While many mainstream commentators blanch at the characterization of the United States as an empire, the hard data show that it is today impossible to seriously dispute. The U.S. military operates between 750 and 800 bases around the world, located in around 80 foreign countries and territories. Because there is no fixed or standard definition of “base” for these purposes, there is no accepted number, and some estimates place the figure at closer to 900. The U.S. is also known to operate dozens of secret military bases and black sites, further complicating attempts to settle upon an exact and definitive number.
Just as the number of military bases is disputed, experts have continued longstanding disagreements about how best to tally up total military spending. As the Peter G. Peterson Foundation observed earlier this year, “The United States continues to lead the world in defense spending by a wide margin. In 2025, defense spending by the United States accounted for 33 percent of all military expenditures by countries around the world,” with its nearly trillion-dollar outlay that year exceeding the combined spending of the other six biggest military spenders. This number is down from 2025’s value of nine to six largely because several other countries dramatically increased their military spending (Germany, for example, upped its spending by 24 percent). Breaking Defense reports, “The Pentagon is betting big on a $1.15 trillion discretionary budget request with a further $350 billion coming from the reconciliation process — together adding up to a historic $1.5 trillion defense budget.” The Trump administration’s discretionary funding request of $1.15 trillion marks the first time in history that a discretionary defense request has exceeded $1 trillion on its own. In the previous budget, for FY 2026, the total number hit the $1 trillion mark with a combination of $848 billion in discretionary spending and $113.3 billion in mandatory reconciliation spending.
The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) notes that many “obvious examples of programs many would consider ‘military spending’” under commonsense definitions are not a part of the Pentagon budget, including spending for veteran benefits, the Coast Guard, and even nuclear weapons. Looking at five different methodologies, a POGO report published in June points out that all five share at least one conclusion: “Military spending in the United States has long been radically underestimated.” (Not unrelated to this slippery accounting is that fact that the Pentagon hasn’t passed an audit in years, failing its eighth in a row at the end of last year.) This recent POGO report finds that “the true total military budget for the last fiscal year (FY 2025) was significantly higher than $1 trillion: It was likely between $1.5 trillion and $1.8 trillion.” If we count interest payments associated with debts for military spending, then “the range is between $1.7 trillion and $2.3 trillion.”
We rarely consider the domestic political implications of Washington’s globe-spanning empire, yet government spending on war and empire functions as the de facto national industrial policy of the United States, largely determining which cutting-edge technologies receive the most investment, which companies will enjoy massive state-guaranteed markets, and which physical objects will be the focus of the country’s industrial production capacity. Through the military empire, the state becomes both the architect of and primary consumer for a huge industrial sector. And while it has grabbed more headlines this year due to the parlous speculative bubble surrounding AI, the political consequences of the connection between the global military empire and the private sector tech industry remain woefully under-discussed in the mainstream discourse. The federal government is funneling billions to AI companies willing to work directly with the military, overpowering objections from employees and the investor market.
Just this week it was reported that “Palantir’s Maven Smart System, an artificial intelligence-powered military platform, is now an official program of record for the Pentagon.” The executive and strategic leadership of major technology companies also increasingly connects and overlaps with the military and national security establishment, often through the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit and liaisons dedicated to recruiting talent and procuring products from the tech sector. As we have already witnessed for decades, cutting-edge technologies developed for the war and empire inevitably end up being deployed domestically against Americans inside the country. Now more than 50 years ago, the Senator Frank Church Committee showed that the intelligence agencies used programs originally designed for foreign surveillance to monitor Americans here at home without warrants. We still have not seriously reckoned with this connection between the policies and technologies of the empire and the ways our own government sees us and governs us.
Since classical antiquity, astute observers have understood that this kind of worldwide military empire is fundamentally incompatible with the rule of law, constitutional government, and even the thinnest definitions of democracy. The administration of such an empire demands secret and centralized forms of decision-making and thus necessarily precludes transparency, accountability, and popular sovereignty. Contemporary political language has managed to disguise what is patently a system of permanent war and empire in the terminology of a liberal and rules-based order of international law and free trade. We have consigned terms like imperialism and colonialism to the history books even as we continue these systems in different forms today. Even the liberal side of our mainstream discourse no longer seriously questions the political system of war and empire that actually governs the country. We will not understand the form of domestic politics we have in the U.S. today until we stop trying to separate it from the imperatives of empire.
Hellbound and Down 
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