Rachel Maddow's new book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power examines the inexorable rise of American 'military bloat' - she starts with Reagan's secret wars and the Iran-Contra scandal in the late 1980s, then the Gulf war, war on terror, Iraq war, war in Afghanistan, secret CIA drone wars...the vast military industrial complex in America forces the American President to send in forces wherever it wishes.

Even with all this the world is no where safer than it was before all this started. Some main ideas from the book:

1. The American military superstructure is an out of control 'leviathan', not concerned with the average Americanss.
2. The US President has too much control to wage war without Congressional approval. The US Congress does not have enough power or will to do anything about it.
3. The rise of the privatization in the army has many serious implications, including the rise of little undeclared wars.
4. The US government seems to be more concerned with raising the US defense budget than paying attention to the ailing education sector.

What the book misses: As the US has become more and more involved militarily on foreign soilds, incidents of collateral damage have risen to unprecendented scale. The book misses to elaborate on this ugly, sad truth about US military.

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