Trump Makes War for the ‘Health of the State’
“War,” Randolph Bourne wrote, is “the health of the state.” But war is also, it has recently and quietly become clear, the cheapest and quickest antidote when the state gets sick. This antidote, in fact, represents the most significant part of President Donald Trump’s agenda since he assumed office on January 20, after running what many supporters believed was an antiwar campaign. Instead he has presided over an infusion of war spending to stabilize America with trickle-down job creation at home and resource extraction abroad.
This strategy represents the ratcheting up of what American patriots from the Founders to Dwight D. Eisenhower feared most: the twisting of life at home and abroad by the “merchants of death” who run Washington’s military corporate complex, what Trump until recently called “the deep state.” It is not the return to normalcy or solidity or America First that a majority of voters clearly hoped for in November. Instead it is a willful ignoring of systemic problems in Washington and a doubling down on American empire, this time in the name of America First.
The key to Trump’s approach is his treatment of the U.S. Armed Forces which, according to investigations in January and February including several of my own, has in recent years suffered a sharp decline in technical competence, equipment, and morale. These investigations have shown that the root of this crisis, which Trump attributes to DEI (Diverity, Equity, Inclusion initiatives), is instead corporate and legal concentration in Washington DC. This means the dominance, beginning in the 1990s, of five weapons manufacturers which captured contracts with the Pentagon and concentrated their operations by buying out smaller companies. They then installed their ex-employees, mostly lawyers, inside the Pentagon to negotiate more contracts and expand bureaucracy to shield themselves from liability. And they funded fifty or so Washington think tanks to issue reports justifying the need for the contracts in the first place. This created an expanded administrative-corporate apparatus focused on mitigating risk at the expense of training soldiers, and on purchasing defective weaponry from the “right” vendors rather than effective weaponry from the best ones.
The most telling example I researched was the crash of a B-1 bomber in January 2024: a more than $450,000,000 failure which stemmed directly from the corporate and bureaucratic concentration described above. The word used by one of my sources to describe this concentration and its effects was the “spreadsheeting” of the U.S. military. This spreadsheeting began in the 1990s with the Bill Clinton administration, and continued up to the Biden-Harris administration which put a faux-progressive blush on military-corporate giveaways. The diminishment of the U.S. Armed Forces it has caused will only be solved by structural reform; breaking up or limiting the influence of weapons contractors in Washington. But this is the last thing on the Trump administration’s mind, despite certain figures in President Trump’s orbit making it plain that it’s a problem.
And the lack of attention is not accidental.
Read more at The Libertarian Institute.