Matt Kennard’s new book Irregular Army is the culmination of more than a decade of investigation into how the United States waged the war on terror both at home and abroad. Picking up where classic critiques of Vietnam-era militarism left off, Kennard traces how a hollowed-out empire kept up its occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan by recruiting those it had once formally excluded: neo-Nazis, white supremacists, gang members, and violent felons. The result is a portrait of how contemporary US imperialism functions, when the draft is politically impossible and permanent war has become an economic necessity.

Ranging from Donald Rumsfeld’s pre-9/11 plans to “transform” the Pentagon, through the occupation of Iraq and the explosion of “moral waivers,” to the return of radicalized veterans in today’s United States, Irregular Army shows how these recruitment policies helped incubate a new far right and fed directly into phenomena like the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Along the way, Kennard links the war on terror to the longer history of white supremacy, the expansion of the military-industrial complex, and the emergence of a permanent war economy that shapes politics far beyond Washington.

In this conversation for Jacobin, Ashok Kumar spoke with Matt Kennard about the hidden history behind the war on terror’s “volunteer” force, the continuity between Vietnam and Iraq, the fusion of empire and white nationalism inside the US military, and what this means for confronting fascism and imperialism in the present.