How military dependency is reshaping American governance
The United States has conducted hundreds of strikes across seven countries under a single authorization passed in 2001. This is not policy choice but structural evolution—a republic whose institutional metabolism now requires continuous military activity to function.
The State as Appetite
The United States government conducted 626 military strikes across seven countries during a period that also saw domestic troop deployments and presidential rhetoric about annexing NATO ally territory. These are not discrete policy choices. They are symptoms of a political system that has evolved beyond its constitutional operating parameters—a state apparatus that now requires continuous military activity to maintain institutional coherence.
This trajectory has a name, though it is rarely spoken plainly: the emergence of a praetorian republic. Not a military dictatorship in the Latin American mold, but something more insidious—a civilian government whose institutional metabolism depends on perpetual security operations, whose executive branch has absorbed legislative war powers through accumulated precedent, and whose correction mechanisms have atrophied from disuse. The pattern does not resolve toward stability. It resolves toward crisis.
The Constitutional Shell
The formal architecture of American war powers remains intact. Article I grants Congress the authority to declare war. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires presidential notification within 48 hours of committing forces and prohibits deployments beyond 60 days without congressional authorization. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 restricts domestic military operations. On paper, the system features robust checks.
In practice, every president since 1973 has deemed the War Powers Resolution’s central features unconstitutional. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force—passed three days after September 11—has enabled “the US president to unilaterally launch military operations across the world without any congressional oversight or transparency for more than two decades.” Congress has not declared war since 1942. It has, instead, acquiesced.
This acquiescence is not passive. It is structurally incentivized. Representatives face asymmetric political risk: voting against military action before an attack invites accusations of weakness; voting for action that fails invites accusations of poor judgment. The rational legislative strategy is to delegate authority upward and avoid recorded votes on war. The executive branch has been happy to accept.
The result resembles what constitutional scholars call “the Gödel problem” applied to governance. Just as Kurt Gödel demonstrated that formal systems cannot prove their own consistency without stepping outside themselves, constitutional systems cannot validate their own legitimacy or resolve fundamental ambiguities—like the allocation of war powers—without extra-constitutional mechanisms. The Constitution’s war powers clauses require interpretation. The interpreters have been the very presidents seeking expanded authority.
The Metabolic Imperative
Military spending in the United States is not primarily a policy choice. It functions as what economists call “military Keynesianism”—government expenditure that sustains aggregate demand, employment, and industrial capacity. But this framing understates the dependency. Defense spending has become metabolic: the state apparatus literally cannot maintain its organizational complexity without continuous military-industrial throughput.
Consider the F-35 program. Components are manufactured across 46 states—all except Alaska, Hawaii, Nebraska, and Wyoming. This geographic distribution was not accidental. It was designed to create a mathematical lock-in where program cancellation becomes structurally impossible. Not because of military necessity. Because the sum of local economic dependencies exceeds any conceivable political coalition for termination.
The defense spending multiplier exhibits diminishing returns identical to neuroadaptive tolerance. Initial regional employment effects require progressively larger fiscal doses to maintain the same impact. A state economy habituated to defense contracts cannot simply redirect to civilian production—the specialized workforce, supply chains, and institutional relationships represent sunk costs that resist conversion. The system requires escalating inputs to prevent withdrawal.
This creates what thermodynamic theorists would recognize as a dissipative structure: a system that maintains organizational complexity only through constant energy throughput. Cut the military spending, and the institutional complexity cannot sustain itself. The state does not choose military Keynesianism. It depends on it.
The Executive Absorption
Presidential power over military affairs has expanded through three reinforcing mechanisms: legislative delegation, judicial deference, and administrative precedent.
The legislative delegation is explicit. The 2001 AUMF authorized force against those who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the September 11 attacks. Twenty-three years later, this authorization has been stretched to cover operations against groups that did not exist in 2001, in countries unconnected to the original attacks. Congress has declined to repeal or replace it. Each year of inaction establishes new precedent for executive discretion.
Judicial deference operates at a different register. Courts have developed doctrines—state secrets privilege, political question doctrine, standing requirements—that systematically prevent substantive review of military and intelligence operations. The July 2024 Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity extended this logic, validating expansive views of executive protection from legal accountability. Deference and immunity function as mutually reinforcing barriers: deference prevents cases from being reviewed substantively; immunity prevents accountability even when review occurs.
Administrative precedent accumulates silently. Each drone strike, each special operations deployment, each intelligence operation conducted without explicit congressional authorization establishes a baseline for the next. The executive branch maintains institutional memory of what it has done; this memory shapes what it believes it can do. The apparatus remembers its own permissions.
The concentration of authority has reached a point where, as one analysis noted, “concentration of power in the executive branch has fostered an American democracy increasingly prone to waging forever wars.” The structure generates the behavior. Individual presidents—their temperaments, their ideologies—matter less than the institutional incentives they inherit.
The Domestic Frontier
The Posse Comitatus Act prohibits using federal military personnel to enforce domestic law. Exceptions exist: the Insurrection Act, National Guard deployments under state authority, specific congressional authorizations. These exceptions have widened.
Border security operations have deployed military assets—including Predator drones—for surveillance and support functions. When migrant crossings decline, surplus drone capacity gets redirected. The infrastructure built for one purpose finds new applications. A resource-redeployment pathway emerges where immigration enforcement infrastructure becomes available for crowd-control surveillance.
The vocabulary itself has shifted. Vietnam-era resistance to military service was articulated through “conscientious objection”—individual religious refusal requiring formal recognition. Contemporary military personnel increasingly describe “moral injury”—collective psychological harm from participation in operations that violate their values. The first framework assumes the system is legitimate and seeks individual exemption. The second framework questions the system’s legitimacy itself.
This linguistic evolution tracks a structural change. When soldiers describe domestic deployments using the language of moral injury rather than conscientious objection, they signal that the problem is not their individual conscience but the orders themselves. The vocabulary of resistance has moved from exception-seeking to system-questioning.
What Scholars See
Academic literature on democratic backsliding identifies warning indicators: executive aggrandizement, erosion of checks and balances, normalization of emergency powers, securitization of domestic politics. The United States exhibits all of these.
But scholars disagree on trajectory. Some argue institutional resilience remains robust—that courts, federalism, civil society, and electoral mechanisms provide correction capacity. The 2020 election transfer, despite unprecedented challenges, ultimately occurred. State officials refused illegal orders. Courts rejected frivolous claims. The system bent but did not break.
Others point to the accumulation of precedent. Each norm violation that goes unpunished establishes permission for the next. The 2024 immunity ruling removed legal constraints that previous presidents assumed applied to them. Executive orders now test boundaries with expectation of judicial support. The correction mechanisms exist but activate too slowly, too weakly, too late.
The convergence point is this: both camps agree the trajectory is toward increased executive authority and decreased legislative constraint on military action. They disagree only on whether this trajectory is reversible and at what cost.
The Praetorian Logic
Rome’s Praetorian Guard began as an elite protective force. Over centuries, it became a kingmaker—capable of deposing emperors who displeased it, installing successors who promised rewards. The guard’s institutional interests superseded its formal mission.
The American analogy is not direct. The United States has no single military unit positioned to seize power. But it has something more diffuse and perhaps more durable: a security establishment whose institutional interests shape civilian policy, whose budget requirements constrain fiscal choices, whose threat assessments drive resource allocation, and whose career incentives favor threat inflation over threat reduction.
The revolving door between the Pentagon and defense contractors is well documented. Over 672 former officials have become defense lobbyists. This creates what one framework calls “structural embedding of deception”—not individual corruption but systemic misalignment between institutional incentives and public interest. The officials are not lying. They genuinely believe the threats they emphasize. Their beliefs happen to align with their career interests.
This is the praetorian logic: not a coup, but a capture. The security establishment does not need to seize power. It needs only to define the threat environment in ways that justify its continued expansion. Civilian leaders who challenge these definitions face asymmetric information disadvantage and political risk. The rational strategy is accommodation.
The Thermodynamic Bind
Dissipative structures—systems that maintain organization through continuous energy throughput—face a characteristic vulnerability. They cannot simply reduce throughput and remain stable. Reduction triggers phase transition: the organizational complexity collapses to a lower-energy state.
Applied to governance: a state apparatus built on military Keynesianism cannot simply cut defense spending and redirect resources. The institutional complexity that military spending sustains—the specialized workforces, the contractor relationships, the congressional district dependencies, the career incentives—would undergo phase transition. Not gradual reform. Collapse and reorganization.
This creates a bind. The current trajectory is unsustainable. Defense spending as a share of GDP can increase, but not indefinitely. The 2001 AUMF’s legal fiction cannot stretch forever. Executive power concentration eventually triggers correction—through electoral rejection, institutional resistance, or systemic crisis. Something gives.
But the alternative—deliberate reduction—triggers the very instability it seeks to prevent. The system has evolved past the point where gradual reform is structurally possible. It requires either continued expansion (unsustainable) or discontinuous reorganization (destabilizing).
Three Scenarios
Continued drift. The most likely near-term trajectory. Executive authority expands incrementally. Military operations continue under existing authorizations. Congress acquiesces. Courts defer. Each year establishes new precedent. The system does not collapse but degrades—democratic quality metrics decline, institutional trust erodes, correction mechanisms atrophy further. This can continue for years, perhaps decades. It cannot continue indefinitely.
Correction through crisis. A military operation fails catastrophically. A domestic deployment triggers mass resistance. An executive overreach finally activates judicial or legislative pushback. The correction is reactive, not proactive—triggered by visible failure rather than structural analysis. The system reorganizes, but the reorganization is shaped by the crisis that triggered it. Wartime corrections favor executive authority. Peacetime corrections favor legislative constraint. The nature of the triggering crisis determines the nature of the correction.
Managed transition. The least likely but most desirable scenario. Political leadership recognizes the structural trajectory and initiates deliberate reform: AUMF repeal and replacement, war powers restoration, defense budget restructuring, domestic deployment constraints. This requires accepting short-term political costs for long-term institutional health. It requires congressional willingness to reclaim authority that legislators have spent decades avoiding. It requires executive willingness to constrain successors.
The incentive structure favors drift. Crisis is more likely than managed transition. The question is not whether correction occurs but what triggers it and what emerges afterward.
The Cost of Correction
Any serious reform faces irreducible trade-offs.
Repealing the 2001 AUMF without replacement would create legal ambiguity for ongoing operations. Replacing it with narrower authorization would constrain executive flexibility against genuine threats. The choice is between over-authorization (current state) and potential under-authorization (reform state). Neither is cost-free.
Reducing defense spending would trigger economic disruption in dependent regions. The $290,000 cost-per-job-year in defense spending reflects not inefficiency but the specialized nature of the work. Conversion to civilian production requires not just funding but institutional transformation—new skills, new relationships, new markets. The transition period would be measured in years, not months.
Constraining domestic deployment authority would limit response capacity to genuine emergencies. The Insurrection Act exists because situations arise where civilian law enforcement cannot maintain order. Narrowing its scope risks under-response to legitimate crises. Maintaining current scope risks over-response to political dissent.
These trade-offs are real. Pretending they do not exist is not analysis. Acknowledging them is the beginning of serious reform.
What Remains
The American constitutional system was designed for a republic that did not maintain standing armies, did not conduct continuous military operations across multiple continents, and did not face the thermodynamic requirements of a modern security state. The framers could not have anticipated a world where the executive branch would conduct 626 strikes across seven countries under a single authorization passed to address a specific attack.
The system has adapted—but adaptation has costs. The checks and balances that remain are weaker than they appear. The correction mechanisms that exist activate too slowly. The institutional incentives favor expansion over constraint.
This does not mean collapse is imminent. Dissipative structures can persist for long periods if energy throughput continues. The American security state can continue its current trajectory for years, perhaps decades, if political will and fiscal capacity permit.
But trajectory is not destiny only if intervention occurs. The structural forces documented here—executive absorption of war powers, metabolic dependence on military spending, judicial deference, legislative acquiescence, revolving-door capture—are not natural laws. They are the accumulated result of choices made by identifiable actors in identifiable institutions.
The question is whether any of those actors will choose differently. The incentives suggest they will not. The system suggests they cannot. The history suggests that change comes only through crisis.
The praetorian republic does not announce itself. It emerges through accumulated precedent, institutional capture, and the quiet surrender of constraints that once seemed fundamental. By the time it is visible, the trajectory is already set.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Has the US actually threatened to annex NATO ally territory? A: Research found no evidence of specific US threats to annex NATO ally territory. NATO’s Article 5 collective defense provision has been invoked only once (after 9/11), and while Turkey has requested consultations under Article 4 regarding Syria, annexation threats against allies are not documented in available sources.
Q: What is the 2001 AUMF and why does it matter? A: The Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed September 18, 2001, allows the president to use force against those who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 9/11 attacks. It has been stretched to cover operations against groups and in countries unconnected to the original attacks, enabling presidential military action without congressional oversight for over two decades.
Q: Can the president deploy troops domestically? A: The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits using federal military personnel to enforce domestic law. However, exceptions exist under the Insurrection Act and for National Guard operations under state authority. These exceptions have widened over time, particularly for border security and emergency response.
Q: What would it take to reverse executive power concentration? A: Meaningful reform would require AUMF repeal and replacement with narrower authorization, restoration of congressional war powers oversight, defense budget restructuring to reduce regional economic dependencies, and judicial willingness to review national security decisions substantively. Each carries significant political costs and trade-offs.
The Quiet Arithmetic
The pattern resolves toward instability—not because individuals choose poorly, but because institutional incentives have diverged from constitutional design. The executive branch has absorbed powers that the framers distributed. The legislative branch has delegated authorities it was designed to exercise. The judicial branch has deferred on questions it was positioned to resolve.
What remains is a system that requires continuous military activity to maintain its organizational complexity, that concentrates war-making authority in a single branch, and that has systematically disabled its own correction mechanisms. This is not conspiracy. It is emergence—the accumulated result of rational actors responding to institutional incentives.
The trajectory does not resolve toward dictatorship in the classical sense. It resolves toward something the American system has no vocabulary to describe: a republic whose form persists while its function transforms, whose elections continue while their stakes narrow, whose institutions survive while their purposes shift.
The praetorian republic is not a destination. It is a direction. The question is not whether the United States has arrived but how far it has traveled—and whether the distance remaining can be recovered.
Sources & Further Reading
The analysis in this article draws on research and reporting from:
- Authorization for Use of Military Force (2001) - The foundational legal authorization enabling two decades of executive military action
- Congressional Research Service: War Powers Resolution - Analysis of presidential claims that the Resolution’s central features are unconstitutional
- American Academy: Concentration of Power in the Executive - Scholarly examination of how executive power concentration fosters perpetual war
- Costs of War Project: 2001 AUMF - Documentation of US military activities across 22+ countries under a single authorization
- Military Keynesianism Assessment - Economic analysis of defense spending as structural economic dependency
- Necropolitics - ECPS - Theoretical framework for understanding state power over life and death
- Wikipedia: Posse Comitatus Act - Legal constraints on domestic military deployment and their exceptions
- Dissipative Structures in Nature and Human Systems - Thermodynamic framework for understanding organizational complexity requirements
