By Tom Engelhardt

Americans may feel more distant from war than at any time since World War II began. Certainly, a smaller percentage of us - less than 1% - serves in the military in this all-volunteer era of ours and, on the face of it, Washington's constant warring in distant lands seems barely to touch the lives of most Americans.

And yet the militarization of the United States and the strengthening of the National Security Complex continues to accelerate. The Pentagon is, by now, a world unto itself, with a staggering budget at a moment when no other power or combination of powers comes near to challenging this country's might.

In the era following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the military-industrial complex has been thoroughly mobilized under the rubric of "privatization" and now goes to war with the Pentagon. With its US$80 billion-plus budget, the intelligence bureaucracy has simply exploded. There are so many competing agencies and outfits, surrounded by a universe of private intelligence contractors, all swathed in a penumbra of secrecy, and they have grown so large, mainly under the Pentagon's aegis, that you could say intelligence is now a ruling way of life in Washington - and it, too, is being thoroughly militarized.

Even the once-civilian Central Intelligence Agency has undergone a process of para-militarization and now runs its own "covert" drone wars in Pakistan and elsewhere. Its director, a widely hailed retired four-star general, was previously the US war commander in Iraq and then Afghanistan, just as the national intelligence director who oversees the whole intelligence labyrinth is a retired US Air Force lieutenant-general.

In a sense, even the military has been "militarized". In these last years, a secret army of special-operations forces, 60,000 or more strong and still expanding, has grown like an incubus inside the regular armed forces. As the CIA's drones have become the president's private air force, so the special-ops troops are his private army, and are now given free rein to go about the business of war in their own cocoon of secrecy in areas far removed from what are normally considered America's war zones.

Diplomacy, too, has been militarized. Diplomats work ever more closely with the military, while the State Department is transforming itself into an unofficial arm of the Pentagon - as the secretary of state is happy to admit - as well as of the weapons industry.

And keep in mind that we now have two Pentagons, thanks to the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which is focused, among other things, on militarizing the southern border. Meanwhile, with the help of the DHS, local police forces nationwide have, over the past decade, been significantly up-armored and have, in the name of fighting terrorism, gained a distinctly military patina. They have ever more access to elaborate weaponry and gadgets, including billions of dollars of surplus military equipment of every sort, often being funneled to once-peaceable small-town police departments.

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