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militarism
Could the US Military’s Recruitment Problem Be a Good Thing?
Is it possible that collective humanity is actually turning against war—seeing it more as the primary problem than the solution to our global ills?
Feb 09, 2025
Some experts worry that, if the country went to war, many reserve units might be unable to deploy. A U.S. official who works on these issues put it simply: ‘We can’t get enough people.’”
“Vietnam Syndrome” hasn’t gone away! It resulted in the elimination of the draft and ultimately morphed into “Iraq Syndrome”—so it seems—and even though those lost, horrific wars are now nothing but history, the next American war is ever-looming (against Canada?... against Greenland?). And yet, good God, the military is having a hard time recruiting a sufficient amount of patriotic cannon fodder.
“We can’t get enough people”—you know, to kill the enemy and to risk coming home in a box. And maybe that’s a good thing! The public is kind of getting it: War is obsolete (to put it politely). War is insane; it threatens the future of life on the planet—even though a huge swatch of the American media seems unwilling to get it and continues to report on war and militarism as though they literally equaled “national defense.” After all, we spend a trillion dollars annually on it.
Indeed, war unites us... in hell.
The above quote is from a fascinating—and troubling—piece by Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker, which has long been my favorite magazine. What troubled me was the unquestioned acceptance in the piece of the inevitability, indeed, the normalcy, of going off to war. In that context, war is simply an abstraction—a real-life game of Risk, you might say—and the proclaimed enemy is, ipso facto, less human than we are, and thus more easily reduced to collateral damage.
The article addresses a highly problematic (from a military point of view) diminishing of the military’s recruitment base. For instance: “Recruiters,” Filkins writes, “are contending with a population that’s not just unenthusiastic but incapable. According to a Pentagon study, more than three-quarters of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 are ineligible, because they are overweight, unable to pass the aptitude test, afflicted by physical or mental-health issues, or disqualified by such factors as a criminal record. While the political argument festers, military leaders are left to contemplate a broader problem: Can a country defend itself if not enough people are willing or able to fight?”
While this is no doubt a legitimate question—militarism, after all, exists in a social context—what’s missing from this question, from my point of view, is the larger one that hovers above it, emerging from the future. Perhaps the larger question could be put this way: In a world that is hostage to multi-thousands of nuclear weapons across the planet, and on the edge of ecological collapse—with its Doomsday Clock currently set at 89 seconds to midnight—can a country defend itself from its greatest risks by going to war? Or will doing so simply intensify those risks?
Here’s a slightly simpler way to put it: For God’s sake, isn’t war obsolete by now? Isn’t militarism obsolete? I’m surprised The New Yorker piece didn’t reach a little further into the stratosphere to establish the story’s context. Come on! This is the media’s job.
Actually, there’s also a second question emerging as well. Let me put it this way: Is it possible that collective humanity is actually turning against war—seeing it more as the primary problem than the solution to our global ills? Could this be so despite the quasi-meaningless borders the world has divided itself into, which must be “protected” with ever more omnicidal violence?
The story notes: “After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a groundswell of patriotic feeling encouraged young people to volunteer for the military. The sentiment held as the U.S. attacked the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and then as it launched an invasion of Iraq, which quickly toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime. But, as those wars dragged on, the public mood soured. The troops deployed there were unprepared and ill-equipped, sent to pursue objectives that could be bafflingly opaque.”
The public mood soured? Could this possibly be described in a more simplistic way—with less respect for the national collective awareness? What if something a bit more significant were actually happening, e.g., a public majority began seeing the invasion, the devastation of hundreds of thousands of lives, as... wrong?
And might, let us say, enormous human change be brewing? The same thing happened in Vietnam. It turned into hell, not just for the people of Vietnam—the war’s primary victims—but for the U.S. troops waging it. It became unendurable. “Fragging”—the killing of officers—started happening. So did moral injury: psychological woundedness that wouldn’t go away. Vet suicides started becoming common.
Back to Iraq. At one point the story mentions Bravo Company, a Marine battalion that had led the bloody assault on Fallujah in 2004. Two decades later, some of the surviving members held a reunion, which was permeated with anguish and guilt. For many, the trauma of Fallujah hadn’t gone away, and they remained emotionally troubled, often turning for relief to painkillers, alcohol, and methedrine.
All of which is deeply soul-cutting, but there’s a bit missing from the context: “Twenty years after the U.S. military offensive in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, locals are still suffering from the lasting impacts of the use of internationally banned weapons by U.S. forces,” according to Global Times. This includes such hellish instruments of war as white phosphorous and depleted uranium, the effects of which—on local air, soil, water, and vegetation—do not go away.
And of course the consequences for the locals have been ghastly, including enormous increases in cancer, birth defects, leukemia, still births, infant mortality and so, so much more, including “the emergence of diseases that were not known in the city before 2004.” And these effects will remain present in Fallujah, according to the article, for hundreds of years.
But the U.S. had to defend itself!
This is insane. War, as I have noted previously, is humanity’s cancer. It affects all of us, whether we belong to “us” or “them.” It affects us collectively. Indeed, war unites us... in hell. The mainstream media needs to stop pretending it doesn’t realize this.
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By Dehumanizing Others, Trump Makes Sure We Remain Our Own Worst Enemies
If Americans hate most of the planet beyond their borders—and go to war with it—they are creating the very reality they fear.a
Jan 24, 2025
And now Trump consciousness purports to claim—or reclaim—control over America: the land of white Christian nationalists and no one else, damnit!
But of course that level of selfishness—mine, mine, mine!—is only possible to maintain with a huge helping of fear alongside it: fear of the enemy. Fear of “them.”
Thus Alexandra Villarreal, writing in The Guardian about Trump 2.0’s first day in office (on Martin Luther King Day), noted, “He immediately involved the military, ordering the armed forces to ‘seal’ the U.S.’s borders ‘by repelling forms of invasion including unlawful mass migration.’
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
The belief that love is for white people only belittles love as a transformative concept: as the means to push beyond what, or who, we know, and continue evolving.
She goes on, “This new system at the border—replete with intense militarization and explicit violations of human rights—comes straight from the imagination of the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory, which pushes the racist idea that non-white immigrants are ‘invading’ predominantly white nations and ‘replacing’ white culture.’”
Governance is so much simpler when you can conjure up a wicked enemy for your followers to fear, but the cost of doing so can be monstrous—and not simply for those dehumanized as the enemy, who are usually not in positions of power and therefore easily exploited. Those pulled into us-vs.-them consciousness have also seriously minimized their own lives. For instance, Andrea Mazzarino, writing about U.S. President Donald Trump’s “divisive rhetoric around immigrants, calling them ‘vermin’ who are ‘poisoning the blood of this country,’” stirred up an old childhood truth in me: Takes one to know one!
You can’t dehumanize others without belittling your own soul.
And this begins to get at what makes the Trump 2.0 phenomenon so painful, at least to that part of the nation that sees beyond him. It’s not just because “they” (i.e., MAGA) won. Hate rhetoric—hate consciousness—is once again expanding its claim on who we are as a nation. But it’s not like this is new. Most of our history is inextricably linked with the exploitation, dehumanization, and, often enough, the murder—of... uh, non-white people of one sort of another.
When the MAGA-hat wearers cry “Make America great again,” they mean make America deaf again, Make America unaccountable again. Turn Uncle Stam into Jim Crow again.
The belief that love is for white people only belittles love as a transformative concept: as the means to push beyond what, or who, we know, and continue evolving. Consider this quote of Martin Luther King Jr. (which I don’t believe wound up being quoted during the Trump inauguration): “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”
This is the faith we need to honor right now, as the second Trump era begins. We find ourselves reaching for a handhold as we step into the darkness: That handhold is love. But what does that mean?
In her Guardian piece, Villarreal pointed out that the mass deportations Trump is planning will be relying on defense—that is to say, military—resources as well as the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, which could include the use of military aircraft to transport people back across the border. And suddenly I thought about Woody Guthrie’s iconic song, “Deportee,” which he wrote in 1948, in the wake of a plane crash in California that killed all 32 people on board. Mostly the dead were Mexican farmworkers, being sent back across the border—which meant, according to the media coverage, that they had no names... and didn’t matter.
. . . The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, “They are just deportees.”
Woody’s song didn’t bring anyone back to life, but it entered the soul of American consciousness and brought anguish, shock, and empathy into the public—the political—arena. It expanded the public sense of humanity; which remains expanded.
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees.”
Trump is claiming the power and authority to dehumanize whom he wants, e.g., the country’s 11 million “illegals,” whom he wants to turn into deportees. In the process, he is making sure that we remain our own worst enemies. If Americans hate most of the planet beyond their borders—and go to war with it—they are creating the very reality they fear. They are creating, or continuing to create, hell on Earth. Those who see the irony in this—linking, for instance, “Christian” with “white” and “nationalist”—must once again take that first step, beyond the worst of who we are, into a future that values all of us.
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Israel's War on Gaza and Beyond Has Cost US Taxpayers At Least $22.76 Billion: Report
"It has been difficult for the U.S. public, journalists, and members of Congress to get an accurate understanding of the amount of military equipment and financial assistance that the U.S. government has provided."
Oct 07, 2024
U.S. armed aid to Israel and related spending on American militarism in the Middle East cost taxpayers at least $22.76 billion over the past year, according to new research published Monday.
The Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs—which has long been the premier source for statistics on the human and economic costs of ongoing U.S.-led post-9/11 wars and militarism in the Middle East and beyond—called the $22.76 billion estimate "conservative."
"This figure includes the $17.9 billion the U.S. government has approved in security assistance for Israeli military operations in Gaza and elsewhere since October 7—substantially more than in any other year since the U.S. began granting military aid to Israel in 1959," report authors Linda Bilmes, William Hartung, and Stephen Semler wrote. "Yet the report describes how this is only a partial amount of the U.S. financial support provided during this war."
In addition to the repeated multibillion-dollar rounds of military aid to Israel, related U.S. operations in the region, particularly bombing and shipping defense in and near Yemen—where Houthi rebels have attacked maritime commerce and launched missiles at Israel—have cost over $2 billion since last October.
"It has been difficult for the U.S. public, journalists, and members of Congress to get an accurate understanding of the amount of military equipment and financial assistance that the U.S. government has provided to Israel's military during the past year of war," the report states. "There is likewise little U.S. public awareness of the costs of the United States military's own related operations in the region, particularly in and around Yemen."
The analysis adds that regional hostilities "have escalated to become the most sustained military campaign by U.S. forces since the 2016-19 air war" against the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
"The Costs of War project has an obligation to look at the consequences of the U.S. backing of Israel's military operations after October 7, especially as it reverberates throughout the region," Costs of War director Stephanie Savell said in a statement. "Our project examines the human and budgetary costs of U.S. militarism at home and abroad, and for the last year, people in Gaza have suffered the highest consequences imaginable."
According to the Gaza Health Ministry and international agencies, Israel's yearlong assault on Gaza has left at least 149,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, and millions more forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened. U.S. military aid to Israel has continued in successive waves, even as the country stands trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice.
The Hamas-led October 7 attack on resulted in more than 1,100 Israeli and other deaths—at least some of which were caused by so-called "friendly fire" and intentional targeting under the Hannibal Directive—with more than 240 people kidnapped.
Although the Costs of War Project report mainly covers U.S. aid to Israel since last October, it also notes that since 1948—the year the modern state of Israel was founded, largely through the ethnic cleansing of Palestine's Arabs—American taxpayers have contributed over a quarter trillion inflation-adjusted dollars to the key Mideast ally.
A second report published Monday by the Costs of War Project found that around 90% of Gaza's population has been forcibly displaced by the Israeli onslaught and 96% of Gazans face "acute levels of food insecurity." The publication cites a letter sent last week by a group of U.S. physicians to President Joe Biden—who has repeatedly declared his "unwavering" support for Israel—stating that "it is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza's population." That figure includes 62,000 deaths due to starvation.
"In addition to killing people directly through traumatic injuries, wars cause 'indirect deaths' by destroying, damaging, or causing deterioration of economic, social, psychological and health conditions," report author Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins wrote. "These deaths result from diseases and other population-level health effects that stem from war's destruction of public infrastructure and livelihood sources, reduced access to water and sanitation, environmental damage, and other such factors."
The new report comes less than two weeks after Israel secured yet another U.S. armed aid package, this one worth $8.7 billion. Meanwhile, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it faced a nearly $9 billion shortfall for Hurricane Helene relief efforts.
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