The Pentagon's a strange place. Inside secure command centers, military officials make life and death decisions--but the Pentagon also offers food courts, banks, drugstores, florists, and chocolate shops. When Rosa Brooks gave her family a tour, her mother gaped at the glossy window displays: "So the heart of American military power is a shopping mall?" In a sense, yes: the U.S. military has become our one-stop-shopping solution to global problems....

The creator of TomDispatch.com “focuses on the specific absurdities of American wars . . . strident, passionate, and problem-solving” (Mother Jones).
 
In 2008, when the US National Intelligence Council issued its latest report meant for the administration of newly elected president Barack Obama, it predicted that the planet’s “sole superpower” would suffer a modest decline...

In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans--all of which were suppressed...

How does a young person who volunteers to serve in the U.S. military become a war-resister who risks ostracism, humiliation, and prison rather than fight? Although it is not well publicized, the long tradition of refusing to fight in unjust wars continues today within the American military. In this book, resisters describe in their own words the process they went through, from raw recruits to brave refusers. They speak about the brutality and appalling...