Yes this is a Rachel Maddow book, however this is NOT a political doctrine. It has earned praise fromy many prominent conservatives including Rodger Ailes, the chairman and CEO of FOX News. Maddow traces the current state of military affairs primarily from Vietnam War when President Johnson escalted the war in 1965 to the present.

She calls the military superstructure we have built a leviathan. It's a great beast that is out of control and has gained a life of its own that is disconnected from average Americans and control by Congress in ways the founders never intended. The President has way too much control to wage war without Congressional approval and the Congress is weak and fails to exercise what oversight it does retain. Americans are for the most part unaffected by the perpetual war with the exception of a tiny percentage of soldiers and their families. This is not the way it was supposed to be argues Maddow.

She argues, quite persuasively, that the founding fathers never intended that we would be in a perpetual state war with a massive standing military for the President to use as he sees fit. There are parts of this book that are depressing and even downright scary. I think it hit bottom for me when she describes how there is some formula used to ignite hydrogen bombs that nobody knows how to make anymore. I guess they didn't write it down and all the people who knew how to do it are now gone. Doesn't that give you a warm fuzzy?

“As we’ve pushed military experience further and further away from civilian life, we’ve also pushed decision making about the use of the military further and further away from political debate,” she says. That seems to be a point that anyone on the left or right would agree is not a good thing.

This book is reasonable, carefully researched, and written with personality. There are other ways to be patriotic than to blindly follow warlike policies that have somehow taken on a life of their own. I highly recommend that you read it.