Norman Solomon’s new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, is an excoriating condemnation of the nation’s use of military force and of the media’s complicity in masking the true cost of America’s wars.

The author of thirteen books of media criticism, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, Solomon’s articles and essays have appeared in dozens of newspapers and progressive online platforms Salon and Common Dreams. Solomon identifies himself as a journalist and social activist. As a young man, he was jailed for civil disobedience in an anti-nuclear demonstration and later made eight trips to Moscow to protest U.S. nuclear policies that included a sit-in at the U.S. Embassy there. Long associated with media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), Solomon lobbied for asylum for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, supported clemency for Edward Snowden (who leaked more than 900,000 classified documents and found asylum as a naturalized Russian citizen), and headed a petition drive to nominate Chelsea (Bradley) Manning (who plead guilty, was convicted of espionage, and served seven years in prison) for the Nobel Peace Prize. 

The readers of War Made Invisible, then, should not expect a deliberative and balanced assessment of the American use of military force, nor of the moral use of force. This book is—and is meant to be—a commentary and a fierce criticism of the American way of making war.

War and Profit

At the center of War Made Invisible is Solomon’s argument that since 9/11 the United States has been in a perpetual state of war, not for a just cause or with the right intent, but as “premeditated and hugely profitable aggression,” enabled by “the structural mendacity that remains built into the military-industrial complex, with its corporate media and political wings.” The author decries the massive defense budget; heaps scorn on the revolving door between the Pentagon, corporate America, and the government bureaucracy; and he disdains the “synergy between those who vote for a military budget and those who vastly profit from it.”

These are valid criticisms and not new. C. Hartley Grattan first explored the linkages between American arms manufacturers and war policy when he wrote Why We Fought in 1929. Smedley Bulter, a highly decorated Marine officer, published War is a Racket in 1935 and described how American businesses profited from war. Butler and others were part of the growing pacifist movement in the United States in the 1920s and the 1930s that attracted such luminaries as Charles Lindbergh.

What Solomon also brings to light are the other dimensions of corporate militarism, for example, the growing reliance on military contractors who often outnumber U.S. troops in combat zones. Hundreds of thousands of contractors have served overseas, and Solomon claims more than 8,000 have died. “Officially, civilians on contracts don’t count as casualties of war,” and their work is “neither a secret nor common knowledge,” and oftentimes casualties are not reported.

According to Solomon, these personnel are often hired to fulfill the terms of hugely profitable no-bid contracts. They drive trucks, work in mess halls, maintain equipment, provide security, and fill dozens of other jobs that sustain the huge logistics train of a military force in the field. But these personnel are also bereft of veteran’s benefits; they have no guaranteed access to continued health care after their contracts end despite being subject to the same risks of injury and disability as military personnel in a combat zone.

Complicit Media

Throughout War Made Invisible, the author repeatedly castigates the media for its continuing failure to bring home to the public the real cost of waging war. “To the shame of major U.S. media outlets,” coverage of the devastating toll on civilians, the collapse of vital infrastructure, and the lasting degradation of the environment, “has been sparse to the point of standard journalistic malpractice.”

Solomon blames this media failure on a variety of factors that include self-censorship, career advancement, job security, and the pressures of nationalism, commercialism, and conformity. A creeping and systemic militarism, he claims, is propelling a state of “non-stop U.S. warfare” that treats military intervention as a prerogative and makes an ally of the media.

Strong challenges to the status quo of U.S. militarism rarely get into mainstream media.

The business of war and the business of news are thoroughly intertwined, and—no matter what political churn or corporate consolidation occurs—the essence of a military-industrial-media complex is structured to be resolute in retaining and wielding its power.

This media complicity, Solomon believes, diminishes the humanity and the suffering of the people in countries where the U.S. is at war. As a case in point, the author compares the coverage of the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with the Russian war in Ukraine. Coverage of Russia’s attacks on civilians was “immediate, graphic, extensive, and outraged,” Solomon writes, but reporting on civilian deaths by American forces “were usually retrospective, appearing long after the fact—postmortems with little political impact and scant follow-up.”

Solomon argues this is more than complicity with militarism. Instead, it is evidence of how the media, the military, and the general public dehumanize and ignore the victims of America’s wars. “The large scale Russian warfare in Ukraine was barbaric,” he writes. “That the same could also be said about American warfare … was a truth nearly taboo to utter in the U.S. mass media.” Comparisons such as these can’t be made with media reports packaged for American audiences. And this, writes Solomon, is “nationalism masquerading as journalism.”

Race and War

While War Made Invisible is highly critical of the American way of war, and probes deeply into the real costs of conflict, much of the narrative amplifies prevailing pacifist orthodoxy and standing criticism of the military-industrial complex (which Solomon has astutely remodeled as the military-industrial-media complex). Not so with the book’s chapter entitled “The Color of War.” Here Solomon argues America’s foreign policy and war-making are driven by “racial factors” that “get very little mention in U.S. media and virtually none on the political world,” and that “hidden in plain sight was the reality that just about every targeted or untargeted victim of U.S. warfare in the twenty-first century was a person of color.”

There’s a lot to unpack in these remarkable assertions, especially when Solomon offers little proof beyond anecdotes. Little media attention is focused on racial factors in American policy- and war-making, simply because those factors do not exist. U.S. nuclear arms, for example, were not first deployed to deter persons of color from making war—it was to deter Soviet nations largely comprised of white Europeans. Solomon’s view is also purposefully historically truncated. Having only focused on the wars of the twenty-first century he has no need, of course, to account for the U.S. targeted and untargeted German, Italian, French, Western European, Eastern European, and Scandinavian victims of World War II—who died by the millions.

Solomon also claims the U.S. is engaged in “shadowy operations,” across a “continent inhabited by more than a billion black people,” and the “negative impacts on Africa have been indirect yet powerful.” For example, he cites the case of Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba who led a coup in Burkina Faso and cites reports that Damiba was schooled by the “U.S. military, which has a strong record of training soldiers in Africa who go on to stage coups.”

This allegation ignores the fact that foreign officers are selected by their own countries’ leaders to attend U.S.-led programs and exercises, and there is no career path that includes “toppling the democratically elected government training.” Moreover, Damiba is a graduate of France’s L’Ecole Militaire, where he was trained as an officer. The U.S. programs he attended included Joint Combined Exchange Training— to raise awareness of human rights and the laws of armed conflict, and the Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance course—to train the trainers and help African military forces conduct peace support and humanitarian relief operations.

In spite of these flaws, there is also a grim reality exposed in the pages of War Made Invisible. America’s wars in the twenty-first century have gone unchecked because of the erosion of the safeguards embedded in the Constitution. Only Congress has the power to declare war, and yet, troops and military force have been used again and again without overt Congressional approval per the Constitution or the War Powers Act. An increasingly imperial presidency, an unchecked executive branch, now exercises vast power to send America’s military into battle on command.

These are the times “when authorities insist that war is not war at all.” Cyber-attacks and remote drone warfare don’t put boots on the ground or troops in harm’s way. The Obama administration, for example, advanced the remarkable legal argument that the War Powers Act did not apply to the 2011 U.S.-led NATO bombing of Libya. The attacks did not qualify as “engaging in military hostilities,” because no Americans were dying. It is, Solomon writes, “an effort to square the circle of a self-exonerating legalistic claim: war is not war if Americans kill without being killed.”

It is insights like this that make Solomon’s work by turns provocative, alarming, informative, and controversial. In the pages of War Made Invisible, he warns of watchdog journalists who fail to alert us to the real costs of America’s wars without end or to hold accountable the civil and military leaders who wage them. It’s a book worth reading and a warning worth heeding.