A.J. Murphy on How the US Military Embraced Business and Managerialism

In his Farewell Address on January 17, 1961, delivered from the White House and aired on national television, President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the "military-industrial complex." In the context of the Cold War, Eisenhower acknowledged the need for military preparedness at all times. "We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions," stated Eisenhower. "Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications."

Those implications were not limited to a new level of closeness between the US military and private industry, but extended to the question of how to manage this new global military force and the nature of military service itself. Expanding on and revising popular and scholarly understandings of the military-industrial complex, this episode shows how the post-WWII decades gave rise to a significant reorganization of the US military along business lines, illuminating the military's embrace of corporate accounting methods, scientific management, and other business practices, and the consequences that resulted from such actions. In doing so, it highlights a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the Cold War US military. At the same time that the country touted the superiority of free enterprise, the US military applied business thinking and methods to expand state power and bureaucracy. Contending with this history, moreover, forces us to reckon with the paucity of modes of analysis that endeavor to draw a sharp line between the market and the state.