Although considered at the time to be grandiose hearsay, General Smedley Butler’s testimony concerning the “Business Plot” to overthrow the Federal government was found credible in 1934 by a special McCormack-Dickstein congressional committee.

In his testimony before the McCormack-Dickstein committee, in which Butler accused many powerful business tycoons and politicians – such as DuPont, J.P. Morgan, even Prescott Bush (father to George H.W. Bush) – of attempting to persuade him to lead 500,000 soldiers in taking the reigns of government from FDR and his progressive proclivities. One year later, the Marine Corps major general wrote a 39-page treatise, “War is a Racket”.

Butler was a war hero. In fact, he was the most decorated Marine of his time, receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor twice. So it may have been a shock for some Americans to hear their famed general accuse powerful people of treason, or the country of racketeering. Or to read sentiments such as this in magazines:

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico…safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate in three districts. I operated on three continents.” (Common Sense, 1935)

In “War is a Racket”, Butler focuses mainly on the actions of the United States, but one of his main arguments is that all wars are rackets, in that all wars are “conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.”

But “the claim that American foreign policy is dictated by economic interests…is a vast over-simplification,” said Michael Morgan, professor of history at UNC at Chapel Hill. “If you say that the [U.S.] only goes to war to help American corporations, well then, that’s an exclusively materialist explanation of foreign policy. There are many more factors other than material interests that influence foreign policy,” he added.

If Morgan is correct, and Butler’s argument lacks nuance, it may have been because of the age in which the general lived. “General Butler’s military experience – Nicaragua, Honduras, Philippines, Mexico – was among the most politicized and aggressive uses of the military advancing U.S. foreign policy interests in U.S. history,” said William Braun, a professor at the U.S. Army War College. With “the exceptions being actual war,” he added.

Whatever the case, whether war is sometimes or always a racket, the fact remains that war has at times been a racket. It remains that the U.S. has used it in such a way, and is arguably still. Economic interest is not the only variable in U.S. foreign policy; however, it is one that is, sadly, lucrative even for the Americans who detest it.

Air Forces commanded from Ankara responded to the attacks launched by ISIS last month in the Turkish location of Suruç and the bordering city of Kilis. With this new development, the conflict takes on a new profile, perhaps one that many were expecting from a NATO ally, to slow down and undermine the progress and consolidation capabilities of the Islamic State.

For Ayça Alemdaroglu, Associate Director at the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program, this decision is related to Turkey’s domestic policy situation. “The governing party is making a clear effort to maintain its power in times of decreasing electoral support. A way to balance this is to look for support in the international community – especially the U.S. – and so, their current fight with the Kurds is not seen.”

If the Islamist militias were aiming at a military escalation, they are indeed succeeding. So far Turkey, which borders to the south with Syria and Iraq, had maintained a poorly defined defensive posture towards the advancement of ISIS. This, even though ISIS’ assault to Kobanî in October last year came dangerously close to the Turkish border.

Turkey, let’s not forget, has also been a haven for sympathizers of jihadism. Many of them are in the Kurdish southern provinces that have chosen to provide support to ISIS given the lack of prospects offered by the Turkish government for their cause.

Alemdaroglu, who has worked as a post-doctoral scholar at the Anthropology Department at Stanford and earned her doctorate in sociology at Cambridge, highlights the fact that several reports indicate that the Turkish government has been indirectly supporting ISIS. “Central intelligence agencies from Turkey have been transporting trucks across the boarder loaded with ammunitions, including anti-aircraft rockets that end up in the hands of Al-Qaeda,” she says.

Turkey is also the gateway to the territories controlled by ISIS for youths coming from all over Europe and the rest of the world to join the Islamist militia. And if that isn’t enough, there are more than a million and a half Syrian refugees living on Turkish soil.

Ankara had wanted to maintain its own agenda on the issue and on more than one occasion refused to provide facilities to the U.S. military. However, in this new stage, the Turkish government has yielded to Washington’s request to use the Incirlik Air Base and although the details of the agreement are unknown, it appears that the U.S. activity in the area will require greater Turkish cooperation.

The U.S. has made their conditions very known to Turkey in order for this cooperation to succeed. Among them is to fully respect the Kurds, who have become key allies to America in the area, and which they have armed to the teeth to avoid having a single boot on the ground.

So far Turkish Presidente Erdoğan has found it difficult to agree, mainly because he doesn’t like the Kurds to be armed by the U.S. and gaining international recognition for their work to eradicate extreme jihadism in the area.

This agreement and the new attitude of the Turkish government will mark a profound change in the management of the crisis by both Washington and Ankara. Before this, it was unacceptable that Turkey, a country that belongs to NATO, had turned a blind eye to the jihadist activity in its own territory.

Furthermore, it was strategically ineffective for the U.S. to combat ISIS militarily from bases and aircraft carriers located more than a thousand miles away.

This turning point, however, will not come without risks and the crisis could spill over to neighboring countries and even deepen the less known violence happening in Turkey right now.

“If you think about national security in a much broader sense, the security of human beings for example, what Turkey is doing right now is not strengthening national security at all. I just came back from Turkey on August 10 and there were two attacks in Istanbul. I think around 10 people died. This could be unrelated to the main ISIS issue but it shows that Turks are not safe at this moment,” says Alemdaroglu.

President Barack Obama defended the Iran Deal at American University in Washington, D.C. Wednesday. “Now, we have before us a solution that prevents Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon without resorting to war,” he said.

US Army Europe officers speaks to reporters at the Pentagon about their rotational training in Eastern Europe, Wednesday, July 22, 2015. (Amina Ismail/Medill NSJI)

Officers of the US Army’s 2nd Cavalry Regiment, currently stationed in Vilseck, Germany, stopped by the Pentagon last week to talk about their rotational training in Eastern Europe and the larger array of efforts in the region being held to reassure NATO allies.

Since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea from February 2014, and his increasingly aggressive actions near NATO’s stomping grounds, the Pentagon has been beefing up its military exercises and rotations in Central and Eastern Europe to ensure what US military officials say is the security and stability of its NATO allies.

“I can tell you that the countries that we are training with are concerned with Russia as a threat to the stability of Europe,” Army Colonel John V. Meyer III, commander of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, told journalists at a roundtable. “We are working on strengthening the alliance. We want a strong Europe.”

The Obama administration’s European Reassurance Initiative was launched in June 2014 with a $1 billion budget for training and temporary rotations.

These rotations are less costly and less politically sensitive than permanently stationing troops in Europe because joint exercises and a temporary presence ensure the allied nation’s sovereignty and improve its military capabilities.

“It is not perceived at all that the US is trying to expand its influence,” Meyer said. “Our host nations, our allies helped sustain us.”

Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, commanding general of US Army Europe, hinted at the long-term goal for the army in a promotional video. “Being able to rotate units to come over to train, but also have an in-depth understanding of the culture, the history, the geography, the infrastructure… This is going to be a permanent part of how the army operates,” he said.

One of the things that proves a regular hindrance for US crisis response is sending hundreds or thousands of troops overseas who don’t know the people, language, culture, or terrain of the country where they’re expected to be fighting.

Meanwhile, local forces have little or no experience working with US forces, procedures, or practices. By cycling troops through a region, it gives local forces ample opportunity to practice with US forces, while giving a wide range of American forces at least a basic working familiarity with the area.

For more than a decade, the US and NATO have avoided deploying permanent troops and military equipment to NATO’s newer member states which, during the Cold War, were part of the Soviet bloc, or even the Soviet Union.

This has been avoided in part to minimize tensions and prevent friction with the Kremlin, and is in keeping with the 1997 Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation, and Security “to give concrete substance to their shared commitment to build a stable, peaceful, and undivided Europe.”

Apart from that more peaceful rationale, the US Army had actual wars to fight elsewhere anyway: Afghanistan and Iraq called for the majority of US troops to be in, going to, or coming from the Middle East and Central Asia.

Last month, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced that the army — for the first time since it downsized its presence in Europe — would store tanks, heavy weapons, and infantry combat vehicles in Eastern and Central Europe, a bold move that may be viewed as a violation of the essence of the treaty, which states that NATO members and Russia should not consider each other adversaries.

Carter’s decision was part of the European Reassurance Alliance and Operation Atlantic Resolve, a training program launched by the US Department of Defense in May.

Operation Atlantic Resolve is the European counterpart to the Pacific Pathways model introduced last fall. In September, the US Army Pacific deployed about 1,200 soldiers for the month-long Garuda Shield training exercise in Indonesia. This joint effort with the Indonesian military served as the pilot program, and was the first time the army deployed troops for rotational training exercises with multinational partners.

The move to expeditionary-style forces in many ways dates back to the end of the Cold War, which marked the beginning of a steady decline of US Army presence in Eastern Europe and pre-positioned Overseas Material Configured to Unit Sets (POMCUS). The last US tanks, stationed in Grafenwöhr, Germany, were pulled out of Europe in March 2013, just one year before Russian tanks began moving into Crimea.

After heavy speculation and rumors about the US decision to store such equipment, and before Carter’s official announcement, Putin responded at an arms fair west of Moscow.

“More than 40 new intercontinental ballistic missiles able to overcome even the most technically advanced anti-missile defense systems will be added to the make-up of the nuclear arsenal this year,” he said.

Considering Russia’s satellite nuclear warning system will be out of service until November, this addition to Putin’s arsenal — and his public announcement — leaves the rest of the world hoping he will become neither brash nor desperate enough to make use of it.

Under Operation Atlantic Resolve, smaller companies of about US 100 soldiers are deployed to the Baltic States, while larger battalions of troops deploy to Poland to engage in rotational training exercises with allied armed forces. These so-called Regionally Aligned Forces are units that rotate into the country without bringing equipment, but instead use the European Activity Set, which contains a combined-arms, battalion-sized group of vehicles, and pre-positioned equipment permanently stationed in the US Army’s training area in Grafenwöhr — the exact location where only two years ago soldiers marked the end of an era, as the last US tanks withdrew from European soil.

The current US operations throughout Europe have a Cold War precedent. NATO’s annual REFORGER — Return of Forces to Germany — exercises filled a similar role: proving to both NATO and Russia that the US is capable of moving a large, decisive combat force quickly into the region in the event of war.

According to the official fact sheet, “Operation Atlantic Resolve will remain in place as long as the need exists to reassure our allies and deter Russia from regional hegemony.”

But is this rotational presence really going to send a clear and strong message to the Kremlin? Magnus Nordenman, an analyst with the Atlantic Council, thinks it sends “somewhat of a message.”

“The preference is to have permanently based forces, but if we can’t have that, then certainly rotations are better than nothing,” he told VICE News.

Both Marine General Joseph Dunford, the nominee to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his prospective vice chairman, General Paul Selva, bring not only experience in strategic mobility, but also described Russia as a greater threat than China, North Korea, or Iran during their confirmation hearings, and encouraged deployment of heavy weapons in Europe to defend NATO allies.

Secretary of State John Kerry, who initially disagreed with Dunford and Selva, was alarmed by Putin’s comments. “Nobody should hear that kind of announcement from a leader of a powerful country and not be concerned about what the implications are,” Kerry said.

The short-term objective of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment’s training now seems obvious. “It provides us with operational mobility to maneuver throughout the alliance, and that is an incredible capability that we have inside Europe now,” Colonel Meyer said.

“A lot has been said over the last weeks about whether or not Russia is a threat, and what I can say is, I am training the formation to deal with any of the threats we can be faced with,” he added.

That same type of training has already occurred in the Pacific. Garuda Shield, along with the other training operations in Malaysia and Japan, were framed as a “Pacific Rebalance” — the current bureaucratic moniker of the Obama administration’s 2013 Pacific Pivot. The official Army Pacific Command website calls these efforts a “tangible demonstration of US commitment to Indo-Asia Pacific region security and stability.”

This operation, like its European equivalent, aims to train US forces with allied forces and familiarize the troops with the region.

Interestingly, the US Army is also focused on increasing its maritime and expeditionary capabilities, and appears to be reassessing its roots and fundamentally rethinking its structure and responsibilities.

With the implementation of this new, lighter-footprint form of power projection, some of the highest-ranking army officers envision a smaller, more flexible force capable of doing the strategic job of a much larger force. European commander Hodges would like “30,000 soldiers [to] achieve the strategic effect of 300,000 soldiers.”

“I don’t think he was being literal,” army spokesman Joseph Buccino told VICE News. “In a literal sense, it is impossible to replicate 30,000 [troops] with 300,000.”

But at least one commander sounded a word of caution.

“Rotating presence is no substitute for permanent forward presence,” said General Philip Breedlove, commander of the US European Command, which controls all military forces in that theater, in a Pentagon press briefing in April. But, he added: “Genuinely and fully funded rotational presence can play an important role in helping meet the requirements in our theater.”

This is ultimately the rub. This sort of “virtual presence” is a good way to extend limited peacetime resources, but is still just a placeholder for non-existent troops that will be sorely needed should conventional deterrence fail and war break out.

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WASHINGTON — Religious experts are saying the U.S. approach with ISIS should be more focused on the movement’s ideology. Islamic extremists claim to be restoring the faith to its original interpretation as part of their recruitment strategy. Experts say interpretations of religion are meant to evolve over time.

“What if a message like the Koran was revealed in modern society, let’s say New York City,” Brookings fellow Shadi Hamid said. “So for example, when it comes to gay rights, presumably anything revealed today in New York would have a little bit of a different perspective, a more tolerant one. They’d say, ‘this doesn’t really relate to our modern context.”

The sentimental appeal ISIS is using continues to give the group momentum, with the ultimate goal being to take over and reform the Caliphate.

Recent innovations point to stronger and higher-performing highways and bridges in the future. Some products are already on the market; others are a long way off.

It may sound far-fetched, but the technology exists for self-healing concrete. The auto-mending material contains limestone-producing bacteria that activates when wet. The bacteria can lie dormant for up to 200 years, according to the European Patent Office, where the technology is registered.

When a structure made of self-healing concrete develops a crack, water inevitably seeps in, prompting the bacteria to feed on calcium lactate in the concrete. The feeding process breaks down different minerals in the concrete and consumes oxygen from the air. This sets in place a process that converts the calcium lactate, which can be dissolved in water, to limestone, which fills the crack.

“This is kind of ‘The Jetsons’ stuff,” says Georgene Geary, with a laugh. Ms. Geary is principal engineer at GGfGA Engineering in Georgia, and chairs the Task Force on Nanotechnology-Based Concrete Materials at the Transportation Research Board in Washington.

“This is the future,” she says.

Hendrik Jonker, a microbiologist in the Netherlands who owns the patent to the technology, came up with the idea by considering how the human body repairs broken bones through mineral processes. The process for concrete works on a crack of any length, as long as it is no wider than 0.03 inches, according to the European Patent Office.

New technology also opens the door for self-cleaning concrete. Engineers such as Kimberly Kurtis, professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, are studying ways to use light as a catalyst for cleaning the surface of concrete or binding pollutants in the surrounding air.

Ms. Kurtis’ team has examined the use of a special form of the mineral titanium dioxide, which has been manipulated to make the mineral react to light. When light hits the surface of a concrete structure containing this special type of titanium dioxide, it begins a chain of events that eventually destroys organic material on the surface of the concrete, such as bacteria. Moss and fungi that feed on bacteria are unable to grow without the food source.

“They can also interact with pollutants in the air – things like nitrogen oxides or volatile organic compounds – and bind those to surfaces to essentially clean the air,” Kurtis says.

Kurtis noted that the high cost of self-cleaning concretes make them best suited for smaller scale projects in particularly dirty environments, such as a section of wall facing a street with heavy pollution.

While self-cleaning concrete has been commercially available for the past decade, its use remains limited. Sculptures near the new Interstate 35 bridge across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis – built after the 2007 collapse of an earlier bridge  – use self-cleaning concrete, as does the Jubilee Church in Rome, a building celebrated for its stunning white walls and unique architecture.

If special concretes can kill bacteria, could they also purify water? Researchers at the University of Central Florida are working to develop a cleansing coating for concrete surfaces that will kill bacteria. According to Boo Hyun Nam, assistant professor of civil, environmental, and construction engineering, the idea is to cover the inside walls of pipelines and storage tanks with the coating to purify the water inside and prevent contamination. Mr. Nam would not specify what the coating is made of.

“It’s their secret recipe,” he says.

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