Beyond a doubt, yes. There are those who point to the ridiculously disproportionate military budget. According to an article called “Our Taxes are Off to War,” by RandomNonviolence, military spending accounted for 51% of the 2010 discretionary budget, compared with 8% toward education and 5% toward health. Accounting for inflation, from 2010 to 2011 military spending increased by 85%. The USA spends nearly as much on the military as the rest of the world combined.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/23/947675/-Our-Taxes-are-Off-to-War—2011-Edition
Yet these numbers are merely symptomatic of a larger trend. There is no question that the USA is getting more militarized, but what this means and how we can change it are much harder questions. As Bacevich argues in The New American Militarism this has been a long time coming, and is not merely the short-term result of the War on Terror. Indeed, looking back as far as the lofty ideals of the Wilson administration, there is a sense that “America knows best, and knows how to carry out peace.” Since the 1960’s in particular, there has been increasing reliance on the military to carry out these ideals. I see the viewpoint of USA superiority all around me, as well as the tendency to jump to a military “solution” whenever a crisis arises. The difficulty, for me, is that I am just recently starting to learn about these problems, because my education, even through most of high school, focused primarily on times of war, and focused on US triumph over obstacles, largely ignoring peaceful movements and periods. War was seen as the core of history, which then reinforces the tendency to reach for military solutions. Any proposed solution must take the history of militarization into account.
I agree totally. I feel like I am just starting to wake up to so many issues that I should have learned earlier in my education including militarization and peaceful alternatives to war.