Let’s face it: the U.S. military only wants you for your body. Your mind, your spirit, your dreams—those are irrelevant. What matters to the war machine is that you can be trained, disciplined, and deployed as human hardware. The uniform doesn’t honor you; it erases you, transforming individuals into instruments of empire.

The military sells itself as a pathway to education, honor, and citizenship. In reality, it is a system that devours working-class youth—particularly young people of color—by preying on their lack of economic opportunity. Recruiters are absent in affluent suburbs but ever-present in poor and rural communities, on reservations, and in schools where students can’t afford college tuition. The implicit message is clear: you have no future unless you give your body to the state.

And what is that body used for? Not to defend democracy or safeguard freedom, but to protect the wealth of the oligarchs, the corporations, and the elite who profit from endless war. U.S. military bases, scattered across the globe like the outposts of empire, serve as enforcement arms for oil companies, arms manufacturers, and extractive industries. The Pentagon does not station troops abroad to defend the poor; it stations them to secure pipelines, shipping lanes, and markets.

Closer to home, the hypocrisy grows starker. In Hawaiʻi, Okinawa, Guam, Vieques, and countless other “strategic” locations, local communities live under the shadow of bases that poison their land, water, and air. The military proclaims itself a protector, but its presence destroys what it claims to defend. Jet fuel leaks into aquifers, chemical munitions contaminate soil, sonar blasts devastate marine life, and training exercises torch forests. Civilians are expected to absorb these costs silently while the Pentagon spends billions protecting corporate interests thousands of miles away.

Meanwhile, when U.S. wars kill civilians abroad—children in Afghanistan, families in Iraq, wedding parties in Yemen—the military calls it “collateral damage,” erasing lives with bureaucratic euphemism. The contradiction could not be clearer: the rhetoric of “defense” cloaks a practice of mass destruction.

This is the true hypocrisy of the military. It markets itself as a force for peace, but exists to perpetuate conflict. It claims to protect the nation, but endangers the very citizens whose taxes pay for it. It pretends to embody honor, but traffics in lies. It uses the language of service while serving only power.

At its core, the U.S. military is not a public institution of defense—it is the private army of the elite, paid for with public money and fed with the lives of ordinary people. The greatest enemies it fights are not “out there” in some distant desert or jungle, but right here: truth, accountability, and justice.

Until we see through the camouflage of its rhetoric, the military will continue to demand our bodies while giving nothing back but death, pollution, and hollow promises. The hypocrisy is not hidden. It is in plain sight—written in the lives it exploits and the lands it ruins.