Maddow, right, with President Shalala on stage at the BankUnited Center Fieldhouse.

In a sit-down conversation with University of Miami President Donna E. Shalala on Sunday, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow discussed some of the reasons she believes the United States is in a perpetual state of war, pointing to the nation’s immense defense industry, military expenditures, and secret drone warfare.

Maddow, author of the New York Times best-selling book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, said her biggest concern is that “war has become easy for us.”

She weighed defense spending against health care. “People are going to have babies. People are going to get old, and cancer still exists,” Maddow said in front of some 900 people, many of them UM students, at the BankUnited Center Fieldhouse. “Our needs around health care are less politically determined than our needs around defense.”

Maddow, whose talk was presented in association with Books & Books, also expressed concern over arms sales abroad, saying it might not be wise to sell technology such as night-vision to countries the U.S. may face in a future conflict.

She criticized the treatment of veterans returning to the U.S. from battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, noting the difficulties they are facing in receiving compensation benefits because of a backlog of claims. “This is something that should be solvable,” she said.

Asked by one student how civilians could help, Maddow said people can volunteer at VA medical centers and veterans organizations. “Maybe they [veterans] need to be driven to [doctors] appointments and you have a car,” she explained.

Maddow, who was a Rhodes Scholar, addressed other topics, calling for more support for the humanities and arts, and predicting that more U.S. states, especially those with large coastlines, will see more practical decision-making that accounts for rising sea levels.

She gave students some advice on activism, telling them not to choose battles they can’t win but causes in which they can make measurable progress.