Right at this moment, we are witnessing an unprecedented shift of resources from domestic investments in the United States to the military-industrial complex (aka the war machine). The only comparable period in our history was the buildup to World War II, when the United States confronted a powerful adversary in Nazi Germany with designs to control not just Europe, but the world. The current buildup is breathtaking in scope and will certainly prove devastating in its impact — not just on this country’s foreign and domestic policies but also on the economic prospects of average Americans.
When, in 2023, my colleague Ben Freeman and I first conceived of our book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine, we viewed it in part as a cautionary tale about just how high the Pentagon budget might rise in the years to come (absent pushback from Congress and the taxpaying public). By the time our book came out in November 2025, however, the Pentagon budget had already topped the $1 trillion mark and, only recently, President Trump has proposed to instantly add another $500 billion to that already staggering figure and to do so in a single year’s time. And imagine this: such a proposed increase alone is higher than the total military budget of any other nation on Earth. Mind you, the current high levels of spending have already underwritten a provocative, unnecessary intervention in Venezuela and a region-wide war in the Middle East, and the larger costs of all this in human lives and damage to the global economy are guaranteed to shape the lives of the rest of us globally for years to come.
To add insult to injury, the Pentagon announced that it would seek a $200 billion supplemental appropriation to pay for its war on Iran, which has spread across the Middle East. That $200 billion would have been in addition to the $1.5 billion proposed for the Pentagon’s future budget. According to an analysis by Pentagon budget expert Stephen Semler, the Iran war, which started on February 28th with Israeli and U.S. air strikes on that country, cost the United States more than $28 billion just in its first two weeks. And to put that in perspective, $28 billion is more than three times the Trump administration’s proposed annual budgets for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency (at a time when the climate crisis and the need to head off future pandemics are essential to the health and security of all Americans). Worse yet, it’s all for a completely senseless war that should never have been started.
As President Trump alternates between engaging in negotiations to end the war and threatening to wipe Iran off the map — or even just walking away to bomb another day — there are reports that the supplemental budget request to pay for the war on Iran will shrink from the proposed $200 billion to $98 billion. And that $98 billion will include other things in addition to war costs, including disaster relief and aviation modernization.
Hellbound and Down 