Military Spending

The Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month unveiled plans for a $740-billion defense-spending bill for fiscal year 2022. That’s nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars—in long form: $740,000,000,000. That looks like a lot of money. But looks can be deceiving.

For those of us who care about the affairs of state, giving credit where it’s due is just as important as calling out mistakes and missteps.

As President-elect Joe Biden pivots to the all-important work of governing, those of us who teach and write about foreign policy are pivoting to the less-important work of forecasting how a Biden administration might steer the ship of state.

Apologists of outer space exploration tout their collective efforts as the supreme manifestation of human rationality: peaceful, non-partisan, inoffensive, and humanistic. But the historical reality is that its institutional origins are largely irrational.

Drawdown: The American Way of Postwar is a fascinating analysis not of how the U.S. fights wars, but what it does in their aftermath.