How to Run Wars: A Confidential Playbook for the National Security Elite

A copy of the top-secret memo below recently came into our hands, and we thought we should bring it to your attention!

＂Dear National Security Elite:

In an ideal world, the public would simply accept whatever their leaders--you, in other words--told them. They would comply with restrictions and mandates, not as a matter of mere obedience, but as a matter of unquestionable patriotic duty.

But we don’t live in an ideal world.

And with the fate of the world, especially the world’s wars, in the hands of our enlightened, benevolent, and eminentlyresponsible national security elite--in your hands, in other words--we can’t afford to risk opening the conversation to an informed public.

And we certainly can’t risk asking for anything so antiquated as ＂consent,＂ either.

Not when the stakes are this high.

You simply must learn:

• How to control the narrative--every narrative--in your favor;
• How to completely capture the media and effectively quash dissent;
• How destroying liberty creates more liberty in the long (long) run;
• Why top-down economic planning, here and abroad, is your best friend;
• How to flout international, and of course domestic, law and get away with it;
• And much, much more...

The danger with any book like this is, obviously, that it may fall into the wrong hands. If any member of the general public should happen upon these pages, the consequences would be fatal.

After all, people may realize that the national security elite--you, in other words--are not, in fact, all-powerful harbingers of peace...

They may realize that you are, literally, a force for good... armed and relentlessly attempting to bend the planet to your noble will.

And that realization would be nothing short of disastrous.

Don’t let this book fall into the wrong hands!＂

Merciless in their penetrating analysis, Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail Hall have written the satirical portrait of America’s contemporary military-industrial complex. Drawing inspiration from the 1936 classic How to Run a War, by Bruce W. Knight, this book is a must-read for anyone who would know the truth about America’s endless wars and the people who run them....

The truth might just set us free.

It will certainly make you laugh.

Then--really angry.

Christopher J. Coyne is Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute and Co-Editor of The Independent Review.

He is the author or co-author of In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace (2022, Independent Institute), Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror (2021, Stanford University Press), Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism (2018, Stanford University Press).

Abigail R. Hall is an associate professor of economics at the University of Tampa and a Senior Fellow with the Independent Institute. She is the coauthor of The Political Economy of
Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and the War on Terror (2023, Cambridge University Press), Manufacturing Militarism: US Government Propaganda and the War on Terror (2021, Stanford
University Press), and Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of US Militarism (2018, Stanford University Press).