Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which . . . the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been achieved.
When Lenin framed imperialism as an economic necessity of advanced capitalism, he understood that modern empires are locked into relentless global expansion. But empires do not run on strategy alone; they run on bodies. Following 9/11, as the United States launched endless occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s global war machine found itself in a crisis of its own making: an aggressive imperial expansion abroad paired with acute public hostility toward war at home—a war-weariness still echoed in current Ipsos opinion polling on the conflict with Iran. In Irregular Army: How the U.S. Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, and Criminals to Fight the War on Terror, investigative journalist Matt Kennard exposes the dark compromise made to bridge this gap. Kennard argues that, facing a severe military recruitment crisis, the Pentagon quietly lowered ideological, physical, and moral standards, effectively outsourcing the dirty work of imperial expansion to violent extremists, Neo-Nazis and criminal networks.
Irregular army: criminals and racists
Kennard (pp.1—5) opens the book by highlighting how the neoconservative architects of the 2000s were disastrously unprepared for the post-9/11 conflicts they so eagerly initiated. He points specifically to Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s ideological push to streamline ground forces to 130,000: an approach tailored for military privatisation and a brief intervention in Iraq, with a projected exit date of December 2006. However, as occupations in both Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on and American imperial ambitions expanded, the Pentagon was confronted with a stark material reality: the U.S. simply lacked the troop capacity to sustain a multi-front war.
By 2005, with 150,000 troops deployed in Iraq and 19,500 in Afghanistan, the U.S. military found itself rapidly losing control of local populations (p.5). Confronted with the political impossibility of a draft—evidenced in 2007 when the army missed its recruitment targets by a wide margin (p.5)—and widespread failure among potential recruits to meet basic fitness standards (pp.125—6), the Pentagon turned to private military contractors and a systemic loosening of enlistment regulations (pp.9—11). This opened the doors for criminal street gangs and neo-Nazi groups to enter the ranks, many of whom were subsequently implicated in overseas atrocities and domestic terrorism (p.11).
To build his case, Kennard relies heavily on primary reporting, internal Pentagon documents, official military studies, and first-hand interviews with extremist veterans, recruiters, and members of far-right hate groups. Through this methodology, he demonstrates how the military knowingly absorbed violent, extremist, and underqualified recruits to sustain its war effort (p.127).
In one of the book’s more alarming interviews, Kennard speaks with Forrest Fogarty, an open, Hitler-worshipping neo-Nazi based in New York (p.16). After spending his formative years drifting between low-wage jobs, drinking, and street fighting, Fogarty was drawn into far-right circles, ultimately enlisting in the armed forces to acquire combat and weapons training for an impending domestic race war (p.16). Although initially turned away due to his prominent white-supremacist tattoos, Fogarty was eventually approved for enlistment into the 3rd Infantry Division and deployed to Iraq in 2004 (pp.21—2). Through Fogarty’s account, Kennard uncovers a broader network of neo-Nazis serving during this period, many of whom revelled in the extreme violence of the occupation and openly flaunted their battlefield experiences on far-right online forums (pp.22—5).
Beyond white-supremacist networks, Kennard also exposes a parallel, systematic infiltration by organised criminal street gangs (pp.45—50) including the Bloods, Crips and Gangster Disciples (p.68). Drawing on internal military police records and FBI gang task-force reports, Kennard (pp.65-6) details how gang members explicitly enlisted to acquire urban-warfare training, master heavy weaponry, and establish interstate drug and weapons trafficking routes through military bases (pp. 66-7). Crucially, Kennard reveals that military commanders and the Pentagon leadership were repeatedly warned of this growing dynamic, yet actively suppressed internal reports and granted conduct waivers to known gang affiliates in order to satisfy relentless monthly recruitment quotas (pp.74—5). This deliberate institutional blindness transformed military installations into operational hubs for organised crime, further demonstrating how the state’s demand for manpower compromised domestic security.
Imperialism at home and abroad
While Irregular Army excels as a meticulous work of investigative journalism, Kennard’s analytical conclusion falls short of its own evidence. By framing the recruitment crisis as a series of administrative blunders, driven by neoliberal privatisation and poor strategic planning, Kennard treats a structural feature of modern imperialism as an operational error. His research does not merely document institutional negligence; it demonstrates how the imperialist state inevitably co-opts reactionary forces to sustain global expansion.
At the heart of the structural mechanism is the imperial state’s strategic absorption and utilisation of the lumpenproletariat. Marx originally defined the lumpenproletariat as the economically alienated layer of society cut off from productive labour, whose precarious conditions often leave them politically volatile and susceptible to reactionary ideology. In Kennard’s detailed profiling of recruits like Fogarty—who drifted between low-wage jobs, alcohol abuse, and street brawling before gravitating toward far-right extremism (p.16)—and established street gangs like the Bloods and Crips (p.68), we see how systemic economic decay creates a surplus ripe for state co-optation. Rather than addressing the domestic crises that foster such alienation, the military apparatus systematically absorbed these disaffected, violence-prone elements. By granting moral waivers, the Pentagon effectively transformed the symptoms of domestic class collapse into cheap, expendable manpower for global intervention, leveraging the violent instincts of an alienated underclass to enforce imperial order abroad while keeping broader working-class resistance at bay.
Irregular Army’s documentation of unchecked far-right networks within the armed forces also illustrates the structural symbiosis between fascism and the imperialist state. Rather than treating white supremacists as ideological enemies, the military leadership operated under an informal policy of institutional tolerance: treating racist tattoos, hate-group affiliations, and extremist online activity as ignorable background noise (pp.9—11). By absorbing fascist elements without ideological re-education, the state tacitly nurtured a reactionary vanguard. The imperial war machine leveraged these recruits’ enthusiasm for brutal violence abroad, simultaneously laying the groundwork for a combat-trained, ultra-reactionary force that could inevitably be turned inward against domestic working-class movements.
We see the impact of this symbiosis domestically through agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Much like the Pentagon’s recruitment waivers, ICE’s rapid organisational growth relies on a pipeline of personnel drawn from militarised backgrounds, frequently absorbing veterans socialised into state-sanctioned violence and xenophobia. Through this mechanism, the state does not merely deploy reactionary elements to enforce imperial order abroad; it institutionalises those same elements at home, transforming imperial warfare into domestic violence while providing a state-sanctioned outlet for far-right ideological zeal under the guise of national security.
This dynamic is further exacerbated by the capitalist state’s systemic post-service abandonment of its veteran workforce. Once soldiers are decommissioned, the imperial war machine largely abdicates its responsibility to them. Deprived of robust mental-health care, housing, or economic safety nets, traumatised veterans—particularly those who entered the ranks through lowered moral standards or from marginalised backgrounds—are returned to the very conditions of material precarity they initially sought to escape. This state neglect creates a volatile feedback loop, driving alienated veterans toward criminal networks, street homelessness, or white-supremacist vanguards seeking combat-trained recruits to exploit their disenfranchisement.
Ultimately, the book’s empirical findings provide concrete backing for Lenin’s analysis of modern empire: imperialist war is not an ideological excess or policy mistake, but an economic imperative of advanced capitalism that requires uninterrupted global force projection. To sustain this expansion without igniting widespread anti-war class consciousness at home, the capitalist state cannot risk reinstating a broad-based draft, which historically galvanises popular working-class resistance. Instead, as Kennard demonstrates, the Pentagon resolved its manpower crisis by absorbing the most politically backward and dispossessed elements of society. By granting moral conduct waivers to violent felons, street gangs, and avowed fascists like Fogarty, the imperial war machine effectively recycled domestic social decay into manpower for overseas intervention, sustaining its global reach while insulating itself from the political fallout of conscription.
Despite its analytical framing, Irregular Army remains an indispensable, harrowing work of investigative reporting that deserves a place on the reading lists of political theorists, historians, and anti-war organisers alike. Kennard’s meticulous documentation provides an empirical foundation for anyone seeking to understand the true institutional mechanisms behind modern state violence. By pulling back the curtain on how the Pentagon weaponised domestic social collapse to sustain overseas aggression, the book does far more than record the recruitment failures of the War on Terror; it serves as a vital, urgent warning about the inseparable feedback loop between imperial overreach abroad and reactionary violence at home.