conditions required from the outset a much larger appropriate military and reconstruction involvement than what unfolded.”[2] The invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to an opposite trend, as the US transferred resources to the new war theater.

Amin Saikal, How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan< (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024). Click Here to Buy.

Saikal considers that the constitutional structure adopted by Afghanistan in 2004 had profound flaws because it created a system of government that was too centralized. The strong presidency established in the constitution led to the domination of the executive over the legislative and judicial powers. It was also responsible for a winner-takes-all mentality that left many strongmen with little formal power but the capacity to spoil the country’s politics and security. Saikal spares no criticism for the two men who presided over Afghanistan during this period, Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani.

About Karzai, Saikal writes that he “invoked the constitution and stressed the importance of the rule of law only when they suited his political and power needs.”[3] The emeritus professor describes Karzai’s government as highly corrupt, dysfunctional, and lacking a clear ideological project. Initially lauded in Western capitals, Afghanistan’s Western partners were only too happy to see Karzai leave his position in 2014. His successor, Ashraf Ghani, was elected after a voting process that saw even more fraud than the previous presidential election in 2009.

Secretary of State John Kerry engaged in a mediation effort between Ghani, the official winner of the 2014 election, and his opponent Abdullah Abdullah, who also claimed to have won the vote. The impasse was resolved in favor of Ghani, who had better connections in Western countries after having spent more than a decade of his life in the US. Ghani, explains Saikal, sought to present himself as a traditional Muslim and Afghan but “ultimately could not be the man of the people.”[4]

The new president also generated resentment among other ethnic groups when he surrounded himself with fellow Pashtuns. Ghani presided over a continuous loss of territories to the Taliban. Although he had promised never to leave the country, he abandoned Kabul as the Taliban were completing its conquest of Afghanistan in August 2021.  

In his balance of twenty years of US presence in Afghanistan, Saikal notes that the country’s economy remained dependent on foreign aid, opium cultivation, and the black-market sector. Infrastructural projects and investments in the health and education sectors significantly improved the overall situation in the country. Still, the improvements bore no proportion with the money spent — $36 billion was allocated to governance and development, with smaller amounts for humanitarian aid, in a figure that does not include contributions by US allies.

US funds were misappropriated by both Americans and Afghans, while mismanagement, wastage, and corruption resulted in Afghanistan seeing “only artificial, not structural, economic development.”[5] The area where improvements were more significant, especially in comparison to the periods that preceded and followed the US intervention, was women’s rights. Even so, the gains were too often restricted to urban areas.

The 2020 Doha Agreement between the US and the Taliban was the prelude to the US exit from Afghanistan. The negotiations, handled on behalf of the Trump administration by Zalmay Khalilzad (who had played a major role in Bush’s Afghanistan policy), were “disastrous”, in Saikal’s words.[6] The emeritus professor argues that Khalilzad, under Trump’s imperative, was so concerned about reaching a quick agreement that he made too many concessions considering that the Taliban did not have control over many areas of Afghanistan at that time.

Under the terms of the Doha Agreement, the US promised to withdraw from Afghanistan in fourteen months whereas the Taliban committed themselves not to attack US and allied troops. The Taliban also agreed not to allow terrorist groups to operate from Afghanistan after the US withdrawal. That they were not ready to keep this promise became evident when a US drone strike killed al-Qaida’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in central Kabul one year after US troops had left Afghanistan.

“How to Lose a War” is the result of Saikal’s decades-long study of Afghanistan’s history and politics. He had access to some of the most prominent politicians and military men, both Afghan and foreign, who shaped Afghanistan during the last two decades. Saikal combines these insider sources with a clear analytical mind in a text that will prove a fruitful read not only for experts but also for those who have been following international politics less closely.

It would be a positive development if the book contributed to renewing the current conversation on Afghanistan, which has moved to the background since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s war on Gaza. One of the current discussions concerning Afghanistan is how foreign governments, NGOs, and multilateral institutions should engage with the Taliban-led country. Saikal pays little attention to the topic in his book, but this is a debate that is likely to stay with us for a long time since there is no realistic chance of the Taliban losing power in the short term.

In his book “The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left”, Hassan Abbas argues that it is vital “to acknowledge the difference between engagement and endorsement”.[7] Abbas sees engagement as a way to better understand the interests and actions of the other side, in this case, the Taliban. Endorsement, on the contrary, would mean supporting the Taliban’s worldview. Whereas endorsement arises from affinity, engagement is born out of pragmatism. Abbas is convinced that engagement with the Taliban is possible and much-needed, even if the gains to be made are limited.

Graeme Smith, the Afghanistan Senior Analyst for the International Crisis Group, makes a similar argument. He notes that, when engaging the Taliban diplomatically, the rights of women and girls cannot be dropped from the conversation. At the same time, however, the international sanctions regime imposed on Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover has counter-productive results as they “do not have much effect on the Taliban, but they do drive up rates of malnutrition among children and disease among vulnerable families, especially female-headed households that often struggle in a patriarchal society.”

Smith reports that some European countries that publicly chastise the Taliban have sent discreet delegations to Afghanistan to confer about security issues. Calling the Taliban out for their transgressions while seeking to ease the suffering of the Afghan population and limiting the danger of international terrorism emerging from Afghanistan is a very complicated endeavor. It does not need to be hypocritical, though.

 Notes

[1] Amin Saikal, “How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan” (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024), p. 61.

[2] Ibid., p. 201.

[3] Ibid., p. 107.

[4] Ibid., p. 129.

[5] Ibid, p. 169.

[6] Ibid., p. 214.

[7] Hassan Abbas, “The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left” (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023), p. 210.

As a start, history offers some inspiration. On issues of war and peace, the trajectory of the Reagan administration suggests how surprising hope can prove to be. The man who joked that “we begin bombing [Russia] in five minutes,” and hired a Pentagon official who told journalist Robert Scheer that America would survive a nuclear war if it had “enough shovels” to build makeshift shelters, ended up claiming that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” He even came tantalizingly close to an agreement with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to abolish nuclear weapons altogether.

To his credit, Reagan developed a visceral opposition to such weaponry, while his wife, Nancy, urged him to reduce nuclear weapons as a way to burnish his legacy. A Washington Post account of her role noted that “[s]he made no secret of her dream that a man once branded as a cowboy and a jingoist might even win the Nobel Peace Prize.” Such personal factors did come into play, but the primary driver of Reagan’s change of heart was the same thing that undergirds so many significant changes in public policy — dedicated organizing and public pressure.

Reagan’s presidency coincided with the rise of the largest, most mainstream anti-nuclear movement in American history, the nuclear freeze campaign.

Along the way, in June 1982, one million people rallied for disarmament in New York’s Central Park. And that movement had an impact. As Reagan National Security Advisor Robert MacFarlane pointed out at the time, “We took it [the freeze campaign] as a serious movement that could undermine congressional support for the [nuclear] modernization program, and potentially… a serious partisan political threat that could affect the election in `84.”

Reagan’s response was twofold. He proposed a technical solution, pledging to build an impenetrable shield against incoming missiles called the Strategic Defense Initiative (more popularly known as the Star Wars program). That impenetrable shield never came to be, but the quest to develop it deposited tens of billions of dollars in the coffers of major weapons contractors like Lockheed and Raytheon.

The second prong of Reagan’s response was a series of nuclear arms control proposals, welcomed by reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, including a discussion of the possibility of eliminating the two sides’ nuclear arsenals altogether. The idea of abolishing nuclear weapons didn’t come to fruition, but the Reagan administration and its successor, that of George H.W. Bush, did at least end up implementing substantial cuts to the American nuclear arsenal.

So, in a few short years, Reagan, the nuclear hawk, was transformed into Reagan, the arms-control-supporter, largely due to concerted public pressure. All of which goes to show that organizing does matter and that, given enough political will and public engagement, dark times can be turned around.

Trump at Peace (and War)

Donald Trump is nothing if not a top-flight marketeer — a walking, talking brand. And his brand is as a tough guy and a deal maker, even if the only time he’s truly lived up to that image was as an imaginary businessman on television.

But because Trump, lacking a fixed ideology — unless you count narcissism — is largely transactional, his positions on war and peace remain remarkably unpredictable. His first run for office was marked by his relentless criticism of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a rhetorical weapon he deployed with great skill against both Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. That he failed to oppose the war when it mattered — during the conflict — didn’t change the fact that many of his supporters thought of him as the anti-interventionist candidate.

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To his credit, Trump didn’t add any major boots-on-the-ground conflicts to the conflicts he inherited. But he did serious damage as an arms dealer, staunchly supporting Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen, even after that regime murdered U.S.-resident and Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In a statement after the murder, Trump bluntly said that he didn’t want to cut off arms to the Saudi regime because it would take business away from “Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and many other great U.S. defense contractors.”

Trump also did great damage to the architecture of international arms control by withdrawing from a treaty with Russia on intermediate-range nuclear forces and the Iran nuclear deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. If those agreements were still in place, the risks posed by the current conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East would be lower, and they might have served as building blocks in efforts to step back from such conflicts and return to a world of greater cooperation.

But there is another side to Trump, too. There’s the figure who periodically trashes the big weapons makers and their allies as greedy predators trying to line their own pockets at taxpayer expense. For example, in a September speech in Wisconsin, after a long rant about how he was being unfairly treated by the legal system, Trump announced that “I will expel warmongers. We have these people, they want to go to war all the time. You know why? Missiles are $2 million apiece. That’s why. They love to drop missiles all over the place.” And then he added, referring to his previous presidency, “I had no wars.” If past practice is any indication, Trump will not follow through on such a pledge. But the fact that he felt compelled to say it is at least instructive. There is clearly a portion of Trump’s base that’s tired of endless wars and skeptical of the machinations of the nation’s major defense contractors.

Trump has also said that he will end the war in Ukraine on day one. If so, it may be the peace of the graveyard, in the sense that he’ll cut off all U.S. support for Ukraine and let Russia roll over them. But his support for peace in Ukraine, if one can call it that, is not replicated in his other strategic views, which include a confrontational stance towards China, a pledge to further militarize the U.S.-Mexican border, and a call for Benjamin Netanyahu to “finish the job” in Gaza.

The last thing to consider in assessing what Trump’s military policies might look like is his administration’s close association with the most unhinged representatives of Silicon Valley’s military tech surge. For instance, Peter Thiel, founder of the emerging military tech firm Palantir, gave J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice president, a job at one of his companies and later donated large sums to his successful run for the Senate from Ohio. The new-age militarists of Silicon Valley loudly applauded the choice of Vance, whom they see as their man in the White House.

All of this adds up to what might be thought of as the Trump conundrum when it comes to war and peace and, to deal with it, a peace movement is truly needed.

Peace Resistance

For any peace movement, figuring out how to approach Trump will be like shadow boxing — trying to imagine what position he’s likely to take next.

The biggest problem in working for peace under a Trump presidency may involve whether groups are even allowed to organize without facing systematic government repression. After all, in the past, Trump has labeled his opponents with the Hitlerian-style insult “vermin” and threatened to jail any number of those he’s designated as his enemies.

Of course, the first job of any future peace movement (which would have applied as well had the Democrats taken the White House) will simply be to grow into a viable political force in such a difficult political climate.

The best way forward would undoubtedly be to knit together a coalition of organizations already opposing some aspect of American militarism — from the Gaza ceasefire movement and antinuclear groups to unions seeking to reduce the roles their members play in arms production, progressive veterans, big-tent organizations like the Poor People’s Campaign, groups opposed to the militarization of the Mexican border, organizations against the further militarization of the police, and climate activists concerned with the Pentagon’s striking role in pouring greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere. A coordinated effort by such movements could generate real political clout, even if it didn’t involve forming a new mega-organization. Rather, it could be a flexible, resilient network capable of focusing its power on issues of mutual concern at key moments. Such a network would, however, require a deeper kind of relationship-building among individuals and organizations than currently exists, based on truly listening to one another’s perspectives and respecting differences on what end state we’re ultimately aiming for.

Even as peace and justice organizations paint a picture of what a better world might look like, they may be able to win some short-term reforms, including some that could even garner bipartisan mainstream support. One thing that the American roles in the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza and plans to arm up for a potential conflict with China have demonstrated is that the American system for developing and purchasing weapons is, at the very least, broken. The weapons are far too costly, take too long to produce, are too complex to maintain, and are often so loaded with unnecessary bells and whistles that they never work as advertised.

A revival of something along the lines of the bipartisan military reform caucus of the 1980s, a group that included powerful Republicans like former Georgia representative Newt Gingrich, is in order. The goal would be to produce cheaper, simpler weapons that can be turned out quickly and maintained effectively. Add to that the kinds of measures for curbing price gouging, holding contractors responsible for cost overruns, and preventing arms makers from bidding up their own stock prices (as advocated relentlessly by Senator Elizabeth Warren), and a left-right coalition might be conceivable even in today’s bitterly divided Congress and the Trump era.

After all, the most hawkish of hawks shouldn’t be in favor of wasting increasingly scarce tax dollars on weapons of little value to troops in the field. And even the Pentagon has tired of the practice of letting the military services submit “wish lists” to Congress for items that didn’t make it into the department’s official budget submission. Such measures, of course, would hardly end war in our time, but they could start a necessary process of reducing the increasingly unchecked power of the Lockheed Martins and Raytheons of our world.

There are also issues that impact all progressive movements like voter suppression, money in politics, political corruption, crackdowns on free speech and the right of political assembly, and so much more that will have to be addressed for groups to work on virtually any issue of importance. So, an all-hands-on-deck approach to the coming world of Donald Trump and crew is distinctly in order.

An invigorated network for peace, justice, and human rights writ large will also need a new approach to leadership. Old-guard, largely white leaders (like me) need to make room for and elevate voices that have either been vilified or ignored in mainstream discourse all these years. Groups fighting on the front lines against oppression have already faced and survived the kinds of crackdowns that some of us fear but have yet to experience ourselves. Their knowledge will be crucial going forward. In addition, in keeping with the old adage that one should work locally but think globally, it will be important to honor and support local organizing. Groups like the Poor People’s Campaign and the progressive feminist outfit Madre have been working along such lines and can offer crucial lessons in how to link strategies of basic survival with demands for fundamental change.

Last, but not least, while such organizing activities will undoubtedly involve real risks, there must be joy in the struggle, too. I’m reminded of civil rights activists singing freedom songs in jail. My favorite of that era isn’t “We Shall Overcome” — although overcome we must — but “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round,” which includes the lyric “gonna keep on walkin’, keep on talkin’, gonna build a brand-new world.” That may seem like a distant dream in the wake of the recent elections, but it’s all the more necessary because of that.

Victory is by no means assured, but what alternative do we have other than to continue to fight for a better, more just world? To do so will call for a broad-based, courageous, creative, and committed movement of the kind that has achieved other great transformations in American history, from securing the end of slavery to a woman’s right to vote to beginning the process of giving LGBTQ people full citizenship rights.

Time is short, when it comes to the state of this planet and war, but success is still possible if we act with what Martin Luther King, Jr., once called “the fierce urgency of now.”

Copyright 2024 William D. Hartung

Via Tomdispatch.com

Of course, financial ties between the Pentagon and American universities are nothing new. As Stuart Leslie has pointed out in his seminal book on the topic, The Cold War and American Science, “In the decade following World War II, the Department of Defense (DOD) became the biggest patron of American science.” Admittedly, as civilian institutions like the National Institutes of Health grew larger, the Pentagon’s share of federal research and development did decline, but it still remained a source of billions of dollars in funding for university research.

And now, Pentagon-funded research is once again on the rise, driven by the DOD’s recent focus on developing new technologies like weapons driven by artificial intelligence (AI). Combine that with an intensifying drive to recruit engineering graduates and the forging of partnerships between professors and weapons firms and you have a situation in which many talented technical types could spend their entire careers serving the needs of the warfare state. The only way to head off such a Brave New World would be greater public pushback against the military conquest (so to speak) of America’s research and security agendas, in part through resistance by scientists and engineers whose skills are so essential to building the next generation of high-tech weaponry.

The Pentagon Goes to School

Yes, the Pentagon’s funding of universities is indeed rising once again and it goes well beyond the usual suspects like MIT or Johns Hopkins University. In 2022, the most recent year for which full data is available, 14 universities received at least — and brace yourself for this — $100 million in Pentagon funding, from Johns Hopkins’s astonishing $1.4 billion (no, that is not a typo!) to Colorado State’s impressive $100 million. And here’s a surprise: two of the universities with the most extensive connections to our weaponry of the future are in Texas: the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) and Texas A&M.

In 2020, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy appeared onstage at a UT-Austin ceremony to commemorate the creation of a robotics lab there, part of a new partnership between the Army Futures Command and the school. “This is ground zero for us in our research for the weapons systems we’re going to develop for decades to come,” said McCarthy.

Not to be outdone, Texas A&M is quietly becoming the Pentagon’s base for research on hypersonics — weapons expected to travel five times the speed of sound. Equipped with a kilometer-long tunnel for testing hypersonic missiles, that school’s University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics is explicitly dedicated to outpacing America’s global rivals in the development of that next generation military technology. Texas A&M is also part of the team that runs the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the (in)famous New Mexico facility where the first nuclear weapons were developed and tested as part of the Manhattan Project under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer.

Other major players include Carnegie Mellon University, a center for Army research on the applications of AI, and Stanford University, which serves as a feeder to California’s Silicon Valley firms of all types. That school also runs the Technology Transfer for Defense (TT4D) Program aimed at transitioning academic technologies from the lab to the marketplace and exploring the potential military applications of emerging technology products.

In addition, the Pentagon is working aggressively to bring new universities into the fold. In January 2023, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced the creation of a defense-funded research center at Howard University, the first of its kind at a historically black college.

Given the campus Gaza demonstrations of last spring, perhaps you also won’t be surprised to learn that the recent surge in Pentagon spending faces increasing criticism from students and faculty alike. Targets of protest include the Lavender program, which has used AI to multiply the number of targets the Israeli armed forces can hit in a given time frame. But beyond focusing on companies enabling Israel’s war effort, current activists are also looking at the broader role of their universities in the all-American war system.

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For example, at Indiana University research on ties to companies fueling the killings in Gaza grew into a study of the larger role of universities in supporting the military system as a whole. Student activists found that the most important connection involved that university’s ties to the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division, whose mission is “to provide acquisition, engineering… and technical support for sensors, electronics, electronic warfare, and special warfare weapons.” In response, student activists have launched a “Keep Crane Off Campus” campaign.

A Science of Death or for Life?

Graduating science and engineering students increasingly face a moral dilemma about whether they want to put their skills to work developing instruments of death. Journalist Indigo Olivier captured that conflict in a series of interviews with graduating engineering students. She quotes one at the University of West Florida who strongly opposes doing weapons work this way: “When it comes to engineering, we do have a responsibility… Every tool can be a weapon… I don’t really feel like I need to be putting my gifts to make more bombs.” By contrast, Cameron Davis, a 2021 computer engineering graduate from Georgia Tech, told Olivier about the dilemma faced by so many graduating engineers: “A lot of people that I talk to aren’t 100% comfortable working on defense contracts, working on things that are basically going to kill people.” But he went on to say that the high pay at weapons firms “drives a lot of your moral disagreements with defense away.”

The choice faced by today’s science and engineering graduates is nothing new. The use of science for military ends has a long history in the United States. But there have also been numerous examples of scientists who resisted dangerous or seemingly unworkable military schemes. When President Ronald Reagan announced his “Star Wars” missile defense plan in 1986, for instance, he promised, all too improbably, to develop an impenetrable shield that would protect the United States from any and all incoming nuclear-armed missiles. In response, physicists David Wright and Lisbeth Gronlund circulated a pledge to refuse to work on that program. It would, in the end, be signed by more than 7,000 scientists. And that document actually helped puncture the mystique of the Star Wars plan, a reminder that protest against the militarization of education isn’t always in vain.

Scientists have also played a leading role in pressing for nuclear arms control and disarmament, founding organizations like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (1945), the Federation of American Scientists (1945), the global Pugwash movement (1957), the Council for a Livable World (1962), and the Union of Concerned Scientists (1969). To this day, all of them continue to work to curb the threat of a nuclear war that could destroy this planet as a livable place for humanity.

A central figure in this movement was Joseph Rotblat, the only scientist to resign from the Manhattan Project over moral qualms about the potential impact of the atomic bomb. In 1957, he helped organize the founding meeting of the Pugwash Conference, an international organization devoted to the control and ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons. In some respects Pugwash was a forerunner of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which successfully pressed for the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in January 2021.

Enabling Endless War and Widespread Torture

The social sciences also have a long, conflicted history of ties to the Pentagon and the military services. Two prominent examples from earlier in this century were the Pentagon’s Human Terrain Program (HTS) and the role of psychologists in crafting torture programs associated with the Global War on Terror, launched after the 9/11 attacks with the invasion of Afghanistan.

The HTS was initially intended to reduce the “cultural knowledge gap” suffered by U.S. troops involved in counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq early in this century. The theory was that military personnel with a better sense of local norms and practices would be more effective in winning “hearts and minds” and so defeating determined enemies on their home turf. The plan included the deployment of psychologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists in Human Terrain Teams alongside American troops in the field.

Launched in 2007, the program sparked intense protests in the academic community, with a particularly acrimonious debate within the American Anthropological Association. Ed Liebow, the executive director of the association, argued that its debate “convinced a very large majority of our members that it was just not a responsible way for professional anthropologists to conduct themselves.” After a distinctly grim history that included “reports of racism, sexual harassment, and payroll padding,” as well as a belief by many commanders that Human Terrain Teams were simply ineffective, the Army quietly abandoned the program in 2014.

An even more controversial use of social scientists in the service of the war machine was the role of psychologists as advisors to the CIA’s torture programs at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba, and other of that agency’s “black sites.” James E. Mitchell, a psychologist under contract to U.S. intelligence, helped develop the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the U.S during its post-9/11 “war on terror,” even sitting in on a session in which a prisoner was waterboarded. That interrogation program, developed by Mitchell with psychologist John Bruce Jessom, included resorting to “violence, sleep deprivation, and humiliation.”

The role of psychologists in crafting the CIA’s torture program drew harsh criticism within the profession. A 2015 report by independent critics revealed that the leaders of the American Psychological Association had “secretly collaborated with the administration of President George W. Bush to bolster a legal and ethical justification for the torture of prisoners swept up in the post-Sept. 11 war on terror.” Over time, it became ever clearer that the torture program was not only immoral but remarkably ineffective, since the victims of such torture often told interrogators what they wanted to hear, whether or not their admissions squared with reality.

That was then, of course. But today, resistance to the militarization of science has extended to the growing use of artificial intelligence and other emerging military technologies. For example, in 2018, there was a huge protest movement at Google when employees learned that the company was working on Project Maven, a communications network designed to enable more accurate drone strikes. More than 4,000 Google scientists and engineers signed a letter to company leadership calling for them to steer clear of military work, dozens resigned over the issue, and the protests had a distinct effect on the company. That year, Google announced that it would not renew its Project Maven contract, and pledged that it “will not design or deploy AI” for weapons.

Unfortunately, the lure of military funding was simply too strong. Just a few years after those Project Maven protests, Google again began doing work for the Pentagon, as noted in a 2021 New York Times report by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Kate Conger. Their article pointed to Google’s “aggressive pursuit” of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability project, which will attempt to “modernize the Pentagon’s cloud technology and support the use of artificial intelligence to gain an advantage on the battlefield.” (Cloud technology is the term for the delivery of computing services over the internet.)

Meanwhile, a cohort of Google workers has continued to resist such military projects. An October 2021 letter in the British Guardian from “Google and Amazon workers of conscience” called on the companies to “pull out of Project Nimbus [a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli military and government] and cut all ties with the Israeli military.” As they wrote then, “This contract was signed the same week that the Israeli military attacked Palestinians in the Gaza Strip — killing nearly 250 people, including more than 60 children. The technology our companies have contracted to build will make the systematic discrimination and displacement carried out by the Israeli military and government even crueler and deadlier for Palestinians.”

Of course, their demand seems even more relevant today in the context of the war on Gaza that had then not officially begun.

The Future of American Science

Obviously, many scientists do deeply useful research on everything from preventing disease to creating green-energy options that has nothing to do with the military. But the current increases in weapons research could set back such efforts by soaking up an ever larger share of available funds, while also drawing ever more top talent into the military sphere.

The stakes are particularly high now, given the ongoing rush to develop AI-driven weaponry and other emerging technologies that pose the risk of everything from unintended slaughter due to system malfunctions to making war more likely, given the (at least theoretical) ability to limit casualties for the attacking side. In short, turning back the flood of funding for military research and weaponry from the Pentagon and key venture capital firms will be a difficult undertaking. After all, AI is already performing a wide range of military and civilian tasks. Banning it altogether may no longer be a realistic goal, but putting guardrails around its military use might still be.

Such efforts are, in fact, already underway. The International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) has called for an international dialogue on “the pressing dangers that these systems pose to peace and international security and to civilians.” ICRAC elaborates on precisely what these risks are: “Autonomous systems have the potential to accelerate the pace and tempo of warfare, to undermine existing arms controls and regulations, to exacerbate the dangers of asymmetric warfare, and to destabilize regional and global security, [as well as to] further the indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force and obscure the moral and legal responsibility for war crimes.”

The Future of Life Institute has underscored the severity of the risk, noting that “more than half of AI experts believe there is a one in ten chance this technology will cause our extinction.”

Instead of listening almost exclusively to happy talk about the military value of AI by individuals and organizations that stand to profit from its adoption, isn’t it time to begin paying attention to the skeptics, while holding back on the deployment of emerging military technologies until there is a national conversation about what they can and can’t accomplish, with scientists playing a central role in bringing the debate back to earth?

Copyright 2024 William D. Hartung

Via Tomdispatch.com

Using the vernacular of the day, perhaps it’s particularly on target to say that our whole country suffers from Militarism Abuse Disorder or (all too appropriately) MAD.

I must confess that I don’t like to admit to my military dependency. Who does? In my case, it’s a tough one for a few reasons, the biggest being that I’m an avowed pacifist who believes that war is a crime against humanity, a failure of the imagination, and never (no, not ever) necessary. Along with the rest of my family of five, I live below the taxable income level. That way, we don’t pay into a system that funds war preparations and war-making. We have to be a little creative to make our money stretch further and we don’t eat out or go to the movies every week. But we don’t ever feel deprived as a result. In essence, I’ve traded career success and workplace achievement for a slightly clearer conscience and time — time to work to end militarism and break our collective addiction!

The Peter G. Peterson Foundation estimates that, in 2023, the United States of America spent $142 billion buying weapons systems and another $122 billion on the research and development of future weaponry and other militarized equipment. And keep in mind that those big numbers represent only a small fraction of any Pentagon budget, the latest of which the Pentagon’s proposing to be $849.8 billion for 2025 — and that’s just one year (and not all of what passes for “national defense” spending either). A recent analysis by the Costs of War Project at Brown University calculated that, since September 11, 2001, the United States has used an estimated $8 trillion-plus just for its post-9/11 wars. Talk about addiction! It makes me pretty MAD, if I’m being honest with you!

It would be nice to ignore such monstrous numbers and the even bigger implications they suggest, to unfocus my eyes slightly as I regularly drive by the fenced facilities, manicured office parks, and noisy, bustling shipyards that make up the mega-billion-dollar-a-year industry right in my own neighborhood that’s preparing for… well, yes… the end of the world. Instead, I’m trying to be clear-eyed and aware. I’m checking my personal life all the time for compromise or conciliation with militarism: Am I being brainwashed when I find myself cheering for the fighters in that blockbuster movie we splurged on? Am I doing enough to push for a ceasefire in Gaza? Am I showing up with young people in my community who are backing higher salaries for teachers and no more police in schools? And of course, I keep asking myself: How are my daily consumer decisions lining up with my lofty politics?

I don’t always like the answers that come up in response to such questions, but I keep asking them, keep trying, keep pushing. Those who suffer from Militarism Abuse Disorder can’t even ask the questions, because they’re distracted by the promises of good jobs, nice apartments, and cheap consumer goods that the military-industrial complex is always claiming are right around the corner.

But here in my community, they never deliver!

New London: A Profile of Militarism Abuse Disorder

New London is a town of fewer than 28,000 people. The median income here is a little over $46,000 — $32,000 less than the state average. We are a very old community. Long part of the fishing and hunting grounds of the Eastern Pequots, Nehantics, Mashantucket Pequot, and Mohegan, the city was founded in the 1600s and incorporated in the late 1700s. You see evidence of our age in the shape of our streets, curbed and meandering, long ago carved out of fields by cows and wagons, and in our architecture — aging industrial buildings, warehouses, and ice houses in the neighborhoods where their workers once lived — now derelict and empty or repurposed as auto repair stores or barber shops.

Sometimes I watch, almost mesmerized by the ferocious energy of all those cars careening up Howard Street on their way to work at General Dynamics. Car after car headed for work at the very break of day. Every workday at about 3 p.m., they reverse course, a river of steel and plastic rushing and then idling in traffic, trying to get out of town as fast as possible.

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General Dynamics Electric Boat repairs, services, and manufactures submarines armed with both conventional and nuclear weapons. And it certainly tells you something about our world that the company is in the midst of a major hiring jag, looking to fill thousands of positions in New London, Groton, and coastal Rhode Island to build the Columbia-class submarine, the next generation of nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed subs. Those behemoths of human ingenuity and engineering will cost taxpayers a whopping $132 billion, with each of the 12 new boats clocking in at about $15 billion — and mind you, that’s before anything even goes wrong or the schedule to produce them predictably stretches out and out. The company has already solved one big problem: how to wring maximum profits out of this next generation of planet-obliteration-capable subs. And that’s a problem that isn’t even particularly hard to sort out, because some of those contracts are “cost plus,” meaning the company says what the project costs and then adds a percentage on top of that as profit.

Such a cost-plus business bothers me a lot. I could almost be converted into a hard-nosed militarist if our weapons production industry was a nonprofit set of organizations, run with the kind of shoestring ingenuity that dozens of outfits in New London employ to feed the hungry, house the homeless, and care for the victims of domestic violence.

I break from my traffic-watching fugue on Howard Street to reflect on all that furious effort, all those advanced degrees, all that almost impossible intelligence being poured into making an even better, bigger, faster, sleeker, stealthier weapons-delivery system, capable of carrying and firing conventional and nuclear warheads. Why? We have so many already. And as the only nation that has ever used nuclear weapons in war (in 1945) and has tested, perfected, and helped proliferate the technology of ultimate destruction for the last eight decades, the United States should be leading the charge to denuclearize, disarm, and abolish such weaponry. That, after all, is what’s called for in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

If we are ever going to break our MAD addiction, one place to start is here on Howard Street with people who make their living working on one tiny component of this incredibly complex system. Economic conversion, moving resources and skills and jobs from the military-industrial complex to civilian sectors, is a big project. And it could indeed begin right here on Howard Street.

You Get What You Pay For

Our small town is also home to the Coast Guard Academy and two private colleges. Add the acreage of those three non-taxpaying institutions to the nearly 30 churches, synagogues, and other houses of worship that enjoy tax-free status here; throw in the dozens of nonprofits that do all the good work and you end up with an awfully small tax base. As a result, the municipal budget leans heavily on commercial taxpayers like General Dynamics Electric Boat, the military-industrial behemoth that moved into 24 acres of prime waterfront real estate in 2009 after it was vacated by the tax scofflaw Pfizer.

General Dynamics, like other military manufacturers, essentially only has one customer to please, the United States government. That makes the cost-plus contracting scheme even more egregious, guaranteeing that, no matter what goes wrong, its profits are always assured. Such a bonkers, counter-capitalist scenario passes all the costs on to American taxpayers and allows the privately held corporation to pocket all the profits, while handing out fat dividends to its shareholders. According to Sahm Capitol, “Over the past three years, General Dynamics’ Earnings Per Share grew by 3.7% and over the past three years, the total shareholder return was 62%.”

For 2024, General Dynamics Electric Boat is paying taxes on property valued at $90.8 million — almost twice as much as that of the next highest taxpayer in our town. But it is also a bone of contention. The company, which paid CEO Phebe Novakovic $22.5 million in salary and stock awards in 2023, has no trouble taking the City of New London to court when they feel like their property is being overvalued or overtaxed. They win, too, so their property valuations yo-yo year to year when New London has been ordered to repay taxes to General Dynamics. Whether they pay taxes based on $90.8 million in property or $57 million doesn’t really matter to the company. It’s literal pocket change to the Pentagon’s third largest weapons contractor, a company that boasted $42.3 billion in revenue in 2023. But it matters a lot in a place like New London, where the annual budget process routinely shaves jobs from the schools, public works, and the civil service to make the columns all add up.

According to a report by Heidi Garrett-Peltier for the Costs of War Project at Brown University, $1 million of federal spending in the military sector creates 6.9 jobs (5.8 direct jobs and 1.1 in the supply chain). That same $1 million would create 8.4 jobs in the wind energy sector or 9.5 jobs in solar energy. Investing $1 million in energy efficiency retrofits creates 10.6 jobs. Use that $1 million to build streets or highways or tunnels or bridges or to repair schools and it will create “over 40 percent more jobs than the military, with a total multiplier of 9.8 jobs per $1 million spending.”

Wait, what? Are you telling me that, with their lack of transparency, accountability, and their cost-plus contracts, while building weapons systems for the sole purpose of destruction and wasting a lot of money in the process, the military-industrial complex is a lousy job creator? Am I to understand that spending money on just about anything else creates more jobs and more economic activity, while not threatening the world with annihilation?

As I work on a local level in my small town in Connecticut, I see how municipal policy should prioritize small businesses, mom-and-pop stores made of brick and mortar, over multinational corporations or big business. I see the return on investment from a small business in granular and tangible ways: the grocery store owner who starts each day by picking up garbage in his parking lot, the funeral home that sponsors the Little League team, the woman at the art gallery and frame shop who waters the street flowers, or the self-employed local photographer who serves on the board of the cooperative grocery store.

These businesses don’t employ tens of thousands of people, but they also don’t insist on tax abatements that undermine our local budget or fill our crowded streets with commuters hell-bent on getting away from the office and our town as quickly as possible.

You get what you pay for, right? Garrett-Peltier’s Costs of War report goes on to note that “healthcare spending creates more than twice as many jobs for the same level of spending, while education creates up to nearly three times as many jobs as defense spending… The employment multipliers for these domestic programs are 14.3 for healthcare, 19.2 for primary and secondary education, and 11.2 for higher education; the average figure for education is 15.2 jobs per $1 million spending.”

These are numbers I wish my City Council would commit to memory. In fact, we should all know these numbers by heart, because they counter the dominant narrative that military spending is good for the economy and that good-paying jobs depend on militarism.

The United States is investing trillions of dollars in the military, as well as in weapons contractors like General Dynamics, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin. Every U.S. president in modern history has prioritized the bottom lines of those corporations over a safe and healthy future for the next generation. Consider all of that as just so many symptoms of Militarism Abuse Syndrome. Isn’t it finally time to get really mad at MAD? Let’s kick the habit and get clean!

Copyright 2024 Frida Berrigan

Via Tomdispatch.com

After the 9/11 attacks, Washington took the bait, launching interventions across the Greater Middle East and Africa. What followed was a slew of sputtering counterterrorism failures and stalemates in places ranging from Niger and Burkina Faso to Somalia and Yemen, a dismal loss, after 20 years, in Afghanistan, and a costly fiasco in Iraq. And just as bin Laden predicted, those conflicts led to discontent in the United States. Americans finally turned against the war in Afghanistan after 10 years of fighting there, while it took only a little more than a year for the public to conclude that the Iraq war wasn’t worth the cost. Still, those conflicts dragged on. To date, more than 7,000 U.S. troops have died fighting the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other militant groups.

As lethal as those Islamist fighters have been, however, another “enemy” has proven far more deadly for American forces: themselves. A recent Pentagon study found suicide to be the leading cause of death among active-duty U.S. Army personnel. Out of 2,530 soldiers who died between 2014 and 2019 from causes ranging from car crashes to drug overdoses to cancer, 35% — 883 troops — took their own lives. Just 96 soldiers died in combat during those same six years.

Those military findings bolster other recent investigations. The journalism nonprofit Voice of San Diego found, for example, that young men in the military are more likely to take their own lives than their civilian peers. The suicide rate for American soldiers has, in fact, risen steadily since the Army began tracking it 20 years ago.

Last year, the medical journal JAMA Neurology reported that the suicide rate among U.S. veterans was 31.7 per 100,000 — 57% greater than that of non-veterans. And that followed a 2021 study by Brown University’s Costs of War Project which found that, compared to those who died in combat, at least four times as many active-duty military personnel and post-9/11 war veterans — an estimated 30,177 of them — had killed themselves.

“High suicide rates mark the failure of the U.S. government and U.S. society to manage the mental health costs of our current conflicts,” wrote Thomas Howard Suitt, author of the Costs of War report. “The U.S. government’s inability to address the suicide crisis is a significant cost of the U.S. post-9/11 wars, and the result is a mental health crisis among our veterans and service members with significant long-term consequences.”

Military Shocked (Shocked!) by a Rise in Suicides

In June, a New York Times front-page investigation found that at least a dozen Navy SEALs had died by suicide in the last 10 years, either while on active duty or shortly after leaving military service. Thanks to an effort by the families of those deceased special operators, eight of their brains were delivered to a specialized Defense Department brain trauma laboratory in Maryland. Researchers there discovered blast damage in every one of them — a particular pattern only seen in people exposed repeatedly to blast waves like SEALs endure from weapons fired in years of training and war-zone deployments as well as explosions encountered in combat.

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The Navy claimed that it hadn’t been informed of the lab’s findings until the Times contacted them. A Navy officer with ties to SEAL leadership expressed shock to reporter Dave Philipps. “That’s the problem,” said that anonymous officer. “We are trying to understand this issue, but so often the information never reaches us.”

None of it should, however, have been surprising.

After all, while writing for the Times in 2020, I revealed the existence of an unpublished internal study, commissioned by U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), on the suicides of Special Operations forces (SOF). Conducted by the American Association of Suicidology, one of the nation’s oldest suicide-prevention organizations, and completed sometime after January 2017, the undated 46-page report put together the findings of 29 “psychological autopsies,” including detailed interviews with 81 next-of-kin and close friends of commandos who had killed themselves between 2012 and 2015.

That study told the military to better track and monitor data on the suicides of its elite troops. “Further research and an improved data surveillance system are needed in order to better understand the risk and protective factors for suicide among SOF members. Further research and a comprehensive data system is needed to monitor the demographics and characteristics of SOF members who die by suicide,” the researchers advised. “Additionally, the data emerging from this study has highlighted the need for research to better understand the factors associated with SOF suicides.”

Quite obviously, it never happened.

The brain trauma suffered by SEALs and the suicides that followed should not have been a shock. A 2022 study in Military Medicine found Special Operations forces were at increased risk for traumatic brain injury (TBI), when compared with conventional troops. The 2023 JAMA Neurology study similarly found that veterans with TBI had suicide rates 56% higher than veterans without it and three times higher than the U.S. adult population. And a Harvard study, funded by SOCOM and published in April, discovered an association between blast exposure and compromised brain function in active-duty commandos. The greater the exposure, the researchers found, the more health problems were reported.

Studies on the Shelf

Over the last two decades, the Defense Department has, in fact, spent millions of dollars on suicide prevention research. According to the recent Pentagon study of soldiers’ deaths at their own hands, the “Army implements various initiatives that evaluate, identify, and track high-risk individuals for suicidal behavior and other adverse outcomes.” Unfortunately (though Osama bin Laden would undoubtedly have been pleased), the military has a history of not taking suicide prevention seriously.

While the Navy, for example, officially mandated that a suicide hotline for veterans must be accessible from the homepage of every Navy website, an internal audit found that most of the pages reviewed were not in compliance. In fact, according to a 2022 investigation by The Intercept, the audit showed that 62% of the 58 Navy homepages did not comply with that service’s regulations for how to display the link to the Veterans Crisis Line.

The New York Times recently investigated the death of Army Specialist Austin Valley and discovered gross suicide prevention deficiencies. Having just arrived at an Army base in Poland from Fort Riley, Kansas, Valley texted his parents, “Hey mom and dad I love you it was never your fault,” before taking his own life. The Times found that “mental-health care providers in the Army are beholden to brigade leadership and often fail to act in the best interest of soldiers.” There are, for example, only about 20 mental-health counselors available to care for the more than 12,000 soldiers at Fort Riley, according to the Times. As a result, soldiers like Valley can wait weeks or even months for care.

The Army claims it’s working to eliminate the stigma surrounding mental health support, but the Times found that “unit leadership often undermines some of its most basic safety protocols.” This is a long-running issue in the military. The study of Special Operations suicides that I revealed in the Times found that suicide prevention training was seen as a “check in the box.” Special operators believed their careers would be negatively impacted if they sought treatment.

Last year, a Pentagon suicide-prevention committee called attention to lax rules on firearms, high operational tempos, and the poor quality of life on military bases as potential problems for the mental health of troops. M. David Rudd, a clinical psychologist and the director of the National Center for Veterans Studies at the University of Memphis, told to the Times that the Pentagon report echoed many other analyses produced since 2008. “My expectation,” he concluded, “is that this study will sit on a shelf just like all the others, unimplemented.”

Bin Laden’s Triumph

On May 2, 2011, Navy SEALs attacked a residential compound in Pakistan and gunned down Osama bin Laden. “For us to be able to definitively say, ‘We got the man who caused thousands of deaths here in the United States and who had been the rallying point for a violent extremist jihad around the world’ was something that I think all of us were profoundly grateful to be a part of,” President Barack Obama commented afterward. In reality, the deaths “here in the United States” have never ended. And the war that bin Laden kicked off in 2001 — a global conflict that still grinds on today — ushered in an era in which SEALs, soldiers, and other military personnel have continued to die by their own hands at an escalating rate.

The suicides of U.S. military personnel have been blamed on a panoply of reasons, including military culture, ready access to firearms, high exposure to trauma, excessive stress, the rise of improvised explosive devices, repeated head trauma, an increase in traumatic brain injuries, the Global War on Terror’s protracted length, and even the American public’s disinterest in their country’s post-9/11 wars.

During 20-plus years of armed interventions by the country that still prides itself on being the Earth’s sole superpower, U.S. military missions have been repeatedly upended across South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa including a sputtering stalemate in Somalia, an intervention-turned-blowback-engine in Libya, and outright implosions in Afghanistan and Iraq. While the peoples of those countries have suffered the most, U.S. troops have also been caught in that maelstrom of America’s making.

Bin Laden’s dream of luring American troops into a meat-grinder war on “Muslim soil” never quite came to pass. Compared to previous conflicts like the Second World War, Korean, and Vietnam wars, U.S. battlefield casualties in the Greater Middle East and Africa have been relatively modest. But bin Laden’s prediction of “wooden boxes and coffins” filled with the “bodies of American troops” nonetheless came true in its own fashion.

“This Department’s most precious resource is our people. Therefore, we must spare no effort in working to eliminate suicide within our ranks,” wrote Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a public memo released last year. “One loss to suicide is too many.” But as with its post-9/11 wars and interventions, the U.S. military’s effort to stem suicides has come up distinctly short. And like the losses, stalemates, and fiascos of that grim war on terror, the fallout has been more suffering and death. Bin Laden is, of course, long dead, but the post-9/11 parade of U.S. corpses continues. The unanticipated toll of suicides by troops and veterans — four times the number of war-on-terror battlefield deaths — has become another Pentagon failure and bin Laden’s enduring triumph.

Copyright 2024 Nick Turse

Via Tomdispatch.com

Congress is spending on the military like it’s World War III. Diverting that money to jobs, health care, and the climate would make us far safer.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – We need to talk about what bombs do in war. Bombs shred flesh. Bombs shatter bones. Bombs dismember. Bombs cause brains, lungs, and other organs to shake so violently they bleed, rupture, and cease functioning. Bombs injure. Bombs kill. Bombs destroy.

Bombs also make people rich.

When a bomb explodes, someone profits. And when someone profits, bombs claim more unseen victims. Every dollar spent on a bomb is a dollar not spent saving a life from a preventable death, a dollar not spent curing cancer, a dollar not spent educating children. That’s why, so long ago, retired five-star general and President Dwight D. Eisenhower rightly called spending on bombs and all things military a “theft.”

The perpetrator of that theft is perhaps the world’s most overlooked destructive force. It looms unnoticed behind so many major problems in the United States and the world today. Eisenhower famously warned Americans about it in his 1961 farewell address, calling it for the first time “the military-industrial complex,” or the MIC.

Start with the fact that, thanks to the MIC’s ability to hijack the federal budget, total annual military spending is far larger than most people realize: around $1,500,000,000,000 ($1.5 trillion). Contrary to what the MIC scares us into believing, that incomprehensibly large figure is monstrously out of proportion to the few military threats facing the United States. One-and-a-half trillion dollars is about double what Congress spends annually on all non-military purposes combined.

Calling this massive transfer of wealth a “theft” is no exaggeration, since it’s taken from pressing needs like ending hunger and homelessness, offering free college and pre-K, providing universal health care, and building a green energy infrastructure to save ourselves from climate change. Virtually every major problem touched by federal resources could be ameliorated or solved with fractions of the cash claimed by the MIC. The money is there.

The bulk of our taxpayer dollars are seized by a relatively small group of corporate war profiteers led by the five biggest companies profiting off the war industry: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon (RTX), Boeing, and General Dynamics. As those companies have profited, the MIC has sowed incomprehensible destruction globally, keeping the United States locked in endless wars that, since 2001, have killed an estimated 4.5 million people, injured tens of millions more, and displaced at least 38 million, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

The MIC’s hidden domination of our lives must end, which means we must dismantle it. That may sound totally unrealistic, even fantastical. It is not. And by the way, we’re talking about dismantling the MIC, not the military itself. (Most members of the military are, in fact, among that the MIC’s victims.)

While profit has long been part of war, the MIC is a relatively new, post-World War II phenomenon that formed thanks to a series of choices made over time. Like other processes, like other choices, they can be reversed and the MIC can be dismantled.

The question, of course, is how?

The Emergence of a Monster

To face what it would take to dismantle the MIC, it’s first necessary to understand how it was born and what it looks like today. Given its startling size and intricacy, we and a team of colleagues created a series of graphics to help visualize the MIC and the harm it inflicts, which we’re sharing publicly for the first time.

The MIC was born after World War II from, as Eisenhower explained, the “conjunction of an immense military establishment” — the Pentagon, the armed forces, intelligence agencies, and others — “and a large arms industry.” Those two forces, the military and the industrial, united with Congress to form an unholy “Iron Triangle” or what some scholars believe Eisenhower initially and more accurately called the military-industrial–congressional complex. To this day those three have remained the heart of the MIC, locked in a self-perpetuating cycle of legalized corruption (that also features all too many illegalities).

The basic system works like this: First, Congress takes exorbitant sums of money from us taxpayers every year and gives it to the Pentagon. Second, the Pentagon, at Congress’s direction, turns huge chunks of that money over to weapons makers and other corporations via all too lucrative contracts, gifting them tens of billions of dollars in profits. Third, those contractors then use a portion of the profits to lobby Congress for yet more Pentagon contracts, which Congress is generally thrilled to provide, perpetuating a seemingly endless cycle.

But the MIC is more complicated and insidious than that. In what’s effectively a system of legalized bribery, campaign donations regularly help boost Pentagon budgets and ensure the awarding of yet more lucrative contracts, often benefiting a small number of contractors in a congressional district or state. Such contractors make their case with the help of a virtual army of more than 900 Washington-based lobbyists. Many of them are former Pentagon officials, or former members of Congress or congressional staffers, hired through a “revolving door” that takes advantage of their ability to lobby former colleagues. Such contractors also donate to think tanks and university centers willing to support increased Pentagon spending, weapons programs, and a hyper-militarized foreign policy. Ads are another way to push weapons programs on elected officials.

Such weapons makers also spread their manufacturing among as many Congressional districts as possible, allowing senators and representatives to claim credit for jobs created. MIC jobs, in turn, often create cycles of dependency in low-income communities that have few other economic drivers, effectively buying the support of locals.

For their part, contractors regularly engage in legalized price gouging, overcharging taxpayers for all manner of weapons and equipment. In other cases, contractor fraud literally steals taxpayer money. The Pentagon is the only government agency that has never passed an audit — meaning it literally can’t keep track of its money and assets — yet it still receives more from Congress than every other government agency combined.

As a system, the MIC ensures that Pentagon spending and military policy are driven by contractors’ search for ever-higher profits and the reelection desires of members of Congress, not by any assessment of how to best defend the country. The resulting military is unsurprisingly shoddy, especially given the money spent. Americans should pray it never actually has to defend the United States.

No other industry — not even Big Pharma or Big Oil — can match the power of the MIC in shaping national policy and dominating spending. Military spending is, in fact, now larger (adjusting for inflation) than at the height of the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq, or, in fact, at any time since World War II, despite the absence of a threat remotely justifying such spending. Many now realize that the primary beneficiary of more than 22 years of endless U.S. wars in this century has been the industrial part of the MIC, which has made hundreds of billions of dollars since 2001. “Who Won in Afghanistan? Private Contractors” was the Wall Street Journal‘s all too apt headline in 2021.

Endless Wars, Endless Death, Endless Destruction

“Afghanistan” in that headline could have been replaced by Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq, among other seemingly endless U.S. wars since World War II. That the MIC has profited off them is no coincidence. It has helped drive the country into conflicts in countries ranging from Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, to El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, and Grenada, to Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, and so many others.

Deaths and injuries from such wars have reached the tens of millions. The number of estimated deaths from the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen is eerily similar to that from the wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia: 4.5 million.

The numbers are so large that they can become numbing. The Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama helps us remember to focus on:

one life
one life
one life
one life
one life

because each time
is the first time
that that life
has been taken.

The Environmental Toll

The MIC’s damage extends to often irreparable environmental harm, involving the poisoning of ecosystems, devastating biodiversity loss, and the U.S. military’s carbon footprint, which is larger than that of any other organization on earth. At war or in daily training, the MIC has literally fueled global heating and climate change through the burning of fuels to run bases, operate vehicles, and produce weaponry.

The MIC’s human and environmental costs are particularly invisible outside the continental United States. In U.S. territories and other political “grey zones,” investments in military infrastructure and technologies rely in part on the second-class citizenship of Indigenous communities, often dependent on the military for their livelihoods.

Endless Wars at Home

As the MIC has fueled wars abroad, so it has fueled militarization domestically. Why, for example, have domestic police forces become so militarized? At least part of the answer: since 1990, Congress has allowed the Pentagon to transfer its “excess” weaponry and equipment (including tanks and drones) to local law enforcement agencies. These transfers conveniently allow the Pentagon and its contractors to ask Congress for replacement purchases, further fueling the MIC.

Seeking new profits from new markets, contractors have also increasingly hawked their military products directly to SWAT teams and other police forces, border patrol outfits, and prison systems. Politicians and corporations have poured billions of dollars into border militarization and mass incarceration, helping fuel the rise of the lucrative “border-industrial complex” and “prison-industrial complex,” respectively. Domestic militarization has disproportionately harmed Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities.

An Existential Threat

Some will defend the military-industrial complex by insisting that we need its jobs; some by claiming it’s keeping Ukrainians alive and protecting the rest of Europe from Vladimir Putin’s Russia; some by warning about China. Each of those arguments is an example of the degree to which the MIC’s power relies on systematically manufacturing fear, threats, and crises that help enrich arms merchants and others in the MIC by driving ever more military spending and war (despite a nearly unbroken record of catastrophic failure when it comes to nearly every U.S. conflict since World War II).

The argument that current levels of military spending must be maintained for “the jobs” should be laughable. No military should be a jobs program. While the country needs job programs, military spending has proven to be a poor job creator or an engine of economic growth. Research shows it creates far fewer jobs than comparable investments in health care, education, or infrastructure.

U.S. weaponry has aided Ukrainian self-defense, though the weapons manufacturers are anything but altruists. If they truly cared about Ukrainians, they would have forgone any profits, leaving more money for humanitarian aid to that country. Instead, they’ve used that war, as they have Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and growing tensions in the Pacific, to cynically inflate their profits and stock prices dramatically.

Discard the fearmongering and it should be clear that the Russian military has demonstrated its weakness, its inability to decisively conquer territory near its own borders, let alone march into Europe. In fact, both the Russian and Chinese militaries pose no conventional military threat to the United States. The Russian military’s annual budget is one-tenth or less than the size of the U.S. one. China’s military budget is one-third to one-half its size. The disparities are far larger if you combine the U.S. military budget with those of its NATO and Asian allies.

Despite this, members of the MIC are increasingly encouraging direct confrontations with Russia and China, aided by Putin’s war and China’s own provocations. In the “Indo-Pacific” (as the military calls it), the MIC is continuing to cash in as the Pentagon builds up bases and forces surrounding China in Australia, Guam, the Federated States of Micronesia, Japan, the Marshall Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Papua New Guinea, and the Philippines.

Such steps and a similar buildup in Europe are only encouraging China and Russia to strengthen their own militaries. (Just imagine how American politicians would respond if China or Russia were to build a single military base anywhere close to this country’s borders.) While all of this is increasingly profitable for the MIC, it is heightening the risk of a military clash that could spiral into a potentially species-ending nuclear war between the United States and China, Russia, or both.

The Urgency of Dismantling

The urgency of dismantling the military-industrial complex should be clear. The future of the species and planet depends on it.

The most obvious way to weaken the MIC would be to starve it of its lifeblood, our tax dollars. Few noticed that, after leaving office, former Trump-era Pentagon chief Christopher Miller called for cutting the Pentagon’s budget in half. Yes, in half.

Even a 30% cut — as happened all too briefly after the Cold War ended in 1991 — would free hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Imagine how such sums could build safer, healthier, more secure lives in this country, including a just economic transition for any military personnel and contractors losing jobs. And mind you, that military budget would still be significantly larger than China’s, or Russia’s, Iran’s, and North Korea’s combined.

Of course, even thinking about cutting the Pentagon budget is difficult because the MIC has captured both political parties, virtually guaranteeing ever-rising military spending. Which brings us back to the puzzle of how to dismantle the MIC as a system.

In short, we’re working on the answers. With the diverse group of experts who helped produce this article’s graphics, we’re exploring, among other ideas, divestment campaigns and lawsuits; banning war profiteering; regulating or nationalizing weapons manufacturers; and converting parts of the military into an unarmed disaster relief, public health, and infrastructure force.

Though all too many of us will continue to believe that dismantling the MIC is unrealistic, given the threats facing us, it’s time to think as boldly as possible about how to roll back its power, resist the invented notion that war is inevitable, and build the world we want to see. Just as past movements reduced the power of Big Tobacco and the railroad barons, just as some are now taking on Big Pharma, Big Tech, and the prison-industrial complex, so we must take on the MIC to build a world focused on making human lives rich (in every sense) rather than one focused on bombs and other weaponry that brings wealth to a select few who benefit from death.

Copyright 2024 Theresa (Isa) Arriola and David Vine

Via Tomdispatch.com

Some of them will die in peace, but others, of course, in violence and agony.

For hundreds of years, the U.S. military has been killing people. It’s been a constant of our history. Another constant has been American military personnel killing civilians, whether Native Americans, Filipinos, Nicaraguans, Haitians, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians, Yemenis, and on and on. And there’s something else that’s gone along with those killings: a lack of accountability for them.

Late last month, the Department of Defense (DoD) released its congressionally mandated annual accounting of civilian casualties caused by U.S. military operations globally. The report is due every May 1st and, in the latest case, the Pentagon even beat that deadline by a week. There was only one small problem: it was the 2022 report. You know, the one that was supposed to be made public on May 1, 2023. And not only was that report a year late, but the 2023 edition, due May 1, 2024, has yet to be seen.

Whether that 2023 report, when it finally arrives, will say much of substance is also doubtful. In the 2022 edition, the Pentagon exonerated itself of harming noncombatants. “DoD has assessed that U.S. military operations in 2022 resulted in no civilian casualties,” reads the 12-page document. It follows hundreds of years of silence about, denials of, and willful disregard toward civilians slain purposely or accidentally by the U.S. military and a long history of failures to make amends in the rare cases where the Pentagon has admitted to killing innocents.

Moral Imperatives

“The Department recognizes that our efforts to mitigate and respond to civilian harm respond to both strategic and moral imperatives,” reads the Pentagon’s new 2022 civilian casualty report.

And its latest response to those “moral imperatives” was typical. The Defense Department reported that it had made no ex gratia payments — amends offered to civilians harmed in its operations — during 2022. That follows exactly one payment made in 2021 and zero in 2020.

Whether any payments were made in 2023 is still, of course, a mystery. I asked Lisa Lawrence, the Pentagon spokesperson who handles civilian harm issues, why the 2023 report was late and when to expect it. A return receipt shows that she read my email, but she failed to offer an answer.

Her reaction is typical of the Pentagon on the subject.

A 2020 study of post-9/11 civilian casualty incidents by the Center for Civilians in Conflict and Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute found that most went uninvestigated. When they did come under official scrutiny, American military witnesses were interviewed while civilians — victims, survivors, family members — were almost totally ignored, “severely compromising the effectiveness of investigations,” according to that report.

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In the wake of such persistent failings, investigative reporters and human rights groups have increasingly documented America’s killing of civilians, its underreporting of noncombatant casualties, and its failures of accountability in Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere.

During the first 20 years of the war on terror, the U.S. conducted more than 91,000 airstrikes across seven major conflict zones and killed up to 48,308 civilians, according to a 2021 analysis by Airwars, a U.K.-based air-strike monitoring group.

Between 2013 and 2020, for example, the U.S. carried out seven separate attacks in Yemen — six drone strikes and one raid — that killed 36 members of the intermarried Al Ameri and Al Taisy families. A quarter of them were children between the ages of three months and 14 years old. The survivors have been waiting for years for an explanation as to why they were repeatedly targeted.

In 2018, Adel Al Manthari, a civil servant in the Yemeni government, and four of his cousins — all civilians — were traveling by truck when an American missile slammed into their vehicle. Three of the men were killed instantly. Another died days later in a local hospital. Al Manthari was critically injured. Complications resulting from his injuries nearly killed him in 2022. He beseeched the U.S. government to dip into the millions of dollars appropriated by Congress to compensate victims of American attacks, but they ignored his pleas. His limbs and life were eventually saved by the kindness of strangers via a crowdsourced GoFundMe campaign.

The same year that Al Manthari was maimed in Yemen, a U.S. drone strike in Somalia killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse. The next year, a U.S. military investigation acknowledged that a woman and child were killed in that attack but concluded that their identities might never be known. Last year, I traveled to Somalia and spoke with their relatives. For six years, the family has tried to contact the American government, including through U.S. Africa Command’s online civilian casualty reporting portal without ever receiving a reply.

In December 2023, following an investigation by The Intercept, two dozen human rights organizations — 14 Somali and 10 international groups — called on Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to compensate Luul and Mariam’s family for their deaths. This year, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Representatives Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), and Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) have also called on the Defense Department to make amends.

A 2021 investigation by New York Times reporter Azmat Khan revealed that the American air war in Iraq and Syria was marked by flawed intelligence and inaccurate targeting, resulting in the deaths of many innocents. Out of 1,311 military reports analyzed by Khan, only one cited a “possible violation” of the rules of engagement. None included a finding of wrongdoing or suggested a need for disciplinary action, while fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made. The U.S.-led coalition eventually admitted to killing 1,410 civilians during the war in Iraq and Syria. Airwars, however, puts the number at 2,024.

Several of the attacks detailed by Khan were brought to the Defense Department’s attention in 2022 but, according to their new report, the Pentagon failed to take action. Joanna Naples-Mitchell, director of the nonprofit Zomia Center’s Redress Program, which helps survivors of American air strikes submit requests for compensation, and Annie Shiel, U.S. advocacy director with the Center for Civilians in Conflict, highlighted several of these cases in a recent Just Security article.

In June 2022, for instance, the Redress Program submitted requests for amends from the Pentagon on behalf of two families in Mosul, Iraq, harmed in an April 29, 2016, air strike reportedly targeting an Islamic State militant who was unharmed in the attack. Khan reported that, instead, Ziad Kallaf Awad, a college professor, was killed and Hassan Aleiwi Muhammad Sultan, then 10 years old, was left wheelchair-bound. The Pentagon had indeed admitted that civilian casualties resulted from the strike in a 2016 press release.

In September 2022, the Redress Program also submitted ex gratia requests on behalf of six families in Mosul, all of them harmed by a June 15, 2016, air strike also investigated by Khan. Naples-Mitchel and Shiel note that Iliyas Ali Abd Ali, then running a fruit stand near the site of the attack, lost his right leg and hearing in one ear. Two brothers working in an ice cream shop were also injured, while a man standing near that shop was killed. That same year, the Pentagon did confirm that the strike had resulted in civilian casualties.

However, almost eight years after acknowledging civilian harm in those Mosul cases and almost two years after the Redress Program submitted the claims to the Defense Department, the Pentagon has yet to offer amends.

Getting to “Yes”

While the U.S. military has long been killing civilians — in massacres by ground troops, air strikes and even, in August 1945, nuclear attacks — compensating those harmed has never been a serious priority.

General John “Black Jack” Pershing did push to adopt a system to pay claims by French civilians during World War I and the military in World War II found that paying compensation for harm to civilians “had a pronounced stabilizing effect.” The modern military reparations system, however, dates only to the 1960s.

During the Vietnam War, providing “solatia” was a way for the military to offer reparations for civilian injuries or deaths caused by U.S. operations without having to admit any guilt. In 1968, the going rate for an adult life was $33. Children merited just half that.

In 1973, a B-52 Stratofortress dropped 30 tons of bombs on the Cambodian town of Neak Luong, killing hundreds of civilians and wounding hundreds more. The next of kin of those killed, according to press reports, were promised about $400 each. Considering that, in many cases, a family’s primary breadwinner had been lost, the sum was low. It was only the equivalent of about four years of earnings for a rural Cambodian. By comparison, a one-plane sortie, like the one that devastated Neak Luong, cost about $48,000. And that B-52 bomber itself then cost about $8 million. Worse yet, a recent investigation found that the survivors did not actually receive the promised $400. In the end, the value American forces placed on the dead of Neak Luong came to just $218 each.

Back then, the United States kept its low-ball payouts in Cambodia a secret. Decades later, the U.S. continues to thwart transparency and accountability when it comes to civilian lives.

In June 2023, I asked Africa Command to answer detailed questions about its law-of-war and civilian-casualty policies and requested interviews with officials versed in such matters. Despite multiple follow-ups, Courtney Dock, the command’s deputy director of public affairs, has yet to respond. This year-long silence stands in stark contrast to the Defense Department’s trumpeting of new policies and initiatives for responding to civilian harm and making amends.

In 2022, the Pentagon issued a 36-page Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, written at the direction of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. The plan provides a blueprint for improving how the Pentagon addresses the subject. The plan requires military personnel to consider potential harm to civilians in any air strike, ground raid, or other type of combat.

Late last year, the Defense Department also issued its long-awaited “Instruction on Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response,” which established the Pentagon’s “policies, responsibilities, and procedures for mitigating and responding to civilian harm.” The document, mandated under the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, and approved by Austin, directs the military to “acknowledge civilian harm resulting from U.S. military operations and respond to individuals and communities affected by U.S. military operations,” including “expressing condolences” and providing ex gratia payments to next of kin.

But despite $15 million allocated by Congress since 2020 to provide just such payments and despite members of Congress repeatedly calling on the Pentagon to make amends for civilian harm, it has announced just one such payment in the years since.

Naples-Mitchel and Shiel point out that the Defense Department has a projected budget of $849.8 billion for fiscal year 2025 and the $3 million set aside annually to pay for civilian casualty claims is just 0.00035% of that sum. “Yet for the civilians who have waited years for acknowledgment of the most painful day of their lives, it’s anything but small,” they write. “The military has what it needs to begin making payments and reckoning with past harms, from the policy commitment, to the funding, to the painstaking requests and documentation from civilian victims. All they have to do now is say yes.”

On May 10th, I asked Lisa Lawrence, the Pentagon spokesperson, if the U.S. would say “yes” and if not, why not.

“Thank you for reaching out,” she replied. “You can expect to hear from me as soon as I have more to offer.”

Lawrence has yet to “offer” anything.

Copyright 2024 Nick Turse

He spends his other weekends right-swiping on dating apps to try to find a new partner (he’s being divorced) and watching — yep, you guessed it! — Fox News. He can be counted among a growing population of White, rural Americans who are lonely, lack people to count on as confidants, and feel poorly understood, not to say excluded from this country (at least as they imagine it).

In 2019, even before the Covid pandemic made gatherings more dangerous, social scientists and public officials had already noted an uptick in Americans who would describe themselves as lonely — nearly three in five — many from rural areas and many of them older. Today, though schools, parks, and businesses have reopened, things don’t seem much better. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently highlighted the problem, claiming that loneliness was as dangerous to our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It increases the risk of various illnesses like heart disease and raises quality of life issues like addiction, depression, the urge to commit suicide, and the odds of premature death.

Our poor relationships, in short, are killing us.

Loneliness and a Lack of Self-Control

I’m a clinical social worker who treats Americans from all walks of life, including serving troops and veterans affected by our post-9/11 wars. Since I live in a rural area just outside Washington, D.C., I can work with both city dwellers and farmers in a single day and so get a sense of what seems to shape the wellness (or lack thereof) of an increasingly sweeping demographic. A key insight in my discipline is the value of human connection, particularly relationships with people who understand your experience and can reflect it back to you. I’ve seen the transformative power of just such relationships and how, when people feel supported and understood, they start to venture out more often, even volunteer in their communities, and cease having angry meltdowns in public. Empathy, in other words, leads to motivation and self-control.

Its underbelly, however, is alienation, loneliness, and their close cousins, anger and fear. I’ve seen a lot of anger lately in people who, like my friend, rant about immigrants and carry guns on their errands in the name of self-defense, while all too often isolating themselves at home or in solitary activities. Both young adults and older ones tend to feel more isolated than the middle-aged, especially if they’re poor and live in rural areas like mine. And many of those who feel lonely and depressed are also angry.

Trump and His Band of Lonely Followers

I’m hardly the only one who’s noticed that former President Donald Trump’s die-hard supporters tend to fall exactly into that crew of people who live in rural America, are poorer, older, and (much like the Donald himself) socially isolated. As pollster Daniel Cox wrote shortly after the 2020 election, “The share of Americans who are more socially disconnected from society is on the rise. And these voters disproportionately support Trump.”

As Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender also noted, Trump rallies build a sense of community among “mostly older White men and women who lived paycheck to paycheck… retired or close to it, estranged from their families or otherwise without children… Trump had… made their lives richer.” He noted how Trump supporters came to share homes and transportation, form relationships, and chant the same slogans (like “Build the wall”) in unison. I would add that those slogans can get so much uglier: “Fuck those dirty beaners” and “Fuck Islam” are anything but unheard of.

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Writing in the wake of the Nazi movement that murdered more than six million European Jews, the philosopher Hannah Arendt noted that those people most likely to align themselves with totalitarian movements lack a sense of their own usefulness to society and feel excluded. In my own world, Arendt’s insight feels true when it comes to the Trump supporters I know in my family and community and know about in this country at large.

What Donald Trump and other MAGA leaders have done is take emotions like loneliness and channel them into a social movement. Key evangelical Christian figures like Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, or the Reverend Franklin Graham provided the initial ideological scaffolding by selling Trump as someone who could deliver policy wins on issues like abortion and prayer in schools.

Later, when Trump’s extramarital affairs and crude sexual remarks made it clear to such figures that he was not exactly a shining example of Christian morality, they needed a different tack. As journalist Tim Alberta has pointed out, evangelical leaders then began selling Trump as one of a line of unlikely Biblical figures (if not Jesus himself) who led the Israelites out of peril. In other words, they saw him as powerful exactly because he was an outsider.

Donald Trump, in short, has provided a world in which isolated Americans can be — yes! — alone together, while embracing hate in an unabashed and distinctly public fashion. In doing so, he’s made the experience of being a resentful outcast a transcendent one in twenty-first-century America. Trump’s rallies are invariably both loud and distinctly angry, like the motorcycle gangs with Confederate flags that roar past me on the rural highway I often take, or church services with MAGA preachers. These sorts of gatherings seem to reflect what French sociologist Emile Durkheim once called collective effervescence, or shared emotional experiences that transform isolated people into something larger (if also in this case angrier) than life.

The anger of the MAGA movement is transcendent. When people act on it, their bodies trigger the release of adrenaline, which can alter behavior. I saw this outside my home once when a White male driver who had crashed his speeding car into a guardrail then threatened a group of Spanish-speaking drivers he’d just passed, calling them “beaners” and kicking and punching the side of their car, even though they’d stopped to help him. Reason and self-control prove elusive at such moments in a world infused with racial slurs as solace for peoples’ woes.

The most striking recent example of how anger can find collective social expression was, of course, the January 6, 2021, insurrection in Washington that came all too close to giving us a new autocratic-style government founded on a sense of rootlessness, victimhood, and rage.

Our Loneliness Epidemic

Ever since Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, many of us have been scratching our heads, wondering how to explain what gave rise to his self-styled band of lonely followers. Are they the victims of global capitalism and university systems that all too few can afford? Are they a cultural movement responding to demographic shifts involving immigration and low birth rates among White families? Personally, I’d like to see more discussion about the decisions many American voters and our representatives in Washington have made to support endless foreign wars with trillions of our tax dollars, instead of investing them in protecting the places here at home that would make community more possible for more of us.

After all, even a relatively modest percentage of our wildly overblown annual “defense” budget, now heading for the trillion-dollar mark, would have funded many of the types of programs Americans need in order to work less and live in cleaner, safer environments. Military spending and where it goes can be hard to understand but, for instance, the Costs of War Project at Brown University, which I helped to start, has broken down our disastrous war expenses — all eight trillion-plus dollars of it — in this century. And now, as defense expert William Hartung points out, a significant part of the Pentagon budget is being spent to deter a hypothetical war with China, whose military isn’t configured to threaten American safety. Meanwhile, since 2018, at least tens of billions of dollars of classified defense contracts have been transferred to some of the world’s largest private tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, in addition to tech startups, to develop surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence, and advanced weapons systems.

President Biden’s original Build Back Better Act (voted down in the Senate in 2021) would have allocated $400 billion over six years to fund universal preschool, $150 billion to be applied to homecare for elderly and disabled Americans, and $200 billion in child tax credits. So, for less than the amount we spend on defense in just one year, taxpayer dollars could have made it possible for Americans with children to stay at work (at a time when more than one in four of us have had to leave jobs or school to avoid soaring child-care costs).

Today, the vast majority of nursing homes are short-staffed, but had we decided not to fund the disastrous Global War on Terror, we could have helped seniors get high-quality care in their own homes. And just think how much more money we would have been able to devote to cleaning up pollution, investing in safer public transportation and infrastructure, restoring state and national parks, and mitigating the worst effects of the Covid pandemic on schools, houses of worship, and businesses — not to mention American lives. And if so, just think how much less isolation, loneliness, and MAGAtivity there might have been.

An incident I witnessed at my rural home last summer epitomized what it means for so many of us to lack the necessary resources to relax and enjoy life with one another in reasonably good health. While smoke from Canada’s wildfires engulfed the D.C. area last June, my children and I watched as the young, Black grocery delivery driver we’d paid to bring us food arrived in his car. A child in a car seat squirmed in the back. He wore a tiny KN95 mask. Why wasn’t he at home or at a childcare facility while his father worked? What kind of quality of life did he have driving through hills and woods he would probably never have a chance to enjoy? I cringed with guilt. The quiet appearance of isolation and alienation in that car stood in marked contrast to the angry Whites at Trump rallies, who looked a lot like me.

In such an ongoing climate of isolation, anger, and underdevelopment, there seem few safe and accessible ways for Americans to gather peacefully anymore. Much has been made lately of antisemitic chants at the student protests against the Israel-Gaza war and the American weaponry eternally being shipped to Israel. As Columbia journalism professor Helen Benedict pointed out in the case of the protests at her university, a majority of the students couldn’t have been more peaceful and less MAGA-style angry as they advocated for a cease-fire and the release of Israeli hostages, even in the face of a disproportionate law enforcement response. Such protests say everything about the ability of disaffected young voters to claim space and connect around common values, even in the face of a militarized police response. And when you think of those 2,000-pound bombs our government has been sending to Israel to devastate Gaza, they should remind us of just how far afield our spending priorities have taken us from what we should truly value.

I do try to claim space that’s positive and community-based in my world, but it isn’t easy. Even going to our church on a Sunday sometimes feels precarious to me. I find myself worrying about what I would do to protect my small children if someone as disturbed as many in my community of origin entered with a gun and started shooting the place up. (And though that doesn’t happen often, it certainly does happen.)

I recently participated with a family friend in a race in deep blue Syracuse, New York, meant to benefit local community-based healthcare. As my young companion and I moved through the starting gate together, a large banner hung above us with a “Blue Lives Matter” flag on it, signaling support for law enforcement as a counter to Black Lives Matter.

As we ran, I couldn’t help noticing boarded-up public housing and abandoned schools, potholed roads and a visible (though supportive) armed police presence to help us make our way through city traffic. I wondered what it meant that an event as innocent as a race to benefit healthcare could just as easily have been mistaken for some sort of post-apocalyptic scene.

Yes, the degradation has been gradual, caused by the bleeding out of U.S. cities, thanks at least in part to the dozens of large and small armed conflicts we’ve fought so disastrously around the world in this century and our taxpayer dollars that have been funneled in that direction.

If only we were to reshape our priorities in enough time to vote in leaders who cared about peace, perhaps our democracy and the ideas that define it wouldn’t be coming apart at the MAGA seams. Wouldn’t it be great if we all could get out more and do so together?

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com