According to a recently published report from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPC), America has spent a whopping $21 trillion on militarization since 9/11. It’s an astonishing figure, so large it can be difficult to comprehend. Here, the report’s authors offer some useful clarity: militarization, they argue, should be understood as a domestic process as well as a series of foreign interventions funded by direct spending on tanks, machine guns, and cruise missiles. The so-called “war on terror,” after all, also brought with it a sprawling new apparatus concerned with what is generally branded “domestic security”: allocating billions, under Democratic and Republican presidents alike, to areas like border administration and domestic surveillance.

Lindsay Koshgarian is the program director of the IPC’s National Priorities Project and a lead author of its new report “State of Insecurity: The Cost of Militarization Since 9/11.” In this interview, Koshgarian speaks with Jacobin about its calculations, and the alarming process of militarization undertaken since the September 11 attacks twenty years ago.