Pentagon Capitalism

A pioneering study of the Cold War military-industrial complex shows how defence leaders reorganised the US armed forces in the image of commercial enterprise.

The strategic landscape of the Cold War generated political support for a permanent US military force of unprecedented scale. Faced with the problem of managing this behemoth, leaders of the defence bureaucracy looked to private industry for inspiration: since the military now resembled a huge industrial conglomerate, they reasoned, it should be run like a business. A. J. Murphy explores the profound consequences of translating military structures of command, logistics, and warfare into capitalist terms.

In the realm of budgeting and finance, defence reformers refashioned the supply process as a buy-and-sell transaction between units, requiring officers to express their need for equipment and labour in dollar terms. Bureaucrats embraced Taylorist work measurement to supervise everything from clerical filing to the production of massive weapons systems. The services even engaged management consultants to establish officer-training academies modelled on the Harvard Business School.

After the Vietnam War, many military leaders pushed back, questioning “managerialism” and calling for a return to traditional concepts of command. Civilian critics also chimed in, protesting the callousness of the business-minded secretary of defence, Robert McNamara, who famously measured success and failure in body counts. By this time, however, the language and values of management had thoroughly infiltrated the military’s institutional structure and daily operations. As Pentagon Capitalism makes clear, the reorganisation of the defence bureaucracy along the lines of a for-profit firm durably altered the experience of military work and facilitated the lasting privatisation of US national security.