Waste is the Mission | The Socialist

Waste is the Mission: The Consumption and Excess of the US War

Machine

January 31, 2026 • Jacob Stevens - Anti-War/Anti-Imperialism Working Group

I once powered up a 35-ton diesel vehicle to charge a cell phone. I faced no reprimand, and I was far from the only one in my unit to do so. Amidst the background of enormous excess and waste that all soldiers see, participate in, or hear about, it simply isn’t a misdeed. Waste is the most pervasive, universal, tacitly accepted aspect of US Army service regardless of a veteran’s military occupation, rank, or service era. It connects us all. The resources extracted for the manufacture of equipment, the fuel consumed by the military machine, the vast amount of surplus that goes underutilized or unused, are all incalculably staggering sums. A large part of my disillusionment with the military is the acceptance of the simple fact that the purpose of a system is what it does. The hopes, values, and oath I wished to impose on my service were ultimately meaningless. My role in the machine, the role of all soldiers from the privates to the generals, is to consume equipment, fuel, and supplies for capitalist gain, and all else comes secondary.

The US Army consumes an ungodly amount of fuel. The diesel for all our trucks, tanks, and a dizzying array of tactical vehicles, most of it burned during training exercises, amounts to roughly 322 million gallons a year. For comparison, the nation of Liberia is consuming about 92 million gallons of petroleum a year for a population of about 5.7 million. If we include all the sworn active-duty soldiers, all the weekend warriors in the Army National Guard and Army Reserve, all the civilian employees of the Department of the Army, we get a “population” of about 1.2 million people. This group of personnel manages to burn three and a half times the amount of fuel as the entire nation of Liberia. Astonishingly, the US Army, as wasteful and excessive as it is, accounts for only 7percent of the 4.6 billion gallons of fuel consumed by the US military annually. The Air Force accounts for just over half of all military fuel consumption, and the US Navy takes about a third. Laughably, all military branches developed plans under Obama to increase energy efficiency in an effort to combat climate change. The Department of the Army had a goal of getting some large military installations to net zero energy consumption. Surprising no one, the Trump administration has ended these energy efficiency goals as part of their effort to scrub anything regarding climate change from the entire federal government.

The American war machine does significant ecological damage just by virtue of being such a large consumer. It is an unavoidable fact that industry harms the ecosystem and human beings extracting resources that we very much need for a wide variety of uses. We need steel for everything from railways to rebar and inflict widespread ecological damage and the displacement of populations through the extraction of useable iron ore. It doesn’t take much imagination to think up a better use for hundreds of thousands of tons of steel than building the army’s tens of thousands M1 Abrams tanks. Even the generals have said they have no need for more of them, but they keep getting built because congress is politically incentivized to ensure their continued manufacture. Likewise, all the resources extracted to make the rubber, plastic, electronics, munitions, etc. for all the army’s inventory could be used far more beneficially than such vast squandering.

The US army is infamous for its high volume of surplus equipment. There is an entire industry of small businesses selling army surplus. One can even bid online on all sorts of vehicles no longer needed by the DoD. But the Army must get rid of more stuff than it can sell (or give away. Every municipal police department is awash in military surplus). Every soldier has heard stories of the destruction of perfectly good, even brand-new equipment. Tens of thousands of vehicles, billions of dollars in munitions, gear of all possible description all are destroyed. My company in the army reserve was issued equipment that a unit of our mission set would never need, that only saw the light of day during inventory layouts, and will one day be run through an industrial shredder, still new in the package, when it has been deemed obsolete. All of those manufactured goods, all of that human labor, all of that resource extraction, for plastic, steel, aluminum, microchips, completely wasted at best. At worst, a piece of army equipment contributed to needless death and the enforcement of the imperial capitalist system that we as a party labor against.

The ecological toll touched on so far is just the US Army working as intended; it doesn’t even touch on the pollution it causes by accident or laziness. Water quality is bad at every Army instillation. The news sources say it is contaminated at a great many army bases, but soldiers have seen it so often, it’s safest to just assume the water is contaminated at every single one. Every building owned by the US army seems to infect the tap water by virtue of being a US Army building. The reserve training center where I went to for monthly training was only a few years old when I started going there; It had posted notices about heavy metals in the water.

The PFAS or “forever” chemicals that have been making the news in recent years are a commonly found contaminant in US military installations’ water supply along with benzene from leaky fuel storage containers and lead. Domestic military installations have provided the EPA a reliable source of superfund sites in need of extensive clean-up. For all the American population puts up with living adjacent to these dangerously polluted facilities, it’s nothing compared to what we do abroad.

The pollution and poor health outcomes caused by the mass burning of waste in the middle east is the most predictable and preventable disaster of the Global War on Terror. Surely, no serious person thought that the open air burning of plastic, rubber, electronics, all manner of textiles, and unexploded munitions via fires set with jet fuel was somehow safe. The phrase “burn pit exposure” in a VA compensation claim is nearly guaranteed to result in a disability rating. Sucking down a long list of unfiltered toxic chemicals has negatively impacted the health of an estimated 3.5 million military personnel over the years. Of course, this exposure only occurred for a deployment or two for these personnel, all of whom were medically assessed prior to their overseas duty to ensure good physical condition. There are no good estimates for the number of Iraqis, Afghans, and others in all stages of life who suffered downwind exposure day in and day out for years. We do know that civilian populations near US military bases in these regions suffered respiratory illness, cancers, birth defects, and damage to crops and livestock. We have caused irreversible harm to developing children and premature death among the elderly and infirm because the military thought it expedient to burn its surplus or damaged gear, and the true number of the harmed and dead will never be known because it wasn’t even worth it to the military to track.

The purpose of a system is what it does. Coming to grips with this line of thinking did a lot to shake me from my complacency and tear away the security blanket of duty and mission that I clung to as a soldier. All US military personnel know of the wasteful, excessive nature of the US military; there is simply no denying it, but for most, this is an unfortunate biproduct of national security, a problem in the war machine that those higher up ought to solve someday. Even most of my fellow socialists believe the US military is mission oriented; granted, they find that mission to be abhorrent, but it is an organization fulfilling a mission, nonetheless. I posit that the mission is secondary. Waste and excess are the main goals. Whether one believes that our army’s mission is national security or the enforcement arm of American capital, in either case, these are the biproduct. The billions upon billions of dollars in annual expenditures fattening the bottom lines of a whole ecosystem of defense contractors is the most reliable outcome of our nation’s army, and it has been a source of steady profits for a very long time.

A sampler of some of the juicy contracts that can be won by private for-profit companies: ManTech is the federal government’s go-to private sector partner for just about any technological solution. In 2017 alone, they were awarded a five-year $847 million contract to maintain and support tens of thousands of Army MRAPs, a $200 million contract providing tech support for DARPA, an $80.3 million contract for US Naval Air Systems Command, and $152 million for supporting the US Army Communications and Electronics Command. The Department of Defense must have been very satisfied with their services, because the following year in 2018, they awarded ManTech another billion in contracts.

ManTech is a heavy hitter in the defense industry, but it looks like a small business compared to the $51.9 billion that Lockheed Martin did in DoD contracts last year. For the army specifically, Lockheed Martin just won a contract last September worth $9.8 billion for building thousands of new and improved interceptors for the Patriot missile defense system (no doubt inspired by the spectacular failure of that weapon system to defend against relatively cheap rockets and drones in recent conflicts).

Not all the big contractors are US companies. As a UK company, BAE Systems has extra hoops to jump through to bid on US defense contracts, but it is highly lucrative to do so. Its American division did $13.6 billion in revenue in 2023 following two decades of gobbling up as many smaller defense companies as it can. Their most visible asset for the common soldier is the Bradley fighting vehicle.

Like all the great evils of our time, the unnecessarily high military expenditures are politically incentivized through lobbying efforts from the industry. The defense industry put about $69 million into its lobbying efforts in 2000, the year before the beginning of the Global War on Terror. By the end of the Bush era in 2008, they were spending $157 million on lobbying annually. It has been enormously successful; the Bush/Cheney administration provided generously for the war profiteers. Interestingly, the industry needed to spend slightly less on lobbying to elicit the Biden era pentagon budget, an unholy monument of bloat at a time that the administration was describing as “peace”. Notice that the sums described here for lobbying are paltry compared to the aforementioned contract amounts. It is challenging to find a better return on investment than the dollars the defense industry spends on lobbying.

The most effective of these lobbyists are former insiders. When looking up the career trajectory of former generals and admirals of all branches, it is more challenging to find one that hasn’t gone into the private sector wing of the military industrial complex. This revolving door galvanizes the perverse for-profit structure of America’s wars. Senior officers at the height of their power are incentivized to make the contractors happy to line up cushy jobs with those same firms.

A small sampling: Major General Kurt Lee Sonntag is a former special forces officer. He was the commanding general of the JFK Special Warfare Center and School; many comrades will recognize that storied institution as the birthplace of some of the worst malignancies of US foreign policy. The aforementioned ManTech proudly advertises all the senior military brass it has collected for its Defense Advisory Board, General Sonntag among them.

General James McConville is a former Army Chief of Staff under Trump’s first term and retained by Biden until his retirement from the military. This is the highest position attainable by a soldier in uniform answering directly to the secretary of defense and the president. Military drone manufacturer Edge Autonomy added quite a feather to its cap when it added him to the board of directors.

Brigadier General Jason Wallace holds a special place for me. He was the deputy commander in charge of operations of the 416th Theater Engineer Command. When I was deployed, he was effectively my fourth level boss. Even at this high level, he was still a reservist doing monthly drills like the rest of us when not activated for overseas duty. Yet even a weekend warrior like General Wallace has a cushy job waiting for him upon separation. He is a senior director at Dtech Mission Solutions, a subsidiary of Cubic Corporation, providing computer systems and support the military. Whether active duty, reserve, or guard, whether combat or support focused, every senior army officer can find himself a high paying position somewhere in the sprawling playground of the military industrial complex. There is enough pork in the appropriations bill to fatten them all.

US wars are about making money. This is not news to socialists, but again, one may be used to thinking of this from a mission focused framework. The US military is used to crack open foreign markets, destroy governments that dare to put their own national interests first, and enforce the rule of global capital, and certainly, it is used for these things. However, I would argue if these were the primary goals of the US military, this mission could be accomplished much more quickly, cheaply, and efficiently than it is managed at present. The class interests of the oil industry, the mining interests, and the other capitalists that enter the newly available foreign market following a US invasion are of secondary concern to the profits of the much more entwined defense contractors. In the last seventy-five years, our military has perfected the profitability of war. Consider, the Korean War cost the US about $30 billion to prosecute, $352 billion in 2024 dollars. The war profiteers watched with glee as we dumped more ordnance on North Korea than we did during WWII. The Vietnam War cost the US somewhere in the neighborhood of $138.9 billion; the real sum is likely higher and may never be known. That’s $766 billion in 2024 dollars. One need not say how happy the contractors were with the situation in Vietnam, a generation of folk singers already did. Iraq has cost the US (and again, it’s probably higher) $1.9 trillion, and Afghanistan $2.26 trillion.

It’s morbidly fun to imagine what could have been done instead with $2.26 trillion. Instead of needlessly destroying a foreign nation at the greatest possible cost for the sake of Raytheon’s shareholders, it could have been invested in solar power. It costs about $20,000 to equip the average home with solar panels. $2.26 trillion could have provided solar power to 113 million homes, the vast majority of America’s housing stock. In terms of wind power, it costs about $1.3 million per megawatt when building large wind turbines. The price tag of the war in Afghanistan could have provided us with 1.7 million megawatts of wind energy. Better mass transit is often cited as an effective means of addressing fossil fuel consumption and combatting climate change. Light rail is expensive to build in the US compared to other countries, but even at an estimated cost of $202 million per mile of newly constructed light rail, the cost of the Afghanistan war could have paid for over 11,000 miles, enough to replicate the Bay Area Rapid Transit system 83 times. The National Park Service costs $3 billion for fiscal year 2025 to run the entire system, and it more than pay for itself in visitors fees. The US National Park System is the envy of the world. The US could have modeled a global park system on the National Park System providing every other country on earth a first-class nature conservation and recreation service at the US’s expense and still not gotten anywhere near $2.26 trillion. Daydreaming outside the bounds of environmentalism for a moment, the government could have sent an entire generation of Americans to college for free, or given every single homeless American a free condo, or given every social security recipient a substantial raise. The only reason the boards and executives of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, etc. aren’t torn limb from limb by angry mobs is because the average American has not conceptualized the dollar cost of the Global War on Terror and what was robbed from the future.

The US Army, even if it did not wage constant war, is so big and intentionally inefficient, it does ecological damage just by the nature of its existence. It swallows up amounts of fossil fuel that dwarfs the annual consumption of entire nations. It demands the extraction of iron, aluminum, lead, rare earth minerals, and all the ecological fall out that results for the creation of equipment and machines that will at best sit and rot. The Navy and Airforce are even worse. The nature of its installations poisons the earth, water and people around them here at home and abroad. The opposition to US imperialism is necessarily an opposition to environmental harm. Any decrease in the defense budget is a decrease in resource extraction and fuel burned. Anywhere the US military is pushed out is territory not being directly blighted by polluting facilities. Anti-imperialists and environmental activists share common cause and should stand united.