The military-industrial-media complex. That’s the terminology Norman Solomon uses in his 2023 book War Made Invisible.
According to Solomon’s meticulously documented analysis, “[t]he business of war and the business of news are thoroughly intertwined,” and this long-standing synergy works to conceal the wide-ranging activities of our country’s military forces as well as the consequences of such activities.
Its efforts have been largely successful. Even many Americans who regularly follow the news from trustworthy mainstream sources are in the dark about the extent of our armed forces’ operations.
Consider some of the facts that Solomon highlights, drawing on Brown University’s Costs of War Project:
At present the United States operates more than 750 military facilities in foreign nations and territories. By contrast, Russia has three dozen at most, and China has a mere five.
Another fact that few Americans know: By 2023, the United States had launched counterterror operations in 85 countries—all in the name of the War on Terror.
So what about the military activities that have been covered?
Such reporting has typically lacked the consistent focus and depth that one would hope for.
Mainstream television reporting about the U.S. operation in Afghanistan, for example, involved an annual average of 24 minutes per network. This dearth of coverage is especially troubling given the price tag for America’s involvement in Afghanistan, which lasted almost two decades: $2.3 trillion.
Solomon notes that major news outlets tend to accept an administration’s account of military events at face value. As he puts it, “In mainstream media, even the best reporting is oriented to assume that Washington’s war policy makers, whatever their flaws, have creditable goals.”
Journalists in the United States tend to present the government’s official version of events, especially in the face of deadlines and because of the very real possibility of career setbacks if they fail to tow the line.
Something else that contributes to the marginalization of such news: the widespread notion that war always involves boots on the ground—U.S. forces in harm’s way. Given this myopic definition, mere attacks from the air don’t rate as war, and hence as a rule they don’t get much coverage.
The subtitle of Solomon’s book is How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.
So what human toll does he have in mind? First and foremost, the civilian lives that have been disrupted and lost in the course of these operations.
According to Brown University’s research group, the War on Terror has been expensive in terms of its human costs.
Since the attacks of 9/11, which precipitated the so-called War on Terror, more than 38 million individuals have been uprooted in such countries as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya. In addition, more than 387,000 civilians have lost their lives “in direct violence by all parties to these conflicts.”
U.S. reporters have failed in large part to examine the effects of our military’s involvement in other countries.
For example, the media’s muted reporting about Afghanistan grew even fainter after the U.S. withdrawal in 2021.
That lack of journalistic activity happened in the face of a devastating humanitarian disaster in the country—a catastrophe that U.S.-led sanctions on the newly installed Taliban government exacerbated.
Media coverage continued to be scarce even as the situation worsened. Early in 2022, Human Rights Watch cited an estimate that more than 13,000 newborns had died since January. In addition, more than three million Afghan children urgently required food aid at that time.
Beyond the arresting numbers of civilian casualties in foreign countries, the casualties of U.S. personnel haven’t gotten the media attention that one would think they’d merit.
More than 7,000 U.S. soldiers have died during the War on Terror.
In addition, a staggering number of active U.S. personnel have suffered psychological and physical injury during this period.
One cause of such physical symptoms: the burn pits that U.S. forces often used in the Middle East.
As Joe Biden put it in his March 2020 State of the Union address, such pits are full of “incinerated wastes of war—medical and hazard material, jet fuel and more.”
Biden included this in his speech in no small part because his son Beau could well have been a victim of burn pits. Beau had been exposed to such a site during his time of service, and he later developed—and died from—brain cancer.
An unusually high rate of veterans who had contact with burn sites later contracted brain cancer.
Biden’s comments provided a rare glimpse into an aspect of U.S. involvement in the Middle East that has otherwise gotten little attention.
Another underreported demographic: military contractors hired by private firms, who have often been placed in harm’s way in the course of War on Terror operations.
Brown University researchers estimate that about 8,000 contractors met their deaths during overseas operations.
Official tabulations of casualties don’t include civilians working on a contract basis.
Such workers, of course, cannot receive veterans benefits, and companies like KBR and Haliburton offered no healthcare benefits for such employees after their contracts came to an end.
The wives of U.S. military personnel have also suffered because of such “eternal wars.”
Spouses of veterans with PTSD are at a higher risk of harsh domestic abuse and intimate partner violence than almost any other group in the country—especially if the vet in question has suffered from a traumatic brain injury.
As it turns out, ordinary Americans living in their own country have also been victims at times.
While President Biden drew attention to the military’s hazardous burn pits overseas in his 2020 speech, he failed to mention that the military frequently makes use of burn pits in our own country.
Journalist Pat Elder, who started the MilitaryPoisons.org website, notes that “[c]hemicals, paint, medical and human waste, metals, aluminum, plastics, rubber, wood, and food waste are routinely incinerated by the Department of Defense in locations across the country” In fact, the Department of Defense burns far more waste in the United States than it ever has in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The outcome of such a practice: the contamination of soil, surface water, groundwater and wildlife in the surrounding areas.
All of these tremendous costs of the War on Terror, however, never get mentioned much when Congress mulls over how the military budget should look each year.
Nor do they make much of an appearance in the mainstream media’s routine delivery of the “news.”
In his final chapter, Solomon recounts a talk he had four years ago with Daniel Ellsberg, who shared the top-secret Pentagon Papers with the press during the Vietnam era.
What’s kept hidden from the American public, Ellsberg felt, “is that they are citizens of an empire, they are in the core of an empire that feels itself as having the right to determine who governs other countries.”Ellsberg also argued that, all in all, it’s not too tough to present a false narrative to Americans. After all, “you’re often telling them what they would like to believe—that we’re better than other people, we are superior in our morality and our perceptions of the world.”
