The way people in the core think about the war machine is complicated, just not in a coherent or consistent way. Very few people like seeing mass violence that’s this brazenly targeted at civilians. That’s precisely why American media largely ignores or blows past international news. The resulting institutional knowledge and structures date back to Vietnam. The whole point is to prevent the US losing the war of public opinion domestically. Many wars function as PR campaigns, so controlling attention is a huge boon to the consent manufacturing machine.

I think it would be interesting for someone to write about how the attention economy relates to this aspect of the war machine. Because the whole idea that social media corporations are complicit in war is no exaggeration. But it tends to be seen as interferences “over there” with anecdotes about Facebook allocating more or less resources for moderation being a political decision. But surveillance companies cosplaying as media hosts are granted a pseudo-monopoly status by the government in exchange for making mass surveillance cheap. This is true both on the private side with ad companies and on the public side with things like the NSA’s integrations with Google and Facebook. So in a very material way, these companies are hooked straight into the war machine.