The War Industry: Why We Call It Murder When You Do It and Patriotism When the State Does

I want you to try a thought experiment with me. Imagine I sat down in my garage and built a machine designed to kill people. Not a hunting rifle, not a kitchen knife with a self-defense use case, but a purpose-built death machine. Now imagine I rolled it out into the street and used it. You would, rightly, consider me a monster. The police would arrest me. The news would call me a murderer, and every person you know would agree.

Now change one variable. Imagine instead that I am wearing a suit, I work for a defense contractor, my machine is called a drone or a missile or a guidance system, and it kills people on the other side of the planet on behalf of the United States government. Now the same machine, doing the same thing, is no longer murder. It's a contract. It pays for my kids' college. The factory that built it employs a thousand people in a swing district. Congress lines up to approve more funding. Nobody calls the cops on me. Nobody even calls me unethical at a dinner party.

That, in one paragraph, is the war industry. And today I want to walk through it with you, because I think most people, including a lot of people who consider themselves moral, have never sat with this contradiction long enough to feel how broken it is.

The Disconnect That Makes Industrial Killing Acceptable

Here is what I think the war industry actually runs on: distance. Not just physical distance, although that matters, but moral and psychological distance. A soldier in a trench in 1916 who stabs another human being looks that person in the eye and lives with it for the rest of his life. A drone operator in a windowless room in Nevada presses a button and the screen blooms white in Pakistan. A defense contractor designing the missile in a glass office in Virginia never sees a body at all.

That layered distance is not a side effect. It is the product. Every step of the modern war industry is engineered to remove the human element from the decision to kill. Algorithms target. Software fires. Logistics chains deliver. Spreadsheets justify. By the time the consequence reaches a child in Yemen or a wedding party in Afghanistan, no single person in the chain feels personally responsible for pulling the trigger, because no single person did.

The same psychology lets you and me, as ordinary citizens, accept this without losing sleep. We don't see the bodies. We see GDP numbers, jobs reports, and stock prices. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon (now RTX), Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and General Dynamics are not nightmares to us. They are stocks in our retirement accounts. That moral distance is the entire business model.

And because there is money in it, a lot of money, the whole arrangement becomes self-justifying. The war industry doesn't just sell weapons. It sells the moral cover that lets the rest of us not think about what those weapons do.

When the State Does It, We Call It Something Else

Let's name the thing plainly. Murder is the deliberate killing of another human being. That's the dictionary definition, not mine. When a private citizen does it without legal authorization, we call it murder and we punish it harshly. When the state does it through war, through executions, or through police violence, we use different words. We call it national defense, justice, or law enforcement. The act is the same. The label is what changes.

Look at the death penalty. As of 2025, the United States is one of the only wealthy democracies that still executes its own citizens. A man in a suit signs a warrant, another man in a uniform straps the prisoner to a table, and a third man in scrubs pushes a button or a syringe. A human being dies on purpose. We do not call it murder. We call it justice. The same act, performed by anyone outside the state, would land everyone involved in prison for life.

The same logic underlies corporal punishment, civil asset forfeiture taken to violent extremes, and the entire framework of state-sanctioned force. The state has, by legal definition, a monopoly on legitimate violence. That is Max Weber's classic 1919 definition of the state from his lecture Politics as a Vocation, and it's still how political scientists describe what a state is. Everything else is just an argument about when it is okay for that monopoly to be used.

If you accept that the state has the right to kill, then you have to ask: under what conditions, with what oversight, and at what cost? And once you start asking those questions honestly, the answers get really uncomfortable, really fast.

The Ethical Quandary of Being Anti-Murder but Pro-War

I want to point at the contradiction sitting in the middle of most American moral life. Most people you know will tell you, without hesitation, that murder is wrong. They will also tell you that war is sometimes necessary, sometimes even good, and that they support the troops, the flag, and the mission. They do not see those two beliefs as in tension. I'd like to suggest, gently, that they are.

If murder, defined as the deliberate killing of a human being, is wrong, then war is wrong, because war is the deliberate killing of human beings at industrial scale. You cannot square that circle by adding the word "enemy" in front of the victim. The man you killed in Fallujah had a mother. The woman vaporized in Gaza had children. The conscript you shot in Ukraine wanted to be home with his family more than he wanted to be holding a rifle.

Either murder is wrong because human life has intrinsic worth, in which case war is mass murder, or murder is only wrong when it's illegal, in which case you don't actually believe murder is wrong, you just believe in following the law. Those are the two options. There is no comfortable third position, no matter how much we want one.

This is not a fringe argument. It's the same logic that drove Tolstoy in The Kingdom of God Is Within You in 1894, that drove Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, and that drives every serious pacifist tradition from the Quakers to certain branches of Buddhism. Most of us have just never been asked to sit with the question.

If the State Has the Right to Kill, We Should Hold It to a Higher Standard

Let's say you disagree with me and you do think the state has the right to kill in certain circumstances. Fine. I'll meet you there for a moment. If we are going to grant the state this awesome and terminal power, then we should be holding it to an absurdly high standard, much higher than we hold an individual. The state has the resources, the time, the data, and the legitimacy that no private person could ever claim. With that comes responsibility.

And yet we don't hold the state to a higher standard. We hold it to a lower one. A private citizen who shoots someone in self-defense faces a grand jury, a trial, public scrutiny, and possibly years in prison even if cleared. A state that drone-strikes a wedding in Yemen issues a press release, classifies the after-action report, and moves on. No one is fired. No one is charged. The next strike is approved the following Tuesday.

That asymmetry is backwards. When the most powerful institution on earth, with the largest military budget on earth, the United States spent roughly 916 billion dollars on defense in fiscal year 2023, takes a human life, the bar of justification should be sky-high. Instead, it is buried in legal memos and the word "classified."

If you support the state's right to kill, then you should be the loudest person demanding transparency, oversight, civilian review, and consequences for mistakes. Otherwise you are not really making a moral argument. You are just licensing power.

It Literally Costs More to Kill Than to Imprison

Here is a fact that breaks the standard "justice is too expensive" argument used to defend the death penalty. In study after study, in state after state, executing a prisoner costs significantly more than locking them up for life. In California, a 2011 study estimated the death penalty had cost taxpayers over four billion dollars since 1978 for thirteen executions. In Kansas, capital cases cost about 70 percent more than non-capital cases. In Maryland, the average death penalty case cost roughly three million dollars compared to about one million for a life-without-parole case.

The reason is simple: due process, appeals, specialized housing, and the extra legal infrastructure required to kill someone responsibly is enormously expensive. Keeping someone in a maximum-security prison for fifty years is, by comparison, cheap. So when politicians tell you the death penalty is about saving money or being efficient, they are either lying or repeating a lie they never bothered to check.

The same math applies to war. The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates that the post-9/11 wars cost the United States over eight trillion dollars and killed roughly 900,000 people directly, with millions more dead from indirect effects like disease, starvation, and displacement. That is not even counting the carbon, the trauma, or the long-term medical care for veterans, which the Department of Veterans Affairs will be paying for the rest of this century.

If we cared about money, we would not be doing this. If we cared about human life, we definitely would not be doing this. Which leaves only one explanation: somebody is making money, and that somebody has enough political power to keep the machine running.

War Is Murder With Better PR

Let me say this clearly so there is no confusion. War is murder by definition. If war is morally acceptable, then murder is not actually wrong. It is just illegal. Those are not the same thing, and once you see the difference, you cannot un-see it.

I am telling you, plainly, that I do not think murder is just illegal. I think it is wrong. I think killing another human being for any reason short of immediate self-defense is a moral catastrophe, and I think we should stop doing it as a species. That means no war except as the last conceivable resort, no death penalty, no extrajudicial killings, no drone strikes on people we have not even properly identified. Diplomacy first, second, third, and fourth. Force only when literally every other option has failed and innocent lives are in immediate danger.

I know this sounds idealistic. I know it sounds like something a person says when they don't understand how the real world works. But I want you to consider that maybe the way the real world currently works is the result of a hundred and fifty years of normalizing industrial slaughter, and maybe the idealistic position is actually the sane one. Every other moral revolution in human history, the end of slavery, the end of monarchy, the expansion of suffrage, looked impossibly idealistic until it didn't.

War should be, with very rare exceptions, completely illegal under international law, treated like a crime against humanity in itself, and discouraged at every diplomatic level. The fact that this sounds radical to you is itself a measure of how propagandized we all are.

The Carbon Cost: How War Is Cooking the Planet Too

Here's something almost nobody talks about. The world's militaries, taken together, are one of the largest carbon emitters on the planet. The U.S. Department of Defense alone is the single largest institutional consumer of petroleum on Earth and one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases of any single organization in human history. Researchers at Brown's Costs of War Project estimate the Pentagon emitted over 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases between 2001 and 2017, more than most entire countries.

And under the Kyoto Protocol and subsequent climate agreements, military emissions were largely exempted from mandatory reporting. The single biggest polluter on the planet doesn't have to count its pollution. That is not an oversight. That is a feature designed by the same lobbyists who keep the war machine running.

Every tank, every jet, every aircraft carrier, every missile launch, every base in the desert is a carbon bomb on top of the literal bombs. The fires we set in Iraq, the fuel we burned in Afghanistan, the destroyed infrastructure we left behind, all of it accelerated the planetary crisis we now refuse to address. War is not just murder. It is making the entire planet less habitable for the people who survive it.

If you care about climate, you have to care about militarism, because they are the same problem wearing different hats. We cannot keep doing this and expect the planet to keep functioning. The math does not work, the chemistry does not work, and our grandchildren are going to inherit a world that is, quite literally, on fire.

The Military-Industrial Complex Is the Engine

President Dwight Eisenhower, a five-star general and a Republican, warned us about this in his farewell address on January 17, 1961. He used the exact phrase "military-industrial complex" and said the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. That was sixty-five years ago, and every single thing he warned about has come true.

Defense contractors now spend roughly 100 to 150 million dollars per year on lobbying Congress, depending on whose numbers you use. The top five U.S. defense contractors received hundreds of billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts in recent years, with their stock prices reliably surging every time a new conflict breaks out. There is a revolving door between the Pentagon, the contractor boardrooms, and the congressional offices that approve their budgets. The same people move between these chairs their entire careers.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is documented public record. Project On Government Oversight, the Stimson Center, and Brown's Costs of War have all published detailed accounts of who profits, how much, and through what channels. The system is designed to need war, because peace is bad for the quarterly earnings report.

And when peace threatens to break out, the machine generates new enemies. China today, Russia yesterday, terrorism the decade before, communism the decades before that. The threat is always real enough to justify the next budget increase, and somehow we never quite win the war, only escalate the next one.

So What Do We Actually Do About It?

I am not here to just complain at you. Here is what I think the path forward looks like, and where you and I can actually push.

First, demand transparency in military spending and military emissions. Every weapons program, every overseas base, every classified strike should be subject to public oversight at a level we currently don't have. The 2025 federal budget for defense and defense-adjacent spending crosses well over a trillion dollars when you count the VA, Homeland Security, nuclear weapons under the Department of Energy, and interest on past war debt. We deserve to see where it goes.

Second, support diplomats over generals. Fund the State Department like we fund the Pentagon. Right now the entire diplomatic corps of the United States receives a small fraction of what the military gets. That ratio reflects our actual priorities, and we should be screaming about it.

Third, push for stronger international law against war itself. The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 actually outlawed war as an instrument of national policy. It was signed by most of the world's major powers and is, technically, still in force. We have just chosen to ignore it. We could choose differently.

Fourth, vote against the war machine at every level. Refuse to support politicians who take defense contractor money. Refuse to celebrate "strong" candidates who promise to bomb our way to peace. Refuse to accept the framing that any criticism of the military is unpatriotic. Real patriotism is wanting your country to live up to its stated values, not laundering its worst impulses.

Fifth, talk about this with the people in your life. Most people have simply never been asked to think about war the way we just did in this post. The conversation itself is the start of the change. The war industry depends on silence and on the moral distance I described earlier. Closing that distance, one conversation at a time, is something every single one of us can do.

Sixth, and this is the deepest one, raise children who do not see violence as glory. The next generation gets the world we hand them, and right now we are still handing them video games where the highest reward is a kill streak and movies where the hero solves problems with a gun. That has to change in our homes before it can change in our politics.

The Truth We Don't Want to Say Out Loud

Here is what I keep coming back to. We have built an entire civilization on the assumption that some lives matter more than others, and that the state, when properly invoked, can decide which is which. That assumption is the rotten foundation under all of this. It is the assumption that lets a man in a suit press a button and feel like a patriot, while a man on a street corner who does the same thing is a monster.

I am not saying every soldier is a murderer. I am saying every war is a mass murder, and the soldiers are usually the youngest, poorest, and most lied-to participants in the whole machine. The people actually responsible wear suits, sit on boards, and never see a body bag.

If we want a different world, we have to be willing to say plainly that murder is wrong, full stop, and that war is a category of murder we have collectively agreed to look away from. Once you can say that out loud, everything else, the budgets, the strategies, the diplomatic choices, the elections, starts to look different.

Your Move

If this post moved you, or made you angry, or just made you think harder about something you've been taught your whole life not to question, I'd love to hear from you in the comments. And if you want a guide for how to think and live with this kind of moral clarity in your daily decisions, I wrote a book about exactly that. It's called Can and Will Do, and you can grab it at CanAndWillDo.com. It's about refusing to accept the easy lies the world hands you and doing what you can and will do anyway.

We do not have to keep building this machine. We chose it. We can choose differently. And the choice starts in conversations exactly like this one.

Thanks for reading! Please comment!

Other Related blog(s): Nouveau Economics, Lyceum Recordz