"One of my favourite ideas is never to keep an unnecessary soldier," Thomas Jefferson wrote. Neither Jefferson nor the other Founders could ever have envisioned our vast and confounding modern national security state.Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow's Drift argues that we've drifted away from America's original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peace with perpetual war. To understand how we've arrived at such a dangerous place, Maddow takes us from the Vietnam War to today's war in Afghanistan, along the way exploring Reagan's radical presidency, the disturbing rise of executive authority, the gradual outsourcing of our war-making capabilities to private companies, the plummeting percentage of American families whose children fight our constant wars for us, and even the changing fortunes of G.I. Joe. Ultimately, she shows us just how much we stand to lose by allowing the priorities of the national security state to overpower our political discourse.Sensible yet provocative, dead serious yet bracingly funny, Drift will reinvigorate a "loud and jangly" political debate about how, when, and where to apply America's strength and power-and who gets to make those decisions.