Drift

By Rachel Maddow

12 min read

Why does it matter? Because America didn't choose to become a warfare state — it was nudged there, one quiet workaround at a time.

In Helmand Province, Afghanistan, the U.S. Army built a pump house to irrigate farmland. By the time it was finished, it had grown into a $5 million facility — complete with a guard tower, a generator the size of a shipping container, and a staff of contractors who had never operated a pump. The pumps did not pump. Nearby, a $108 million sewage treatment plant sat finished and idle because no one had thought to train anyone to run it. These weren't scandals. Nobody got fired. They were just the system working as it actually works.

You probably think America's forever wars happened because the wrong people had too much power and wanted to use it. Defense contractors writing checks, ideologues who liked the smell of jet fuel. And you're not entirely wrong — those people exist. But that's not the story. The real story is quieter and more depressing: the Founders specifically engineered American democracy to make war painful — politically, financially, personally painful — for anyone who wanted to start one. That friction was the whole point. And then, over roughly fifty years, through a long series of moves that each looked reasonable in isolation, we took it apart. A workaround here. A privatization there. A legal memo redefining what a president can do without asking anyone. No conspiracy required. The machinery of endless war doesn't need villains to keep running. It just needs the brakes to be gone.

The Founders Built a Speed Bump Into the Constitution. We Paved Over It.

The Founders deliberately engineered war to be inconvenient. They understood that the temptation to fight — glory, vengeance, territory — would always outrun the wisdom to resist, so they built structural friction into the system: only Congress could declare war, and any serious military campaign would require calling up citizen-soldiers from their civilian lives. Disruption was the point. If the neighbors' kids had to go, the neighbors got a vote on whether it was worth it.

For a century and a half, that mechanism held. Americans mobilized massively for each major war and then demobilized with stunning speed — twelve million in uniform at the end of World War II, down to one and a half million within five years. The pattern was: catastrophe, mobilization, victory, everybody goes home. The machine worked because going to war genuinely cost something on the home front.

Then Lyndon Johnson broke the machine, deliberately and quietly.

In 1965, as Johnson escalated in Vietnam toward what would eventually reach half a million troops, he faced a choice: call up the National Guard and Reserves — those weekend soldiers living in every community across the country — or increase the draft. Every war in American history had required the reserves. But Johnson understood what calling them up would mean politically. 'I think it's too dramatic,' he told Senate Armed Services Chairman Richard Russell. 'It commits me where I can't get out.' Disrupting the airline pilots and small-business owners who'd quietly joined the Guard to avoid service would force a public conversation Johnson didn't want to have. So he doubled draft calls instead, sending young men who lacked the connections or the college deferments to carry a war the rest of the country could mostly ignore. The structural safeguard — civilian disruption as the price of admission — had been quietly switched off.

General Creighton Abrams spent the rest of his career making sure no president could do that again. After Vietnam, he rebuilt the Army so that the reserves controlled functions essential to any major campaign — logistics, medical, civil affairs. You couldn't go to war without calling them up. The reserves were now the tripwire: activate them and you'd pulled half a million people out of communities across the country, and every one of those communities would want to know why. As one of his colleagues put it: 'Let's not build an Army off in the corner someplace. The Armed Forces are an expression of the nation.' The inconvenience the Founders built in was back, now hardwired into military structure. That was the lesson of Vietnam, and for a while, it stuck.

Reagan's Secret Weapon Wasn't the Military — It Was Fear Itself

The military had been re-hardwired for democratic accountability after Vietnam — but nobody had touched the political machinery that decided when to use it.

In the spring of 1976, Ronald Reagan found himself losing the Republican primary to a sitting president — losing badly, going 0 for 6 — when he landed on the line that would define the next two decades of American politics. President Ford was about to surrender the Panama Canal to a Panamanian general, Reagan told audiences in North Carolina. Never mind that the Canal Zone was never sovereign American territory, not legally, not historically. Never mind that Barry Goldwater publicly called him out for dishonesty, or that journalists catalogued the fabrications in real time. Reagan had his tagline: 'We bought it, we paid for it, we built it, and we intend to keep it!' When people corrected him, he said it louder. He won North Carolina going away.

Reagan's military buildup wasn't a response to a Soviet threat — it was built on a manufactured one, and the manufacturing started before he ever reached the Oval Office. A small group of hawks calling themselves the Committee on the Present Danger were lunching at Washington's Metropolitan Club and insisting that the CIA's analysts were too naive to read Soviet intentions accurately. Ford's CIA director, George H. W. Bush, let them into the intelligence process to write their own parallel threat assessment — Team B. What they produced was extraordinary. They claimed the Soviets were developing submarine tracking systems far superior to anything the U.S. possessed. The evidence? There was none. Team B's explanation: the absence of evidence proved the Soviets were hiding something even more advanced. They conjured Soviet capabilities out of thin air and called the conjuring 'analysis.'

When Reagan took office, he turned this theatrical intelligence into a glossy Pentagon publication called 'Soviet Military Power' — ninety-nine pages of artists' renderings showing Soviet tank factories superimposed over the National Mall, cover-to-cover scare copy about laser weapons and genetic engineering. It was released every year right around budget time. The first defense appropriation Reagan sent to Congress clocked in at nearly a 20 percent increase, unprecedented in peacetime by any measure. Congress, watching a president with 70 percent approval ratings, passed it. Deficits ballooned from 2 percent of GDP to 6.3 percent.

The Soviet Union whose capabilities Team B had conjured was, at that moment, struggling to feed its own citizens and fifteen years from disintegration. What Reagan built and left behind was a permanent national security apparatus that had learned the most important lesson of the era: fear is a better funding mechanism than facts.

The President Went to War. Congress Found Out on the News.

What did Iran-Contra actually cost? Iran-Contra (the mid-1980s scandal in which Reagan officials secretly sold arms to Iran and used the proceeds to illegally fund Nicaraguan rebels) ended with two national security advisers, a deputy CIA director, and a handful of operatives indicted. Reagan escaped by pleading a kind of presidential amnesia — 'I don't remember — period' — and the Tower Commission wrapped things up. Scandal caught, scandal corrected. That's the common understanding, and it's wrong about the part that mattered most.

The real damage wasn't in the courtrooms. It was in a 145-page minority report filed by a Wyoming congressman named Dick Cheney, who used the occasion of the most serious executive-branch lawbreaking since Watergate to argue that Reagan had done nothing wrong — that Congress had no legitimate power to stop a president from waging any war he chose. Cheney's argument was straightforward and radical: any congressional effort to constrain the president in foreign policy should be reviewed with 'considerable skepticism' and, where it interfered with 'core presidential functions,' struck down. Doubtful cases should always be resolved in the president's favor. This wasn't a brief filed in some obscure docket. It was a congressional document, formally entered into the record, reframing a scandal as a vindication.

The Founders didn't leave war powers to the executive by accident — they studied the history of governments and concluded that executives are structurally biased toward war, so they vested the decision in the legislature on purpose. The friction was the feature. Reagan's team had bypassed that friction spectacularly: they funded an illegal war in Nicaragua through Saudi petrodollars and a web of offshore shell companies run by a retired general, financed partly by profits from illegal arms sales to Iran, all while lying to Congress about every piece of it. When confronted, Attorney General Ed Meese performed legal acrobatics before a Senate committee, arguing that because the law forbidding the covert operations named the CIA and the Defense Department but not the National Security Council, NSC staffers could legally do what the CIA could not. Senator Daniel Inouye pressed him: couldn't the Agriculture Department run covert wars on that logic? Meese said yes. Essentially.

That argument deserved to die in that hearing room. Instead, Cheney's minority report put it in writing and called it constitutional principle. The intellectual framework he assembled — that war-making authority belongs, for all practical purposes, to one person — was waiting, fully formed, when September 11 arrived.

The Last Safeguard Worked — But Only by Accident

The Gulf War looked, in the end, like democracy working. Congress debated, senators gave floor speeches that made grown adults cry, and the Senate voted 52 to 47 to authorize force. Constitutional system vindicated. Except that's not quite right about what actually happened.

George H.W. Bush and Dick Cheney believed they needed no congressional permission whatsoever to send 440,000 Americans into combat in the Persian Gulf. Cheney said so explicitly, under oath, in Senate testimony — the president's authority as commander in chief was sufficient, full stop, the historical record of 200-plus military actions without a formal declaration of war proved it. The White House framed any eventual congressional vote not as a constitutional requirement but as a 'political benefit,' the way you might want a friendly foreign ally on board before a big operation: nice to have, not necessary.

What forced Congress into the picture anyway was purely logistical. Colin Powell told the president flatly that the offensive would require calling up at least 200,000 additional reservists. Bank managers in Ohio, schoolteachers in Georgia, getting their deployment papers before Thanksgiving. The moment those orders went out, the country was going to notice, and Congress was going to have to say something. The Abrams Doctrine didn't care about Cheney's constitutional theories. It just created an unavoidable political fact.

A federal judge named Harold Greene got to the legal heart of it plainly: the power to declare war belongs to Congress alone, and no president can reclassify a half-million-troop invasion as something other than war through a 'semantic decision.' But Greene refused to issue an injunction. He said it was Congress's job to assert itself — the court wouldn't do it for them. Congress eventually did, not out of principle, but because the reservist call-up had already made silence politically impossible. The system worked. Just not the way the Founders designed it to.

Once You Replace Soldiers with Contractors, Nobody Has to Notice the War

The story starts with toddlers. By the mid-1990s, the all-volunteer military was married, middle-class, and reproducing at a healthy clip. The Pentagon was spending roughly $6,200 a year on daycare for 575,000 preschool children of service members. Meanwhile, the procurement budget — the money for new weapons — had collapsed from $126 billion to $39 billion in a decade. Pentagon task forces staffed by defense industry executives, Halliburton among them, reached the obvious conclusion: what if the soldiers didn't come with all this overhead? What if you just hired someone else to cook the food, do the laundry, maintain the helicopters? Dick Cheney, in his final months as Secretary of Defense, signed the first contract under the Logistics Civilian Augmentation Program with Brown & Root Services — a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company Cheney would run for a comfortable salary four years later.

Think about what happens when a city hires a private company to run its parking enforcement. Suddenly there's no public vote every time they want to add more meters, no city council debate about whether Main Street should cost a dollar an hour or two. The contractor just adds meters. The political friction that used to slow the city down was doing democratic work, and now it's gone.

That's the logic that swallowed the Abrams Doctrine. What nobody said out loud, but what Army War College studies eventually put in plain language, was that LOGCAP wasn't just cheaper — it was quieter. When Clinton sent peacekeeping troops to Bosnia, he used contractors instead of reservists specifically, according to a government audit, because "the political sensitivity of activating guard and reserve forces" made the call-up unnecessary. An Army planner acknowledged they could have asked for more troops. They had LOGCAP instead. No reservist call-ups meant no bank managers getting deployment papers, no communities noticing, no Congress forced to respond.

The Abrams Doctrine worked by making war impossible to ignore. Privatization made it possible to ignore completely. American peacekeeping forces stayed in the Balkans for more than eight years. A Pew poll found the public was paying more attention to a recent blizzard.

The War Machine Learned to Run Without Anyone Steering It

Somewhere in the suburbs of northern Virginia, a CIA contractor sits in an air-conditioned room in front of a government-issue laptop, a joystick, and a bank of flat-screen monitors showing a live infrared feed from a drone circling a village in North Waziristan. When someone on the ground runs — when a 'squirter' tries to flee — a computer algorithm calculates how many of them can acceptably die to kill the one high-value target the system has been tasked to eliminate. The contractor in Virginia doesn't decide those ratios. The algorithm does. Nobody in particular is responsible for what happens next.

By 2011, one in five CIA analysts had been reassigned from intelligence gathering to hunting human targets — 'targeting' had become a formal career track at America's civilian spy agency. The CIA ran its own robotic air force, maintained by private contractors from the company formerly known as Blackwater, operating out of airbases in countries where the United States was not officially at war. The program was funded through a classified budget that Congress was legally forbidden to discuss. The oversight, such as it was, consisted of two senators telling the press they were deeply alarmed about something they couldn't name.

None of this required a single dramatic decision by a single identifiable person. It accumulated. Contractors replaced soldiers so nobody had to notice the deployments. Drone strikes replaced ground troops so the casualty count stayed invisible. The Founders built the Constitution to make war politically expensive — requiring a public argument, a legislative vote, a mobilization that touched ordinary lives. Each of those friction points had been quietly engineered away, leaving a system that generates war the way a factory generates product: continuously, with no one at the controls, and with the output largely hidden from the people paying for it. When a former intelligence official described the CIA as 'one hell of a killing machine' and then immediately asked to rephrase, he'd already said the true thing. The machine runs. Nobody steers.

The Nukes Are Fine. Probably. Nobody Checked.

Here's a question worth asking before you go to sleep tonight: how confident are you that someone checked? Not metaphorically — literally checked, flashlight in hand, peering through a postage-stamp-sized window on a missile casing to verify what was actually loaded onto the bomber.

In August 2007, a weapons crew at Minot Air Force Base loaded two pylons of cruise missiles onto a B-52 for what everyone assumed was a routine ferry flight to Louisiana — decommissioned hardware, scrap metal, no warheads. Nobody used the flashlight. Nobody consulted the updated schedule. One pylon wasn't even marked for transfer, which raised no flags. The bomber, call sign Doom 99, flew 1,400 miles across the American heartland carrying six live nuclear warheads — each capable of ten times the Hiroshima yield — past Sioux Falls, Omaha, and Kansas City. The pilot wasn't qualified for a nuclear mission. She'd never touched a nuclear weapon. When the ground crew at Barksdale finally discovered what had arrived, the warheads had been sitting unguarded on the runway for nine hours. Six nuclear weapons unaccounted for, a day and a half.

The Air Force general's reassurance to the Senate was that the weapons 'never migrated off the aircraft.' The senator had to ask whether pilots knowing they're carrying nuclear bombs might, in fact, matter.

That's what $8 trillion buys after the original purpose dissolves. The engineers who designed the W76 warhead's key components retired without documenting their formulas; when the government tried to refurbish the weapons, the knowledge had simply ceased to exist. So rather than ask whether thousands of aging warheads still made sense, the institutional response was to buy Republican votes for a modest arms reduction treaty by promising $185 billion in new modernization spending — rewarding the failure with a larger budget. Nobody steers. The machine just keeps running.

The Uncomfortable Math of Getting the Friction Back

Here's what Maddow leaves you with, even if she doesn't quite say it directly: the exit requires politicians to voluntarily rebuild the very obstacles their predecessors spent fifty years quietly demolishing. Tax the wars while you're fighting them. Force the votes. Bring the killing back inside the chain of command where someone's name is attached to it. None of that is complicated. All of it is politically suicidal for anyone who tries it first. The drift happened the way it did precisely because each workaround felt like the reasonable response to an immediate problem — Johnson didn't want an awkward conversation, Cheney wanted cleaner legal architecture, the Pentagon wanted cheaper logistics. That's what makes the ending hard: you're not looking for villains. The people who built this were doing exactly what their incentives rewarded, and the rest of us found it easier not to watch. Nobody scheduled a meeting to dismantle democratic accountability. Right now, there are roughly 50,000 private contractors operating in active conflict zones, none of them counted in the official casualty figures, and nobody had to vote for any of them. They just kept solving the problem in front of them.