The Pentagon buzzword can apply to anything from missiles to pepperoni pizzas inside the military — while papering over the corpses that “lethality” produces.
“As Commander in Chief,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention last week, “I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”
Harris’s bellicose bluster received raucous applause from many in Chicago (although not from her stepdaughter, Ella Emhoff, or younger sister, Maya Harris) but struck some observers and pundits as especially “hawkish.” In reality, Harris is merely uniting two popular threads of Beltway boasting about the U.S. military.
For the last two decades, successive presidents have competed to offer the most hyperbolic assessment of the U.S. military. For George W. Bush, the U.S. armed forces were “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.” His successor Barack Obama declared them “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.” Donald Trump said America had the “greatest military in the world.” Joe Biden returned to Obama-era levels of praise, proclaiming them “the greatest fighting force the world has ever known.” (Just this week Harris repeated the exact line.)
The grandiosity of these claims is no doubt meant to paper over a dismal record: a bloody stalemate in Korea that still lacks a peace treaty, a devastating loss in Vietnam, a forever war in Iraq, a blowback-generator of a conflict in Libya, the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan, a dead end in Syria, an unending stalemate in Somalia, failures in the African Sahel, and on and on.
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Nick Turse is a contributing writer for The Intercept, reporting on national security and foreign policy. He is the author, most recently, of “Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan,” as well as “Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa,” and “Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.” He has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, and Village Voice, among other publications. He has received a Ridenhour Prize for Investigative Reporting, a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Turse is a fellow at The Nation Institute and the managing editor of TomDispatch.com.
