American Arsenal

When America declared war on Germany in 1917, the United States had only 200,000 men under arms--a twentieth of the German army's strength. It was a second-rate military power in nearly every respect, its arsenal practically empty. Today, slightly less than a century later, the United States has by far the world's largest military budget and provides more than 40 percent of the world's armaments.

In American Arsenal , Patrick Coffey tells the story of America's military evolution from isolationist state to super-armed superpower. Focusing on fifteen specific technologies, Coffey illustrates the unplanned, often haphazard nature of this transformation and the various political, technological, and commercial interests that have driven it. Beginning with Thomas Edison's work on submarine technology, he moves from World War I to the present conflicts in the Middle East, covering topics from chemical weapons, strategic bombing, and the nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union, to "smart" bombs, hand-held anti-aircraft missiles, and drones.

Tracing the story of each advance in weaponry from drawing board to battlefield, American Arsenal presents absorbing portraits of the men, starting with Edison, who invented and deployed these new weapons--Edward Teller, "the father of the hydrogen bomb"; Robert Oppenheimer, head of atomic bomb design at Los Alamos; Curtis LeMay, who led the fire-bombing of Japan; Abraham Karem, inventor of the Predator drone; and many others. Whether their motivations were patriotic, purely scientific, or profit-driven, the technologies they championed had in common the notion of preserving American lives and distancing the face of battle and the way of harm. The ultimate goal was and remains to remove soldiers from the battlefield entirely--limiting casualties but also lessening the political and psychological costs of war. The dramatic reduction in casualties in post-Vietnam conflicts, for example, coupled with the elimination of the military draft, Coffey argues, has made it easier for a president to take the country to war and for these wars to continue for longer periods of time.

A fascinating, chilling, and engaging tour through the history of military technology, American Arsenal also offers a critical perspective on the U.S. defense program's continual evolution, starting with its origins a century ago.