Originally posted at TomDispatch. Somehow, when it comes to Congress and the mainstream media, the true strangeness of the Pentagon budget always is missing in action. Despite arguments about the small things, just about everyone accepts that the United States must...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Just in case you were wondering where your tax dollars went in this century, consider the American war, now 20 years old, in Iraq (and after 2014 in Syria as well). Neta Crawford of the invaluable Costs of War Project has just...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. News flash! Ten thousand Marines and other U.S. troops recently invaded southern California and captured Twentynine Palms in the Mojave Desert — 1,200 square miles of desert seized! Oh, wait, my mistake! Those were just a series...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. The name of the game in Ukraine seems to be escalation, not just in the fighting (with a major Russian offensive expected soon), but in weaponry, too. Only recently, after initially refusing, President Biden agreed to send advanced...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Consider just one long-gone date in the world of give-peace-(not-war)-a-chance: January 27, 1973. On that day, the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the South Vietnamese rebel forces signed an agreement initiating a...

More than two millennia ago, in the History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides recounted a disastrous conflict Athens waged against Sparta. A masterwork on strategy and war, the book is still taught at the US Army War College and many other military institutions...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. It was a backlit wonder of a plane on what looked like a Hollywood set – though the location was actually a Northrop Grumman plant in California. The workers from that giant weapons maker were there, too, chanting “USA!...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. In March 2007, Karen Greenberg reported on a visit she had made to the war-on-terror prison camp at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and what it felt like to be distinctly offshore of American justice. She began that piece...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. I felt it then. I feel far more certain of it now. My dad, who died in 1983, was a member of what came to be known as the Greatest Generation, those who served in World War II. In fact, he volunteered the day after Pearl Harbor...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. War is, to say the least, nothing new. In his memorable first book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges began with a possible quote from Plato (“Only the dead have seen the end of war”). And it’s sadly...