Not only is Donald Trump’s colossal military spending bad for the country, but it’s bad for the military and may well wreck what’s left of U.S. democracy, writes William J. Astore.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth finishes the installation of a Department of War plaque at the River Entrance in front of the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., Nov. 13, 2025. (DoW /Madelyn Keech/Public Domain)
By William J. Astore
TomDispatch.com
What constitutes national security and how is it best achieved? Does massive military spending really make a country more secure, and what perils to democracy and liberty are posed by vast military establishments?
Questions like those are rarely addressed in honest ways in America. Instead, the Trump administration favors preparations for war and more war, fueled by potentially enormous increases in military spending that are dishonestly framed as “recapitalizations” of America’s security and safety.
Such framing makes Pete Hegseth, America’s self-styled “secretary of war,” seem almost refreshingly honest in his embrace of a warrior ethos. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham is another “warrior” who cheers for conflict, whether with Venezuela, Iran, or even — yes! — Russia. Such macho men revel in what they believe is this country’s divine mission to dominate the world.
Tragically, at the moment, unapologetic warmongers like Hegseth and Graham are winning the political and cultural battle.
Of course, U.S. warmongering is anything but new. Neither is a belief in global dominance through high military spending.
In 1983, as a college student, I worked on a project that critiqued President Ronald Reagan’s “defense” buildup and his embrace of pie-in-the-sky concepts like the Strategic Defense Initiative (S.D.I)., better known as “Star Wars.”
Never did I imagine that, more than 40 years later, another Republican president would again come to embrace S.D.I. (rebranded “Golden Dome”) and ever-more massive military spending, especially since the Soviet Union, America’s superpower rival in Reagan’s time, ceased to exist 35 years ago.
Amazingly, Trump even wants to bring back naval battleships, as Reagan briefly did (though he didn’t have the temerity to call for a new class of ships to be named after himself). It’ll be a “golden fleet,” says Trump.
President Trump announces the Golden Dome missile defense system, May 2025. (White House Gallery)
Trump’s recent advocacy of a “dream military” with a proposed budget of $1.5 trillion in 2027 (half a trillion dollars larger than the present Pentagon budget), is a proposal disturbingly backed by the editorial board of The Washington Post.
But at the Pentagon, nothing succeeds like failure, namely eight failed audits in a row (part of a 30-year pattern of financial finagling) that accompanied disastrous wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
Reagan was nicknamed the “Teflon president” because scandals didn’t seem to stick to him (at least until the Iran-Contra affair proved tough to shed). Yet history’s best candidate for Teflon “no-stick” status was never Reagan or any other president. It was and remains the U.S. warfare state itself, headquartered on the Potomac River in Washington. Even as the Pentagon has moved from failure to failure in war-fighting, its war budgets have continued to soar and soar some more.
The Democrats, supposedly the “resistance” to Trump, boast openly of their support for what passes for military lethality (or at least overpriced weaponry), while Democratic members of Congress line up for their share of war-driven pork. To cite a cri de coeur from the 1950s, have they no sense of decency?
The Shameless Embrace of Forever War & Its Spoils
In his farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned U.S. citizens about the “military–industrial complex.” (Elton Lord & Minesweeper; Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)
America should still embrace the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first significant figure to warn the country about the then-developing military-industrial complex (MIC) in his 1961 farewell address to the nation. Yet, even then, his words were largely ignored. Recently, I reread Ike’s warning, perhaps for the 100th time and was struck yet again by the way he highlighted the spiritual dimension of the challenge that all too sadly still remains.
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Those were the prescient words of the most senior military man of his era, a citizen-soldier and president, and more than six decades later, they need to be acted on if there is to be any hope left of preserving “our liberties and democratic processes.”
Wise words seldom heeded. Since 1961, the MIC’s “disastrous rise of misplaced power” has infected U.S economy and culture. Indeed, though the MIC failed spectacularly to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, the Afghans, the Iraqis, plus other embattled peoples across the globe in misbegotten and mendacious wars, it did succeed, over the years, in winning the hearts and minds of those who make the decisions in the U.S. government.
In an astonishing paradox, a spendthrift military establishment that almost never wins anything, while consistently evading accountability for its losses, has by now captured almost untrammeled authority within the land.
It defies logic, but logic never was this country’s strong suit. We reached a point of almost ultimate illogic when America’s bully-boy commander-in-chief insisted that an already bloated Pentagon budget needs an extra $500 billion, bringing it to about $1.5 trillion annually.
No matter what it does, the Pentagon, America’s prodigal son, never gets punished. It simply gets more.
More, More, More!
Not only is such colossal military spending bad for the country, but it’s also bad for the military itself. After all, it didn’t ask for Trump’s proposed $500 billion raise. America’s prodigal son was relatively content with a trillion dollars in yearly spending. In fact, the president’s suggested increase in the Pentagon budget isn’t just reckless; it may well wreck not just what’s left of democracy, but the military, too.
Like any massive institution, the Pentagon always wants more: more troops, more weapons, more power, invariably justified by inflating (or simply creating) threats to this country. Yet, clarity of thought, not to speak of creativity, rarely derives from excess. Lean times make for better thinking, fat times make for little thought at all.
Not long ago, Trump occasionally talked sense by railing on the campaign trail against the military-industrial complex and its endless wars. Certainly, more than a few Americans voted for him in 2024 because they believed he truly did want to focus on domestic health and strength rather than pursue yet more conflicts globally (and the weapons systems that went with them).
Operation Midnight Hammer against Iran, June 2025, was the first combat use of the 30,000-pound GBU-57 MOP (Massive Ordnance Penetrator pictured, May 2023). (US Air Force photo, Wikipedia)
Tragically, Trump has morphed into a warlord, greedily siphoning oil from Venezuela, posturing for the annexation of Greenland and its resources, while not hesitating to bomb Iran, Nigeria, or most any other country.
Although Trump’s supporters may indeed have been conned into imagining him as a prince of peace, the country’s militarism and imperialism clearly transcend him.
Generally speaking, warfare and military boosterism have been distinctly bipartisan pursuits in America, making reform of any sort that much more difficult. Replacing Trump in 2028 won’t magically erase deep-rooted militarism, megalomaniacal imperial designs, or even the possibility of a $1.5 trillion military budget.
Clearly, more, more, more is the bipartisan war song sung inside the Pentagon, Congress, and the White House.
Taking on the MICIMATTSHG, or the Blob
Ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern coined a useful acronym from the classic military-industrial complex, or MIC. He came up with MICIMATT (the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex) to highlight its blob-like growth. Congress and the rest are all deeply implicated in the blob.
I would add an “S” for the sporting world, an “H” for Hollywood, and a “G” for the gaming sector, which influence the public while being influenced by and subservient to the MIC. That gives us MICIMATTSHG.
Ike warned about the “disastrous rise of misplaced power” if it wasn’t challenged back in 1961. He also warned that the MIC could change the very structure of society, making America far less democratic. Subtly, he warned it might weaken America spiritually.
What did he mean by that? In another speech Ike made in 1953, he warned that Americans could end up hanging themselves from a cross of iron, becoming captives of war by pursuing military dominance globally, while losing democratic beliefs and liberties at home.
That is exactly what happened. The people were seduced, silenced, or sidelined via slogans like “support our troops” or with over-the-top patriotic displays like military parades, no matter that they represented something distinctly less than triumphant.
Americans in various polls today indicate that they don’t want a war against either Venezuela or Iran, but their opinions simply aren’t heeded. It’s time to perform an “about-face” and a march in double-time away from permanent war.
That means major reductions in Pentagon spending. The best and only way to tackle the inexorable growth of the blob is to stop feeding it money — and stop worshipping it. Instead of a $500 billion increase, Congress should insist on a $500 billion decrease in Pentagon spending. The task should be to force the military-industrial complex to think, improvise, become leaner and focus on how most effectively to defend America rather than fostering imperial dreams of wannabe warlords.
Trump’s current approach of further engorging the imperial blob is the stuff of national nightmares, not faintly a recipe for American greatness. It is, in fact, a sure guarantee of further decline and eventual collapse, not only economically and politically but spiritually as Ike warned in 1961. More wars and weapons will not make America great (again).
As the U.S. celebrates its 250th birthday on July 4, 2026, wouldn’t it be wonderful if it could save this deeply disturbed country by putting war and empire firmly in the rearview mirror? A tall task for sure, but so, too, was declaring independence from the British Empire in 1776.
William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, is a TomDispatch regular and a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals. His personal substack is Bracing Views. His video testimony for the Merchants of Death Tribunal is available here.
This article is from TomDispatch.com.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Mmmmmm – backtrack 100 years from his speech in 1961 and what do we have. The start of a massive Civil War that took many more citizens lives than all wars to date.
Donald is at war with his own citizens now – the irony that the Republicans have started it and are inflicting it specifically on Democrats is Civil War. When is the US military going to protect ALL the citizens from a President that clearly is at war with democracy and wields more power than the US Constitution ever envisaged?
The primary aim of modern warfare…is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society…
… For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.
George Orwell, 1984
AMEN!
The entire US economy is built around militarization, military contracts, pork defense spending, Silicon Valley tie-ins to the war industry, etc.
To move away from this would require a total dismantling of the status quo all around. In a word, it would mean a move towards socialism.
We have this sensation that increasing this military budget has everything to do with Big Investors making even more profits off of these increases.
Perhaps someone should do a Deep Dive into this aspect. Let’s ask Professor Richard Wolff or Dr. Hudson in how this is the Rich becoming even more wealthy by stealth and subterfuge.
The military technology complex always gets paid and so do their investors and the funds that run on their quarterly profits in order to claim fixing the problems the wars caused. Vietnam had to shoulder the Bill for South Vietnam in order to be reintegrated with world economics. Iraq still has their sanctioned funds for oil payment distribution under our control and various Afghan and Russian foreign assets held prisoner as a form of asset forfeiture. The deficit spending benefactors of technological billionaires still win.
The earnings get recycled by hedge funds and world investors until we lose their loyalty which may be ahead soon.
As it is wars get recycled into humanitarian attempts to restore our false dignity.w
The problem isn’t a lack of logic. It’s that cold rationality is incapable of appreciating the non-rational modes of life. If the goal is unipolar dominance, then stockpiles of military equipment and a short term profit oriented rapacious capitalism are useful strategies. If aiming at the most efficient ways to kill people, then employing a million or two brilliant scientists and engineers to design and build WMDs is logical.
My simple example of the difference is this: scientifically analyzed, a painting is a chunk of botanically derived fibers with splotches of chemically derived pigments. It’s the artistic, poetic, mystical, and even religious aspects that give it meaning. Non-rational values, symbols that connect directly to the unconscious, and metaphors that carry meaning merely rational words cannot are part of being human. Lack of these traits is why the MICIMATT planners seem so inhuman.
The CPI inflation calculator (bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm) says $100 worth of genocide munitions (if like food and other necessities) bought on 9/11 would cost $183.39 today. Just like the Average American’s wages (and support for Israel, Ukraine and illegal aliens) the military budget needs to be adjusted for inflation. The military appropriations bill for 2001 was “only” $287.8; it jumped to $343.5 the following year. If the military appropriations bills kept up only with consumer price index inflation (which seems to be calculated differently every few years), today’s appropriations would run about $628.53 billion.
Fortunately, Congress not the President sets the military appropriations budget. Unfortunately, both parties are stridently pro-War and pro-Israel (same thing, most of our wars this century have centered on stealing land and resources for the Zionists.) And it is no surprise America has picked countries like Israel and Saudi Arabia and Ukraine (most corrupt in Europe) and Somalia and South Sudan (most corrupt globally) to dump massive amounts of un-audited money. Nor is it a surprise that many of our elected officials and many of our top federal bureaucrats and their families become $10 million to $100 million richer during or shortly after their “service”. As one said about insider trading: “That’s the way capitalism works”, with a huge assist from the MICIMATT.
MICIMATTSHG leaves off the fundamental driving force behind all this militarism and its concomitant imperial lies: WS — Wall Street — or more accurately FC — finance capital — the parasitical octopus (Matt Taibbi’s vampire squid if you prefer), the tentacles of which are legions of financial predators for whose benefit the MIC exists in the first place: to exert muscle when bribery, extortion, fraud, and treachery fail to move the wealth of a target country into the hands of U.S. banks, debt peddlers, privatizers, and securitizers.
All the brainwashing, all the weapons, all the psychological conditioning of Western populations by media, think tanks, Hollywood, academia, etc., etc. etc. is there to manufacture bleachers full of cheering “patriots” when “beautiful” (Peter Jennings) U.S. Tomahawks tear through the sky to tear off the flesh of people whose leaders “massacre their own people” and make doors once shut to Wall Street open to “investment,” meaning plunder, debt, and poverty there and unimaginable opulence for the owners of the planet here.
Thank you. You beat me to it. All wars are banker wars.
Mr. Appledorf has the story exactly right here. I would add only one important nuance to his description of rackets he describes. The plunderers are in fact the members of the world’s longest-running, most successful and most psychopathic organized crime syndicate – the Western Mafia. The global scale of their plunder and destruction began with their founding of the British East India Company. They lost control of their American colonies in 1782 and regained their plunder control with their financial coup d’etat on December 23rd, 1913, and regained their political control with their assassination of JFK on November 22nd, 1963. They founded and control the operations side of the CIA (actually controlled by the Executive Director), and they control enough of what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls the MICIMATT to have siphoned off at least $20 trillion for their own purposes by 2016.
It’s highly likely that Eisenhower had gotten through most of his two presidential terms before he realized how little control he had over what was being planned and executed by the Mafia. The Dulles brothers were well positioned to be able to operate on their own while hiding behind the veil of “national security.” The speech was Eisenhower’s exposing the nature of what was going on without naming names. The Mafia had already planned the 1953 Iran coup d’etat before Eisenhower took office that year. Guatamala in 1954 as well. The Dulles brothers were at war with the McCarthy Committee (HUAC) all during this period, as well. And by 1956, there was enough social upheaval going on around racial integration and civil rights that the public’s and the [Mafia-owned] media’s attention was focused elsewhere as the Viet Nam War began, the 1956 Suez rupture where the British and French threats against the Egyptians were thwarted by the Eisenhower administration (by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles), and the British Empire was presumed to be finished (it wasn’t and isn’t). By the end of his presidency, I’m sure Eisenhower had wondered just who it was he had been fighting for in Europe. The Western Mafia has been running its rackets for many generations now. We need to think of our enemies as the psychopathic gangsters they are and use appropriate language to identify them. They have never believed that the rule of law applies to them, anywhere. The American Constitution has been their greatest obstacle to full control over the West, which is why they’re attempting to systematically dismantle it.
Give the M.I.C. all the $ they want on condition that they stop the *^$÷% killing .
While I agree wholeheartedly with this article I’m really sick to death of the hypocrite Eisenhower’s empty rhetoric being endlessly trotted out as an example of a wise man from our past warning us about our present disaster. The motherfucker was president for eight fucking years, what did he do to mitigate the burgeoning MIC of his day, which as he knew was really the Military Industrial Congressional Complex?
Not a damn thing as far as I know. He overthrew Mossadegh and installed the Shah, he signed off on the assassination of Patrice Lumumba as well as the Bay of Pigs invasion that they tried to force on Kennedy. He didn’t do anything that I’m aware of to draw down the military or the US empire.
So fuck Eisenhower and his empty bullshit, he had eight years to do something about what he obviously knew was an immense problem and he didn’t do a damn thing. Instead he kicked the can down the road and hoped somebody else would have the balls to do what he clearly didn’t have the balls to do.
Well that applies to a lot of ex presidents too.
Thanks, Analog Man. Do we have any historians of the Eisenhower years with evidence to dispute what Analog Man says. (I have often thought the same thing, but when “I Like Ike” was president, I was just a teen — and don’t really know how to think about this now.) ray
Thanks for confirming my conclusion.
Amen! You said about Ike exactly what I have been thinking.
Unfortunately, there is much in what you say.
He could have acted to save the 1960 summit with Khrushchev after the U2 crashed over the Soviet Union (probably due to CIA sabotage). Instead, he did not.
President Nixon actually tried to curtail the power of the CIA by ensuring that its Director delivered intelligence to National Security Council meetings after which he was required to leave.
Eisenhower, by contrast, allowed Allen Dulles to discuss policy. In fact, Eisenhower rejected his advice for a coup in Iran. Then, however, Allen Dulles later came back with a completely different set of arguments. Instead of realising that he was being manipulated, Eisenhower now chose to give in.
Well said. Thank you.