Politics & Power Quote by David Hackworth

“Modern American war is as easy to script as a B movie” lands like a veteran’s sneer, not a professor’s thesis. Hackworth isn’t just accusing the U.S. military of predictability; he’s accusing it of rehearsing war for optics. The B-movie jab matters: it’s mass entertainment built from stock characters, recycled plots, and cheap effects. In his framing, “modern” war becomes something planners can storyboard in advance: clear villains, clean objectives, tidy timelines, a triumphant final reel. That’s not strategy so much as genre.

The subtext is a warning about institutional self-deception. Wars that feel scriptable tend to be the ones leaders think they can manage with metrics, technology, and messaging. Hackworth, shaped by Korea and Vietnam and later known for publicly skewering Pentagon complacency, is pointing at the gap between the war sold at home and the war experienced on the ground. If the public is offered a B-movie narrative, the messy parts - civilian costs, political blowback, insurgent adaptation, moral injury - get cut in the editing room.

It also doubles as an indictment of a media-military feedback loop. A war designed to be communicable to Americans becomes a war designed around what can be televised and defended at a podium. Scriptability isn’t a feature; it’s a symptom: of overconfidence, of careerist incentives, of a country that keeps trying to turn geopolitical violence into a manageable production. Hackworth’s line works because it’s brutal in its simplicity: when war starts to look like a movie, someone is already lying about the ending.