The purpose of the military is to start wars and change governments, it's not to deter conflict. We're gonna invade countries...

As globalization continues to take effect, large powers will often use the military to back up their globalization goals to maximize the benefits that can be obtained from it.

World military expenditure is estimated to have reached $1739 billion in 2017, the highest level since the end of the cold war.

In 2015, according to Special Operations Command spokesman Ken McGraw, U.S. Special Operations forces deployed to a record-shattering 147 countries — 75% of the nations on the planet, which represents a jump of 145% since the waning days of the Bush administration. On any day of the year, in fact, America's most elite troops can be found in 70 to 90 nations.

Since 1990, each large-scale U.S. intervention has left behind a string of new U.S. military bases in a region where the U.S. had never before had a foothold. The U.S. military is inserting itself into strategic areas of the world, and anchoring U.S. geopolitical influence in these areas, at a very critical time in history. It has been projecting that military dominance into new strategic regions as a future counterweight to its economic competitors, to create a military-backed "dollar bloc" as a wedge geographically situated between its major competitors (Euro, Yen)... The goal is not to end "terror" or encourage "democracy," and Bush will not accomplish either of these claimed goals. The short-term goal is to station U.S. military forces in regions where local nationalists had evicted them. The long-term goal is to increase U.S. corporate control over the oil needed by Europe and East Asia.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

The arms trade is surrounded by great controversy. The nature of arms and the possibility to hold governments accountable for irresponsible trades makes the issue politically charged. In recent years, the propensity of many democratic governments to sell arms to autocracies and human-rights violators has stirred great public discontent.

The fact that military activities may become a profitable enterprise leads to the realization that peace is the main enemy of the military-industrial complex. A simple metaphor can illustrate this problem. Grape growers, the wine industry and wine marketers would be completely out of business if people stopped drinking wine. In a similar way, the military-industrial complex would be put out of business by lasting peaceful conditions because the development, production, marketing and use of military equipment would be not needed.

War therefore is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfill our will. ... Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat the enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed.

Is there any man here or any woman, let me say is there any child here, who does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry? The real reason that the war that we have just finished took place was that Germany was afraid her commercial rivals were going to get the better of her, and the reason why some nations went into the war against Germany was that they thought Germany would get the commercial advantage of them.

In any good crisis, multiple parties are ready to take advantage of the state of emergency (Higgs 1987, 2004, 2005b, 2006, 2012). During the Depression and the war that followed, a partnership between industry, the military, and politicians emerged.

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose — especially their lives.

The United States federal government has spent or obligated 4.8 trillion dollars on the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. ... This total omits many other expenses, such as the macroeconomic costs to the US economy; the opportunity costs of not investing war dollars in alternative sectors; future interest on war borrowing; and local government and private war costs.

New research by the Costs of War Project based at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs finds that federal spending on domestic programs creates far more American jobs and yields more broad-based benefits than military spending.

All warfare is based on deception.

Probably every conflict is fought on at least two grounds: the battlefield and the minds of the people via propaganda. The "good guys" and the "bad guys" can often both be guilty of misleading their people with distortions, exaggerations, subjectivity, inaccuracy and even fabrications, in order to receive support and a sense of legitimacy.

One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting... It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours.

And one of the great things about American foreign policy in the post-World War II era was that we did a pretty good job with that. It wasn't perfect, but the UN, the IMF, and a whole host of treaties and rules and norms that were established really helped to stabilize the world in ways that it wouldn't otherwise be. Now, I also think that if we were just resorting to that and we didn't have a realistic view that there are bad people out there who are trying to do us harm – and we've got to have the strongest military in the world, and we occasionally have to twist the arms of countries that wouldn't do what we need them to do if it weren't for the various economic or diplomatic or, in some cases, military leverage that we had — if we didn't have that dose of realism, we wouldn't get anything done, either.

Veil is the story of the covert wars that were waged in Central America, Iran and Libya in a secretive atmosphere and became the centerpieces and eventual time bombs of American foreign policy in the 1980s.

Yes, we now have confirmation that the CIA was behind Iran's 1953 coup. But the agency hardly stopped there. The era of CIA-supported coups dawned in dramatic fashion: An American general flies to Iran and meets with "old friends"; days later, the Shah orders Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh to step down. When the Iranian military hesitates, millions of dollars are funneled into Tehran to buy off Mossadegh's supporters and finance street protests. The military, recognizing that the balance of power has shifted, seizes the prime minister, who will live the rest of his life under house arrest. It was, as one CIA history puts it, "an American operation from beginning to end," and one of many U.S.-backed coups to take place around the world during the second half of the 20th century.

Regime change did not begin with the administration of George W. Bush, but has been an integral part of U.S. foreign policy for more than one hundred years. Starting with the toppling of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, the United States has not hesitated to overthrow governments that stood in the way of its political and economic goals.

Then we may conclude that we must work for regime change in Iran from the outside.

Henry Kissinger urged President Richard Nixon to overthrow the democratically elected Allende government in Chile because his "'model' effect can be insidious," ... The posted records spotlight Kissinger's role as the principal policy architect of U.S. efforts to oust the Chilean leader, and assist in the consolidation of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.