The Military and the Market. Edited by Mark R. Wilson and Jennifer Mittlestadt. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022.

The Military and the Market, edited by Jennifer Mittlestadt and Mark R. Wilson, is a generally strong work that reflects some of the best features of the War and Society academic approach. Over the past four decades, “War and Society” scholarship has grown increasingly popular among American military historians.[1] Looking beyond more traditionally studied factors such as battlefield tactics, leadership, and military strategy, new studies under the general War and Society umbrella consider social dynamics such as race, class, and gender in the context of national defense and warfare. In the case of this work, the wide scholarly aperture offered by the War and Society approach extends to marketplace and economic factors, adding additional layers of complexity to American military history.

The raison d’etre of this anthologized, multi-author volume rests on an expansive definition of the word “marketplace,” moving beyond the defense industry hardware which often assumes analytical primacy in studies of defense markets.

At its best, The Military and the Market is an excellent analysis of how the United Stated defense establishment shapes, and is shaped by, external economic trends and business marketplaces. The raison d’etre of this anthologized, multi-author volume rests on an expansive definition of the word “marketplace,” moving beyond the defense industry hardware which often assumes analytical primacy in studies of defense markets. Through offering this wide intellectual umbrella, the editors bring into the work a varied and often surprising array of case studies – ranging from topics such as Cold War housing construction to modern national security contracting – and along the way shed light on some lesser-known episodes of American military history. In keeping with the broad War and Society approach, Middlestadt and Wilson contend that “long-term shifts in historical inquiry and methods” toward social and cultural history have enabled the new lanes of analysis found in their volume.[2]

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At a fundamental level, a good analysis will tackle a complex phenomenon and break it down into more manageable pieces, identifying and exploring the parts to better understand the whole. In its “breaking down of the parts,” The Military and the Market succeeds. The chapters superbly cover several discrete areas of the military-marketplace phenomenon. A strong chapter from Timothy Barker, for example, looks at defense spending during the Cold War through the lens of Keynesian economics.[3] The calculus Barker raises is both an interesting and practical one: if the government is going to spend significant resources on defense(whether due to objective need or political pressure), why not kill two birds with one stone by using the defense budget as a form of targeted economic stimulus? Barker shows how the Nixon administration treated the overlap as somewhat of a dirty secret, the publication of which would open a president to charges of making less than objective national security decisions in favor of chasing domestic support.[4] Other chapters touch on less politically controversial lines of mutual compatibility between defense spending and U.S. economic health, such as Gretchen Heefner’s exploration of the positive benefit that overseas military construction programs had for skilled American construction worker wages and domestic construction companies.[5]

A chapter that most pithily exemplifies the contemporary War and Society approach concerns the relationship between “sex markets” and the U.S. military. Past the eye-catching chapter title is a relatively straightforward contention that nests well with the book: while always unofficial, prostitution has historically been regulated, managed, and facilitated by mid-level leaders within the U.S. military.[6] The chapter brings to bear solid evidence demonstrating that a military marketplace does not require official sanction to exist, let alone flourish. Perhaps more open to debate are the arguments regarding Cold War military housing, portrayed in this case as not only a massive government-commercial partnership in response to a practical need, but also as a deliberate attempt by the federal government to perpetuate nuclear families and heterosexual marriages. Despite this somewhat tenuous argument, the chapter otherwise convincingly demonstrates a public to private shift in military housing programs during the 20th century.[7]

The book also offers plenty of fascinating anecdotal material. One excellent section in Heefner’s chapter details the construction of the Thule Air Base in Greenland during the 1950s, adeptly outlining the planning assumptions and challenges inherent to this groundbreaking construction enterprise in harsh arctic conditions. Likewise, Sarah Weicksel’s chapter on “consumer culture and camp life” during the American Civil War is a fascinating and original look at the private and often ad-hoc supply networks and businesses that soldiers relied on for uniforms, food, and equipment.[8] Weicksel’s chapter also offers a lens to examine parallels to the predicament of the contemporary Russian soldier and their reliance on the private sector economy for basic kit and medical supplies.[9]

A natural association with The Military and the Market title is the adjoining concept of a “military-industrial” complex, made famous in President Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address. A chapter by David Wirls offers a new exploration of this nebulous term, arguing that the traditional conception defined by large weapons manufacturers has morphed into a more varied and complex phenomenon.[10] Wirls notes that the defense contractor workforce is more deeply embedded than ever before across a variety of critical functions within government agencies. We might imagine that Eisenhower would not look kindly on this development from an influence standpoint, but as one who incorporated a variety of civilian experts into his military headquarters during WWII, might understand a limited role for advisors outside of the official bureaucracy.

The combination of outstanding questions and discrete analyses contained within the book invites further research and deeper academic exploration of these questions in the future.

If the Military and the Market falters as a holistic work, it is in attempting to tie together discrete insights and analysis. Broader conclusions about the military-marketplace phenomenon casually appear in the text and would have benefited from more overt acknowledgement and argument. For example, Mittlestadt and Wilson point to militatext andation as “primarily a political project,” and “neither especially pragmatic nor popular,” but leave a gap in this assertion.[11] A rather glaring omission is what impact the move to an All-Volunteer Force during the 1970s, and the precipitous decline in military manpower during 1990s, may have had on privatization. Indeed, despite what Mittlestadt and Wilson state in the context of those two larger realities, having the private sector assume various defense functions looks quite pragmatic. Finally, the book tacitly imparts – but does not stop to ponder – a twist on the classic Janowitzian argument: that military business practices have become increasingly indistinguishable from those of their civilian and private sector counterparts as part of a broader societal trend.[12]

Perhaps most conspicuously, while the book imparts the impression that the commercialization, privatization, and marketization of numerous defense and military functions is a vaguely negative trend, the authors do not question if this trend is in response to a legitimate national security need, or if there are actionable alternatives. Assuming that the majority of privatized defense functions are in fact necessary from a national security standpoint, reductions in the commercial and market elements necessitate a corresponding increase in government functions. What an increase in government functions might mean for resource efficiency, workforce diversity, and military effectiveness – whether positively or negatively, for transition would inherently involve both – is left to the reader’s imagination. The combination of outstanding questions and discrete analyses contained within the book invites further research and deeper academic exploration of these questions in the future. In the meanwhile, the editors should be commended for convening a fine group of scholars and assembling this volume to further the exploration of an important and often overlooked topic, and make a meaningful contribution to the field.

Samuel Canter is a policy and strategy analyst, PhD candidate, and a U.S. Army officer. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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Header Image: The littoral combat ship Coronado (LCS 4). Mobile, Alabama, 2011 (U.S. Navy photo courtesy Austal USA).

Notes:

[1] See for example Brian McAllister Linn, “Forty Years On: Master Narratives and US Military History,” in War and Society 0, no. 0 (2022), 1-8.

[2] Jennifer Mittlestadt and Mark R. Wilson eds., The Military and the Market, (PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), 6.

[3] Timothy Barker, “’Don’t Discuss Jobs Outside this Room,’: Reconsidering Military Keynesianism in the 1970s,’ in The Military and the Market, 135-149.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Gretchen Heefner, “Building the Bases of Empire: The U.S. Army Corp of Engineers and Military Construction During the Early Cold War,” in The Military and the Market, 105-119.

[6] Kara Dixon Vuic, “A Girl in Every Port? The US Military and Prostitution in the Twentieth Century,” in The Military and the Market, 87-104.

[7] A. Junn Murphy, “The World’s Biggest Landlord: How the Cold War Military Built Its Arsenal of Houses,” The Military and the Market, 31-46.

[8] Sarah Jones Weicksel, “’Make Up a Box to Send Me,’: Consumer Culture and Camp Life in the American Civil War,” 67-86.

[9] Robert Ashenden, “Putin’s Desperate Recruits Are in a Life and Death Scramble for Kit,” The Spectator, January 23, 2023.

[10] David Wirls, “Updating the Military Industrial Complex: The Evolution of the National Security Contracting Complex from the Cold War to the Forever War,” 47-66.

[11] The Military and the Market, 30.

[12] Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait, (NY: The Free Press, 1960).