The Detached Cruelty of Air Power

Mass Killers Have Been Above It All

by Norman Solomon and Tom Engelhardt | Aug 29, 2025 | 

The one thing you can say about Donald Trump in his second term in office is that, whatever he may be doing at home, he’s not fighting any wars abroad, right? Well, actually, wrong! Yes, American ground troops are no longer actively fighting wars around the world, but when it comes to air power, think again. And I don’t just have in mind his brief but devastating recent air assault on Iran (in conjunction with Israel) in which he dispatched B-2 stealth bombers to use (for the very first time) 30,000-pound bunker-busting bombs on that country’s nuclear facilities. After all, in the two months of this year in which he ordered the U.S. Air Force to bomb Yemen (yes, Yemen!), as the Guardian reported, the result would be “the deaths of almost as many civilians… as in the previous 23 years of U.S. attacks on Islamists and militants in the country.”

Of course, you’re right that, while the attack on Iran got major media attention, there’s next to no news about the other bombing campaigns he’s ordered. Since he took office in January 2025, his administration has launched air strikes in Somalia — yes, Somalia! — at least 68 (yes, 68!) times to almost no coverage whatsoever in this country (unless you happen to be reading Dave DeCamp’s work at the website Antiwar.com). That beats Trump’s previous record there of 63 set in 2019.

It’s true that, in his first term, he withdrew U.S. ground troops from Somalia, but the ongoing air war there has been brutal. Of course, air wars always are, though these days that’s something that’s seldom thought about, which is why, especially given the ongoing nightmare in Gaza, TomDispatch regular Norman Solomon’s piece today is so painfully appropriate. ~ Tom Engelhardt

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From Guernica to Gaza

by Norman Solomon

Killing from the sky has long offered the sort of detachment that warfare on the ground can’t match. Far from its victims, air power remains the height of modernity. And yet, as the monk Thomas Merton concluded in a poem, using the voice of a Nazi commandant, “Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.”

Nine decades have passed since aerial technology first began notably assisting warmakers. Midway through the 1930s, when Benito Mussolini sent Italy’s air force into action during the invasion of Ethiopia, hospitals were among its main targets. Soon afterward, in April 1937, the fascist militaries of Germany and Italy dropped bombs on a Spanish town with a name that quickly became a synonym for the slaughter of civilians: Guernica.

Within weeks, Pablo Picasso’s painting “Guernica” was on public display, boosting global revulsion at such barbarism. When World War Two began in September 1939, the default assumption was that bombing population centers — terrorizing and killing civilians — was beyond the pale. But during the next several years, such bombing became standard operating procedure.

Dispensed from the air, systematic cruelty only escalated with time. The blitz by Germany’s Luftwaffe took more than 43,500 civilian lives in Britain. As the Allies gained the upper hand, the names of certain cities went into history for their bomb-generated firestorms and then radioactive infernos. In Germany: Hamburg, Cologne, and Dresden. In Japan: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.

“Between 300,000-600,000 German civilians and over 200,000 Japanese civilians were killed by allied bombing during the Second World War, most as a result of raids intentionally targeted against civilians themselves,” according to the documentation of scholar Alex J. Bellamy. Contrary to traditional narratives, “the British and American governments were clearly intent on targeting civilians,” but “they refused to admit that this was their purpose and devised elaborate arguments to claim that they were not targeting civilians.”

Past Atrocities Excusing New Ones

As the New York Times reported in October 2023, three weeks into the war in Gaza, “It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign. In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II — including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to try to defeat those countries.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told President Joe Biden much the same thing, while shrugging off concerns about Israel’s merciless killing of civilians in Gaza. “Well,” Biden recalled him saying, “you carpet-bombed Germany. You dropped the atom bomb. A lot of civilians died.”

Apologists for Israel’s genocide in Gaza have continued to invoke just such a rationale. Weeks ago, for instance, Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, responded derisively to a statement by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer that “the Israeli government’s decision to further escalate its offensive in Gaza is wrong.” Citing the U.S.-British air onslaught on Dresden in February 1945 that set off a huge firestorm, Huckabee tweeted: “Ever heard of Dresden, PM Starmer?”

Appearing on Fox & Friends, Huckabee said: “You have got the Brits out there complaining about humanitarian aid and the fact that they don’t like the way Israel is prosecuting the war. I would remind the British to go back and look at their own history. At the end of World War II they weren’t dropping food into Germany, they were dropping massive bombs. Just remember Dresden — over 25,000 civilians were killed in that bombing alone.”

The United Nations has reported that women and children account for nearly 70% of the verified deaths of Palestinians in Gaza. The capacity to keep massacring civilians there mainly depends on the Israeli Air Force (well supplied with planes and weaponry by the United States), which proudly declares that “it is often due to the IAF’s aerial superiority and advancement that its squadrons are able to conduct a large portion” of the Israeli military’s “operational activities.”

The “Grace and Panache” of the “Indispensable Nation”

The benefactor making possible Israel’s military prowess, the U.S. government, has compiled a gruesome record of its own in this century. An ominous undertone, foreshadowing the unchecked slaughter to come, could be heard on October 8, 2023, the day after the Hamas attack on Israel resulted in close to 1,200 deaths. “This is Israel’s 9/11,” the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations said outside the chambers of the Security Council, while the country’s ambassador to the United States told PBS viewers that “this is, as someone said, our 9/11.”

Loyal to the “war on terror” brand, the American media establishment gave remarkably short shrift to concerns about civilian deaths and suffering. The official pretense was that (of course!) the very latest weaponry meshed with high moral purpose. When the U.S. launched its “shock and awe” air assault on Baghdad to begin the Iraq War in March 2003, “it was a breathtaking display of firepower,” anchor Tom Brokaw told NBC viewers with unintended irony. Another network correspondent reported “a tremendous light show here, just a tremendous light show.”

As the U.S. occupation of Iraq took hold later that year, New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins (who now covers military matters for The New Yorker) was laudatory on the newspaper’s front page as he reported on the Black Hawk and Apache helicopter gunships flying over Baghdad “with such grace and panache.” Routine reverence for America’s high-tech arsenal of air power has remained in sync with the assumption that, in the hands of Uncle Sam, the world’s greatest aerospace technologies would be used for the greatest good.

In a 2014 commencement speech at West Point, President Barack Obama proclaimed: “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come.”

After launching two major invasions and occupations in this century, the United States was hardly on high moral ground when it condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and frequent bombing of that country’s major cities. Seven months after the invasion began, President Vladimir Putin tried to justify his reckless nuclear threats by alarmingly insisting that the atomic bombings of Japan had established a “precedent.”

Whoever Doesn’t Count Goes Uncounted

Journalist Anand Gopal, author of the brilliant book No Good Men Among the Living, spent years in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion of that country, often venturing into remote rural areas unvisited by Western reporters. While U.S. media outlets were transfixed with debating the wisdom of finally withdrawing troops from that country in August 2021 and the flaws in the execution of the departure, Gopal was rendering a verdict that few in power showed the slightest interest in hearing: the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan had involved the large-scale killing of civilians from the air, and civilian deaths had been “grossly undercounted.”

In Helmand Province (“really the epicenter of the violence for the last two decades”), Gopal investigated what had happened to the family of a housewife named Shakira, who lived in the small village of Pan Killay. As he explained during a Democracy Now! interview, she had lost 16 members of her family. “What was remarkable or astonishing about this was that this wasn’t in one airstrike or in one mass casualty incident,” he pointed out. “This was in 14 or 15 different incidents over 20 years.” He added:

“So, people were living — reliving tragedy again and again. And it wasn’t just Shakira, because I was interested, after interviewing her, to see how representative this was. So, I managed to talk to over a dozen families. I got the names of the people who were killed. I tried to triangulate that information with death certificates and other eyewitnesses. And so, the level of human loss is really extraordinary. And most of these deaths were never recorded. It’s usually the big airstrikes that make the media, because in these areas there’s not a lot of internet penetration, there’s not — there’s no media there. And so, a lot of the smaller deaths of ones and twos don’t get recorded. And so, I think we’ve grossly undercounted the number of civilians who died in this war.”

Citing a U.N. study of casualties during the first half of 2019, the BBC summed up the findings this way: “Some 717 civilians were killed by Afghan and U.S. forces, compared to 531 by militants… Air strikes, mostly carried out by American warplanes, killed 363 people, including 89 children, in the first six months of the year.”

During my brief trip to Afghanistan 10 years earlier, I had visited the Helmand Refugee Camp District 5 on the outskirts of Kabul, where I met a seven-year-old girl named Guljumma. She told me about what had happened one morning the previous year when she was sleeping at her home in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley. At about 5 a.m., the U.S. Air Force dropped bombs. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.

As Guljumma spoke, several hundred people were living under makeshift tents in the refugee camp. Basics like food arrived only sporadically. Her father, Wakil Tawos Khan, told me that the sparse incoming donations were from Afghan businessmen, while little help came from the government of Afghanistan. And the United States was offering no help whatsoever. The last time Guljumma and her father had meaningful contact with the U.S. government was when its air force bombed them.

Normal and Lethal

When Shakira and Guljumma lost relatives to bombs that arrived courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer, their loved ones were not even numbers to the Pentagon. Instead, meticulous estimates have come from the Costs of War project at Brown University, which puts “the number of people killed directly in the violence of the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere” at upwards of 905,000 — with 45% of them civilians. “Several times as many more have been killed as a reverberating effect of the wars — because, for example, of water loss, sewage and other infrastructural issues, and war-related disease.”

The increasing American reliance on air power rather than combat troops has shifted the concept of what it means to be “at war.” After three months of leading NATO’s bombing of Libya in 2011, for instance, the U.S. government had already spent $1 billion on the effort, with far more to come. But the Obama administration insisted that congressional approval was unnecessary since the United States wasn’t actually engaged in military “hostilities” — because no Americans were dying in the process.

The State Department’s legal adviser, former Yale Law School dean Harold H. Koh, testified at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the nation’s actions targeting Libya involved “no U.S. ground presence or, to this point, U.S. casualties.” Nor was there “a threat of significant U.S. casualties.” The idea was that it’s not really a war if Americans are above it all and aren’t dying. In support of Koh, a former colleague at the Yale Law School, Akhil Reed Amar, claimed that the United States truly wasn’t engaged in “hostilities” in Libya because “there are no body bags” of American soldiers.

Ten years later, in a September 2021 speech at the United Nations soon after the last American troops had left Afghanistan, President Biden said: “I stand here today, for the first time in 20 years, with the United States not at war.” In other words, American troops weren’t dying in noticeable numbers. Costs of War project co-director Catherine Lutz pointed out in the same month that U.S. engagement in military actions “continues in over 80 countries.”

Seeking to reassure Americans that the Afghanistan withdrawal was a matter of repositioning rather than a retreat from the use of military might, Biden touted an “over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on any direct threats to the United States in the region and to act quickly and decisively if needed.” During the four years since then, the Biden and Trump administrations have directly sent bombers and missiles over quite a few horizons, including in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and Iran.

Less directly, but with horrific ongoing consequences, stepped-up U.S. military aid to Israel has enabled its air power to systematically kill Palestinian children, women, and men with the kind of industrial efficiency that fascist leaders of the 1930s and 1940s might have admired. The daily horrors in Gaza still echo the day when bombs fell on Guernica. But the scale of the carnage is much bigger and unrelenting in Gaza, where atrocities continue without letup, while the world looks on.

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include War Made Easy, Made Love, Got War, and most recently War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press). He lives in the San Francisco area. Norman Solomon’s Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State is out now.

Copyright 2025 Norman Solomon

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

 

“Who Is Uncivilized, Mr. Barrack?”

by Mir Ali Hosseini / August 26th, 2025

U.S. envoy Thomas Barrack urges Lebanese journalists to be “civilized,” “kind,” and “tolerant,” rather than “animalistic.” The irony is impossible to miss. Anyone familiar with the history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East will understand the depth of the hypocrisy.

Mr. Barrack implies that the “problem with the region”—the “chaos”— stems from Middle Easterners’ supposed lack of civilization, or worse, their allegedly subhuman nature. In truth, “the chaos” has been actively manufactured by the United States: sponsoring terrorism, violating sovereignty, propping up dictators, bombing cities and infrastructure, killing civilians, and plundering resources—just as it has done elsewhere in the world.

It is no surprise, then, that many across the world view the decline of the American empire with some satisfaction, saying “inshallah.” For them, its downfall would not signify the end of human civilization, but perhaps the beginning of an opportunity for others to live with dignity and freedom.

Despite being the richest nation in history, the U.S. has tragically failed to care for its own citizens—its “tired” and “poor”— while efficiently exporting misery abroad. Its foreign policy has consistently crushed the aspirations of peoples seeking self-determination—the “masses yearning to breathe free”—whether through coups, repression, or outright war.

The reality is unmistakable: the gravest threat to human dignity and civilization today is not Middle Eastern journalists—scores of whom are silenced daily with American weapons and assistance—but the United States itself.

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Mir Ali Hosseini is a research associate at the University of Regensburg, where he works on mid-twentieth-century intellectual history. He occasionally writes political and cultural criticism. He is coeditor (with Derek Attridge and Anirudh Sridhar) of The Work of Reading: Literary Criticism in the 21st Century (2021). Read other articles by Mir Ali.

 The World Will Change When the Press Understands Its Power

by David Andersson / August 27th, 2025

The recent Putin–Trump spectacle drew a thousand journalists to Alaska, culminating in an overhyped meeting with European leaders and President Zelensky at the White House. And for what? Nothing happened.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration deployed the National Guard in Washington, D.C., followed days later by FBI raids on the home of John Bolton, his former national security adviser and one of his fiercest critics.

The drama continued when Federal Judge Kathleen M. Williams issued a preliminary injunction on August 21, 2025, halting the expansion of the controversial “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention facility and ordering its operations wound down.

These headlines all share a common thread: they do not aim to resolve problems. Their purpose is to trap us—to keep us afraid, silent, and isolated. The system is using the media to paralyze, and it’s working.

As Common Dreams recently pointed out in the article “Trump’s DC Occupation Costs 4 Times More Than It Would Take to House City’s Entire Homeless Population,” these spectacles highlight misplaced priorities. The issue is never resolved—it is a distraction.

There is a persistent belief that a fearful population will eventually revolt and seize control of its destiny. But history offers little evidence to support this claim. Fear more often breeds submission than transformation.

The real question is: has the press become complicit in amplifying fear, endlessly recycling hollow slogans and inconsequential headlines instead of contributing to genuine human understanding and development?

Do we still need to publish—and read—yet another article about Trump’s threats? Or should we commit to our real work: reporting and investigating consequential events that shape people’s lives?

We hold the power to choose what we publish. We hold the power to build a different narrative—one rooted in the human experience and its future.

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David Andersson is a French-American journalist, photographer, and author who has lived in New York for over 30 years. He co-directs Pressenza International Press Agency and is the author of The White-West: A Look in the Mirror, a collection of op-eds examining the dynamics of Western identity and its impact on other cultures. Read other articles by David.

 

Expelling Iran’s Ambassador to Australia

Useful Expedient

by Binoy Kampmark / August 28th, 2025

The rank odour of opportunity seems to have presented itself to Australia’s Albanese government. To balance its apparently principled promise to recognise Palestinian statehood come the 80th United Nations General Assembly next month, it seemed only fair that some firm measure be taken against another Islamic outfit to balance the ledger. The Israelis were watching closely, and a sense of concern had started to bubble along the diplomatic channel that Canberra was proving wobbly. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had made his views felt: “History will remember Albanese for what he is: A weak politician who betrayed Israel and abandoned Australia’s Jews.”

On August 26, it all came to the fore. Iran had become the latest, if only briefest, of bogeymen for political consumption in Australia. The Islamic Republic, charged the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, had “directed at least two” attacks of an “appalling” and “antisemitic” nature. Expecting revelations of gleeful massacres involving whole families including livestock and uprooted orchards, we are told that these outrageous incidents were ones of arson: an attack on Lewis’ Continental Kitchen in Sydney in October last year, and the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne last December. “These were extraordinary and dangerous acts of aggression orchestrated by a foreign nation on Australian soil. They were attempts to undermine social cohesion and sow discord in our community.”

Mike Burgess, the domestic spy chief, confirmed the claim that the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) had identified “at least two and likely more attacks on Jewish interests in Australia.” These were linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and found through “painstaking investigation” (good to see that investigations at the spy agency are painstaking). The IRGC had been fiendish in concealing its role, using “a complex web of proxies to hide its involvement.” With shamanistic self-confidence, Burgess revealed that he had warned of this very thing earlier in the year. For a sense of restrained balance, he stated that Tehran may not necessarily be “responsible for every act of antisemitism in Australia.”

The action undertaken seemed outsized, involving the expulsion of the Iranian ambassador Ahmad Sadeghi along with three other embassy officials. They have been given seven days to exit the country. The IRGC is also slated for proscription as a terrorist organisation.

The head scratching question in all of this is: Why bother? The Iranian Revolutionary Guards have larger fish to skin, fry and broil. Tehran, for all its appetites in seeking power and influence in the Middle East, has tended to keep its targets beyond the region to Israeli embassies and property and, most notably of all, dissidents. To target the Australian Jewish community would seem to be a needless expenditure of effort and resources. Australia’s resident talking head on the wickedness of the mullahs, Kylie Moore-Gilbert, herself having spent time incarcerated in Iran on suspicions of espionage, is hardly illuminating in her explanation. “It’s difficult to say what Iran’s direct motivations are, other than to undermine Australia’s social cohesion.” She opts for the primary colour approach, streaked with syllogism: as the Iranian regime is antisemitic, and as Israel is the main enemy, it follows that all Jews, according to the dotty haters in Tehran, are “an extension of Israel.”

The expulsion’s salience would have been more significant if it had been done in response to activities undertaken against members of the Iranian Australian community, a far more widespread and evident problem. Yet on this point, the Albanese government proved tardy, despite ample evidence of harassment and surveillance orchestrated at Tehran’s behest. In February 2023, the then Minister for Home Affairs Clare O’Neil stated in her Australian National University address that ASIO had “disrupted the activities of individuals who had conducted surveillance in the home of an Iranian-Australian, as well as conducted extensive research of this individual and their family.” The previous month, a spokesperson for Foreign Minister Penny Wong expressed deep concern at “reports of foreign interference, including the harassment and intimidation of Australians online and in-person.” These matters had been raised with Iran “in no uncertain terms.”

Iran had also proved to be a more convenient, if selective target. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, for instance, Indian intelligence operatives have been creating much mischief, snooping, harassing and leaving their warning signs, most notably when it comes to the global Sikh diaspora. Concerned about the pangs of longing for the independent state of Khalistan, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not been above resorting to assassination. Melbourne taxi driver Harjinder Singh is one who can attest to threats from the Indian authorities regarding his pro-Khalistan activities, notably to his family back in India.

To add to this, India was found to have engaged in such friendly activities as cultivating access to sensitive defence technology in Australia and securing airport security protocols. In 2020, Burgess announced that his agency had “confronted” the spies in question “and quietly and professionally removed them.” Despite this fuss, there were no diplomatic expulsions. A façade of excruciating politeness was maintained.

Least surprising of all was the hearty approval of the Australian move by Israel. With Netanyahu venomously spouting at the Australian Prime Minister that he was feeble and incapable of protecting Jews in Australia, the expulsion was automatically assumed to be a product of constructive Israeli interference. Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer, after explaining the reasons for Netanyahu’s hectoring, thought it a “positive outcome” that Australia was “taking the threats against Israel and the Jewish people, Jewish Australians living in Australia […] seriously”.

Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke dismissed efforts on the part of the Israeli government to claim the lion’s share of credit as nonsense. “We’ve taken this action because Iran has attacked Australians. No other country is involved in terms of that conclusion.”

Short of WikiLeaks finding out the inner strangeness of this, we await further evidence why Iran would ever bother to expend any time on focusing on a country so far from its interests as to be satirically irrelevant. That said, the nature of much intelligence is that it is often short of being particularly intelligent.

 

The US Military Budget Nobody Controls

Unaudited Power

by Ellen Brown / August 28th, 2025

The U.S. federal debt has now passed $37 trillion and is growing at the rate of $1 trillion every five months. Interest on the debt exceeds $1 trillion annually, second only to Social Security in the federal budget. The military outlay is also close to $1 trillion, consuming nearly half of the discretionary budget.

As a sovereign nation, the United States could avoid debt altogether by simply paying for the budget deficit with Treasury-issued “Greenbacks,” as Abraham Lincoln’s government did. But I have written on that before (see here and here), so this article will focus on that other elephant in the room, the Department of Defense.

Under the Constitution, the military budget should not be paid at all, because the Pentagon has never passed an audit. Expenditures of public funds without a public accounting violate Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7of the Constitution, which provides:

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.

The Pentagon failed its seventh financial audit in 2024, with 63% of its $4.1 trillion in assets—approximately $2.58 trillion—untracked. From 1998 to 2015, it failed to account for $21 trillion in spending.

As concerning today as the financial burden is the wielding of secret power. Pres. Dwight Eisenhower warned in his 1961 farewell address, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Pres. John F. Kennedy echoed that concern, warning in 1961 that “secret societies” and excessive secrecy are “repugnant in a free and open society,” threatening democracy by withholding truth from the public. He warned that excessive concealment, even for national security, undermines democracy by denying citizens the facts needed to hold power accountable. “No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed,” he said.  If untracked billions fund classified programs, citizens are left powerless, governed by a shadow entity answerable to no one.

Those concerns persist today. On Aug. 13, 2025, Joe Rogan interviewed U.S. Representative Anna Paulina Luna, who leads a House Oversight Committee focused on government transparency regarding various topics, including UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, formerly UFOs). Luna said the committee had been formed after she and two other congressmen were denied access at Eglin Air Force Base to information on UAPs provided by whistleblowers. The problem, she said, was that Congress was supposed to represent the public and be an investigative body for it, “and you have unelected people operating basically in secrecy. … I think this goes all the way back even to JFK, with how they basically have operated outside of the purview of Congress and basically… have gone rogue ….”

A Behemoth Without Oversight

The Department of Defense’s $885.7 billion budget for 2025, approved by the House of Representatives, dwarfs the military spending of China ($296 billion), Russia ($84 billion), and the next eight nations combined. Managing $4.1 trillion in assets—from aircraft carriers to secret drones—along with $4.3 trillion in liabilities (e.g. personnel costs and pensions), the federal government’s largest agency oversees a military empire spanning over 4,790 sites worldwide. Yet it operates with minimal oversight.

The Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 mandated audits for all federal agencies, but the National Defense Authorization Act of 2018 delayed the Pentagon’s first department-wide audit to 2018 due to its unwieldy size, its decentralized systems, and its outdated software. The DOD has failed every audit since that time. In 2024, it could not account for its $824 billion FY 2024 budget, with 2,500 new audit issues identified. Of 24 reporting entities, only nine received clean opinions, while 15 received disclaimers due to insufficient data. In fact the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has flagged DoD financial management as high-risk for waste, fraud, and abuse ever since 1995.

As observed in a January 2019 article in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi, openly secret budgets were first legalized in 1949 with the passage of the Central Intelligence Agency Act, which exempted that newly created agency from public financial disclosure. The Act stated, “The sums made available to the Agency may be expended without regard to the provisions of law and regulations related to the expenditure of Government funds.”

The aim of the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 was to curb billions of dollars said to be lost each year through fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement of public budgets. Despite the mandated audits for all federal agencies, the DoD – the only major agency without a clean audit – has received $3.9 trillion in congressionally approved funding since 2018. “Every year that members of Congress vote to boost Pentagon spending with no strings attached,” observed federal budgeting expert Lindsay Kosgharian, “they choose to spend untold billions on weapons and war with no accountability.”

The Audit the Pentagon Act of 2023, backed by Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Grassley, proposes docking 0.5–1% of budgets for audit failures, but the measure has not received a vote.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), launched with promises to strip waste, fraud, and abuse from federal agencies, has conspicuously sidestepped the Pentagon. A June 2025 article titled “Why DOGE Was Always Doomed: The Pentagon Problem,” points out that the DOGE mission was seriously hampered by the Pentagon’s exemption from auditing:

In FY 2024, total discretionary spending was about $1.6 trillion. Of that, the Pentagon alone received $842 billion. In other words, it got more funding than all other departments combined. You read that right: one (very special) department received more than all the rest put together.

Funds that are not accounted for divert resources from critical needs like troop readiness, healthcare, and infrastructure. Overbilling by contractors enriches corporations while taxpayers foot the bill. And the lack of transparency erodes public confidence, as Americans struggle with domestic priorities.

The Missing $21 Trillion: Fraud, Waste or Something Worse?

The Pentagon’s audit failures mask not just inefficiency and waste but pervasive fraud and corruption. Between 1998 and 2015, Inspector General reports show that the DoD could not account for $21 trillion in spending—65% of federal spending during that period. For perspective, the entire U.S. GDP in 2015 was $18.2 trillion. In 2023, the agency failed to document 63% of its $3.8 trillion in assets, up from 61% the prior year. A 2015 DoD report identifying $125 billion in administrative waste was suppressed to protect budget increases.

There is plenty of verified waste to support the case for mismanagement. Military contractors, who receive over half of the Pentagon’s budget, are a major culprit. The F-35 program, managed by Lockheed Martin, was reported in 2021 to be $165 billion over budget, with $220 billion in spare parts poorly tracked. A 2023 CBS News investigation found that contractors routinely overcharged by 40–50%, with some markups reaching 4,451%. A 2016 report in the Nation highlighted $640 for a toilet seat and $7,600 for a coffee pot.

It is no longer even necessary to cover up fraud and corruption by wildly inflated prices. In 2017, former HUD official Catherine Austin Fitts collaborated with Mark Skidmore, an economics professor at Michigan State University, to document the missing $21 trillion in unsupported journal voucher adjustments at the DoD and HUD. In a June 2025 article published in Fitts’ journal The Solari Report titled “Should We Care about Secrecy in Financial Reporting?,” Dr. Skidmore discussed how the government responded to the publication of his research with Fitts. Its response was to immediately eliminate the paper trail leading to its covert financial operations. In particular, “Pentagon officials turned to the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) for advice. Several months later, FASAB posted a new document (FASAB 56), which recommended that the government be allowed to misstate and move funds to conceal expenditures if it is deemed necessary to protect national security interests.”

Fitts remarked, “The White House and Congress just opened a pipeline into the back of the US Treasury, and announced to every private army, mercenary and thug in the world that we are open for business.”

Speculation Run Rampant

In a widely-viewed interview by Tucker Carlson on April 28, 2025, Fitts expressed her belief that the missing trillions had been funneled into classified projects involving advanced technologies, including massive underground bunkers to protect elites from a “near-extinction event;” and that they were using advanced energy systems and hidden transit networks possibly linked to extraterrestrial tech. She discussed “interdimensional intelligence” and a secret space program linked to a “breakaway civilization.” The latter term was coined by UFO researcher Richard Dolan and is defined by Google as “a theoretical, hidden society that operates outside of mainstream civilization with advanced technology, often linked to UFO phenomena and secret space programs.”

In a Danny Jones interview in May 2025, Fitts alluded to Deep Underground Military Bases (“DUMBs”), perhaps used for “advanced technology or off-world operations.” Existence of these bases was confirmed two decades earlier by whistleblower Philip Schneider, a U.S. government geologist and engineer involved in their construction. In his last presentation in 1995, Schneider said there were 131 of these cities connected underground by mag-lev rail, built at a cost of $17-26 billion each. According to his biographer, Schneider was assassinated in 1996 by a U.S. intelligence agency for disclosing the government cover-up of UFOs and aliens.

Too over the top? Perhaps, but the Pentagon is so secretive that the public is left to speculate. Are we dealing with a scenario like that in such Hollywood movies as the 1997 film Men in Black, in which hidden forces—human or alien—control our fate?

The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) contends that no verifiable evidence supports extraterrestrial activity. But other prominent figures support the UFO/UAP narrative. In 2017, the New York Times exposed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), said to be a $22 million DoD initiative run by Luis Elizondo investigating UAPs from 2007–2012.

According to BBC News, Haim Eshed, former head of Israel’s space security program, claimed in a 2020 interview with the Yediot Aharonot newspaper that the U.S. government has an “agreement” with a “Galactic Federation” of extraterrestrials. He alleged aliens have been in contact with the U.S. and Israel, with secret underground bases where they collaborate on experiments. Eshed claimed the United States was on the verge of disclosing this under President Trump but withheld it to avoid “mass hysteria.” The claims were unverified but provocative.

In recent years, Congress has increased its focus on UAPs, with high-profile hearings in 2022, 2023, and 2024. In 2023, whistleblower David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, testified that the U.S. possesses “non-human origin” craft and “dead pilots,” based on classified briefings. On November 13, 2024, the House Oversight Committee’s hearing, “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth,” featured testimony from Luis Elizondo, retired Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, journalist Michael Shellenberger, and former NASA official Michael Gold, who claimed the U.S. possesses UAP technologies and has harmed personnel in secret retrieval programs. Shellenberger alleged that a covert “Immaculate Constellation” program hides UAP data from Congress.

Some lawmakers, including Rep. Luna and Rep. Tim Burchett, continue to criticize Pentagon secrecy and to push for transparency. In May 2024, Burchett introduced the UAP Transparency Act, requiring the declassification of all UAP-related documents within 270 days. He stated:

This bill isn’t all about finding little green men or flying saucers, it’s about forcing the Pentagon and federal agencies to be transparent with the American people. I’m sick of hearing bureaucrats telling me these things don’t exist while we’ve spent millions of taxpayer dollars on studying them for decades.

Secrecy Undermines Democracy

With $21 trillion unaccounted for historically, $165 billion in F-35 overruns, and $125 billion in buried waste, the DoD’s financial mismanagement needs urgent reform. Congress is primarily responsible for overseeing the DoD budget, exercising its constitutional “power of the purse” under Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution. So why isn’t it enforcing this mandate?

The chief excuse given is the need for secrecy for security reasons, but a congressional committee could be given access to the Pentagon’s financial data in closed session in order to exercise public oversight and enforce accountability. Other factors are obviously at play, including political influence, lobbying, campaign contributions from the defense sector, and a lack of penalties for noncompliance.

To restore accountability, Congress needs to enforce the Audit the Pentagon Act, modernize DoD systems, and investigate contractors profiting from lax oversight. UAP transparency is also critical, whether to debunk myths or uncover truths.

As taxpayers footing the bill, we are entitled to know not only where our money is being spent but who is really in charge of our government. The Pentagon’s secrecy and lack of accountability could be shielding anything from contractor fraud to UAP programs and alien alliances. If there is information so secret that even our elected representatives don’t have access to it, who does have access? Is there a secret government above the government we know? Without fiscal transparency and accountability, we can no longer call ourselves a democracy, as JFK warned.

• This article was first posted as an original to ScheerPost.com.

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Ellen Brown is an attorney, co-chair of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 400+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com. Read other articles by Ellen.