The term “military-industrial complex” wasn’t really a thing in the United States before it was used as a warning in President Dwight “I Like Ike” Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation. And it’s not like Eisenhower was some peacenik, either. He attended West Point, fought in both world wars, was a five-star general, held the rank of Supreme Commander at one point, oversaw D-Day, and threatened to nuke China.

Eisenhower was president at a weird time. It was the post-War era and the United States was thriving, but so was the Cold War and McCarthyism. The military was growing even as wars became more cold and proxy-based. He oversaw some US-backed coups around the world — in Iran and Guatemala —and set the stage for the Vietnam War. He signed the Civil Rights Act and enforced integration of schools in the South. He planned the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Dude was all over the place.

At the end of his second term as president, his farewell address was short and refreshingly honest. Toward the end of his speech, he warned about some things he saw coming for America.

To say that we didn’t listen is a bit of an understatement. When he gave the speech, he pointed out that the US spent more on its military than the income of all US industries combined. At the time and adjusted for inflation, it was about a third of what it is today.

In August of 1990, President Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded and attempted to annex the neighboring country of Kuwait. It was a whole thing involving war debts, Donald Rumsfeld, and oil production that can, like most bad things, be traced back to British colonialism. The invasion was universally condemned and the UN issued an ultimatum backed up by a 42-country coalition. In January of 1991, the US led that coalition in a bombing campaign followed by a ground attack that freed Kuwait about a month later.

The on-the-ground fighting lasted roughly 100 hours.

It wasn’t the first war to be televised, but it was the first war with live broadcasts. CNN built almost its entire brand of 24-hour news on the Gulf War.

It was the first time the media got to broadcast video taken from the perspective of the weaponry itself — “camera-equipped high-tech weaponry directed against Iraqi targets." It was dramatic and high-tech and flashy. Front-line reporting and its narrative was tightly controlled by the US government, and the imagery of the Gulf War was all military spectacle and unabashed patriotism. It was propaganda. The US military had learned a lot of lessons from the bad image it (deservedly) got from the media during the Vietnam War.

Most of all, the coverage was effective. US President George H. W. Bush had an 89% approval rating — a number only surpassed by his son in the days following 9/11.

Umberto Eco, the guy that wrote the treatise on fascism, was born in 1932. He spent his formative years in Italy during World War II and he lived to be 84, only dying in 2016. He saw firsthand the evolution of warfare across his entire lifetime.

In April of 1991, he published “Pensare la guerra” in la Rivista dei Libri which was later republished as “Reflections on War” in Five Moral Pieces. In it, he lays out how he sees war in the late-20th century.

War stopped being nation-states in opposition and had become conflicts of nebulously aligned powers enacting the fighting for their own means. Sometimes these powers were nations, but even then, a globally connected, capitalist world meant that the concept of a nation had become a lot more permeable. And that meant that warfare, once a means to an end, had shifted as well.

Eco again:

The United States hasn’t been in a “war with a capital W” since 1945. Everything since — every military action, bombing, massacre, war crime, and death — has been something, apparently, less than a war. War has to be declared by Congress, and they haven’t done that. They’ve approved military actions. They’ve increased the military’s budget. But they haven’t, technically, declared war.

The label doesn’t matter. It’s entirely reasonable to say that the US has been involved in war-like foreign conflicts since the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941 — 85 years ago. That’s 98.3% of the US population that has never known the US at peace.

In 1995, French diplomat Eric Rouleau wrote of the Gulf War:

The damage was estimated to be almost $200 billion at the time — about $440 billion in today’s money. Power stations, oil refineries, communication, transportation, and manufacturing were all targeted. As many as 3,000 civilians — those people who were not consulted about the invasion — were killed during the Gulf War.

One decade and one Bush later, 3,000 American civilians were killed by the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The attacks frightened America in a way it had never been scared before, and it legislated accordingly.

The Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001 kicked off the Global War on Terror and gave the American president the authority “to unilaterally launch military operations across the world without any congressional oversight or transparency.” The USA Patriot Act expanded the surveillance apparatus of the US in ways that we are still grappling with and allowed for the indefinite detention of immigrants. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 created the Department of Homeland Security — ultimately leading to Customs and Border Patrol, ICE, Trump’s border wall, and the TSA.

A year after 9/11, 78% of Americans said they were willing to give up “certain freedoms to gain security.” In the 25 years since, the country has been slowly coming to terms with what that actually means, and how shortsighted the initial reaction was.

The Global War on Terror led the US into Afghanistan in October 2001. It was a war of revenge and it was a war driven by hurt. The stated goal was to remove the ruling Taliban who were allies of the group responsible for the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda. But the Taliban was not representative of Afghanistan. Even at the time, rule by a strictly religious minority group that didn’t even speak the same language as the majority of the country “made the Taliban appear as an occupying force.”

But the US didn’t care. It had been hurt and it was hitting back indiscriminately. The war in Afghanistan wasn’t even a war against an ideology. It was a war against the US’s nebulous and unfamiliar concept of fear. It took a decade before the head of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, was killed, and another decade until the US disastrously withdrew from the country. Over that time, over 400,000 civilians were killed.

Two years after the US invaded Afghanistan, it invaded Iraq. This second war was launched on a fabricated justification of Saddam Hussein acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Up to about 66% of Americans supported the new war. But support no longer mattered.

The Iraq War was also not a war and its prosecution was left to the powers handed to the office of the president after 9/11. Over the two decades of military action in the country, support for the war dropped to one in three Americans. But the US president had all those new levers to pull with the unilateral military authority Congress handed over in 2001. The civilian death toll of the Iraq War is widely disputed, but a number around 500,000 seems most likely. Half a million people who had nothing to do with the fabricated justification of a war that lasted an entire generation.

One of America’s favorite new acts of lethal not-war was drone strikes. The first drone strike happened in Yemen in 2002. Since then, the US has conducted an estimated 15,000 drone strikes in half a dozen countries. The official military numbers for how many of those strikes also killed civilians range from less than 1% to a little over 4%. Independent investigations put those numbers in the 10% to 15% range.

Initially, any drone strike needed high-level — White House-level — approval. The first Trump administration loosened those requirements and stopped reporting both drone strikes and the resulting casualties. Every president since George W. Bush has authorized or overseen hundreds of drone strikes.

Here in 2026, the Trump administration kicked off its not-war-war with Iran by bombing a girls’ elementary school, killing over 100 people. In the first month of the US’s attacks on Iran, nearly 2,000 civilians had been killed per the Human Rights Activists News Agency. That count is from over five months ago.

Last week, the US bombed a wedding in Kuhestak, killing five and injuring 70. The bombing was apparently part of an attack on a communication tower a block over from where the wedding was being held. When asked about it, a Central Command spokesman told the New York Times, “We are aware of reports, which originated from Iranian state media. The U.S. military never targets civilians, unlike the [Islamist Revolutionary Guard Corps].” Regardless of where the report originated or what the actual target was, there’s no doubt that the US fired the weapon.

The wedding is the fourth US attack that killed civilians instead of military targets that The New York Times has reported on.

Only 31% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the Iran war. But that doesn’t matter. The US’s reaction to 9/11 made sure that public opinion didn’t matter. Approval and disapproval aren’t even considerations.

It’s all business.

We’re a long way from Eisenhower’s story about US manufacturers begrudgingly switching from making plowshares to making swords. Instead, we have an entire industry — an entire military-industrial complex — devoted to making weapons.

There are entire companies whose only customer is the US military. Companies with CEOs and shareholders and a lot of people who get very rich from the business of killing. The US military’s budget for 2026 is just shy of $1 trillion, and Trump wants $1.5 trillion for next year.

In 2023, Senator Elizabeth Warren published a report showing “672 cases in 2022 in which the top 20 defense contractors had former government officials, military officers, Members of Congress, and senior legislative staff working for them as lobbyists, board members, or senior executives.” The steady flow of policy-makers turning into lobbyists has been called the Government-to-Lobbyist Revolving Door:

This is the exactly the “unwarranted influence” and “misplaced power” Eisenhower warned about made real.

Warmongering has become resume padding.

While children and wedding attendees are being killed, other people are getting rich.

The stock prices for a lot of the defense contractors are down — the stock market is more reflective of long-term contracts than, say, the number of Raytheon-branded missiles fired this week — but they’re still making bank. Fortune reports that, “RTX [Raytheon] and Northrop Grumman recently reported record backlogs of $289 billion and $105 billion, respectively, while Lockheed Martin’s backlog stands at $167 billion.”

Those backlogs are there to resupply the US’s munition reserves which are dramatically low. (And saying that makes me “treasonous scum” according to the president.)

But it’s not just the defense contractors that are profiting.

About a month into the war, on March 21, Trump posted a threat on his Truth Social account that Iran had 48 hours to fully open the Strait of Hormuz (the strait that was fully open before he started the war) or the US would “hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” That was around 8 p.m. on a Saturday. On Monday morning at 7 a.m., he posted, “I HAVE INSTRUCTED THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR TO POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES AGAINST IRANIAN POWER PLANTS AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A FIVE DAY PERIOD.”

Fifteen minutes earlier, someone (or a group of someones) moved a bunch of money in the futures market. They, effectively, bet that the price of oil would drop and that the stock market would go up — both things you’d expect if you knew what Trump was about to announce. Which is usually called “insider trading” and is, technically, illegal if that matters.

That someone made at least $580 million. 

The same thing happened again on April 7, but this time it was closer to $1 billion.

And that’s just in the established made-up-money-betting markets. Polymarket, a site where you can bet on literally anything from weather to sports to war, has been similarly suspiciously active. The day before the war started, 150 accounts placed bets that the US would attack Iran. Minutes before the attack that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, another account made over half-a-million dollars betting on that exact outcome.

In the US, people are paying higher gas prices, airfares, grocery prices, energy prices, and will be left with a $38 billion, taxpayer-funded bill. In Iran, people are paying with their infrastructure, their cities, and their lives. The economy of the entire globe has been disrupted and the lives of thousands of people have been ended.

And all of it — all of the suffering of those people “who were not consulted about … their government's madness” — is driven by the power-hungry actions of only a few people in service of making their cadre of the already rich slightly richer.