Although the United States’ militarist mentality is conventionally understood to have begun with the Spanish war in 1898, it pre-dates the very inception of the republic in 1783. Indeed, America’s war-making mindset is inseparable from its elitist, gendered, and racialised national identity that engaged in “scorched earth” violence against natives to seize land and colonise the continent. Such deeply-rooted militarised identities, linked with the material interests of arms firms and elites with a will to power, have endured despite mass opposition. The United States is and always has been an imperial, expansionist power.

Bipartisan Militarism

Despite the deafening “fire and fury” of domestic politics, Democrats and Republicans unerringly support the military-industrial complex – as exemplified by (Democratic) Roosevelt-Truman’s groundwork (1941-52) and (Republican) Eisenhower’s presiding over its construction after the Korean War (1953-61). External threats, real or imagined, Red, Black, or Yellow, are a fundamental feature of America’s wars and are politically expedient in diverting mass attention and extending elite interests in times of domestic crisis.

Even the end of the Cold War failed to diminish bipartisan militarism. Republican President George H.W. Bush’s militaristic New World Order was forged in the first Iraq War. Democratic President Clinton shifted America’s national security strategy away from “containment” to “democracy promotion” – a new imperial rationale for perpetuating the military-industrial complex amid mounting mass demands for a “peace dividend”. Clinton mobilised the so-called democratic peace theory to justify a coercive and soft power regime change underpinned by the violent power of the indispensable nation. A historic opportunity to promote peace was squandered, regime change institutionalised, and the era of “forever wars” relaunched. War remains the instinctive reflex and first resort of what Democratic President Obama – the Nobel laureate who waged relentless military interventions, especially unrestrained drone strikes – called the “Blob”, the “civilian” wing of the warlords of the military-industrial complex.

Modern Origins of Militarism

After 1945, a massive military-industrial structure vested in continuing global interventionism and dominance endured. In his 1961 farewell address, Eisenhower, the former Supreme Allied Commander who had seen firsthand the horrors of war, warned that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence…by the military-industrial complex.” He believed that unless compelled into alignment with “peaceful methods and goals,” the military-industrial complex would “endanger our liberties [and] democratic processes.”

The American power elite remained relevant in the socio-political milieu by capitalising on and helping to craft a global environment defined by incessant threat and emergency.

In 1956, political sociologist C. Wright Mills showed how the components of the military-industrial complex were embedded into an overall structure of what he called “power elites” across the military, political, and economic domains. World War II had elevated the leaders of those three hierarchies into positions of unparalleled power, which therefore incentivised them to work together to maintain those positions in “an often uneasy coincidence of interests”. They wielded the power of life and death over the planet.

The American power elite remained relevant in the socio-political milieu by capitalising on and helping to craft a global environment defined by incessant threat and emergency. Mills argued that “men in authority are talking about an ’emergency’ without a foreseeable end,” peace replaced with brief interludes in war-making, the default, permanent condition of the United States.

US General Smedley Butler, a highly decorated military officer, exposed the reality of American war-making after witnessing the devastation of World War I. He called wars a “racket” where “a few people make huge profits” and asked how many of the new 21,000 American millionaires and billionaires created during the war had “spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?” The realities of war are far removed from the lives of power elites.

New Times, Same Story

After the Cold War, the military-industrial complex needed and found new enemies to maintain its political influence and bloated budgets. Saddam Hussein’s swift defeat in Desert Storm promoted a Revolution in Military Affairs, where advanced technologies would guarantee similar victories across the globe, despite the imprecision of so-called “smart”. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright argued that 500,000 deaths of Iraqi children in the conflict were a price “worth” paying, a statement forgotten in her recent euphemistic eulogies. In 1991, the CIA produced more enemies with a coup d’état in Haiti that later “required” direct military intervention, while American special forces in Somalia (1992-1994) were withdrawn in disgrace after the “Black Hawk Down” debacle.

Europe, too, found itself back in the American crosshairs during the collapse of Yugoslavia from 1992-1994, as did Bosnia and Croatia in 1995. American boots returned to Africa post-Somalia; in Zaire and Liberia, an American airstrike destroyed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan that American intelligence somehow believed was a chemical weapons facility, an eerie prelude for the disastrous Iraq War in 2003. In 1998, prior to the crusading War on Terror, American aircraft were already bombing Afghanistan and Iraq (again), then went back to Yugoslavia in 1999 and Macedonia in 2001. This complete list of “official” American military actions between 1990 and 2001 does not account for what are likely hundreds of covert operations undertaken by American special forces, paramilitary groups, and foreign state-sponsored fighters.

The War on Terror, and especially its conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, had a similar effect on the military-industrial complex as World War II scholar Andrew Bacevich stated that “9/11 provided the tailor-made opportunity to break free of the fetters restricting the exercise of American power”. Indeed, 9/11 renewed the power of elites interested in the continuation of violence.

What’s it all for? America’s wars, what are they good for?

George Kennan – Princeton scholar, state department planner, and US establishment member who coined and outlined the Cold War strategy of “containment”, said it clearly in 1948: “We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships that will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security … We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”

And the fruits of American wars since 9/11 have been spectacular for military interests. According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University, post-9/11, “Pentagon spending…totaled over $14 trillion, one-third to one-half of which went to defense contractors.” Meanwhile, the human cost is around 500,000 dead in post-9/11 wars, excluding an estimated half-million deaths in Syria. Another 38M people across Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria were displaced internally or forced abroad.

Will it ever end?

From 2014-2021, the US substantially expanded its security assistance to Ukraine, amounting to more than $2.7B. Since the Russian invasion in February 2022, however, the US has earmarked close to $50B in military assistance, boosting the shares of the major US arms firms and raising energy and food prices that disproportionately hit working people.

Yet, there is a rising degree of opposition to militarism within the US. In 2020, both presidential candidates ran on promising an end to America’s “endless wars” in response to this sentiment among the general public. On the right, left, and centre of US politics, there is growing opposition to the sheer costs in blood and treasure of America’s military-industrial complex. But can this opposition overcome the might of the power elite?