The Military's Stranglehold on America

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website and is now here on the Mother Jones site.

The Pentagon is, by now, a world unto itself, with a staggering budget at a moment when no other power or combination of powers comes near to challenging this country's might.

In the post-9/11 era, the military-industrial complex has been thoroughly mobilized under the rubric of "privatization" and now goes to war with the Pentagon. With its $80 billion-plus budget, the intelligence bureaucracy has simply exploded.

In a sense, even the military has been "militarized." In these last years, a secret army of special operations forces, 60,000 or more strong and still expanding, has grown like an incubus inside the regular armed forces.