“I didn’t guarantee no war. Why would I have built the strongest military in the world?” —Donald Trump

“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection.” —Donald Trump

U.S. military spending is a threat to the globe.

It has to be created by the U.S. Congress every year. Right now the so-called National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2027 has passed the House and not the Senate but will require more votes in each.

The legislation now moving through the U.S. Congress takes major steps to merge the U.S. and Israeli militaries into a single war and genocide machine, potentially eliminating any public notice of or possibility to block U.S. weapons shipments to Israel. The same legislation vastly increases U.S. military spending to a level far above the rest of the world’s military budgets combined. Part of U.S. military spending goes to aiding the militaries of other countries, part to pressuring other countries to increase their military spending, part to occupying other countries with U.S. bases, and part to producing propaganda for war and — in a deadly vicious cycle — to further increasing military spending the next year.

President Trump has threatened Iran with “levels of Military Terror, Strength, and Power not seen since World War II.” He has attacked numerous boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, the nation of Venezuela, and the nation of Iran, while supporting wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen, launching missiles into Nigeria, Somalia, and Syria, and threatening further violence in numerous other locations. This agenda is opposed by the people of the United States and the world in poll after poll. Candidates for the U.S. Congress are campaiging against it while failing to take the necessary steps to stop it.

The damage takes many forms.

Military spending does vast amounts of harm, first and foremost by taking funding away from areas where it could save and transform countless lives, but also as a leading cause of death, injury, homelessness, trauma, and environmental destruction, and as the leading cause of the violation of civil liberties, of government secrecy, and of the militarization of borders, policing, and culture. It concentrates wealth, fuels bigotry, impedes international cooperation, creates the risk of nuclear war, and increases the possibility of catastrophic climate collapse.

War spending is propped up by false beliefs that it is inevitable, justifiable, necessary, and/or beneficial — including the false belief that it creates jobs (see below) — but primarily by the false belief that we are powerless to stop it. 

We need to focus.

We are not powerless to stop it. Fortunes are spent on making us think that, and on distracting us from our goal. Even should the entangling of the U.S. and Israeli militaries be stripped from the current legislation, the results of the massive spending increase would be catastrophic. Even if some significant number of U.S. Congress Members should support some other hopeless bill that would reduce military spending, the results of passing the actual military spending bill would be catastrophic. Even if the Congress should block spending or express it’s feckless wish to block spending for the war on Iran, and even if 18 positive reforms should be attached to the military spending bill, and even if the Pentagon should be required for the umpteenth time to pass an audit, and even if U.S. elections should become a day closer each day, the results of passing the military spending bill would be catastrophic.