My understanding of many of the most recent military engagements by the US is that they are basically sandbox experiments for prototyping new warfare tech and tactics, especially to study things like asymmetric urban warfare in which the distinction between combatant and civilian is difficult.

We enter the conflicts under whatever pretext is popularized in the media, but the real reason is to fuel warfare R&D efforts, grow surveillance infrastructure, and collect data that reflects situations our military leaders forecast to be important.

Large contracting firms profit. Soldiers lose time, often also money, often their mental health and family relationships, and sometimes their lives. Taxpayers lose money. Foreign civilians lose their lives. Few benefits are ever given to soldiers or foreigners, if they are even paid lip service with promises of benefits at all.

It's basically a string of smaller scale proxy wars to fuel tech, surveillance, and population control between larger, "actual" wars.

I fear we are already past a point where democratic process could stop it. I think by now it would require almost an actual revolt from U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, and that it would be bloody, and that part of the military engineering being studied is exactly how much civilians will tolerate before being pushed to the point of revolt.

As long as you can watch Netflix on your iPad and put it out of your mind, then while it might ruffle your feathers, you won't actually take action that could jeopardize your creature comforts. Even things like Occupy Wall Street seem like they are more data collection opportunities than anything else. "OK, so they will protest via X, Y, and Z, but too few of them can be pushed to do A, B, or C for us to care."

It's a very depressing feeling. In the meantime, just like everyone else, I have to worry about money, family, life goals, comforts, health, and all my biases push me to ignore the military industrial conflict, because already giving it maybe 1/100th of my overall bandwidth is exceedingly depressing. Something close to 40% of the country believes in young earth creationism. Open up to a highly-visited YouTube video and scroll down to the comments and behold the inanity of how we use our time and what our priorities are.

How could enough people possibly coordinate beliefs and actions around humanity-affirming rebukes of the military industrial complex? Of course they won't, so then I guess I'd better put my brain towards how to live in a world where they won't, which is too depressing to think about... and the cycle continues.

I'm sure it has been articulated even earlier than the early 1900s. It's just goes on and on.