U.S. national media have been lazy in their treatment of our military—pandering to the military itself and using retired general officers with ties to the military-industrial complex as spokesmen. The United States is largely in an arms race with itself, but the media typically ignore bloated defense spending. It is past time to reinforce Martin Luther King’s address to the Riverside Church in 1967 that linked chronic domestic poverty and military adventurism.
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Department of Defense has been playing an outsize role in the implementation of U.S. foreign policy and has too much clout in the production of intelligence analysis. The administrations of Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump have given the Pentagon an unprecedented position of power and influence, including huge increases in defense spending and a dominant voice in the making of national security policy. The media, relying for the most part on retired general officers, have been insufficiently critical of this militarization.