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Colombia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the former Yugoslavia. US conventional military power, which is now unrivaled by that of any other country, grounds policies that promote empire—the political, cultural, economic, and military hegemony of the United States—on a global scale. In the wake of/, rhetorical devices and doctrines such as “shock and awe,”“preemptive strike,” and the “war on terror” have come to embody this military drive, engaging other countries as allies, targets, or clients of the US military machine. Militarization also undergirds the insidious dilution of the concept of torture, the erosion of international commitments to limit violence and aggression, and the weakening of civic life, politics, and truth as the US president and his administration attempt to justify unrestrained war in the name of security.

The term militarization refers to how societies become dependent on and imbued by the logic of military …