William D. Hartung, Shutting Down the War Machine
Consider the change remarkable in its own fashion. The “President of PEACE” in his first term in office has distinctly become the President of WAR the second time around, whether in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean, in Venezuela, in Nigeria, in Somalia,or now in Iran. And it was indeed true that, though in his first term he took ludicrous creditfor bringing peace to the planet by stopping wars that he generally didn’t halt, Donald Trump did not launch any significant wars himself. The second time around, however, the Peace President of increasingly “Epic Fury” simply can’t seem to stop doing so. And he’s been using language in the process that no American president has ever publicly used before. As he posted on Truth Social recently about his plans for Iran (no matter that purposely targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime): “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
Yep, and with that “Fuckin’ Strait” (the Strait of Hormuz, of course), he’s piling presidential firsts one on top of another, even as, in a big-time fashion, he joins all the previous American presidents since World War II who have launched or been involved in staggeringly unsuccessful wars from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq. (Mind you, when it comes to Donald J. Trump and crew, “Fuckin’ Crooked” would be a significantly more accurate phrase.) Explain it as you will, in his second term as president, he has indeed been in a mood of — to steal his code name for his war on Iran — epic fury and seemingly all too ready to take the world that refused to give him a Nobel Prize down with him.
So, there should be little surprise that, this time around, the President of Peace is also remarkably eager to raise an already astronomical Pentagon budget by a mere $500 billion more dollars to a genuinely unprecedented $1.5 trillion and, if that doesn’t get him a Nobel Prize, maybe he’ll have to try raising it to two trillion dollars while cutting every civilian program in sight (as he’s already beginning to try to do). Now, with all of that in mind, take a deep breath and let TomDispatch regular William Hartung, co-author of The Trillion Dollar War Machine (though, of course, any future edition may have to be retitled The Trillion and a Half Dollar War Machine), escort you into the Trumpian version of the military-industrial complex. (If President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who gave the MIC its name in his farewell address in 1961, could be brought back today, he simply wouldn’t believe his eyes!) Tom
Reining in the Pentagon
Can the Military-Industrial Beast Be Tamed?
Right at this moment, we are witnessing an unprecedented shift of resources from domestic investments in the United States to the military-industrial complex (aka the war machine). The only comparable period in our history was the buildup to World War II, when the United States confronted a powerful adversary in Nazi Germany with designs to control not just Europe, but the world. The current buildup is breathtaking in scope and will certainly prove devastating in its impact — not just on this country’s foreign and domestic policies but also on the economic prospects of average Americans.
When, in 2023, my colleague Ben Freeman and I first conceived of our book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine, we viewed it in part as a cautionary tale about just how high the Pentagon budget might rise in the years to come (absent pushback from Congress and the taxpaying public). By the time our book came out in November 2025, however, the Pentagon budget had already topped the $1 trillion mark and, only recently, President Trump has proposed to instantly add another $500 billion to that already staggering figure and to do so in a single year’s time. And imagine this: such a proposed increase alone is higher than the total military budget of any other nation on Earth. Mind you, the current high levels of spending have already underwritten a provocative, unnecessary intervention in Venezuela and a region-wide war in the Middle East, and the larger costs of all this in human lives and damage to the global economy are guaranteed to shape the lives of the rest of us globally for years to come.
To add insult to injury, the Pentagon announced that it would seek a $200 billion supplemental appropriation to pay for its war on Iran, which has spread across the Middle East. That $200 billion would have been in addition to the $1.5 billion proposed for the Pentagon’s future budget. According to an analysis by Pentagon budget expert Stephen Semler, the Iran war, which started on February 28th with Israeli and U.S. air strikes on that country, cost the United States more than $28 billion just in its first two weeks. And to put that in perspective, $28 billion is more than three times the Trump administration’s proposed annual budgets for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency (at a time when the climate crisis and the need to head off future pandemics are essential to the health and security of all Americans). Worse yet, it’s all for a completely senseless war that should never have been started.
As President Trump alternates between engaging in negotiations to end the war and threatening to wipe Iran off the map — or even just walking away to bomb another day — there are reports that the supplemental budget request to pay for the war on Iran will shrink from the proposed $200 billion to $98 billion. And that $98 billion will include other things in addition to war costs, including disaster relief and aviation modernization.
The Garrison State and the Reign of the War Profiteers
On the campaign trail in 2024, Donald Trump pledged to drive the “war profiteers” and “war mongers” from Washington, suggesting that they like wars because “missiles cost $2 million each,” while bragging that, in his first term in office, “I had no wars.”
And his rhetoric as the ultimate champion of peace has continued during his second term, even as he has indeed launched reckless wars guaranteed to fill the coffers of the “war profiteers” he railed against on the campaign trail. He has, however, also pledged to help the weapons industry quadruple production of the same sort of “$2 million bombs” he decried during the campaign, plus — even better for the arms makers — missile interceptors that cost up to $12 million each. Worse yet, the demands of the current war on Iran, coupled with support for Israel’s war on Gaza and Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself from Russia, have left the Pentagon and the giant weapons corporations complaining that, if the U.S. doesn’t radically increase its production of artillery shells, bombs, and missiles, the cupboard could soon be bare.
Of course, filling that cupboard again to the tune of staggering sums of money is exactly the wrong solution. The answer to the current munitions shortage is not to further supersize this country’s arms manufacturing base, but to refrain from supplying the weapons used by Israel to commit genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, or to fuel unjustified wars like the current conflict with Iran. The best policy to prevent such stocks of military equipment from running low would, of course, be a more discriminating approach to military aid and a more restrained approach to U.S. foreign policy and war-making (writ large).
Washington should, in fact, put diplomacy first and only engage in military action if there is a genuine threat to the United States itself. We need a smarter policy toward military procurement and military strategy, not the garrison state with its “military-industrial complex” that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than six decades ago.
In addition, of course, the Pentagon needs to shift its procurement strategy toward producing more reliable weapons at a more reasonable cost, while avoiding unnecessary complexity so that they can be made more rapidly and spend more time ready to be used and less time down for maintenance. Such a formula was a watchword of the bipartisan congressional military reform caucus of the 1980s, which at one point included more than 100 members of Congress and helped roll back the extremes of the military buildup launched by President Ronald Reagan.
The Diminishing Economic Returns of Pentagon Spending
In a detailed forthcoming study for the Transition Security Project and in her own writings, investigative journalist Taylor Barnes of Inkstick Media has charted the diminishing returns from Pentagon spending. Despite a soaring Pentagon budget, direct jobs in arms production are now one-third of what they were 30 years ago, down from three million then to 1.1 million now, according to the arms industry’s own trade association. Unionization rates in the arms production sector are also down sharply, with some big weapons firms like Northrop Grumman having unionization rates of less than 10%. In keeping with that trend, Lockheed Martin moved the production of its F-16 fighter — a staple of foreign arms exports — to the anti-union state of South Carolina.
Even worse, many states provide special tax breaks and other subsidies to attract or keep weapons factories — and that’s on top of the hundreds of billions the industry receives in federal tax dollars. In Utah, the state government staunchly refused to reveal how many jobs Northrop Grumman had promised in return for state subsidies, with one official claiming it would “compromise” the interests of the company to do so. Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman’s work on the Sentinel, the newest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), has been a poster child for dysfunctional weapons development, with the estimated cost of the program as a whole growing by 81% in just a few years. Part of the problem was that Northrop Grumman somehow managed to ignore the fact that its new missile would be too large to fit in existing silos, creating the need for further costly new construction efforts.
The spending of scarce tax revenues goes to ICBMs that former Secretary of Defense William Perry once labeled “one of the most dangerous weapons we have.” After all, a president might literally have only minutes to decide whether to launch them on being warned of a potential enemy attack, greatly increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war prompted by a false alarm. And there have been many false alarms and nuclear accidents in the nuclear age (even if not yet an actual nuclear attack loosed on the world), as meticulously documented in Eric Schlosser’s essential book Command and Control.
Then there’s the Golden Dome missile “defense” system, a fantasy of President Trump’s that, in reality, could never provide the promised “leakproof” protection against weaponry ranging from ICBMs and hypersonic missiles to low-flying drones. By now, more than 40 years after President Ronald Reagan promised a perfect defense against ICBMs in his 1983 “Star Wars” speech, it should be all too obvious that such a leakproof shield is physically impossible, since enemy ICBMs with nuclear warheads would come in at 15,000 — and no, that is not a misprint! — miles per hour and could be surrounded by large numbers of decoy balloons that would be indistinguishable from a warhead when floating in space. There could be hundreds of such incoming warheads in a full-scale nuclear attack. To even have a chance of intercepting all of them, a defensive system would have to devote as many as 1,600 interceptors to take down incoming missiles. An analysis by the conservative American Enterprise Institute estimates that a full-blown effort to build a comprehensive Golden Dome shield could cost $3.6 trillion just to construct.
In fact, the Golden Dome concept is so delusional that it barely merits a detailed critique, though many such analyses are available. A more reasonable way to deal with it would, of course, be ridicule.
Ben Cohen, cofounder of Ben & Jerry’s and the founder of the “Up in Arms” campaign to cut Pentagon spending, has taken just such an approach. On April Fool’s Day, he placed a “Golden Hole-in-Dome” statue on the National Mall that included a Donald Trump, fully clothed, being soaked by water leaking through a faux Golden Dome shield. The Daily Beast‘s headline on its piece about the event captured the spirit of that day: “Ben and Jerry’s Co-Founder Humiliates Trump Outside His House.”
Meanwhile, the dysfunctional weapons systems on the Pentagon’s shopping list only continue to grow. Take Lockheed Martin’s F-35 combat aircraft, which was supposed to do almost anything (and does nothing) well. The plane, which could cost $2 trillionfor roughly 2,500 aircraft if the Pentagon’s original plans hold, had taken 23 years to develop and still can’t operate as advertised, spending almost half its time in its hangar for maintenance.
Similarly, as Dan Grazier of the Stimson Center has pointed out, the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, which had to dock in Cyprus recently after multiple mishaps including a clogged toilet system that spewed feces onto the flight deck, is a $13 billion nightmare, chock full of fancy, untested, and expensive technology that all too often fails to work as advertised. As he points out, a more viable, less expensive carrier could have been built if proven technologies had not been replaced with high-tech fantasies. Unfortunately, that’s generally not how Pentagon procurement works these days.
Palmer Luckey Will Not Come to the Rescue
Palmer Luckey, the 32 year-old former game designer who now runs Anduril, one of Silicon Valley’s top military tech firms, made news a few months ago when he told a CNBC interviewer that, if the Pentagon were to stop buying the wrong things, it could provide a robust defense for America at a cost of perhaps $500 billion, half of current levels and one-third of the level President Trump is now seeking. Presumably, the wrong things are piloted aircraft like the F-35 and mammoth ships like the Gerald Ford, and the right things are drones, uncrewed submarines, and complex AI-driven targeting and surveillance systems of the type that Anduril and Peter Thiel’s Palantir produce.
But count on this: replacing piloted combat aircraft with swarms of drones won’t automatically be cheaper, depending on how large the swarms are and how complex their designs may prove to be. Early on, the Ukrainian military decided that U.S.-supplied drones from Silicon Valley were too brittle and expensive, so it launched a do-it-yourself drone program that took cheap commercial drones from China and fitted them with bombs and cameras. U.S. arms companies are now trying to get back in the act by partnering with Ukrainian firms to build more sophisticated drones. Don’t be surprised, though, if their price soars and their reliability sinks.
Another reason AI-driven weapons may not be as cheap as advertised is that Luckey, Thiel, and their merry band of unhinged techno-optimists want to eliminate virtually any oversight of their activities, whether through independent testing of their new systems or measures to prevent price gouging by unscrupulous contractors. At present, the motto of the military tech sector is “trust me.” I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer to have someone minding the store, so that the tech billionaires don’t simply rob us blind.
Of course, what would it mean if Silicon Valley could deliver cheaper, more deadly advanced weaponry? After all, artificial intelligence systems were indeed used in recent times to accelerate targeting during Israel’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza, and they have been used in President Trump’s disastrous assault on Iran. And neither of those situations has yet had a happy ending. But that’s the point. The truth is we really don’t need ever more new weaponry that kills even faster. We need to stop the killing. And that means blunting the political influence of the warmongers and war profiteers that Donald Trump criticized on the campaign trail in 2024 and then so warmly embraced as president.
And to put all of this in grim perspective, he is now presiding over perhaps the most corrupt, incompetent, repressive regime in the history of this republic. And worse yet, some of his most dismal policies — like unstinting support for Israeli aggression — have, sadly enough, had bipartisan backing in Washington. In short, he has taken what were already some of the worst American policies and accelerated them, even as he destroys positive aspects of the government like the U.S. Agency for International Development’s provision of food, clean water, and public health services abroad or any further engagement in constructive international institutions.
Among other things, he is now narrowing America’s foreign policy options by dismantling civilian tools of statecraft, while doubling down on military approaches that haven’t “won” a war in this century (or the second half of the last one either). Meanwhile, the economic damage and humanitarian costs are spreading globally, including to his own supporters.
The challenge now is to build a movement that not only turns back Trump’s policies, but gets at the underlying economic, political, and cultural forces that have kept the United States in a permanent state of war for so long, while robbing us of opportunities to build a better, more peaceful, tolerant, and just future. Given the pace of destruction and chaos being visited upon us, it’s important to act now and continue to do so until we build enough power to rein in the war machine and begin creating actual structures of peace.
Copyright 2026 William D. Hartung
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.
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