The US has been engaged in military interventions worldwide over the past decades. America's heavy reliance on military approaches over the past decades has been driven by "a hankering to retain hegemony in the world" and "vested interests of the country's influential military-industrial complex," according to experts. The US' "war addiction," which has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and destruction of countless homes in an array of countries, has also backfired, with casualties and tragedies among its troops piling up amid sky-high military spending. War addiction "Violence is the primal problem of American history, the dark reverse of its coin of freedom and abundance," wrote US historian David Courtwright in 1996. The root cause of America's addiction to the use of armed forces lies in its yearning to maintain hegemony. Read: Taliban guard airport as most NATO troops leave Afghanistan