Tom Engelhardt: Slaughter Central
The United States as a Mass-Killing Machine
William Astore: Back to the Future at the Pentagon
‘It hardly occurs to us to question how the Pentagon’s mad military scenarios about near-peer wars could indeed end in nuclear annihilation.’
Tom Engelhardt: The Sports Pages of Death
Life in a Wounded and Wounding Land
William Astore: A Ten-Point Plan to Make Joe Biden a Peace-Time President
“What could be more exceptional, more laudable, than seeking a lasting global peace?”
Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. Davies: Will Biden End America’s Global War on Children?
Nothing in Biden’s long record in public life suggests that he will, unless the American public and the rest of the world act collectively and effectively to insist that America must end its war on children and finally become a responsible, law-abiding member of the human family.
Andrew Bacevich: Reflections on Vietnam and Iraq
Virtually all Democrats and many in the media ascribe to Donald Trump full blame for the mess in which this country finds itself. Yet Americans would do well to temper their expectations of what supplanting Trumpism with Bidenism is likely to produce.
Rebecca Gordon: It’s Almost Twenty Years Since 9/11
Perhaps the horrors of 2020—the fires and hurricanes, Trump’s vicious attacks on democracy, the death, sickness, and economic dislocation caused by Covid-19—can force a real conversation about national security in 2021. Maybe this time we can finally ask whether trying to prop up a dying empire actually makes us—or indeed the world—any safer.
William D. Hartung & Mandy Smithberger: Shrinking the Pentagon
Will the Biden administration dare cut military spending?
Mandy Smithberger: The Pentagon Budget
A Post-Coronavirus Economy Can No Longer Afford to Put the Pentagon First.
Lindsay Koshgarian: Cut the Pentagon 10 Percent. Invest in Public Health
At more than $740 billion this year, the Pentagon budget is more than 100 times the budget of the CDC—and more than 1,800 times the U.S. contribution to the World Health Organization that the president has promised to cut.
Andrea Mazzarino: The War Zone Is America
A Military Spouse’s Perspective on Racism and Armed Violence in the United States
Mandy Smithberger: Creating a National Insecurity State
At $1.21 trillion, the actual national security budget is essentially twice the size of the announced Pentagon budget… Yet those calling for higher budgets continue to argue that the only way to keep America safe is to pour in yet more tax dollars at a moment when remarkably little is going into, for instance, domestic infrastructure.
Mel Packer: A History of Deadly Meddling
In this essay, we hear a first-hand account from Mel Packer who was one of the Americans who visited Iran during the hostage crisis of 1980.
