By Benjamin Franklin Cooling.
Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2022.
ISBN 978-1-62190-586-8.
Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. ix, 488.
$55.00.
Dr. Benjamin Franklin Cooling, a retired professor from the Eisenhower School at the National Defense University, has written an authoritative academic work on the complicated history of the U.S. military and the civilian business sector that provides the support necessary for both war and security beginning before the American Revolution to present. Dr. Cooling’s work is detailed and extensively researched. Using primarily secondary sources, he tells a compelling story about the interrelationship between the government and the business sector of America.
The central thesis of Dr. Cooling’s work is that the famed “Military-Industrial Complex” (MIC) from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell speech in 1961 has existed before there was a United States. He carries this throughout the work through detailed telling of the different conflict eras in America’s history.
The first chapter of the book introduces the idea of the security enterprise that the United States inherited as a colony of the Crown and laid the foundation for how Americans had to learn and adapt to arm a new country during the fight for independence from Great Britain. While gun culture in the United States began pre-Revolution, the tools of war at the time required new procurement processes, especially for cannons, warships, and bulk supplies. According to Cooling, the conflict and contradictions in the government, military, and business sector incentives and priorities began in the Revolution and continue to the present.
The Civil War and the resourcing of both the Union and the Confederacy is the subject of Chapter Three. There are many arguments about the importance and impact of the Civil War, among them is the whole of governments’ approach to generating military power. It took federal, state, and local governments, along with civilian suppliers, to create the two armies. The change in military technology, especially in naval technology and the sailing of the first ironclad ships, created a permanent dependency on private industry to meet Navy requirements. Cooling asserts that the Civil War did not create the permanent defense industrial base, but it laid the groundwork.
The fifth chapter, among the most interesting, is on the United States as the Arsenal of Democracy for the two World Wars. What America learned from the two interrelated conflicts is that war, production, and mobilization are all linked. Cooling notes that the United States also practiced a strategic clarity linking the outcome: absolute victory with both a mobilization plan and a logistical production plan that could support the strategy. According to Cooling, the United States practiced “big mobilization, big logistics, (for) big victory.” In essence, the citizens of the United States bought victory for the Allies by joining the military and business. Something that fundamentally changed post-World War II was the United States’ history of rapid decline in military power postwar. The lessons from the two World Wars and beginning of the Cold War soon after prevented America’s regular habit of returning to a skeleton force post-conflict and required that the military, government, and defense industry stay active, thus creating the defense security enterprise we see today.
The final chapters deal with the post-Cold War and the national security enterprise from 2001 to the present. What we see here is a continuation of what the nation learned in the previous chapters, that the MIC, regardless of name, is a critical portion of both the defense and security of the United States and its partners. As noted in this chapter, the 2008 recession did not impact defense spending, effectively showing that the MIC is recession-proof and that Americans will accept significant defense spending on a technologically advanced All-Volunteer Force rather than relying on conscription for collective defense.
Johnathan L. Leming
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas
