THE MILITARY NEXUS, II
That the military establishment has enjoyed exemption from the more general constraint on public action and public expenditure during the age of contentment has been sufficiently stressed. It is not seriously in doubt, nor, perhaps, is the substantial support it received in the past from the fear of Communism. This, however, explains only part of the present role and power of the military. There is also what may be called the autonomous power of great organization, a power that acts with particular force in the case of the military establishment. And there is the more than convenient tendency for formal and conventional thought and theory to conceal the true character and even the existence of this autonomous or internally generated power.
We have seen its elements—and its concealment—in the organizations of ordinary civilian economic life, and here I must refer back to matters earlier discussed. The great business enterprise, it is assumed and taught, is in the service of the consumer and is subject in all important respects to his or her sovereign authority. This service is said to be solely in pursuit of profit maximization. There can be monopoly or otherwise imperfect competition that allows the firm to extract undue compensation for what it does for the consumer; there can also be, although, as earlier noted, this is rarely discussed, bureaucratic incompetence. These are aberrations. The consumer remains in command. This the tens of thousands who are subject to scholarly economics instruction are taught every year.
In fact, the consumer is very substantially in the service of the business firm. It is to this end that advertising and merchandising in all their cost and diversity are directed; consumer wants are shaped to the purposes and notably to the financial interests of the firm. This is not a subtle exercise of power; television advertising, a more than slightly ostentatious instrument of persuasion, is not easily overlooked.
Nor is profit maximization, the presumptively controlling motivation in market response, uniformly operative. Management in the large organization may instead be concerned primarily with its own security, prerogatives, perquisites and power, and with defending these against intruders—a deeply destructive phenomenon, as has also already been noted. And members of the organization may have a general commitment to bureaucratic stability and comfort. Such are the frequent, wholly visible tendencies of great organization.
They are not, however, visible in conventional economic teaching and more general discourse. Here the market is a semireligious totem; in the market economy, instruction as to wants and needs proceeds ineluctably from consumer to producer. That the former is in some measure the instrument of the latter, that the great producing firm serves not a public purpose but its own, is thus removed from sight and thought. In much formal economic discussion extending on into the textbooks there is a measure of discontent and sometimes impatience when these matters are pressed. The market has its own truth on which reality does not intrude. We see here how effectively, even brilliantly, the preferred ideas can subsume and control inconvenient reality where organization is concerned.
The self-contained power that is thus exercised in civilian life is, however, of rather small importance and effect as compared with its much greater manifestation in the military establishment. On any detached examination, the latter—the armed services, the associated and supporting bureaucracy and the supplying business enterprises, principally the weapons firms—has a power, certainly has had a power, far transcending that of any civilian organization, certainly of any private business firm.
In all economic life there are two primary constraints on organization power. One is external authority over what is produced—in civilian life the ultimate decision of the consumer, however influenced by advertising and other persuasion. The other is the flow of purchasing power—in economic terms, the effective demand—that is available for the purchase of the good or service. The special, even unique character of the military establishment is that neither of these constraints is operational; both authority over what is produced and effective demand are, or have been, substantially within the control of the military establishment itself. The military forces and facilities that are to be maintained are extensively a military decision; the weapons to be developed and produced, and therewith the money to procure them, are also all but exclusively a military decision.
An important ceremonial role is played by the civilian heads of the defense establishment; it has long been recognized that with the rarest, most eccentric exceptions, they are effectively the captives of the establishment as a whole, or, as the case may be, the Army, Air Force or Navy department that is nominally their responsibility. It is indicative of this power, or more exactly of its absence, that the names of these civilians in the several services, the departmental secretaries, are no longer known even in Washington. That one of them should stand in strong opposition to the interest of the service he heads is nearly unthinkable. Tenure in these positions is also brief and, in the nearly normal case, the occupant and also his civilian subordinates move on to jobs in the defense industry—either direct employment or remunerative service as consultants. In effect, all are part of the complex itself, of a closed circle of common interest—a point that, indeed, is now widely accepted.
There is also, it will be observed, the role of the Congress and its committees. This too has long been partly ceremonial. The armed services committees attract, as a matter of course, legislators whose interests accord closely with those of the military. All are given careful and rewarding attention by high military officers and civilian officials. Some, through political action committees, are broadly in the pay of the defense firms. Others, as also legislators in general, are held hostage by the defense firms and military installations in their home districts or states. Thus Senator Alan Cranston of California, long a critical voice on the power of the military, found it necessary to make an exception for the B-2 bomber, a prospective source of substantial income and employment in his state. Thomas J. Downey, a vigorous and effective spokesman for arms control from Long Island, New York, was required to speak for the survival of the military aircraft production of the Grumman Corporation in his own congressional district.
Other legislators, similarly pressed, had no similar problem of conscience in coming to the support of their local defense production. And numerous legislators with no commitment either as to conscience or constituency have been no less ardently, even automatically, in the service of the military. As previously observed, a legislator could not be thought soft on Communism, and equally he or she could not be thought soft on defense. The result has been substantial military control of the legislative process, as of the presumptively responsible but extensively ceremonial civilian authority. Thus consolidated are the two vital sources of power. The military establishment largely determines the military mission that it pursues and the manpower and weaponry that support it. And, effectively, it controls the support or funding—the effective demand—for that mission, manpower and weaponry. None may say that this power is total or without occasional impairment; nothing is ever gained by exaggeration. Of this a word presently. That there is, in the nature of great organization, a sharply autonomous power here will not, in any detached view, be doubted.
Another important point is that just as the power of the great corporate enterprise is held to be under the benign constraints of the market, so the military power has long been held to be under the equally benign authority of democracy. What exists is said to be an expression of democratic will. Democracy is here, as elsewhere, the gracing note for a singularly independent and self-reinforced exercise of authority. It is the rood screen, perhaps more precisely the altar, behind which the modern military-industrial complex enjoys its self-generated and self-serving autonomy.
There is, as suggested in the preceding chapter, one further requirement if the military power is to be fully sustained. That is an enemy. This is not a primary need; as we have seen, the military establishment—the great organization that is currently extant—has emanating from within itself a full justification of its role. Nonetheless a visible threat is also important.
During the age of contentment there was no doubt as to the enemy. It was the Soviet Union and its presumed allies, the members of the Warsaw Pact,1 and the underlying threat of Communism, extending on into the Third World. Here, however, there was difficulty. Preparation for war, the arms race, would admirably serve the military power. A nuclear war, however, would not; it would, the view of suicidal intransigents apart, be destructive of that power, as of all else. In consequence, during the Reagan and early Bush years there was, instead, a succession of small military exercises of no enduring pain or importance. Marines were sent into Lebanon for largely unspecified purposes, although they were quickly withdrawn as they came under severe terrorist attack. Bombers were sent to destroy Muammar Qaddafi in Libya but managed to strike only some unfortunate adjacent bystanders instead. There was a military excursion to Grenada, there to unseat an allegedly dangerous Communist head of government and assure the benign control of an allegedly threatening airport then under construction. There was the more serious descent on Panama to arrest a former CIA anti-Communist asset, General Manuel Noriega, who had turned his attention to the drug traffic. Trading on the anti-Communist paranoia, there were slightly more subtle military interventions in Afghanistan, Angola and elsewhere in Africa and Central America, notably in Nicaragua and El Salvador. There was also major arms assistance to the same end in numerous other countries.
That Communism or socialism, a point earlier emphasized, is not a plausible economic and political design in countries that have not experienced capitalism, Angola and Nicaragua being good examples, was not a serious restraining factor. Nor was the evident fact that those countries, as earlier South Vietnam, posed no real security threat to the United States. These matters were raised and dismissed. What was less understood, even by those raising them, was that these objections missed the real point. Such military activities, however remote from any rationally established need, served in an important way the broad purpose of the military establishment. They were visible justification of its eminence and power; small, safe and spectacular, they were a reminder that military force was of continuing relevance. There were limits to which the confrontation with the Soviet Union could be carried, but here there were none. These demonstrations were not, from any seriously offered analysis, in the service of any essential foreign policy advantage; their primary service, as, indeed, was also widely understood, was to the autonomous power of the military establishment.
The point should not be carried to extremes. The need for an enemy and the service of that enemy to the military establishment unquestionably had something, perhaps much, to do with President Bush’s decision in January 1991 to intervene in the Middle East against Iraq. That this promised to justify the development of advanced communications and other electronic aircraft and military technology was especially attractive, as was the fact that the troops involved, especially those experiencing the extreme discomforts and casualties of ground combat, did not come from the contented electoral majority. The de facto exemption of the sons and daughters of this class was, without doubt, an important factor in making this particular military venture politically acceptable.2
There was, as has indeed been much noted, an even more specific service to the military power. The earlier venture into Vietnam and Cambodia had exposed major shortcomings and rather pronounced incompetence in the military, especially in the conduct of jungle warfare against determined guerrilla forces. Iraq, which was indubitably guilty of aggression and, by American standards, was small in population, insignificant in comparative industrial power and openly exposed on the desert, was admirably designed to retrieve the military reputation. The war was prosecuted with dispatch and at low cost in American casualties. It was favorably reported because of the impressive and generally successful control over the attendant and often unduly cooperative press. While there were dissonant voices that made reference to the heavy death rate among Iraqi civilians and the visibly reluctant Iraqi soldiers who had been forced into combat, and to the generally unfortunate, even disastrous, political aftermath, there is little doubt that the war in the Gulf did much for the reputation and prestige of the military establishment. In the celebrations marking the return of the victorious soldiers, no opportunity for enhancing this prestige was lost.
The collapse of Communist power in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s, the evident upheaval and disassociation within the Soviet Union itself, and the overthrow of the Communist Party there were thought by many to presage a major change in the position, power and control over financial resources of the American military establishment. The term peace dividend became part of the language. This underestimated the autonomous character of the military power. The military budget was only mildly affected by these events. The development of weapons systems, now unrelated to a plausible enemy, continued generally as before. Weapons technology was seen to have its own independent and affirming mission. An enemy was useful but not essential.
Yet here a final qualification must, indeed, be entered. The collapse of Communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union are not small events; they constitute the greatest transformation on the world scene in the last half century and more. The military power may well not escape the consequences, and what the ultimate effect on it will be no one can know. Modest reductions are possible. What is certain, however, is that it will yield neither easily nor completely to change. Exports of weaponry to other countries will be encouraged and financed. Understanding of politics in our time will continue to require an appreciation of the depth and breadth and influence of the modern military power.
1 Even though there was doubt, even in the Reagan years, of the full utility of the members of that organization as adversaries. At a meeting in Washington in the 1980s, an informed, more than slightly undisciplined but distinctly amused member of the Pentagon staff observed in private conversation that in the case of war the Hungarian divisions were potentially much more damaging to the Soviets than those of Poland. The Polish divisions, being relatively efficient, would change sides very quickly and thus be out of the way. The Hungarians, militarily incompetent, would stand in place and be a major barrier to effective deployment and operations.
2 Writing this during the days when the conflict was under way and much applauded, I asked the Harvard dean responsible for student matters how many of his charges had rallied to the war or been commanded thereto. He replied, “Very few.” I pressed for a precise figure. He replied, “Zero.”