Celebrations erupted quickly across the United States. And for good reason.
The cost of the War was high.
More than 330,000 American soldiers were dead. Families were heartbroken. Even those civilians who hadn’t lost a loved one were used to the scarcity of wartime, forced to ration ordinary goods like sugar, tires, gasoline, meat, coffee, and even butter.
Even worse, the Roosevelt administration aggressively censored those who opposed these measures and those who criticized the war.
Any dissenting voice was almost guaranteed an unsalvageable professional reputation…and loss of livelihood.
But Americans were wrong to think the price had been paid once the surrender papers were signed.
The truth is, the wartime policies of WWII—and the Cold War that followed—sowed the seeds of today’s out-of-control warfare and surveillance state.
It used to be called the “military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower, who coined the phrase in his farewell address, warned against “the entanglement between private actors (contractors, defense firms) and the government’s national security sector.”
But he nonetheless explained that Americans must
“…create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.... [Its] total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government.”
And today, we live with that military-industrial complex, now exponentially larger than it was in its infancy.
In their latest book, How to Run Wars: A Confidential Playbook for the National Security Elite, Senior Fellows Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall present a darkly satirical portrait of America’s supercharged military-industrial complex—and in doing so, raise some very important questions.
