State of War: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1945-2011 by Paul A. C. Koistinen (review)

State of War completes Koistinen's pentalogy of books about the relationship between war and industry in United States history, capping a career dedicated to the study of the military-industrial complex and its ancestors and successors. Readers of this journal will find it less inter-disciplinarity than Koistinen claims in his introduction, but any work that addresses political economy has some claim on their attention.

The author's conceptual model for his five-volume study posits four categories for analyzing military mobilization—economic, political, military, and technological—and three major stages—preindustrial, transitional, and industrial. Obviously, this last volume resides in the industrial stage; some of us might wish to see a post-industrial category. The book is densely populated with evidentiary trees, most of them transplanted from existing secondary literature. The forest that imposes shape and meaning on these trees is imagined in the tradition of William Appleman Williams—a historian who shaped a whole generation of scholarship during the Vietnam era by pointing out America's responsibility for everything from the Indian Wars and the Banana Wars to the Cold War and the quagmire in Southeast Asia.¹ Successors writing in this convention have spoken of a "warfare state," a "national security state," and a "weapons culture," all of them terms that Koistinen uses compatibly with President Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex."

Although the book is rich in detail and exhaustive in its coverage of the institutions, issues, and events that surrounded the American nexus of war and industry since World War II, the large generalizations that collectively form the argument of the book are more rhetorical than analytical. Koistinen suggests, for example, that defense spending has grown inexorably since the 1940s, though his own evidence refutes this assertion. Writing in the 2000s, when President George W. Bush was doubling defense spending, Koistinen teleologically suggests a more or less continuous growth since the Korean War. Defense spending as a percentage of gdp reached double digits, however, only during the 1950s and early 1960s, the real heyday of the military-industrial complex; it receded thereafter to a steady state closer to 5 percent of gdp. As a percentage of the federal budget, defense spending fell from 49.2 percent in 1962 to 18.7 percent in 2012. Koistinen sees a "national security state" driven by "vast" and "massive" imperatives, but the data that he presents fail to support such characterizations.

Readers of this journal will probably be most interested in Chapter 8, "National Security and the Economy." Most of that chapter offers a critique of American corporate practice during the late twentieth century, invoking Melman and Dumas to claim that defense spending struck "the most devastating blow to America's economic viability" and even "the viability of the republic" (217, 221).² A comparison of the military-industrial complex with the health/ pharmaceutical/ insurance complex might have tempered such rhetoric while also promoting a closer analysis of both interests.

Koistinen's monumental pentalogy does not achieve the interdisciplinary synthesis that he sought, but it will nonetheless remain the essential starting point when economists, political scientists, and other scholars discuss this topic for decades to come.