A veteran Washington reporter reveals how years of military-slanted domestic and foreign policy have turned the U.S. into a perpetual war machine. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower prepared to leave the White House in 1961, he did so with an ominous message for the American people about the "disastrous rise" of the military-industrial complex. Fifty years later, the complex has morphed into a virtually unstoppable war machine, one that dictates U.S. economic and foreign policy in a direct and substantial way. Based on his experiences as an award-winning Washington-based reporter covering national security, James McCartney presents a compelling history, from the Cold War to present day that shows that the problem is far worse and far more wide-reaching than anything Eisenhower could have imagined. Big Military has become "too big to fail" and has grown to envelope the nation's political, cultural and intellectual institutions. These centers of power and influence, including the now-complicit White House and Congress, have a vested interest in preparing and waging unnecessary wars. The authors persuasively argue that not one foreign intervention in the past 50 years has made us or the world safer. With additions by Molly Sinclair McCartney, a fellow journalist with 30 years of experience, America's War Machine provides the context for today's national security state and explains what can be done about it.

Scott explores the covert aspects of U.S. foreign policy. He presents compelling evidence to expose the extensive growth of sanctioned but illicit violence in politics and state affairs, especially when related to America's long-standing involvement with the global drug traffic.

Award-winning Washington reporter James McCartney and his wife and co-writer Molly Sinclair McCartney reveal how reckless military spending has made the U.S. into a perpetual war machine

Why does the United States go to war?—a leading Harper’s commentator on U.S. foreign affairs searches for answers. A withering exposé of runaway military spending and the private economic interests funding the U.S. war machine—for fans of Rachel Maddow and Democracy Now! America has a long tradition of justifying war as the defense of democracy. The War on Terror was waged to protect the West from the dangers of Islamists. The US soldiers stationed in over 800 locations across the world are meant to be the righteous arbiters of justice. Against this background, Andrew Cockburn brilliantly dissects the true intentions behind Washington’s martial appetites. The American war machine can only be understood in terms of the private passions and interests of those who control it—principally a passionate interest in money. Thus, as Cockburn witheringly reports, Washington expanded NATO to satisfy an arms manufacturer’s urgent financial requirements; the US Navy’s Pacific fleet deployments were for years dictated by a corrupt contractor who bribed high-ranking officers with cash and prostitutes; senior Marine commanders agreed to a troop surge in Afghanistan in 2017 for budgetary reasons. Based on years of wide-ranging research, Cockburn lays bare the ugly reality of the largest military machine in history: as profoundly squalid as it is terrifyingly deadly.

This intriguing study examines Western perceptions of war in and beyond the nineteenth century, surveying the writings of novelists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, philosophers, poets, natural scientists, and journalists to trace the terms of modern thought on the nature of military conflict. Daniel Pick brings together philosophical and historical models of war with fictions of invasion, propaganda from the Great War, interpretations of shellshock and speculations about the biological value of conquest. He discusses the work of such familiar commentators as Clausewitz, Engels, and Treitschke, and examines little-known writings by Proudhon, De Quincey, Ruskin, Valery, and many others, culminating in the extraordinary dialogue between Freud and Einstein, Why War? He analyses Victorian fears of French contamination through the Channel Tunnel as well as the widespread continuing dread of German domination. And he charts the history of the pervasive European belief that war is beneficial or at least functionally necessary. A central theme of the book is the disturbing relationship between machinery and destruction. Visions of relentless technological 'progress' and the inexorable advance of the military-industrial complex often seem to distort our understanding of war, even to reduce it to a sophisticated game played out by high-precision automata. Pick explores both the reassuring and troubling aspects of such representations. Shorn of human agency or responsibility, war apparently threatens to become technologically unstoppable, the remorseless 'perfect abattoir' of the industrial age. War Machine explores the enduring historical fascination with - and recoil from -brutal mechanical slaughter, and the modern aquiescence in, and enthusiasm for (in Rilke's phrase), 'these days of monstrously accelerated dying'.

Focusing on the draft resistance movement in Boston in 1967-68, this study argues that these acts of mass civil disobedience turned the tide in the antiwar movement by drawing the Johnson administration into a confrontation with activists who were largely young, middle-class, liberal, and from suburban backgrounds--the core of Johnson's constituency.

The inspiration for the Netflix original movie War Machine, starring Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton, and Ben Kingsley From the author of The Last Magazine, a shocking behind-the-scenes portrait of our military commanders, their high-stake maneuvers, and the politcal firestorm that shook the United States. In the shadow of the hunt for Bin Laden and the United States’ involvement in the Middle East, General Stanley McChrystal, the commanding general of international and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, was living large. His loyal staff liked to call him a “rock star.” During a spring 2010 trip, journalist Michael Hastings looked on as McChrystal and his staff let off steam, partying and openly bashing the Obama administration. When Hastings’s article appeared in Rolling Stone, it set off a political firestorm: McChrystal was unceremoniously fired. In The Operators, Hastings picks up where his Rolling Stone coup ended. From patrol missions in the Afghan hinterlands to senior military advisors’ late-night bull sessions to hotel bars where spies and expensive hookers participate in nation-building, Hastings presents a shocking behind-the-scenes portrait of what he fears is an unwinnable war. Written in prose that is at once eye-opening and other times uncannily conversational, readers of No Easy Day will take to Hastings’ unyielding first-hand account of the Afghan War and its cast of players.