Militarization remains a relatively minor concept in the academy, while war, peace, and torture are everyday terms of some pedagogy and some hallway conversation. This is both sign and challenge to the normalization of a huge military in the United States, that is, history's largest military budget and most extensive military-industrial-media-educational complex. Professor Lutz discusses how the bio-evolutionary notion that "security is the highest need of any organism" and other cultural premises form some of the foundation stones for everyday discussions of the idea of America and its military. These notions are especially illuminated by looking at those premises in two extreme contexts, including the massive military buildup currently underway in the US territory of Guam and the drive to revivify counterinsurgency theory and practice in Iraq and Afghanistan.
