The #1 NY Times bestseller that charts America’s dangerous drift into a state of perpetual war.

‘One of the best ideas is, never to keep an needless soldier,’ Thomas Jefferson composed in 1792. Neither Jefferson nor the various other Found­ers could ever possess envisioned the modern national security state, with its tens of thousands of ‘privateers’; its bloated Department of Homeland Protection; its rust­ing nuclear weapons, ill-maintained and hard to dismantle; and its strange fascination approximately Drift: The Unmooring of American Armed service Power with an unproven counterinsurgency doctrine.

Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow’s Drift argues that we’ve drifted from America’s original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peacefulness with perpetual war, with all the current financial and human being costs that entails. To understand how we’ve attained such an unhealthy place, Maddow will take us in the Vietnam Battle to today’s war in Afghanistan, on the way exploring the troubling rise of professional authority, the gradual outsourcing of our war-making capabilities to private businesses, the plummeting percentage of American family members whose children battle our constant wars for all of us, and even the changing fortunes of G.We. Joe. She offers up a fresh, unsparing appraisal of Reagan’s radical presidency. Eventually, she shows us the amount of we stand to lose by enabling the priorities of the national security condition to overpower our politics discourse.

Sensible yet provocative, lifeless critical yet seri­ously funny, Drift will reinvigorate a ‘noisy and jangly’ politics debate about how exactly, when, and where to apply America’s strength and power–and who gets to produce those decisions.