“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. Trump’s path to re-election was smoothed by the outright or implicit support or strategic silence of tech players (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel) who have recently entered the defense sphere and who have, along with the Big Five contractors, spent the past decade twisting the Pentagon to their wills. Policy, or the lack of it, has followed from there. No efforts have been made to expand DOGE’s government cuts to the Pentagon-and-contractor-funded think tanks. Attacks on weapons contractors and the elite law firms which service them seem to have had as their only purpose pressuring these players into highly specific giveaways like committing to pro-bono work for conservative causes that benefit the Trump Administration.
On top of this is Trump’s defense spending in the “Big Beautiful Bill”: $150 billion, “including $113 billion in mandatory funding for the military, which the Pentagon has said pushes its budget close to $1 trillion for the first time.” If recent history is any guide, almost half of this budget will go to the five private contractors: RTX (formerly Raytheon), Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin. The latter two, a government report found in 2015, regularly overcharge the Pentagon by hundreds of millions of dollars for Patriot PAC-3 missiles alone. The noncompetitive nature of the bidding also means not just cost overruns but technical problems, which put soldiers at risk. All the while there have been new and continuing Pentagon contracts with tech: with Amazon; with Musk; with, above all, Palantir, which has received $908 million in defense contracts since Trump took office. These include a contract to facilitate a project based on a March executive order “calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether [Trump] might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.”
The surge in spending, though, is not just a play for tech and corporate support. It is also meant to juice the economy without alienating corporations the way they might be alienated if their bottom lines were hurt by, say, a systematic deregulatory agenda that strips benefits from lobbied interests. This juice-the-economy-with-military-spending play is a repeat of Ronald Reagan’s “trickle down economics”—which, for all the debate about the economic theories at play, relied on military spending as well. At the height of the Cold War, according to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, “direct jobs in the arms manufacturing sector” were at 3 million; today the figure is 1.1 million, and sure to rise off Trump’s infusion of spending. These are significant figures—in 2008, for perspective, 880,000 workers were in the automative industry in total. But even more significant will be the jobs created downstream from these direct jobs—by subcontractors and vendors of all kinds who benefit from the spending of the well-employed. And an increasing number of these jobs will go to the native-born Americans who benefit from President Trump’s immigration policies.
Of course, the economic benefits of military spending to any administration increase exponentially if a national security threat can be located abroad—and securing these benefits is the likely purpose of our recent and continuing engagement with Iran. For one thing, continuing to monitor the Iranian threat so that, in a pinch, we can give Israel our backing will require ship deployments and private contractors. For another, a defanged Iranian regime (one which should, in Trump’s words in late June, get back into “the World Order Flow”) would help guarantee corporate contracts in Iran and with its allies, the flow of oil, and even development projects to American operators in the region. And all of these essentially economic plays can be done without criticism since they’re being done in the name of national security.
What’s more, a strike abroad on a designated enemy like Iran serves not just an economic but a political benefit. Standing for national security gives any administration a drawback-free chance to look strong in public—assuming it can minimize actual engagements abroad to avoid a body count. It was the body count area where the George W. Bush administration failed, in Afghanistan and Iraq—but Trump, like Reagan and Bush Sr., appears to be avoiding this pitfall. Indeed, like the invasion of Grenada in 1983, and like the invasions of Panama and even the First Gulf War a few years later, what President Trump calls the “Twelve Day War” is a play for oil and other Middle East resources mainly memorable for the rhetoric surrounding it.
“Our days of weakness are over, our military forces are back on their feet and standing tall,” President Ronald Reagan declared after the invasion of Grenada, an operation for which the number of medals awarded exceeded the number of combatants and which quickly became the subject of jokes on sitcom TV. General Keith Kellogg, the Special Assistant to President Trump, tweeted after the Twelve Day War:
Walking around the EOB/West Wing today there is a “different feel”. Like if you are sports team that won a major game or in business winning a major competitive contract. You “strut” differently. Helps when you have a President @POTUS and a military able to be described in two…
— Keith Kellogg (@generalkellogg) June 23, 2025
This was a retired three-star general talking about a no-casualty strike against a threat America’s own intelligence community deemed nonexistent by a president opposed to the strike until he saw how it might “play” on Fox in a conflict whose sole legacy may be the name the president gave it. But, just as CNN had its ratings breakthrough in 1991 with 24-hour coverage of the Gulf War (much of it off footage not captured by journalists but provided by the Pentagon from a test film of Patriot missiles), in the Twelve Day War the media got copy and the White House got coverage.
There is yet another benefit to militarism beyond juicing the economy and juicing an administration’s image, which is that talking about putting the military back on its feet with spending and strikes is a way for a president to act like a reformer without doing any of the actual work of reform. Not coincidentally, at just the moment when Trump’s focus turned to the military—a military parade on June 14, the strike on Iran a week later, the Big Beautiful Bill almost two weeks after that—the substantial reforms promised by the Trump administration have stalled. As of June, DOGE has saved $190 billion (arguably, when its costs are factored in, much less) and is tapped out unless it attacks the Pentagon and therefore the contractors. Immigration enforcement is inconsistent—leaving off workers in hotels, restaurants, and farms as well as potentially much of the state of Texas to keep key economic sectors humming. And only two new deals are, as yet, materializing from the tariff brinkmanship with over 170 nations that was supposed to bring back American jobs.
But what is most significant about the essential Trump Administration policy, the use of defense spending to bolster the economy and placate domestic discontent, is that it is the strategy our ruling class has used to keep power for eighty years. A recent, authoritative dissertation by Harvard PhD Tim Barker has shown that, in periods of recession since 1945, defense spending has boomed. This is the case for a straightforward reason. Defense spending is the only agreed-upon way by Democrats fearful of direct corporate giveaways and Republicans fearful of direct government programs to inject money into the economy, and it is hard to mount opposition against because it’s done in the name of “national security.” This is why those Democrats in the ascendency to oppose Trump’s Republican Party—U.S. Senator from Michigan Elissa Slotkin, gubernatorial candidate in Virginia Abigail Spanberger, U.S. Representative from New York Ritchie Torres—mimic Trump’s approach to defense.
In the end, there’s not much good news from this spending. Most jobs created in the defense sector are unstable, unless they’re unionized; and, if they’re unionized, they’re difficult to get rid of, making for inefficient production of vital equipment and harms to soldiers, which is already the case anyway thanks to contractor concentration. About the only people who really benefit from any of this are the corporate shareholders and the white collar weapons contractors who work for them. And the harms of these plays don’t end with wasted spending, faulty weaponry, at-risk soldiers, stunted reforms domestically, and alienated nations abroad. As I will show in a coming report, militarist policies meant to “heal the state” create wars at home that, in the Trump administration, are fast finding new detritus among Americans.
