Overview

America spends nearly a trillion dollars a year on its military. This extraordinary spending not only detracts from our ability to address pressing social problems but compels us into foreign wars to justify our vast arsenal. Sold to us in the name of “security,” our military industrial complex actually makes us far less safe.

A damning indictment of the conflicts of interest running rampant in the defense establishment.

Publishers Weekly

Top policy experts William D. Hartung and Ben Freeman follow the profits of militarism from traditional Pentagon contractors, which receive more than half of the Pentagon’s budget, to the upstart high-tech firms that shamelessly promote unproven and destabilizing technologies. They unmask the enablers of the war machine–politicians, lobbyists, the media, Hollywood, think tanks, and so many more–whose work enriches a wealthy elite at the expense of everybody else, spreading conflict around the world and embroiling America in endless wars.

A damning tour de force, The Trillion Dollar War Machine shows who is pulling the strings and pushing for war, and offers a blueprint for how we can shut down the war machine and restore American security and prosperity.


Authors

William D. Hartung is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and an expert on the arms trade, Pentagon spending and strategy, and nuclear weapons policy. His books include The Trillion Dollar War Machine, and Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.

Ben Freeman is director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute. Ben is the co-author, with William Hartung, of the recently released The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home.

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