“I love the military,” said Sen. Elissa Slotkin in a recent interview. A $1 trillion budget for war in 2026 is a lot of love. War in the U.S. is the norm — tolerated and assumed — even desirable and exciting. (I can’t find the interview.)
Last spring, as I was driving past the Pellston airport, I found the small regional facility peppered with military vehicles and soldiers. I pulled over to take a few photos. A friendly young soldier or guardsman waved at me persistently. Drills and exercises were apparently underway in a public place. Militarism is increasingly on display in our communities and in our daily lives.
Friends tell me they’ve seen Blackhawk helicopters patrolling the shores in the Traverse City area and near the Line 5 crossing in St. Ignace. As I was writing yesterday evening, three military helicopters flew over my home as part of annual war games known as Northern Strike. It feels like we are being groomed for something big.
The militarization of Michigan, of the land, of fresh water, has been on-going for years. Now it’s being put on steroids. There are consequences. The iconic Au Sable River and Lake Margrethe are both contaminated with PFAS, “forever chemicals” from military activities around Camp Grayling. Impacted residents who need filters to be able to drink their well water today hope to have access to municipal water in 2026.
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Efforts to capitalize on increasingly hefty federal budgets by further militarizing the state became more visible in April 2024 when Governor Gretchen Whitmer officially launched the Office of Defense and Aerospace Innovation. “Michigan is all-in on defense,” she remarked. (This was before the Trump administration restored the Department of Defense back to its original, refreshingly honest name, the Department of War.)
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In April, Saab, the Swedish car company, broke ground on a new $75 million munitions plant in Grayling, home of the largest National Guard training facility in the nation. Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Representative Jack Bergman were there. “Sometimes you do the work and sometimes it takes a little while to see the fruit of your labor, but this is something that makes so much sense for our economy, this community, and I think for Michigan broadly. We are growing our defense sector,” said the Governor. The new facility, which received substantial financial incentives and substantial opposition from local residents, is expected to start producing close combat and precision fire weapons systems in 2026. This will be Saab’s 10th facility in the United States. Saab is a sponsor of the AuSable Canoe Marathon and the AuSable River Festival, associating war with summer fun. The company’s website says the company’s mission to “keep people and society safe.”
Sources: https://www.saab.com/markets/united-states/the-path-to-grayling;
Have you heard of the Michigan National All-Domain Warfighting Center? This umbrella term was introduced in 2020 to integrate the operations of various military installations around the state: the Alpena Combat Readiness Training Center, Battle Creek Air National Guard Base, Camp Grayling Joint Maneuver Training Center, and Selfridge Air National Guard Base. The All-Domain Warfighting Center brand offers the means to market the state’s capabilities to the industry. Its stated intent is to dominate all domains of life.
Known as Northern Strike (you can watch the video here: https://www.facebook.com/reel/812078268418695) the U.S. Department of War’s two-week annual readiness exercises took place in northern Michigan in August. It’s a very big event, including more than 7,500 participants representing 36 states and territories along with nine international partners. A quick look at a Facebook page called Camp Grayling Joint Maneuver Training Center will demonstrate the enthusiasm for state-of-the-art equipment that is increasingly lethal, traumatizing, and costly. On August 15, 500-pound bombs were dropped on the land. Examples of comments on the Facebook page included these:
- I have 10 acres… if I give you the coordinates, can you make me a new pond?!
- I love hearing the Sounds of Freedom shaking my house
- FINALLY IM IN THE AREA FOR THE A10 AND I GET TO FEEL THE 500LBS AGAIN? LETS GOOOO
- This comment section is 100% America! Love to see it!
Northern Strike ended on a celebratory note with entertainment, ice cream, the national anthem, and fireworks that evoke bombs bursting in air. Photos showed the feeling of teamwork, camaraderie, and excitement of being part of something bigger than oneself and having the power to control the world stage.
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The Detroit Arsenal in Warren manufactured tanks, jeeps, and bombers for WWII. “Now, 85 years later, Michigan is again pitching itself as America’s factory floor for the future of warfare — except this time, the tools of defense are drones powered by artificial intelligence and made with 3D-printed parts….” Small businesses around the state manufacture parts for weaponry. “Basically 60% of what an Army soldier drives or shoots comes out of Michigan,” Slotkin told Defense News in a recent interview.
A network of relationships ensures close collaboration between government, military, industry, and academia. It includes the Michigan Chapter of the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) with its approximately 1,700 members. Each year, the association rents the sprawling Sports & Expo Center of Macomb Community College’s South Campus in Warren for their annual expo. The school has relationships that promote and link students to career opportunities related to the military and war. (If you’re wondering whether there is a comparable network that works to avoid war by investing in mutually beneficial relationships among equals and the common good, I’m not aware of one. There’s no money in it.)
In April, a new F15-EX fighter mission for Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Macomb County was announced. The Governor said, “This is a huge, bipartisan win for Michigan, decades in the making, that will grow our economy and make our country safer. Since day one, I’ve been laser-focused on securing a new fighter mission….” President Trump announced that approximately 20 F-15EXs will be stationed at Selfridge in addition to the KC-46As the base will receive.
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Militarism and war are sold to us as necessary for our safety and security, the most noble form of service. This weaponizes deep instinctive needs and denies our common humanity.
Elected officials from both major political parties and their major donors agree: war is good for business. It also enforces domination and control abroad. (Militarized borders, detention facilities, and prisons are also profitable and enforce domination and control at home.) The U.S. boasts of some 750 military bases in over 80 countries and territories. Military installations, activities, and war pollute water, air, and land. They further destabilize an increasingly unstable climate. The U.S. military is one of the largest consumers of energy in the world and one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases.
“The fact that an empire-like alliance of western governments and their proxies keeps expanding its warmongering, militarism, and nuclear brinkmanship around the world with the goal of complete planetary domination.”
A parallel universe exists on social media. Pages like Military.com, Military Today News, Defense News, and many more, valorize the equipment and tools of death and destruction. What is not pictured on these sites are those on the receiving end of this terrifying capacity to destroy life. The collective trauma and devastation of war is the gift that keeps on giving over generations.
What is also not shown on these social media sites is the suffering of those who fight the wars, the moral injury that finds veterans living on the street, numbing pain with drugs and alcohol, and taking their lives. Veterans deserve real care to heal from soul wounds and their exposure to toxic chemicals.
Human needs for teamwork, camaraderie, the rush of peak experience and a sense of purpose greater than oneself are real. Yes, everyone has the responsibility to defend themselves. But that’s not what this is about. Necropolitics creates a world where life has little value. Master puppeteers decide who is allowed to live and who must die. When is it enough? It’s never enough.
It will take years for the desecration of life we’ve seen in Gaza over the past two years to be understood and felt: the horrors of AI warfare: drones buzzing overhead day and night disrupting sleep and thought; children’s faces filled with confusion and pain, spattered with blood; amputated limbs; elders displaced and starved; toxic water, air, and soil. Homes, families, infrastructure, history, and culture reduced to rubble. AI warfare is a horror show, the next wave of automated cruelty. The U.S. sent $21.4 billion in weaponry under the Biden and Trump administrations.
As war and militarism become increasingly embedded in Michigan’s economy, it will be difficult to extricate ourselves. We who live near the Great Lakes are the stewards of over 20% of the fresh surface water of the world. Continuing to militarize the land of fresh water demonstrates an unreflective, arrogant abdication of our responsibilities to one another and to life.
Questioning war and why we fight is imperative. It will require a courageous confrontation with a powerful taboo, a palpable force field that snarls and growls. But this is the end of the line. War at this scale is ecocide, a death wish. Climate collapse may see nation-states falling away. Maybe they already are. An unprecedented level of global solidarity and cooperation will be needed to protect the beauty, preciousness and vulnerability of complex life. The self-absorption, hubris, and aggressive ways of the nation-state block that.
So let us unlearn the mastery that broke these waters.
Let us re-member, stitch back the broken members of relation.
Not to become Indigenous to this place,
but to become responsible to it,
to stand beside those who never forgot,
and to learn again how to live as kin.
The cure is not control.
The cure is kinship.
The river is waiting. – Paul Baines
Rev. Deb Hansen. Deb describes herself as a life-long border-crosser when it comes to culture, language, religion, ethnicity, and worldview. She worked for many years in corporate America, served as a chaplain at Sinai-Grace Hospital, and currently offers soul work and advocates for healing and repairing our relationships with the larger kin-dom and with one another. Deb is a student of healing collective trauma and the author of Borderlands: Stories from an El Paso Shelter, a memoir of her first three winters volunteering at the U.S./Mexico border.
