Why, despite decades of disastrous wars, do Pentagon budgets continue to grow, year after year, like ever-expanding nuclear mushroom clouds?
America doesn’t lack toughness — it lacks smarts. Selling more weapons to Ukraine or Taiwan isn’t the answer. Nor are constant threats.
It’s easy to be gung-ho about the military. It’s also easy, I think, to dismiss military service with extreme prejudice.
America worships its Pentagod and the weapons and wars that feed it.
Imagine you’re President Joe Biden. You need $2 trillion dollars to fund one of your stated priorities – infrastructure. You learn of a war plane, the F-35 Lightning II, that would cost as much as $1.7 trillion to buy, field and maintain over the next 50 years. It’s $200 billion over budget, and more than ten years behind schedule. What do you do?
Imagine you’re President Joe Biden. You need $2 trillion dollars to fund one of your stated priorities – infrastructure. You learn of a war plane, the F-35 Lightning II, that would cost as much as $1.7 trillion to buy, field and maintain over the next 50 years. It’s $200 billion over budget, and more than ten years behind schedule. What do you do?
Imagine you’re President Joe Biden. You need $2 trillion dollars to fund one of your stated priorities – infrastructure. You learn of a war plane, the F-35 Lightning II, that would cost as much as $1.7 trillion to buy, field and maintain over the next 50 years. It’s $200 billion over budget, and more than ten years behind schedule. What do you do?
The United States has been embroiled in “nonstop war” since 9/11, fueled by an astonishing funding of the military-industrial complex and pursuit of never-ending conflicts overseas.
Retired lieutenant colonel William Astore argues in TomDispatch that we have all become “American POWs,” while brave whistleblowers like Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, who expose what is being done in our names and with our money, are left to suffer “grim fates.”
Read the full article here.
“What mad story can we possibly tell ourselves to justify the continued building of more ecocidal and genocidal weapons?”
Retired lieutenant colonel William Astore warns in Popular Resistance that the stories Americans tell themselves about war – ones where violence is always the answer and America is always a good actor – are dangerous.
Read the full article here.