Fifty years after Dwight D. Eisenhower’s January 17, 1961 speech on the “military-industrial complex”, that threat has morphed into a far more powerful and sinister force than Eisenhower could have imagined. It has become a “Permanent War State”, with the power to keep the United States at war continuously for the indefinite future.

Andrew J. Bacevich has emerged in the early years of this century as the country’s most widely read and widely respected critic of U.S. militarism and empire. He has addressed this issue with unprecedented intensity for an academic. With the appearance of Washington Rules, he has produced six books addressing illuminating these themes in the span of a single decade, writing three major books American Empire (2002), The New American Militarism (2005), and The Limits of Power (2008), and editing two other volumes, The Imperial Tense (2003) and The Long War (2006).