 When your government ends a war but increases the military budget, you're being scammed. The U.S. Senate has passed its National Defense Authorization Act military spending bill for the fiscal year of 2022, setting the budget at an astronomical 778 billion dollars by a vote of 89 to 10. The bill has already been passed by the House, now requiring only the President's signature, an amendment to cease facilitating Saudi Arabia's atrocities in Yemen was stripped from the bill. The most controversial parts of the 2100-page military spending bill were negotiated behind closed doors and past the House mere hours after it was made public, meaning members of Congress couldn't possibly have read the whole thing before casting their votes, reads a political article on the bill's passage by Lindsay Kosh Gairian, William Barber and Liz Theoharis. The U.S. military had a budget of 14 billion dollars for its scaled down Afghanistan operations for the fiscal year of 2021, down from 17 billion dollars in 2020. If the U.S. military budget behaved normally, you'd expect it to come down by at least 14 billion dollars in 2022 following the withdrawal of U.S. troops and the official end of the war in Afghanistan. Instead, this new 778 billion dollar total budget is a 5% increase from the previous year. Months after U.S. President Joe Biden's administration pulled the last American troops out of Afghanistan as part of his promise to end the country's forever wars, the United States Congress approved a 777.7 billion dollar defense budget, a 5% increase from last year. Al Jazeera reports. For the last 20 years, we've heard that the terrorist threat justified an ever-expanding budget for the Pentagon when without war executive director Stephen Myles told Al Jazeera. As the war in Afghanistan has ended and attention has shifted toward China, we're now hearing that that threat justifies it. Upon the removal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, President Biden said the following. After more than two trillion dollars spent in Afghanistan, a cost that researchers at Brown University estimate would be over 300 million dollars a day for 20 years in Afghanistan, for two decades, yes, the American people should hear this, 300 million dollars a day for two decades. If you take the number of one trillion dollars, as many say, that's still 150 million dollars a day for two decades. And what have we lost as a consequence in terms of opportunities? I refused to continue that war that was no longer in the service of the vital national interest of our people. You would think a government so grieved over the loss of opportunities for the American people due to Afghanistan war spending would be eager to begin allocating that wealth toward providing opportunities to Americans at the end of that war. Instead, more wealth has been diverted to the U.S. war machine. Anti-war's Dave DeKamp reports, quote, the NDA passage comes amid heightened tensions between the U.S. and Russia and the bill includes 300 million dollars for military aid to Ukraine, 50 million dollars more than what the Pentagon requested. According to the Wall Street Journal, at least 75 million dollars of the Ukraine aid will be lethal, meaning it will be spent on offensive weapons such as javelin anti-tank missiles the U.S. had already provided to Kyiv. With the Pentagon focused on countering China, the NDA includes 7.1 billion dollars for the Pacific deterrence initiative. The PDI is meant to build up U.S. forces in the Asia-Pacific to better confront China. Part of that plan is to establish a network of long-range missiles near China's coast, end quote. Americans are being scammed. A sane military, if there is such a thing, would be bolstered in times when a nation needs to defend itself and scaled down during peacetime. With the U.S. military, it's completely backwards. It's taken as a given that the budget must keep expanding and then reasons are made up to justify doing so by making peacetime non-existent. The military budget doesn't serve existing conditions. Conditions are created to serve the military budget. Before it was the Russians and the Chinese, it was terrorists. And before it was terrorists, it was the Soviets. After the fall of the USSR, there emerged a popular notion of peace dividend in which defense spending could be reduced in the absence of America's sole rival and the abundant excess funds used to take care of the American people instead. The only problem was that a lot of people had gotten rich and powerful as a result of that Cold War defense spending. And that money was used at some key points of influence. Less than three months after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, we learned of the Wolfowitz Doctrine from the New York Times. Saying the U.S. had resolved to prevent the rise of another superpower at all cost. And a few years later, the neocons found their way into the George W. Bush administration to usher in an unprecedented new era of military expansionism and wars of aggression. The military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address as president became inevitable as soon as the U.S. government espoused imperialist ambitions. War profiteering is what you get when you mix capitalism with a globe-spanning power structure that must labor continuously to maintain unipolar planetary domination, which can only be done with ceaseless violence and the threat thereof. It was inevitable that an industry would not only arise to meet that demand, but begin using its wealth that it generates to push for more war-mongering. The war industry serfs on the war-fueled empire like dolphins on the wake of a freight ship, except in this case the dolphins are also able to help propel and steer the ship. And meanwhile, that insane, mindless juggernaut is hurtling toward a direct confrontation with Russia and China, who are growing increasingly intimate and unified against their common enemy. These are forming the head of a rapidly coalescing group of powers who have refused to be absorbed into the folds of the U.S. centralized power alliance, and you don't have to be a historian to understand that world powers splitting into two increasingly hostile alliance groups can lead to some very ugly places. Especially now in the age of nuclear weapons. The human species has some very daunting tests ahead of it. I hope we pass.