Drift

Rachel Maddow argues that the United States has gradually abandoned the constitutional safeguards its founders designed to make going to war difficult, deliberate, and collectively felt. Over nine chapters and an epilogue, she traces how political decisions, institutional changes, and bureaucratic expansions since the Vietnam War have made American war-making nearly frictionless, insulated from public debate, and effectively controlled by the executive branch alone.

Maddow opens with examples of national security spending disconnected from rational purpose: her small Massachusetts town used post-9/11 Homeland Security funds to buy an oversized fire truck and elaborately secure a pump house serving seven homes, while a wastewater treatment plant in Fallujah, Iraq, ballooned from $33 million to $108 million, took seven years, served only a quarter of the city, and funneled roughly 10 percent of subcontractor payments to terrorist organizations. The post-9/11 intelligence apparatus grew to 17 million square feet of high-security office space and nearly 1 million security-cleared professionals, yet failed to catch the 2009 underwear bomber. National security policy, Maddow contends, now runs on its own momentum.

She traces this drift from the founders' intent. Thomas Jefferson cut the standing army by a third upon becoming president in 1801, and the United States long followed a pattern of rapid mobilization using citizen-soldiers followed by equally rapid demobilization. The Constitution vested war-declaring power in Congress precisely to make the decision difficult. That system broke down during Vietnam, when President Lyndon Johnson refused to call up the National Guard and Reserves, fearing full mobilization would provoke Russia and China and invite domestic scrutiny. The war was fought by active-duty troops and draftees while civilian life continued largely undisturbed. After Vietnam, Army Chief of Staff Creighton Abrams restructured the military under the Total Force Policy, weaving the Guard and Reserves into active-duty operations so that waging a major war without calling them up would be impossible. Congress also passed the War Powers Resolution of 1973 over President Nixon's veto, requiring the president to seek congressional authorization within 30 days of any military operation.

Maddow examines how Ronald Reagan, a Republican who rose to prominence through hawkish rhetoric, undermined these constraints. Reagan nearly won the 1976 presidential nomination by falsely claiming the Panama Canal Zone was sovereign US territory. As president, he pushed through an unprecedented peacetime defense spending increase of nearly 20 percent in his first year. The justification came from the Committee on the Present Danger, a group of hawkish academics and former officials who overstated Soviet capabilities. In 1976, CIA Director George H. W. Bush had invited these outside experts to produce a rival assessment of Soviet military strength. Known as Team B, the group invented threats, including nonacoustic submarine tracking technology they posited solely because they found no evidence of acoustic tracking. Many Committee members became senior Reagan officials, and their threat inflation fueled a trillion-dollar defense buildup at the expense of schools, infrastructure, and health care.

Reagan tested his war-making power with the 1983 invasion of Grenada. Planners used outdated tourist maps and avoided requesting intelligence from the National Security Agency for fear of leaks. Congress was informed only after troops were loading into transport planes. The stated justification was rescuing American medical students, but the government did not know most students lived at a second or third campus. Friendly-fire casualties and an accidental bombing of a mental hospital that killed 18 patients marred the operation, yet public approval soared to nearly 90 percent, establishing the precedent that a president could wage war while excluding the press and treating congressional consultation as an afterthought.

The Iran-Contra affair extended executive overreach. When Congress passed the Boland Amendment in 1984, prohibiting any US intelligence entity from supporting military operations in Nicaragua, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a member of the National Security Council staff, built a covert network to fund the Contra rebels using Saudi donations, private fundraisers, and an arms dealer's offshore companies. Simultaneously, Reagan authorized secret arms sales to Iran through an intermediary the CIA had classified as a known fabricator, hoping to free American hostages held by Hezbollah, an Iran-allied militant group in Lebanon. Profits from the Iranian sales were diverted to the Contras. When the scandal broke, Representative Dick Cheney's minority report on the congressional investigation argued that presidential war-making power should be essentially unconstrained. Maddow contends that because Reagan escaped accountability by pleading ignorance, these radical claims survived to shape future administrations.

The 1991 Gulf War tested whether remaining constraints could force national debate. President George H. W. Bush insisted he needed no congressional authorization, and his secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, argued that seeking it would set a dangerous precedent. But Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell requested 200,000 additional troops, requiring a massive Reserve call-up. That call-up was a product of the Abrams Doctrine, the deliberate restructuring of the military so that major wars could not be fought without mobilizing the Reserves. The mobilization made conflict impossible for the public and Congress to ignore, and the Senate voted 52 to 47 to authorize the war. Maddow argues the Abrams Doctrine functioned as the last surviving structural barrier forcing collective deliberation.

That barrier was dismantled through military privatization in the 1990s. Cheney, during his tenure as secretary of defense, had created the Logistics Civilian Augmentation Program, whose first contract went to Brown & Root; Cheney later became CEO of its parent company, Halliburton. When 20,000 US troops deployed to Bosnia in 1995, an equal number of private contractors accompanied them. DynCorp employees in Bosnia purchased minors for sexual exploitation from the Serbian mafia, and Army lawyers determined that neither Bosnian nor US law applied to the contractors. Under President Bill Clinton, Defense Department contracts grew to over $300 billion. Clinton used private military firms such as Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI), a company of retired US generals, to train foreign militaries under programs like the Democratic Transition Assistance Program in Croatia, avoiding the large Reserve call-ups the Abrams Doctrine was designed to require.

By the post-9/11 era, Maddow argues, war-making had become almost autonomous. The CIA operated armed drones from secret bases, functioning as a de facto military branch. Less than one percent of adults served during the post-9/11 wars, and half the public reported being unaffected by a decade of combat. In the decade after 9/11, the US Army lost more soldiers to suicide than to enemy fire in Afghanistan. By 2005, US defense spending equaled that of every other country in the world combined, yet the wars were funded entirely through deficit spending, with both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama extending tax cuts during wartime. The Iraq War's justification shifted repeatedly without generating sufficient resistance to end it.

Maddow devotes her final full chapter to nuclear weapons infrastructure as a case study in how massive military programs resist dismantlement. The United States spent roughly 8 trillion dollars on nuclear weapons in the second half of the 20th century. By the 2000s, scientists could no longer reproduce a classified material called Fogbank because the original experts had retired and no one had recorded the formula. In 2007, six live nuclear warheads were mistakenly loaded onto a B-52 and flown 1,400 miles without anyone on board knowing. To secure Senate ratification of a new nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia, President Obama agreed to massive increases in nuclear infrastructure spending, illustrating how programs built at enormous cost acquire their own political constituency.

In her epilogue, Maddow proposes reforms: pay for wars through taxes or war bonds; end secret military operations by making the CIA as accountable as the military; stop assigning diplomatic missions to the military; restore the Guard and Reserves to their citizen-soldier role; reverse privatization and hold contractors accountable; shrink the nuclear arsenal; and reassert congressional authority over war-making. She frames the founders' design of a peaceable nation not merely as an inheritance but as a responsibility.