{"id":52857,"date":"2025-05-05T06:31:14","date_gmt":"2025-05-05T14:31:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=52857"},"modified":"2025-05-05T06:31:14","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T14:31:14","slug":"the-department-of-empire-and-its-bloated-imperial-budget","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/05\/the-department-of-empire-and-its-bloated-imperial-budget\/","title":{"rendered":"The Department of Empire, and Its Bloated Imperial Budget"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from Bracing Views<\/a> with the author\u2019s permission.<\/i><\/p>\n

Language and repetition of the same is so important. We hear about the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Pentagon budget and we think little of it. The DoD, of course, used to be called the Department of War until 1947, a far more telling and accurate name, and there wasn\u2019t a Pentagon until we built one during World War II. In the old days, the Army fought the Navy for which service would get more money in the War Budget, with the Navy usually winning as America sought to control the seas as a means of dominating trade and \u201cintercourse\u201d among nations.<\/p>\n

Those were more honest times when retired generals like Smedley Butler wrote in the 1930s that he\u2019d served as a \u201cgangster\u201d for capitalism. Butler was a Marine who was twice awarded the Medal of Honor, so it wasn\u2019t easy for the imperialists to smear him, though they certainly tried (as they did to David M. Shoup, another Marine Corps general and Medal of Honor recipient who turned against the Vietnam War in the 1960s).<\/p>\n

Anyhow, I just saw at Antiwar.com<\/a> that President Trump is proposing a $1.01 trillion budget for the Pentagon for FY2026, a 13% increase in imperial spending. Trump, of course, is proud of reaching the Trillion Dollar threshold. Big numbers have always appealed to him.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t seem to matter who is president, whether it\u2019s Biden or Trump, Democrat or Republican, when it comes to the Department of Empire and its bloated imperial budget. For that is what it is, a budget that seeks to sustain and enlarge America\u2019s imperial domain. If you add other costs related to imperial dominance, such as interest on the national debt due to war spending, VA costs, nuclear weapons, and the like, the true imperial budget soars toward $1.7 trillion yearly.<\/p>\n

No matter. A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you\u2019re talking real money.<\/p>\n

The Pentagon tries to disguise the enormous waste of this imperial budget by speaking of it as an \u201cinvestment,\u201d but imagine an \u201cinvestment\u201d that you\u2019re involved in which fails seven audits in a row. How likely would you be to see this as anything other than theft?<\/p>\n

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Dwight D. Eisenhower had it right in 1953<\/a> when he spoke of military spending as a theft from those who hunger. Ike\u2019s words are almost never heard today inside the Washington Beltway. It\u2019s worth reflecting upon them again as America\u2019s leaders boast of trillion-dollar war budgets:<\/p>\n

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.<\/em><\/p>\n

America, I can\u2019t improve upon that.<\/p>\n

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), professor of history, and a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals. His personal substack is Bracing Views<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author\u2019s permission. Language and repetition of the same is so important. We hear about the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Pentagon budget and we think little of it. The DoD, of course, used to be called the Department of War until 1947, a far more telling and accurate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_social_image_id":0,"_social_image_url":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[758],"class_list":["post-52857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","_social_image_id":false,"_social_image_url":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/290"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52857"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52862,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52857\/revisions\/52862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52857"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=52857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}