The Business of American Business is War

War sells. Or more accurately, the topic of war sells. For evidence, simply peruse the cable television listings on any given week or browse the history section in any modest-sized bookstore in the local mall. Much to the delight of academic and non-academic military historians, their work sells, whether rigorous or not. Yet chances are, one topic essential to an understanding of modern war is absent or, at best, seriously under-represented in the popular outlets for military history. Total economic mobilization represents one of the distinctive characteristics of modern warfare. While this topic may not attract the average channel surfer or reader, Paul A.C. Koistinen tackles it with Mobilizing for Modern War and in the process enhances our understanding of how warfare shaped the present-day American state.

In this study, Koistinen argues that a combination of government officials and business leaders laid the foundations around the turn of the twentieth century for the military-industrial complex of the Cold War. This account actually resumes where a previous volume concluded and represents the second installment in a projected five-book treatment of the political economy of American warfare. When completed, the project will provide a comprehensive analysis of how the United States organized its economy for war and the impact of various wartime mobilizations on national political and economic development. The first in the series, Beating Plowshares into Swords, surveyed the Revolutionary period through the Civil War. Mobilizing for Modern War covers the transitional phase in American warfare after 1865 and through World War I when industry became inextricably linked to the nation’s fortunes in war and helped foster a close business-government relationship.

The structure of Mobilizing for Modern War follows a pattern established in Beating Plowshares. Koistinen sets the stage with a discussion that encompasses several decades, and conflicts, and then devotes the bulk of the book to a single major war. In volume one, he provides expansive coverage of both sides in the Civil War, and in volume two, World War I is the primary object of attention. For some readers, the disproportionate coverage may be unsatisfactory, but even in a series with the projected heft of this one, the author must choose what events to emphasize and what details to sacrifice to the larger theme. Still, Koistinen will cause some disappointment with the topics that he chose not to flesh out. In the first volume, the colonial and Revolutionary periods were the most wanting, and in the second, the Spanish-American War and the era of military reforms that bracketed that conflict receive the shortest treatment. As a result, the analysis seems familiar at times as Koistinen moves swiftly through five decades in the first hundred pages in order to reach the climax of World War I. For example, he recounts the origins of the modern American military-industrial complex in the development of the new steel navy in the 1880s and 1890s. At that time, the government and a select group of manufacturers formed a relationship that helped insure a secure place for industrial elites in shaping future mobilizations. This subject is essential to the development of Koistinen’s argument, yet it departs little from material already covered by studies such as B.F. Cooling’s Gray Steel and Blue Water Navy (1979). ¹ Such a fact is hardly surprising in a semi-synthetic work, but one might expect that Koistinen would follow up on the evolution of this particular government-business relationship in the in-depth section on World War I.

Instead, he leaves this promising thread on the navy dangling. The chapter on the new steel navy represents the only extensive treatment of naval affairs in the book, although Koistinen makes repeated allusions to the Navy Department, efficiency during World War I, especially compared to the War Department’s more awkward performance. A more complete explanation would round out Koistinen’s case...