Pentagon Capitalism... How the US Army during the Cold War inspired its model from the private business sector

A pioneering study of the Cold War military-industrial complex shows how defense leaders reorganized the U.S. armed forces in the image of the commercial enterprise. The strategic landscape of the Cold War led to political endorsement of a permanent U.S. military force of unprecedented size. Faced with the dilemma of managing this powerful force, the leaders of the defense bureaucracy took inspiration from the private sector: since the army had become more like a huge industrial conglomerate, they felt that it should be managed like a commercial company. AJ Murphy explores the profound implications of translating military structures of command, supply, and war into capitalist concepts. In the area of ​​budgeting and finance, defense reformers recast the supply process as one of buying and selling between units, requiring officers to express their equipment and labor needs in monetary terms. Bureaucrats adopted Taylorism's system of work measurement to supervise everything from simple office work to the production of massive weapons systems. The armed forces even hired management consultants to establish training academies for officers modeled after Harvard Business School. After the Vietnam War, many military leaders opposed this approach, questioning the usefulness of "management" and calling for a return to traditional leadership concepts. Civilian critics also joined in, objecting to the callousness of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the business-minded man who famously measured success and failure by numbers killed. However, by then, the language and values ​​of management had completely permeated the Army's institutional structure and day-to-day operations. As “Pentagon Capitalism” shows, the reorganization of the defense bureaucracy along the lines of for-profit corporations has fundamentally changed the experience of military action and facilitated the long-term privatization of American national security.