The eyes of a new generation were opened in an episode that seemed like dark science fiction for those of a certain age, and an unyielding nightmare regardless: a genocide streaming into smartphones around the world in real time. Many American eyes were opened for the first time to the reality not only in Palestine, but in the places in the world that are meant to be forgotten, where the U.S. and its allies may tread at their will and pleasure. At the center of this system of license and aggression is the Department of Defense, as it is now euphemistically named. What we call “defense” spending in the United States is actually spending on weapons and war-making, and it has continued its unabated rise in both red and blue presidential administrations.
The U.S. spends far more on its military than any other country – it spends more than the next nine countries combined, and as a share of GDP, its military spending far outpaces that of other rich countries in the G7 group. The Department of Defense is massive, “with $4 trillion in assets dispersed across fifty states and over 4,500 locations worldwide,” and its sheer size is at the heart of pathological accounting failures in recent years. Last November, the Pentagon flunked its seventh audit in a row, again failing to properly account for its budget – over $800 billion. A Stimson Center policy brief published last July called the Pentagon’s wild spending “a budgetary time bomb set to explode in the next twenty years,” noting the explosion in Pentagon spending in the years since 9/11. “Adjusted for inflation, defense spending has increased more than 48% in just the first 24 years of this century.” The U.S. imperial military is a truly global enterprise. According to data compiled by political anthropologist David Vine at American University, there were about 750 bases outside of the United States as of 2021, scattered throughout the world in 80 countries and colonies. Vine points out that given the “sheer number of bases and the secrecy and lack of transparency” around the information, a complete list is impossible:
The Pentagon’s previously annual list of its bases, the “Base Structure Report,” is notoriously incomplete and, at times, inaccurate. The Pentagon has also failed to release the Congressionally-mandated annual report since the Fiscal Year 2018 version, making an accurate list even more difficult than in prior years. Most observers assume the U.S. military does not know the true number of bases occupied by U.S. forces. It is telling – but not a good sign – that when a recent U.S. Army-funded study evaluated the effects of U.S. bases on conflict globally, the study relied on my 2015 list of bases rather than the Pentagon’s list.
But troops are deployed throughout an even wider swath of countries. As Statista’s Anna Fleck noted in December, “when every single country with some kind of U.S military presence is taken into account, nearly every nation on the map needs to be highlighted.” The United States’ globe-straddling war program has earned its reputation as a hotbed of waste, fraud, and abuse within the federal government. Most major defense-related projects – from nuclear weapons and GPS systems to battleships and IT – are years behind schedule and often billions over budget. One recent ProPublica investigation found that billions of dollars had been spent on “warships with rampant and crippling flaws,” which were early discovered and widely known. They estimated that over the course of their lifetimes, these ships could cost Americans $100 billion or more. The Navy’s response to their scandal is to ask for $1 trillion over the next 30 years to build more battleships. Recent reporting from Bloomberg’s Roxana Tiron notes that when it comes to investing in new defense technologies, the Republicans and Democrats are on the same page. Innovation in the tools of war has become increasingly costly, but both parties have committed themselves to the twenty-first century arms race in which the country continues to pour massive amounts of money into developing weapons of mass destruction. Mike Rogers, a Republican congressman from Alabama, said, “We need to get over 4% of GDP in defense. We got to start the process now.” Several members of the GOP caucus have targeted 5 percent of GDP as the appropriate level of defense spending. That they target GDP rather than tying defense spending to concrete defense objectives reveals much about how they understand “defense.” There has been a strong push within the Republican Party to push this year’s Pentagon budget north of $1 trillion, their talk about cutting spending notwithstanding.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Military Expenditure Database is continuously revised and measures “the volume of resources used for military activities” rather than limiting itself to, for example, the Department of Defense budget or spending in the U.S. For 2023, for example, SIPRI reported $916 billion in U.S. military spending, a value higher than that associated with Pentagon spending alone. Some researchers find that the value of U.S. military spending is in fact much higher, if it includes other expenditures such as the NASA budget and billions in Pentagon-approved weapons sales to its friends and allies; including these additional military outlays pushes the number for fiscal year 2022 to about $1.6 trillion.
A massive center of inescapable social and economic gravity, this structural and institutional framework preempts the possibility of peace and democratic government. A system of such size and political power carries its own logics and motivations. For all of the much hand-wringing about fascism, there is an astonishing lack of attention to the single most important font of fascism in our society, the inviolable military-industrial complex at the center of our political and economic system. Today, we have an apparently unbreakable “iron triangle” made up of (1) arms manufacturers, (2) military and intelligence bodies and private security firms, and (3) the civilian national security state, at the center of which are the White House, the State Department, the National Security Council and nominally independent think tanks that are actually funded and aligned with the formal state.
The infamous revolving door that connects all three sides of the iron triangle has created a corrupt “public-private arrangement [that] has allowed corporate lobbying disguised as policy recommendations” to guide decision-making at the very highest levels of Pentagon leadership. A report published last spring by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft found that for almost 30 years, the Pentagon has been using taxpayer money to house hundreds of top military officials in the country’s largest and most powerful defense contractors. The report notes that “as much as half” of the yearly Pentagon budget goes to private contractors (in FY 2022, the market was worth about $415 billion).
The Stimson brief calls for a “wholesale reevaluation of the nation’s national security strategy,” warning that Americans could soon “remember the days of a $850 billion Pentagon budget request with nostalgia.” Based on November’s presidential contest, we seem to have no political ability or motivation to seriously confront this crisis, despite its implications for democracy, civil rights, and the broader system of political economy. When he resigned from NBC several years ago, during the first Trump term, the award-winning investigative journalist William M. Arkin lamented that he had “failed to convey this larger truth about the hopelessness of our way of doing things,” drawing attention to a failed “conventional wisdom” driving “the machine of perpetual war.”
Arkin – who noted in the letter that he was among the few to report that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – was surprised at the mechanical responses of many in the corporate media to the facially reasonable policies of normalizing and improving relations with Moscow, attempting to denuclearize North Korea, retreating from costly meddling in West Asia, questioning U.S. military interventions in Africa, and seriously criticizing the intelligence community and the FBI. Of the FBI, he said, “What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?” Arkin’s warnings through a lifetime of reporting on “the creeping fascism of homeland security” have clearly fallen on deaf ears as our government doubles and triples down on its worse decisions, on a runaway train careening toward systemic collapse.
David S. D’Amato is an attorney, businessman, and independent researcher. He is a Policy Advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation. He has written in Newsweek, Investor’s Business Daily, RealClearPolitics, The Washington Examiner, and many other popular and scholarly publications, and his work has been cited by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, among others.
