Two Books on the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex

Two volumes address the consequences of what President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned of in 1961, when he described the growing “military-industrial complex,” the huge military establishment that would have “grave . . . economic, political, even spiritual . . . implications” that would be felt “in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government.” Pemberton focuses on the military budget, which is now nearing $1 trillion per year: how it became so big, what it funds, its impacts on communities around the country, and how the linked forces of members of Congress, the military, and defense contractors work together to push its constant growth. The military’s workforce, which includes active-duty soldiers, reserves, and civilians, exceeds three million people. In addition to thousands of bases within the United States, the military maintains 750 bases in at least 85 countries. No other country owns more than a handful of bases abroad. The U.S. defense budget is larger than the rest of the discretionary federal budget combined, and private contractors now account for more than half of it. According to Pemberton, a well-funded force of congressional lobbyists and a revolving door that guides retired generals and admirals into senior roles at arms manufacturers keep the money flowing into private hands even in the absence of clear threats. At first glance, communities should be expected to benefit from military projects funded with huge sums of federal money. Yet a majority of the states that have received the most military contracts over many decades have poverty rates above the national average.

Toft and Kushi work from an ambitious data set they have created that covers every U.S. military intervention since 1776—a total of 392 operations by their reckoning, more than double the number covered in other such compilations. They classify interventions by type, region, causes, consequences, and length and supplement the empirical data with case histories. The authors argue that the data reveal patterns of U.S. military activity through six historical eras they succinctly define in terms of the country’s prime strategic objective at the moment, from winning independence from Great Britain in the 1700s to fighting jihadist terrorism in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Since the end of the Cold War, the data show a sharp uptick in the use of force, more interventions in semidemocratic countries, shifts in objectives, and a widening gap in the level of hostility between the United States and the countries in which it chooses to intervene. This amounts, they argue, to Washington’s increasing propensity to use “force-first diplomacy” in the face of ill-defined threats. These interventions frequently backfire and threaten long-term national interests. The authors’ conclusions go beyond what their numbers prove, but the data they have amassed provide powerful insights into the trajectory of both recent and long-term American foreign policy that deserve close attention.