The “Garrison State”: How Has It Turned Out?

Harold D. Lasswell: “The Garrison State.” The American Journal of Sociology. Volume 46, Number 4 (January 1941), pp. 455-468).

Aaron L. Friedberg: In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

 

“The Garrison State” numbers among the miniscule number of influential articles published by professional political scientists. Harold D. Lasswell was among the most prominent of these, serving as president of the American Political Science Association and, more importantly, founding the field of political psychology after having written his Ph.D. dissertation on the use of propaganda in World War I. Writing at the beginning of the Second World War, Lasswell asks his readers “to consider the possibility that we are moving toward a world of ‘garrison states’—a world in which the specialists on violence are the most powerful group in society.” Hitherto, at least in the commercial republics, regimes have favored “the specialist on bargaining,” the businessman, who enjoys “dominance.” But “the trend of our times” flows “toward the supremacy of the soldier,” albeit through such “transitional forms” as “the party propaganda state,” whose dominant human ‘type’ “is the propagandist,” and “the party bureaucratic state, in which the organization men of the party make the vital decisions.” And of course there are “mixed forms” of government, wherein “predominance is shared by the monopolists of party and market power.” Had Lasswell lived to see the rule of the Chinese Communist Party in the twenty-first century, he would have identified elements of all these forms of rule in it. And Chairman Xi Jinping has been especially insistent on not allowing the military to supersede Party rule, partly for ‘ideological’ reasons, partly because China has often seen its emperors threatened by warlords. [1]

Lasswell takes care to tell his readers that “the picture of the garrison state that is offered here is no dogmatic forecast.” He regards its rise as “probable,” “not inevitable.” He understands that “expectations about the future may rest upon the extrapolation of past trends into the future,” but extrapolations are only that. There can be many a slip. Nor does Lasswell claim to have discovered such a state. Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer both described “the military state.” But the garrison state is a new kind of military state, one that combines military rule with modern technology. “The military men who dominate a modern technical society will be very different from the officers of history and tradition” because they will be experts “in many of the skills that we have traditionally accepted as part of civilian management.” The new military officer will merge his knowledge of warfighting with “skill in supervising technical operations, in administrative organization, in personnel management, in public relations,” “translat[ing] the complicated operation of modern life into every relevant frame of reference,” namely, “the frame of fighting effectiveness as well as of pecuniary profit.”

The problem he will face, as a ruler and not merely a soldier, will be that technology cuts both ways: knowledge most assuredly is power in modernity, but it also causes society to become “honeycombed with cells of separate experience, of individuality, of partial freedom.” Decades later, one points to the Internet, noting that China has one of its very own. “Concerted action under such conditions depends upon skillfully guiding the minds of men; hence the enormous importance of symbolic manipulation in modern society,” propaganda. With the coming of aerial warfare and its partial abolition of “the distinction between civilian and military functions”—notice, “functions” rather than “persons”; Lasswell really is a social ‘scientist’—the nation “becomes one unified technical enterprise” which requires vigorous propaganda campaigns to hold it together, maintain the way of life and the purposes of the regime.

What sort of propaganda? Since “in the garrison state there must be work—and the duty to work—for all,” and “all who do not accept employment flout military discipline,” garrison statesmen will compel their subjects to work and, when (inevitably) some fall between the proverbial cracks, they will redefined as not unemployed—this being “chiefly a matter of redefining symbols”—but as miscreants. In the educational system, “from the earliest years youth will be trained to subdue—to disavow, to struggle against—any specific opposition to the ruling code of collective exactions.” The so-called Protestant work ethic will exclude the right to protest. On the contrary, the conscience of the subjects will impose “feelings of guilt and anxiety upon the individual whenever his impulses are aroused, ever so slightly, to break the code.”

A proletarian state, you say? Hardly, or at most in name only: “The chief targets of compulsory labor service will be unskilled manual workers, together with counterélite elements who have come under suspicion.” Technology replaces the unskilled; they will become expendable. And the same trend will prevail in warfare, as the battlefield infantryman will become increasingly obsolete; tank warfare was a harbinger of this. The soldiers that remain will be controlled not only by propaganda but much more effectively by drugs that induce both “temporary orgies of energy on the part of front-line fighters but in order to deaden the critical function of all who are not held in esteem by the ruling elite.” But such pharmacological methods are in the future. Propaganda and also “some equalitarian adjustments in the distribution of income for the purpose of conserving the will to fight and to produce” will suffice, for now.

The institution of a garrison state obviously amounts to a regime change. “In addition to the adjustment of symbols, goods, and violence, the political elite of the garrison state will find it necessary to make certain adaptations in the fundamental practices of the state,” most obviously as it acts in commercial republics but also as it acts in tyrannies and oligarchies. As to the republics, “decisions will be more dictatorial than democratic, and institutional practices long connected with modern democracy will disappear,” including elections to office and referendums. Elections will continue, but they will be plebiscites, “unanimous demonstrations of [the] collective sentiment” fostered by the aforesaid manipulation of symbols, goods, and violence, with “rival political parties” rigorously suppressed. “Legislatures will be done away with,” except in those states whose rulers prefer to keep them as part of the symbology. Real lawmaking “will be in the hands of the supreme authority and his council.” What Lasswell calls “mystic” democracy (“not, strictly speaking, democracy at all”) consists of the rulers’ “established practice…to speak in the name of the people as a whole.”

Where will the new rulers come from? “What part of the social structure”? The officer corps will provide the top echelon. Civil-social standing (whether ‘aristocratic’ or oligarchic) will give way to “recruitment for ability,” somewhat constrained by the inevitable formation of family ties from one generation to another among the new ruling class. “Any recurring crisis, however, will strengthen the tendency to favor ability,” while ideological conformity and obedience will not go unnoticed.  Regarding the social structure itself, farewell, Alexis de Tocqueville. “The role of independent associations will disappear, with the exception of secret societies,” as administrative centralization and “the leadership principle” prevail in combination. Rule will focus on safety (“equalizing the distribution of safety throughout the community” thanks to “the socialization of threat in modern war”), income (“some moderation of huge differences in individual income”), and “deference” or honors, which will also be somewhat equalized, although of course the “leaders” will enjoy the lion’s share, with lesser distributions to the Stakhanovites. As Lasswell mildly puts it, “distribution of power will show the largest inequalities.”

Can such a state sustain itself financially? Or will productivity decline? Lasswell anticipates that high rather than low productivity will be the rulers’ economic-political problem. They will need to rule “the stupendous productive potentialities of modern science and engineering,” and to do a more effective job than modern corporation oligarchs, who have not mastered the booms and busts of the business cycle. This failure, however, has arisen from the profit motive. “The rulers of the garrison state,” however, “will be able to regularize the rate of production,” as they will be unmoved by such greed and “free from many of the conventions that have stood in the way of adopting measures suitable to this purpose in the business state,” such as “flexible adjustment between governmental and private channels of activity” and “strict measures to maintain price flexibility.” Nonmilitary consumption will be restricted in favor of the production of new military technologies. Here, propaganda enters once more: “The rulers of the garrison state will depend upon war scares as a means of maintaining popular willingness to forego immediate consumption”; moreover, when propaganda begins to lose its effect, real wars will follow, as “ruling classes will feel that bloodletting is needed in order to preserve those virtues of sturdy acquiescence in the regime which they so much admire and for which they so greatly benefit.”

Will the garrison state eventually suffer from sclerosis, from political, economic, and social rigidity? There is no doubt that “the fighter must steel himself against deep-lying tendencies to retreat from death and mutilation,” a steeling that becomes habitual from the use of drill “as a means of disciplining men to endure personal danger without giving in to fear of death.” Lasswell anticipates that military life will consist of alternate patterns of strictness and laxity, of drill and of tolerance for time-limited trips to the local taverns and brothels. The latter activities will intensify “the guilt generated by self-indulgence,” which in turn “can be relieved through the orgiastic reinstatement of the established mores of disciplined sacrifice.” Further, “one of the subtlest ways by which the individual can keep his mind distracted from the discovery of his own timidity” is the implementation of “ritual and ceremony.” The military parade, with soldiers in lockstep, will gratify both rulers and ruled alike.

‘Totalitarian’ in these ways, the garrison state will likely be “far less rigid than the military states of antiquity” because technological rule requires “physical scientists and engineers” whose “focus of attention is entirely given over to the discovery of novel ways of utilizing nature.” In antiquity, the few philosophers were outcasts, suspect eccentrics in the polis. In modernity, including the modern garrison state, philosophers will be replaced by “an enormous body of specialists, men and women of technical expertise”—expertise directed, to be sure, in service of the regime, but nevertheless afforded a degree of freedom for increasing the body of knowledge. As science or knowledge replaces philosophy or love of wisdom, the human mind will be narrowed but not necessarily overridden—unless, of course, machines can be invented that out-think the humans. That prospect was some decades in the future, and Lasswell takes no notice of it, leaving such speculations to the writers of ‘science fiction.’

More immediately, “the friend of democracy views the emergence of the garrison state with repugnance and apprehension,” preparing to “do whatever is within his power to defer it” or, failing in that, preserve “democratic values” in some way within it. Lasswell points to “several elements in the pattern of the garrison state [that] are compatible with democratic respect for human dignity,” such as its “socialization of respect for all who participate in the garrison society,” albeit “with the ever-present exception of the lowest strata.” This will comfort those who have read Tocqueville on democratic despotism rather coldly. Lasswell knows that, and does the academic’s typical move, calling for more research on the subject.

Some sixty years later, Aaron L. Friedberg published a report on how Americans actually dealt with the prospect of the garrison state during the decades of the Cold War, when one might have expected government and civil society to have become increasingly garrison-like. War, ‘hot’ or ‘cold,’ tends to incline statesmen to ‘grow’ the state. “The comparative absence of immediate military threats [had] permitted the United States to survive and thrive during the first century and a half of its existence without developing a central state that was strong in the traditional ways.” That “eras of insularity” ended with the end of World War II. However, the inclination to empower the American state was, “to a degree, counterbalanced by strong anti-statist influences that were deeply rooted in the circumstances of the nation’s founding” or, more precisely, in the character of the Founders’ regime and the consequent “domestic constraints” on statism that the regime reinforced. What is more, this course of events may aid citizens to understand “why it is that, over the course of several centuries, liberal democracies have been able to best a series of less liberal, less democratic challengers.”

Friedberg cites three causes for the American regime’s relative success in resisting the democratic despotism of the garrison state: the structure of its ruling offices; the interest groups organized within its civil society; and American “ideas,” the purposes the regime set for itself. With respect to ruling offices, he cites the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches while mentioning “the fragmented character of the American system” generally (federalism being an obvious example) as barriers to “those who wanted to build stronger, more highly centralized power creating mechanisms.” Interest groups without any stake in statism enjoyed the liberty to resist encroachment. And American ideas, especially its esteem for liberty, constituted “not just a rhetorical cloak concealing selfish interests” but “a strong source of self-constraint on American government officials,” up to the highest ranks. However, Friedberg rightly remarks, “To the extent that anyone deserves credit for this, it is the Founding Fathers, not their descendants.” They, not the statists or the libertarians who would have weakened the American state to the point of imbecility, enabled the generation of citizens living throughout the Cold War to resist the Soviet Union, to retain their independence among the powers of the earth, while securing their safety and happiness at home. While “there is no question that the American state was bigger and stronger in 1950 than it was in 1930,” it “was not nearly as big or as strong as it could have been, nor as many influential people believed at the time that it must become in order to survive.” Part of this achievement owed to the invention of nuclear weapons, which gave the American government formidable power to deter its enemies while keeping the government small enough not to regiment civilians. Even so, the regime still mattered. The Soviets developed their own nuclear arsenal, but, owing to the difference in regimes, the two countries “responded to nuclear weapons in very different ways.” That is, technology contributed to the maintenance of a republic, but the regime itself had a decisive influence. “In a totalitarian system,” a tyrannical or overbearingly oligarchic regime, “closed hierarchical political institutions, centralizing ideologies, and the atomization of civil society all combine to enhance the power of the state,” even “when they are not at war.” In republican regimes, state-builders have a tougher go, with representative government, “institutionalized protection for individual rights,” ideas supporting individual and political liberty, Tocqueville’s “vibrant civil societies,” all mitigating against them. They need the consent of the governed, typically induced by the inculcation of fear and of compassion. Despite the impressive reach of propaganda media, consent is harder to manipulate than conformity induced by force.

Friedberg cites Leo Strauss, who wrote called the American regime the only one in the world “founded in explicit opposition to Machiavellian principles,” principles that commended, among other things, lo stato. “The architects of the American republic labored to create a regime in which it would be impossible for even the wiliest and most ambitious prince to achieve the dream of total power.” Far from princely in Machiavelli’s sense or kingly in the traditional sense, the president is not sovereign, with “the essential state-building functions” taken “out of the hands of the executive and placed…securely with the legislature,” with its powers to regulate money and commerce both interstate and international. If anything, American business interests depended less upon the national and state governments in the years 1830 to (at least) 1900 than they had during the founding and its immediate aftermath—so much so, that Americans “proceeded to erase all memory of their previous dependence on the state and to embrace the myth that America had always been the land of unfettered free enterprise.” In some desperation, American state-builders have resorted the language of war, of national emergency, whether in pushing for a ‘New Deal’ or a ‘Great Society.’ ‘Wars’ on “poverty, drugs, crime, and disease,” proliferated, but their very mixed record of success slowed the intended growth of the state. And prior to 1945, “the war-related ‘ratchet effect’ at work” to build the American state” was relatively weak” as, for example, “the dramatic increases in the scale and scope of the federal government that occurred during the Civil War and World War One were followed by sharp contractions.” If the past is prelude, “no matter how big and strong it grows, the American state is destined always to be uneasy.”

At the outset of the Cold War, American saw “an unusually intense current of resistance to statism as well as a strategically induced push for a permanent expansion in governmental power.” It is (as Marxists once habitually said) no accident that ‘conservatism’ as a political movement arose in those years. [2] It is true that the Joint Chiefs of Staff and President Harry S. Truman warned that aerial warfare made even the American heartland potentially vulnerable to attack, especially since neither the Atlantic and Pacific oceans nor the exhausted countries of Western Europe any longer provided a powerful shield. As one 1948 planning document put it, “Soviet domination of the potential power of Eurasia, whether achieved by armed aggression or by…subversive means, would be strategically and politically unacceptable to the United States.” [3]. “A “continuing, imminent threat of war” from a garrison state and its allies imposed serious choices on American officials and the citizens they represented.

Against the possibility of an increasingly militarized and socialist state stood the Republican Party, whose leaders warned that “rising taxes, expanding expenditures, a ballooning federal bureaucracy, and increasingly government regulations and controls were tilting the balance of national power toward Washington, and within Washington toward the executive branch,” with “a loss of political as well as economic freedoms” as a looming consequence. Southern Democrats, terrified of anti-segregationist sentiments in the majority of their colleagues, began to drift away, against the statism they had welcomed during the Great Depression, and Congress members (“even some liberals”) grew somewhat restive under presidential power. While they did not repeal many regulations, Congress members did restructure committees to enable better ‘oversight’ of the executive branch agencies. Multiple investigations followed. And the legislators found ready support among business groups, chafing under regulation conducted by those agencies. Friedrich Hayek’s anti-statist arguments in The Road to Serfdom, Edwin S. Corwin’s constitutionalist case against an overweening centralized state, and indeed Lasswell’s description of the “garrison state” all found sympathetic audiences.

Voters reached an initial compromise by electing Dwight D. Eisenhower to the presidency in 1952. Ever the realist, Eisenhower saw that any political party that attempted “to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs” would lose. Regarding the military, it was clear to him, and not only to him, that (as Friedberg puts it) “the American people wanted a state that was strong enough to defend them against their foreign enemies but not strong enough to threaten their domestic liberties.” He adds, “These were not unreasonable desires; the question was whether they were compatible.” The Eisenhower Administration and the Congress of that time showed that they were, although Eisenhower’s farewell warning against a possible “military-industrial complex” betokened continued anxiety that the balance might not hold. To prevent this, military planners implemented a policy of “flexible response” with nuclear weapons, whereby the United States stood ready to answer any attack at the level of the attack, reserving any nuclear strike for retaliation against a nuclear strike by the enemy. This moderated military spending. Eisenhower cut the military budget, manpower levels, and conventional forces, all of which Truman had increased. “Flexible response would endure until the Cold War had run its course.” Although the geopolitical/military advances by the Soviets in the 1970s, the military bureaucracy’s pressures on Congress for spending increases, and the now entrenched civil social beneficiaries of military spending (scientists, industrialists, engineers) added more pressure still, the regime held firm, successfully preventing substantial encroachments on American civil society. Even in the 1980s, under the relatively ‘hawkish’ Reagan Administration, a commitment to liberty prevented the military buildup from betokening a garrison state, as anti-Communism, after all, can only go so far in tapping into the statism exhibited by the dictatorship of the proletariat.

By contrast, that dictatorship “lacked all such countervailing tendencies,” with both “Communist ideology and the structure of Soviet political institutions combin[ing] to elevate the state and to permit, indeed, to encourage, a strategically stimulated metastasis in its internal powers.” Under Khrushchev in the early 1960s and Gorbachev in the late 1980s, attempts to ‘restructure’ that state only served, in Khrushchev’s case, to provoke his removal by the generals and then, under Gorbachev, to throw it off balance and, ultimately, to bring on its collapse.

As to the ever-present concern about money, “in retrospect, what is most remarkable about American defense budgets during the first fifteen years of the Cold War is not how big they were, but how small.” While the military men wanted a substantial increase in spending (“between 100 percent and 300 percent”) in the late 1940s, Congress refused to panic. Military spending did increase substantially during the Korean War. But after that, as usual in postwar times, expenditures leveled off, thanks to the ingrained American resistance to high taxes, to conservative fiscal policy, and to “a strong aversion to deficit spending.” “While the Korean War certainly weakened the constraints on defense spending, it did not do so completely or permanently,” as “during the war. as before and after. The reluctance of Congress to raise taxes was the critical factor in this process,” while Eisenhower’s authority as the former commander of Allied forces in Europe during World War II lent him the prestige necessary to balance the budget “at the lowest possible levels of spending and taxation.” Economic growth, which flowed from those constraints, eased the pain of the still-impressive levels of military expenditures, and that growth continued under the Kennedy Administration, even as military spending also increased; the percentage of GDP devoted to military spending decreased. Again, in noteworthy contrast, “over the course of the Cold War, the Soviets imposed much heavier burdens on their economy,” to their considerable disadvantage in the long term. For Americans, “the reality of a centrally managed wartime economy, with all its inefficiencies and corruption,” had provided “a rude shock” to the optimists of statism, dependent as they were on popular consent for their authority; no such constraint operated in the Communist countries, where the joke was, ‘We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.’

Another constraint on military spending, although assuredly not on domestic spending, was the Johnson Administration and its ‘Great Society’ domestic programs, which competed (many times successfully) against military budget requests, although the Vietnam War and its attendant expenses “obscured and partially delayed” New-Deal aspirations. Increasing tax revenues that might have gone for tax cuts went to domestic spending, but neither did they go for increased military spending, when the war expenses leveled off and began to decline.

There was the matter of conscription, a notable feature of any garrison state. “More even that the power to tax, the power to conscript is truly the power to destroy.” Conscription had been a feature of the American states prior to 1776, but the Jeffersonian Democrats successfully opposed Federalist attempts to keep it going, after the Revolutionary War. “America’s armed forces soon came to consist in peacetime of a small, regular federal Army composed entirely of volunteers backed by an assortment of state militias that were themselves manned increasingly on a voluntary basis.” As Tocqueville remarked, “in America conscription is unknown.” During the Civil War, conscription was revived, first by the Confederates, then by the Unionists; notoriously, draft riots ensued in the North. With his characteristic rhetorical legerdemain, President Wilson explained the revival of conscription in 1917 by claiming that the “servicemen” had been “selected from a nation which has volunteered en masse” via Congress’s declaration of war. But as before, conscription ended with the war, and “the Army’s plans for a permanent peacetime system of universal military training were abandoned almost as quickly.” A year before the Pearl Harbor attack, “Congress agreed, after considerable debate, to permit the reimposition of a draft,” since “even the most ardent isolationists could not deny that the threats to the nation’s security were large and growing rapidly.” But there were conditions: draftees would fight only in the Western Hemisphere or to defend U.S. overseas possessions; the term of service was one year, extended to a year and a half in the fall of 1941. Only the Japanese attack and the German declaration of war induced Congress to extend conscription further, this time ‘for the duration.’

The Cold War, featuring the strategy of containing Communism to its newly expanded borders in central Europe, presented Americans with a new circumstance. “The onset of the Korean War…made possible the imposition of a limited draft.” After the war, the constant threat of war, but without an actual war, evidently required a new policy, neither the abandonment of conscription altogether nor universal conscription of young men. That policy consisted of what the government termed “selective service”: an army staffed with volunteers and also a limited number of draftees. That number steadily declined throughout the decade. When the Johnson Administration escalated the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s, “the demise of the draft” was postponed, but at the price of making the draft so unpopular that its “inevitable inequities” “seal[ed] its fate.” Meanwhile, the Soviet Union “maintained a system of universal conscription [UMT] from 1918 until the end of the Cold War,” giving it “the world’s largest standing forces” (six million by 1985) and “vast ready reserves” (25 million). Although Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall had pushed for universal military training during and after World War II, with the approval of both FDR and Truman, Eisenhower scotched the plan. “From the mid-1940s onward, the suggestion of anything even remotely resembling universal peacetime conscription aroused sustained vocal opposition from an assortment of labor, education, farm, church, left-wing, and pacifist groups,” who “shared a common abhorrence of compulsion by the state,” or, in the case of the Leftists, more specifically an abhorrence of compulsion by the American state. These groups “were able to exert an influence on events out of proportion to their actual numbers” because they could appeal to the American principles of liberty and government by consent. “These assertions moved the debate over UMT away from the technical issues on which government manpower planning experts might otherwise have had a decisive advantage and toward broad philosophical questions on which they could not claim a monopoly of wisdom.” The attempt to distinguish universal military training from conscription failed, Friedberg drily observes, as “this distinction seems for the most part have been lost on the larger audience.” The most that could be obtained was limited conscription with no universal training, a compromise that enjoyed better than sixty percent approval among the American people from the mid-1950s until the mid-1960s. And not surprisingly, since between 1953 and 1961, the number of conscripts “fell more or less steadily from over 560,000 to roughly 61,000.” Reliance of nuclear deterrence enabled the Eisenhower Administration to accomplish this. The additional softening of the draft via deferments for men enrolled in college was justified in one Air Force document by saying that America needed “brainpower” more than it needed “manpower.” (It might be noted that the Army brass might have said the opposite.) By 1964, that old Air Force man, Senator Barry Goldwater, denounced the draft as unnecessary in the course of his presidential campaign.

By then, draft calls had begun to increase under the Kennedy Administration, and in 1965-66, under Johnson, draft calls tripled. As the Vietnam War intensified, college students panicked and rebelled, leaving it to Richard Nixon and the Republican Part to outflank the Democrats on the issue. The draft ended in 1973, and although Army recruitments declined for the remainder of the decade, the Reagan Administration’s increases in military pay and his frequent praise of American military personnel, which restored the prestige of the armed forces, badly damaged in Vietnam, corrected the problem. Since then, elected officials have taken pains to praise American military personnel even when condemning a given war.

Another indispensable feature of a garrison state is “industrial policy,” i.e., “a strong, active, permanent industrial planning system.” This was considered very seriously in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In this area, too, Eisenhower’s increasing emphasis on nuclear deterrence “diminished the importance of emergency war production and justified decrease government efforts to shape the wider national industrial base.” The development of intercontinental ballistic missiles by the Soviets also weakened the case for planned dispersal of industrial assets; any point on U.S. territory could now be hit. The American aversion to ‘planning’ kicked in, and the federal structure of the American government gave political heft to those who suspected that one region might be favored over others by the planners. “Even in the face of an enemy, and to a remarkable degree even in wartime, the American system has proven itself to be highly resistant to centralized industrial planning.” Although a National Security Resources Board was established in 1947 (along with the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency), it “never became anything more than an ineffectual advisory appendage to the Executive Office of the President, with little authority and no access to powerful policy instruments.” Truman, for example, rejected its request for power over wage and price controls. It was soon replaced by the Office of Defense Mobilization. The government adopted a policy of granting tax breaks to defense industries, much more consonant with American liberty than planning with coercion. And even that program was dismantled by Eisenhower. “By the mid-1960s, the once-powerful and independent Arm Ordnance Department had been effectively organized out of existence.”

How then, Friedberg asks, “did the American armed forces come to rely on private entities to design, develop, and build their weapons for them?” This policy departed from previous U. S. practice, when the military kept such things in-house, except during wartime. It is true that “private producers were more efficient, more cost-effective, and more innovative than their public sector counterparts.” But that had always been so. And “by the end of the Second World War the government-owned and -operated arms production complex had grown greatly in size, economic importance, and potential political influence.” The workers could “claim to have tradition and experience on their side.”

The big change was in public sentiment. ‘Merchants of death’ in the decades following World War I, arms manufacturers were lauded as part of ‘the arsenal of democracy’ following World War II, ‘the good war.’ With that shift in sentiment, “Congress became a powerful proponent of private arms production.” And with “the creation and gradual strengthening of the Office of Secretary of Defense,” formerly known as the Secretary of War, the military officers had less leeway in following their old policies. Civilians more closely tied to the electoral fortunes of incumbent presidential administrations took control of procurement. “Throughout the American government and, indeed, throughout American society, there was…a widely shared and ultimately decisive belief that placing primary reliance on the private sector to produce the nation’s arms was good for reasons of political principle as well as of practicality.” Even the Navy’s shipyards, long the nearly exclusive producer of warships except during wartime, when production needed to be accelerated rapidly, were displaced by private industry. [4] And as for the Air Force, it had never had experience in airplane manufacture, so it simply continued to rely on the private sector.

Critics soon found a new catchphrase to replace ‘Merchants of Death,’ one provided them by President Eisenhower in his final address to the nation in 1960, when he warned against the influence of the “military-industrial complex.” In Friedberg’s judgment, however, “the big American defense firms probably played as small a role in perpetuating the Cold War as they did in starting it.” And why, he asks, would a military that manufactured its own weapons be a less ardent, less effective advocate of arms-racing than arms industry lobbyists and research universities?

That arms race came down to a competition in technology between two radically different regimes. Friedberg concurs with the argument made by Vannavar Bush in Modern Arms and Free Men, published in 1949, who drew “a connection between the fundamental character of a nation’s domestic political regime and its capacity for technological innovation.” Indeed, “each of the essential structural characteristics of the American Cold War research and development system (its size and strategic importance, its organizational pluralism and lack of bureaucratic centralization, its constrained functional scope, and its reliance on private entities) was strongly influence by ideological considerations and by the workings of the American domestic political institutions.” The armed forces themselves very much liked new technology, but they disliked “disruption to existing patterns of organization and doctrinal thought” just as much. The regime overall typically overcame the military sub-regime on that point, initially thanks to the jolt that superior German military technology had given Americans during the war, worries perpetuated by “the clear emergence of the Soviet Union,” with its substantial population advantage, as the most likely enemy in any future war.” “The nations of the free world would have to offset the advantages of their rivals by substituting firepower for manpower, capital for labor, quality for quantity,” even as Ukrainians would need to do, in the next century. Accordingly, “the Eisenhower administration elevated the substitution of firepower for manpower to the position of key organizing principle of national strategy”—even more so, when the Soviets demonstrated technological capability to go along with their manpower advantage.

This notwithstanding, in the longer run “the very domestic strength that permitted the totalitarian states to extract human and material resources in such quantities from their own societies also tended to suppress their capacity for innovation,” as those regimes “were rigid, arbitrary, hierarchical, and regimented”—garrison-like. “Intolerant of heresy, individual genius, the free movement of peoples and ideas, and [as Bush wrote] the ‘winnowing of chaff by competition and criticism’ on which true scientific progress inevitably rested,” the modern tyrannies looked more formidable than they actually were. Bush therefore concluded that the “democratic system” is “the best system” in human terms and also “the strongest system in a harsh contest.” [5] And when the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite panicked American lawmakers and pundits, Bush remarked that Soviet advances in space technology had come only when they had finally given some limited freedom to their scientists.

The United States never put forward a ‘master plan’—much less a Soviet-style ‘Five-Year Plan’—for military research. “In the construction of governmental mechanisms for the control of research, as in other arenas of postwar institution building, ideological factors, interest group pressures, and executive-legislative tensions”—prominent features of the American regime—all “tended to promote the diffusion of power and to discourage its concentration.” While the National Science Foundation was founded in 1950, that was too late to make it the powerful centralized agency its designers envisioned. At no time during the Cold War did the U. S. government spend much money “on supporting civilian industrial research for its own sake, nor did it create powerful new agencies for that purpose.” Between 1945 and 1990, seventy-five percent of the government research budget went to corporate or university laboratories or to government-owned by privately-run laboratories working on contracts, as any good Lockean would do. This approach had been pioneered during the war, as “the detonation of the first atomic bomb eliminating any lingering doubts about the ability of civilian scientists, working outside the confines of traditional defense research establishments, to produce fundamental breakthroughs in military technology.” As a result, in the ensuing decades “the government could influence, but could not, and would not, seek ultimately to control the larger course of national technological development.” And this “imposed real and significant burdens on the Soviet Union,” which could not apply the lesson of the successful Sputnik program across the board because freedom threatened the regime. In the event, “Soviet planners in the 1960s and 1970s…shift[ed] an even greater share of scarce scientific and technological resources from the civilian to the military sector, thereby contributing to a continuing slowdown in productivity growth and in national economic expansion.”

“Perhaps, in retrospect, the Cold War will come to be seen as one in a three-hundred-year series of contests between increasingly liberal, increasingly democratic states and a succession of autocratic, authoritarian, and totalitarian rivals,” contests in which “for Britain as for America, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as in the nineteenth and twentieth state weakness and national strength went hand in hand.” A worse threat to liberal, commercial, democratic republics might come from “a regime that was ‘liberal,’ at least in the limited sense of permitting private property, markets, and international trade, without being democratic.” Friedberg has China in mind, although the scope of its liberalism may be narrower than he thought, back in the year 2000.

 

 

Notes

1. On this, see “”China in the 1990s,” “The Chinese Strategy,” and “The Comprehensive Strategy of Xi Jinping,” on this website under the category, “Nations.”
2. For an account of Conservatism in the U.S., see “The Man Who Organized American Conservatism” and “The Conservative Credo of Frank S. Meyer,” on this website under “American Politics.”
3. This follows the geopolitical logic of Halford Mackinder, with its emphasis on the importance of the “World Island.” See “Foreign Policy Since 1890,” on this website under “Nations,” for an account of how Mackinder’s argument influenced American policy in Europe and Asia.
4. The exception to the rule of Navy control of ship manufacturing in peacetime occurred from the mid-1880s to the end of World War I. At that time, European states had begun “to exploit the products of the ‘second industrial revolution’ to build steam-powered, steel-hulled ships with big, accurate breech-loading guns,” while the American shipyards lagged behind, technologically. These were the decades when the American military strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan galvanized the attention of American politicians with his explanation of sea-power as key to controlling geopolitical chokepoints; Mahan’s most important ally in the government was the formidable Navy Secretary, Vice President, and President Theodore Roosevelt. The government reached out to private manufacturers during this period, rightly expecting them to be more innovative than the military.
5. This, in anticipation of Francis Fukuyama’s famous, too-much-spurned argument in The End of History (1992).