Originally posted at TomDispatch. War: what is it good for? Apparently, in Washington’s world of think tanks, the answer is: the bottom line. In fact, as the Biden presidency approaches, an era of great-power competition between the United States and China is...
Dominance in the Name of Internationalism
Originally posted at TomDispatch. I was never in the military myself, but I did spend time at a U.S. military base and I have to admit that it remains a treasured experience among my memories. Sometime in the 1950s, my father ran a gas station on Governors Island in...
How To Stuff the Middle East With Weaponry
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Yes, his first act on returning to the White House from Walter Reed Medical Center was to step out on a balcony and rip off his face mask to display to the world that thoroughly contagious look of his. He’s been a killer...
A Game of Nuclear Chicken With Russia and China
The MQ-9 Reaper, a drone armed with Hellfire missiles, has been a workhorse in Washington’s forever wars across the Greater Middle East and Africa, but its days could be numbered. According to Air Force Magazine, that service "has grown skeptical that the Reaper...
Ending the Pentagon’s Pandemic of Spending
Suckers? Give me a break. It’s perfectly clear that Donald Trump considers just about every last one of us a sucker (including the members of his base) and that’s not news at all. It's only news when he calls the military dead of past wars "suckers" and...
Artificial (Un)intelligence and the US Military
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, the U.S. military, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare informs us today, has had a brilliant idea – robot generals (!) – into which to sink yet more billions of our tax dollars...
Could Covert War With Iran Become Overt Before November 3rd?
Originally posted at TomDispatch. History’s a joke, right? We know that from our president who creates laughable moments of history daily – as when, reading from a script recently, he pronounced America’s famed Yosemite National Park...
War and Pandemic Journalism
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In the midst of the pandemic from hell, with a president who seems incapable of grasping the reality of, no less dealing with, the spreading virus, as deaths mount and cases cascade, in a land where a Covid-19 “second...
Thinking About the Unthinkable (2020-Style)
Originally posted at TomDispatch. He sent what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called his "unidentified storm troopers" togged out like soldiers in a war zone onto streets filled with protesters in Portland, Oregon. Those camouflage-clad federal law enforcement...
A World of ‘Killer Robots’ But Not ‘National Security’
As Covid-19 was spreading across the planet in April and the crew of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt was being consumed by the virus, I wrote a piece for TomDispatch in which I wondered: "Will our troops, trainers, advisers, and military contractors...