Estimated reading time: 9 minutes ·
INITIAL SYNTHESIS
Since 1973, the United States has known no peace. It has fought in Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and dozens of classified operations that never merited a name in the evening news. During this half-century of continuous war, no social mechanism has compelled the American population to feel it as such. Three institutional devices, articulated with precision and maintained by governments of both parties, have made possible what no propaganda could achieve alone: a nation in permanent war that does not experience war. The result is not a deceived public opinion but something more durable and more serious: a structural anaesthesia that turns foreign deaths into background noise and domestic ones into state secrets.
Three interlocking mechanisms, none of them accidental, built this architecture over half a century. Their analysis reveals not a conspiracy but something more disturbing: the cold logic of a state that learnt, after Vietnam, that the cheapest war is the one no one has to justify at home.
The abolition of compulsory military service in January 1973, signed by Nixon four months before the official end of the Vietnam War, was presented as a victory for individual freedom. It was, above all, a decision in social engineering. With conscription, war touched every stratum of the population — the sons of senators, East Coast university students, the white middle-class suburbs that had protested in the streets between 1967 and 1971. Abolishing it transferred the vital risk towards those with fewer options. Pentagon data published in 2005 confirmed what anecdotal evidence already suggested: nearly two-thirds of Army recruits in 2004 came from counties with median household income below the national median. The South provides 40% of recruits and rural areas 44%; both concentrate the bulk of the war effort of a nation that perceives itself as urban and cosmopolitan.
The Geography of Sacrifice
The mechanism is simple, as all well-designed extraction mechanisms are. The Army does not recruit through direct coercion but through narrowness of alternatives. The offer is always the same: university funding, job stability, community belonging, expedited citizenship for undocumented immigrants. What is called patriotism is often the only reasonably dignified way out available in a county where the factory closed fifteen years ago and the cheapest opioid costs less than a litre of petrol. Thus, the most powerful armed force in human history recruits among those who have the least to lose in relative terms and the least political capacity to object.
This externalisation of sacrifice produces a first-order political effect. War ceases to be a shared social fact. When conscription existed, every middle-class family had concrete reasons to monitor foreign policy, to calculate the human cost of each intervention, to tolerate or not tolerate the death toll. The abolition of 1973 deactivated that circuit. Subsequent wars, however numerous, unfolded in a sociological space separate from the one inhabited by the majority of voters. War became a professional activity, like mining or long-distance lorry driving: dangerous, necessary according to whoever defines it, and invisibly carried out by others.
KEY FACT
According to Pentagon data analysed by the Seattle Times, nearly half of all recruits in 2004 came from low- or lower-middle-income households. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 required all public secondary schools in the country to grant military recruiters the same access as universities; Army recruiters visited low-income schools up to forty times a year while affluent schools received four visits.
The Dover Operation
The second device came into operation on 21 January 1991, in the midst of the Gulf War. The exact date matters because it reveals the logic that generated it. In December 1989, during the invasion of Panama, three networks broadcast a split-screen press conference by President George H.W. Bush in which the president joked, while on the opposite half of the screen the first coffins of fallen soldiers arrived at Dover, Delaware. The White House described the coverage as “outrageous and unfair”. In February 1991, at the start of the ground operation in the Gulf, the Pentagon banned all photographic and television coverage of coffins arriving at Dover.
The ban, instituted by Defence Secretary Dick Cheney, was maintained for eighteen years. Republicans and Democrats enforced it with identical determination. In March 2003, weeks before the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon extended the ban to all military bases in the country and issued an explicit directive: no arrival ceremonies and no media coverage of the remains of fallen service members. The operational concept was precise. Political analysts called the phenomenon the “Dover Test”: the measure of how many casualties public opinion could tolerate before a war became unsustainable. The ban eliminated the test. It disconnected the death counter from the political nervous system. Robert Gates, in partially lifting the ban in February 2009 under the Obama administration, admitted without ambiguity that he had never been comfortable with the official justification based on family privacy. The real justification was no secret to anyone who had followed the record: the aim was that war should have no image.
“Images of the fallen have always had consequences for war policy, most notably in Vietnam, dubbed ‘the living room war’ for its extensive television coverage, which included images of coffins coming off planes as if off a conveyor belt.”
– Washington Post, 2009
The Dead Who Do Not Exist
The third device is the most effective because it requires no executive order and no classified directive. It functions through omission, through the simple absence of any mechanism conferring public existence on the foreign civilian victims of American wars. The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates that between 2001 and 2023 more than 432,000 civilians died as a direct consequence of violence in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan. If one adds the indirect deaths — those produced by the destruction of health systems, infrastructure and local economies — the total rises to between 4.5 and 4.7 million people. Figures without names. Figures without faces in the American media space.
The asymmetry is constitutive. American television networks devote considerable editorial resources to the 7,052 military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan; the 210,000 Iraqi civilians documented by Iraq Body Count merit only occasional statistical mentions, almost always framed as collateral damage of a violence that the journalistic text attributes diffusely to “the conflict”, as if the conflict had spontaneously emerged from Mesopotamian soil. This unequal distribution of grief is not an editorial accident but a structural convention of Western war journalism, in which the identifiable dead are those who carry the passport of the country that funds the newsroom.
KEY FACT
The 2006 Lancet study estimated 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq in the first three years of occupation, more than 90% violent. More than 38 million people were displaced by the post-9/11 wars across eight countries. In 2024, a journalist was killed in a conflict zone every three days.
The silence on foreign deaths has a political function that goes beyond simple propaganda. When a state conducts wars that produce millions of victims without those victims acquiring public existence for its citizens, the political cost of war approaches zero. There is no image to ban because there was never any intention of producing one. The philosopher Judith Butler described this mechanism as the distinction between lives that are “grievable” and lives that do not merit that status. In recent American wars, the distinction is not philosophical but operational: the one that defines which deaths activate the political system and which leave it inert.
The Horizon Without Witnesses
The trajectory described does not end in the present. It has its own logic that points with precision to where it is heading. If the abolition of conscription removed the citizen from the physical battlefield, and if drone warfare removed the operator from the psychological battlefield, the next step is already underway. In January 2026, the Pentagon launched a hundred-million-dollar challenge to develop autonomous, voice-controlled combat systems. Project Maven, launched in 2017 as a drone video analysis tool, now holds a contract amounting to 1.3 billion dollars through 2029; its intelligence director stated in 2025 that by June 2026 the system would be transmitting intelligence “100% machine-generated” to commanders in combat.
For fiscal year 2026, the Pentagon requested 14.2 billion dollars for artificial intelligence and autonomous systems research. The United States and Russia were the only major military powers to vote against the resolution adopted in November 2025 by the UN General Assembly, which called for negotiating a binding treaty on lethal autonomous weapons before the 2026 Review Conference. The message of that vote is transparent: Washington has no intention of allowing any legal instrument to limit the integration of artificial intelligence into its lethal decision chain.
The logical consequence of this trajectory is a war that no longer requires any citizen at any point in the process. Not as a combatant, not as a witness, not as a voter calculating the cost. A war that happens as server processes happen: in the background, without a visible window, with activity logs that nobody consults. The dead will continue to exist somewhere in the world, by the hundreds of thousands, perhaps by the millions. What will have disappeared is any institutional obligation to know it.
Conclusion
What this text describes is neither a conspiracy nor an anomaly. It is the normal functioning of an imperial state that learnt, after Vietnam, that the only sustainable war is the one no one has to justify at home. The three devices — the professional military class recruited from those who have no alternative, the ban on images of its own dead, the structural invisibility of foreign dead — were not designed in a crisis room but sediment over decades through apparently routine decisions: an administrative reform, a Pentagon directive, an editorial convention. Their combined effect is a normalisation of war that bears no resemblance to the brutal propaganda of authoritarian regimes. It is something more sophisticated and more stable: the absence of war from the consciousness of those who fund it and vote for it.
The question that merits follow-up is not whether this system will survive but in what form it will consolidate when lethal automation makes it entirely autonomous. By then, the question of democratic consent will have ceased to be uncomfortable. It will simply have ceased to make sense…
G.S.
SOURCES
- Costs of War Project, Brown University, costsofwar.watson.brown.edu, 2023
- Iraq Body Count, iraqbodycount.org, July 2024
- “Military Recruiters Target Isolated, Depressed Areas”, The Seattle Times, November 2005
- “Photos of the Fallen and the Dover Ban”, Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy, 2016
- “Ban on Media Coverage of Military Coffins Revisited”, NPR, February 2009
- “Pentagon to Lift Press Ban on Coffins at Dover”, The Washington Post, February 2009
- Defense Primer: U.S. Policy on Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems, Congressional Research Service, Congress.gov, 2025
- “Regulating Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems in a Fractured Multipolar Order”, Usanas Foundation, January 2026
- “Future Warfare: The Autonomy Spectrum”, RobotToday, March 2026
- “The Military Views Poor Kids as Fodder for Its Forever Wars”, The New Republic, November 2023
- Butler, Judith, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, Verso, 2009
Actualizado el 19 de April de 2026
