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Washington's latest war (now on pause) -- the one in Yemen against the Houthis -- was hardly noticeable here. Or rather it would have been barely noticeable if Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth hadn't shared plans for the first air strikes there with his wife and others in a private Signal chat that just happened to include the editor of the Atlantic magazine. But other than that obvious headline-making goof, it's barely been news. Yes, if you were paying close attention, you might have seen that, six weeks after those strikes began, the New York Times reported -- in what's now known (with a bow to President Teddy Roosevelt and the Spanish-American War of the nineteenth century) as Operation Rough Rider -- that more than 800 targets had been hit in that country. And then there was the news that just the first few weeks of that new war had already cost U.S. taxpayers close to $1 billion.
But if you truly wanted to follow what was happening there in all its distant grimness, you would have had to pay attention to the website Antiwar.com. Here's the news I recently noticed there when it came to America's latest war: Between March 15th and April 24th, the U.S. launched 750 airstrikes on Yemen and claims to have killed hundreds of Houthi rebels. However, at least 63 civilians were killed, including 11 children, and 150 were injured by U.S. airstrikes from March 15th to April 15th. More recently, there were those 68 people killed by a U.S. airstrike at a detention facility for African migrants in Yemen's northwestern Saada province. And don't forget the 80 people (including five paramedics) killed and another 150 wounded at a Yemeni fuel port on the Red Sea. And that's the way the killing of civilians goes -- on and on and on, with almost no one in this country paying the slightest attention -- Senators Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Tim Kaine (D-VA), who have indeed protested it, excluded.
In addition, the Houthis took down a number of American MQ-9 Reaper drones, worth $30 million each, and, oh yes, one jet plane that essentially fell off the deck of one of the two aircraft carriers the U.S. positioned in the Red Sea to hit Yemeni targets, while the ship was maneuvering to avoid Houthi attacks.
And so indeed it went (and went and went) in just the latest American war of these years of repeated (and deeply unsuccessful) conflicts. And though Donald Trump has stopped the bombing for the time being, who knows when it might start up again? In the meantime, in his 112th piece for this site, let retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore, author most recently of American Militarism on Steroids: The Military-Industrial Complex, Unbounded, Uncontained, and Undemocratic, fill you in on a country that, in some sense, no longer knows what peace is (even if we hardly notice anymore). Tom
The Real Evil Empire May Surprise You
Serving In (or Thinking About) the U.S. Military for 40 Years
Forty years ago this month, I was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force. I would be part of America's all-volunteer force (AVF) for 20 years, hitting my marks and retiring as a lieutenant colonel in 2005. In my two decades of service, I met a lot of fine and dedicated officers, enlisted members, and civilians. I worked with the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps as well, and met officers and cadets from countries like Great Britain, Germany, Pakistan, Poland, and Saudi Arabia. I managed not to get shot at or kill anyone. Strangely enough, in other words, my military service was peaceful.
Don't get me wrong: I was a card-carrying member of America's military-industrial complex. I'm under no illusions about what a military exists for, nor should you be. As an historian, having read military history for 50 years of my life and having taught it as well at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School, I know something of what war is all about, even if I haven't experienced the chaos, the mayhem, the violence, or the atrocity of war directly.
Military service is about being prepared to kill. I was neither a trigger-puller nor a bomb-dropper. Nonetheless, I was part of a service that paradoxically preaches peace through superior firepower. The U.S. military and, of course, our government leaders, have had a misplaced -- indeed, irrational -- faith in the power of bullets and bombs to solve or resolve the most intractable of problems. Vietnam is going communist in 1965? Bomb it to hell and back. Afghanistan supports terrorism in 2001? Bomb it wildly. Iraq has weapons of mass destruction in 2003? Bomb it, too (even though it had no WMD). The Houthis in Yemen have the temerity to protest and strike out in relation to Israel's atrocities in Gaza in 2025? Bomb them to hell and back.
Sadly, "bomb it" is this country's go-to option, the one that's always on the table, the one our leaders often reach for first. America's "best and brightest," whether in the Vietnam era or now, have a powerful yen for destruction or, as the saying went in that long-gone era, "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it." Judging them by their acts, our leaders indeed have long appeared to believe that all too many villages, towns, cities, and countries needed to be destroyed in order to save them.
My own Orwellian turn of phrase for such mania is: destruction is construction. In this country, an all-too-offensive military is sold as a defensive one, hence, of course, the rebranding of the Department of War as the Department of Defense. An imperial military is sold as so many freedom-fighters and -bringers. We have the mega-weapons and the urge to dominate of Darth Vader and yet, miraculously enough, we continue to believe that we're Luke Skywalker.
This is just one of the many paradoxes and contradictions contained within the U.S. military and indeed my own life. Perhaps they're worth teasing out and exploring, as I reminisce about being commissioned at the ripe old age of 22 in 1985 -- a long time ago in a country far, far away.
The Evil Empire
When I went on active duty in 1985, the country that constituted the Evil Empire on this planet wasn't in doubt. As President Ronald Reagan said then, it was the Soviet Union -- authoritarian, militaristic, domineering, and decidedly untrustworthy. Forty years later, who, exactly, is the evil empire? Is it Vladimir Putin's Russia with its invasion of Ukraine three years ago? The Biden administration surely thought so; the Trump administration isn't so sure. Speaking of Trump (and how can I not?), isn't it correct to say that the U.S. is increasingly authoritarian, domineering, militaristic, and decidedly untrustworthy? Which country has roughly 800 military bases globally? Which country's leader openly boasts of trillion-dollar war budgets and dreams of the annexation of Canada and Greenland? It's not Russia, of course, nor is it China.
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