Understanding the War Industry

Understanding the War Industry
Author: Christian Sorensen
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2020-08-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1949762238

"To an ever-increasing extent, the business of America is the business of war. But although Americans live in the shadow of a war economy, few understand the full extent of its power and influence. Thanks to Christian Sorenson's deeply researched book into the military-industrial complex that envelops our society, such ignorance can no longer be an excuse." - ANDREW COCKBURN, author of 'Kill Chain, The Rise of the High Tech Assassins.' “A devastating account of American militarism, brilliantly depicted, and exhaustively researched in an authoritative manner. Sorensen’s book is urgent, fascinating reading..." RICHARD FALK "“I’m adding Christian Sorensen’s new book, Understanding the War Industry , to the list of books I think will convince you to help abolish war and militaries.." DAVID SWANSON World Without War “This meticulously researched book lays out in painstaking detail exactly how our nation has been captured by a war industry that profits from endless conflict and pursues profit at all costs. It will shock you, infuriate you, and hopefully inspire you."MEDEA BENJAMIN, co-director, CODE PINK The War Industry infests the American economy like a cancer, sapping its strength and distorting its creativity while devouring its treasure. Stunning in the depth of its research, Understanding the War Industry documents how the war industry commands the other two sides of the military-industrial-congressional triangle. It lays bare the multiple levers enabling the vast and proliferating war industry to wield undue influence, exploiting financial and legal structures, while co-opting Congress, academia and the media. Spiked with insights into how corporate boardrooms view the troops, overseas bases, and warzones, it assiduously delineates how corporations reap enormous profits by providing a myriad of goods and services devoted to making war, which must be rationalized and used if the game is to go on: advanced weaponry, drones and nukes; invasive information technology; space-based weapons; and special operations—with contracts stuffed with ongoing and proliferating developmental, tertiary and maintenance products for all of it.

American Industry in the War: A Report of the War Industries Board

American Industry in the War: A Report of the War Industries Board
Author: Bernard M. Baruch
Publisher:
Total Pages: 518
Release: 2009-07
Genre:
ISBN: 9781104851798

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

The Spoils of War

The Spoils of War
Author: Andrew Cockburn
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2021-09-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1839763655

Why does the United States go to war?—a leading Harper’s commentator on U.S. foreign affairs searches for answers. A withering exposé of runaway military spending and the private economic interests funding the U.S. war machine—for fans of Rachel Maddow and Democracy Now! America has a long tradition of justifying war as the defense of democracy. The War on Terror was waged to protect the West from the dangers of Islamists. The US soldiers stationed in over 800 locations across the world are meant to be the righteous arbiters of justice. Against this background, Andrew Cockburn brilliantly dissects the true intentions behind Washington’s martial appetites. The American war machine can only be understood in terms of the private passions and interests of those who control it—principally a passionate interest in money. Thus, as Cockburn witheringly reports, Washington expanded NATO to satisfy an arms manufacturer’s urgent financial requirements; the US Navy’s Pacific fleet deployments were for years dictated by a corrupt contractor who bribed high-ranking officers with cash and prostitutes; senior Marine commanders agreed to a troop surge in Afghanistan in 2017 for budgetary reasons. Based on years of wide-ranging research, Cockburn lays bare the ugly reality of the largest military machine in history: as profoundly squalid as it is terrifyingly deadly.

A Call to Arms

A Call to Arms
Author: Maury Klein
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 916
Release: 2013-07-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1608194094

The colossal scale of World War II required a mobilization effort greater than anything attempted in all of the world's history. The United States had to fight a war across two oceans and three continents--and to do so, it had to build and equip a military that was all but nonexistent before the war began. Never in the nation's history did it have to create, outfit, transport, and supply huge armies, navies, and air forces on so many distant and disparate fronts. The Axis powers might have fielded better-trained soldiers, better weapons, and better tanks and aircraft, but they could not match American productivity. The United States buried its enemies in aircraft, ships, tanks, and guns; in this sense, American industry and American workers, won World War II. The scale of the effort was titanic, and the result historic. Not only did it determine the outcome of the war, but it transformed the American economy and society. Maury Klein's A Call to Arms is the definitive narrative history of this epic struggle--told by one of America's greatest historians of business and economics--and renders the transformation of America with a depth and vividness never available before.

Shadows of War

Shadows of War
Author: Carolyn Nordstrom
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2004
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780520239777

Annotation This book captures the human face of the frontlines, revealing both the visible and the hidden realities of contemporary war, power, and international profiteering in the 21st century.

War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
Author: Chris Hedges
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2014-04-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1610395107

General George S. Patton famously said, "Compared to war all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God, I do love it so!" Though Patton was a notoriously single-minded general, it is nonetheless a sad fact that war gives meaning to many lives, a fact with which we have become familiar now that America is once again engaged in a military conflict. War is an enticing elixir. It gives us purpose, resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble. Chris Hedges of The New York Times has seen war up close -- in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Central America -- and he has been troubled by what he has seen: friends, enemies, colleagues, and strangers intoxicated and even addicted to war's heady brew. In War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, he tackles the ugly truths about humanity's love affair with war, offering a sophisticated, nuanced, intelligent meditation on the subject that is also gritty, powerful, and unforgettable.

Delta of Power

Delta of Power
Author: Alex Roland
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2021-08-10
Genre: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS
ISBN: 1421441810

"The book covers the Cold War origins of the military-industrial complex and explains its current relevance since the 9/11 terrorist attacks"--

Oil, Power, and War

Oil, Power, and War
Author: Matthieu Auzanneau
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Total Pages: 674
Release: 2020-02-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1603589783

The story of oil is one of hubris, fortune, betrayal, and destruction. It is the story of a resource that has been undeniably central to the creation of our modern culture, and ever-present during the darkest exploits of empire the world over. For the past 150 years, oil has become the most essential ingredient for economic, military, and political power. And it has brought us to our present moment in which political leaders and the fossil-fuel industry consider extraordinary, and extraordinarily dangerous, policy on a world stage marked by shifting power bases. Upending the conventional wisdom by crafting a “people’s history,” award-winning journalist Matthieu Auzanneau deftly traces how oil became a national and then global addiction, outlines the enormous consequences of that addiction, sheds new light on major historical and contemporary figures, and raises new questions about stories we thought we knew well: What really sparked the oil crises in the 1970s, the shift away from the gold standard at Bretton Woods, or even the financial crash of 2008? How has oil shaped the events that have defined our times: two world wars, the Cold War, the Great Depression, ongoing wars in the Middle East, the advent of neoliberalism, and the Great Recession, among them? With brutal clarity, Oil, Power, and War exposes the heavy hand oil has had in all of our lives—and illustrates how much heavier that hand could get during the increasingly desperate race to control the last of the world’s easily and cheaply extractable reserves.

War, Economy and Society, 1939-1945

War, Economy and Society, 1939-1945
Author: Alan S. Milward
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 1979
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780520039421

"This remarkable book should be the standard work for a long time. A true comparative study, it relates the experience of all the main countries (and sometimes others) to a series of key issues that are deftly analyzed and not just described. In addition to the basics--production, consumption, food, finance and organization--the book deals with such famous themes as war as the bringer-of-growth and stimulus-to-technology, and such special questions as the exploitation of occupied areas and economic warfare. Throughout, Professor Milward of Manchester relates economics to strategy in an illuminating way."--Foreign Affairs "An admirable state-of-the-arts report on what we know about how agriculture, population, technology, labor, industrial production, and public finance were affected by the war. He also sets out some highly challenging findings concerning the rationale and effectiveness of economic strategy as applied b the main powers. And he has tentatively advanced some large concepts about the nature of advanced economies as revealed by the manner in which they strove to cope with the war. His approach is broadly comparative: he gives us an account not only of the relative economic performance of individual European powers, but also of the Japanese and American war economies, plus a few observations on the situation in many smaller countries from Australia to Yugoslavia. The book is a mine of information and arresting concepts."--American Historical Review "Milward displays an impressive mastery of his material, both from a historical and economic point of view. He uses quantification effectively, but the book can be read with ease and pleasure by those who are neither trained in nor interested in econometrics. Lucidly written, this superb work deserves a much wider audience than merely specialists."--Journal of Economic Literature "Milward's portrayal of events operates on the proposition that strategic deicions cannot be understood apart from the economic considerations which each leader or government had to take into account. . . . a permanent contribution to our understanding of World War II. Henceforth it will be hard to escape his contention that the big battalions that counted were those on the production line."--Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Torpedo

Torpedo
Author: Katherine C. Epstein
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2014-01-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674727401

When President Eisenhower referred to the “military–industrial complex” in his 1961 Farewell Address, he summed up in a phrase the merger of government and industry that dominated the Cold War United States. In this bold reappraisal, Katherine Epstein uncovers the origins of the military–industrial complex in the decades preceding World War I, as the United States and Great Britain struggled to perfect a crucial new weapon: the self-propelled torpedo. Torpedoes epitomized the intersection of geopolitics, globalization, and industrialization at the turn of the twentieth century. They threatened to revolutionize naval warfare by upending the delicate balance among the world’s naval powers. They were bought and sold in a global marketplace, and they were cutting-edge industrial technologies. Building them, however, required substantial capital investments and close collaboration among scientists, engineers, businessmen, and naval officers. To address these formidable challenges, the U.S. and British navies created a new procurement paradigm: instead of buying finished armaments from the private sector or developing them from scratch at public expense, they began to invest in private-sector research and development. The inventions emerging from torpedo R&D sparked legal battles over intellectual property rights that reshaped national security law. Blending military, legal, and business history with the history of science and technology, Torpedo recasts the role of naval power in the run-up to World War I and exposes how national security can clash with property rights in the modern era.