LIBERAL MILITARISM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: REVISITING THE US
‘NATIONAL SECURITY STATE’
Bryan Mabee
School of Politics and International Relations
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road, London
E1 4NS
[email protected]
Draft version: comments welcome; please do not cite without permission
Abstract:
That a ‘national security state’ was built in the post-World War II period is a commonplace
characterisation of the postwar US state. While there are differing interpretations of exactly what
a national security state consists of (generically or in the specific case of the US), all
demonstrate that the US national security state was an important shift in the focus of the US
state, which allowed for a renewed (and militarised) internationalism. The paper focuses on such
claims in order to theorise the specific varieties of militarism that emerged in postwar period,
demonstrating that the US version was a species of militarism characterised as ‘liberal
militarism’, that emerged due to a particular ideology of national security that triumphed in the
postwar period. The importance of liberal militarism is not only in its external manifestations,
but in how a broad ideology of national security implied a particularly liberal ordering of state
and society, both internally and externally. ‘Liberal militarism’ was a particular product of the
US state, but one that was formed in relation to both the needs of capital and geopolitics.
The United States in the post-World War II period developed a distinctive means of organizing
for national security, that invested a rather unheralded amount of state power in national-level
organizations dealing with all matters to do with defence, from overall strategic planning across
the civil-military divide found in the National Security Council (NSC), through the unification of
the Armed Forces in the Department of Defense, to the creation of a internationally-oriented
intelligence agency in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The creation of all of these
institutions led to a real shift in the priorities and make-up of the federal government, amounting
to what many have described as a ‘national security state’ (Hogan, 1998; Jablonsky, 2002-2003;
Yergin, 1977). Such a description is not just meant for rhetorical value, as it rather sums up the
Revisiting the US ‘National Security State’
distinctive approach to national security embodied in these institutions: they not only (eventually)
led to a highly militarized pursuit of the Cold War, but fundamentally altered the priorities and
make up of government (May, 1992). The American state post-war managed to overcome a
historic anti-militarism and anti-statism – mainly embodied in a belief against centralized,
peacetime standing armies – towards a strongly militarized state.
With the rise of the importance of military-security matters, ‘the main business of the U.S.
government had become the development, maintenance, position, exploitation and regulation of
military forces’ (May, 1992: 227). The creation of new security bureaucracies, and the
militarisation that they allowed for, led to a particular version of US government that as May
points out, the Cold War effectively created. As Jablonsky describes it: ‘this expansive concept of
US national security led increasingly to the dominance of military-security concerns and a
transcendent military establishment’ (Jablonsky, 2002-2003: 5). Such a vision recalled President
Truman’s initial desire, that ‘our military policy, for example, should be completely consistent
with our foreign policy.’ Overall, Truman envisaged a ‘total security program’ that not only
unified civilian and military management, but also supported the military through economic and
scientific planning during peacetime (Truman, 1945).
That the structure of the US state is fundamental to understanding the Cold War should not be
controversial, but its creation and purpose seem rather under-explained in International Relations
(IR), and to a certain extent in studies of American political development (APD).1 That this is so
is not entirely surprising with the separation of the study of the international and domestic.
However, the development within the US of a ‘national security state’ post-World War II could
become an increasingly interesting site of research for IR scholars, demonstrating as it does a key
instance where the domestic constitution of a state had international ramifications.2 Though wellstudied by historians from a number of different angles,3 there are two issues which require
1
For two IR accounts, see Friedberg (2000) and Zegart (1999). For two approaches that draw more on the
traditions from APD, see Grossman (2001), Oakes (1994) and Waddell (2001), as well as the contributions to
Katznelson and Shefter (2002) and Mayhew (2005).
2
Note to Halliday
3
See for example Hogan (1998); Sherry (1997).
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Revisiting the US ‘National Security State’
further attention. First, what exactly is distinctive about the ‘national security state’? The exact
configurations of state institutions and the way they pushed against antimilitarist and antistatist
traditions in the US are of course important, but how do these trends – often only viewed in terms
of the US case itself – relate to changes in militarism and statism in the international system more
broadly? Militarism – often defined narrowly as a proclivity to use military force – is frequently
seen (by IR scholars at least) as endemic to the international system, but are there different forms
of militarism? Is the content of militarism historically and socially contingent? The paper
contends that the US national security state needs to be seen in the broader context of global
militarism and total war, and its particularity comes out in terms of its specifically liberal
militarism.
The second issue concerns the domestic focus of the national security state. If setting the
origins of the national security state in the context of changes in global militarism explains a
wider context, the specifically liberal nature requires a deeper analysis of the specific discourse of
national security that suffused the US polity after World War II and in the onset of the Cold War.
While this is conventionally seen as an adaptation to specific threats and a need for permanent
preparedness (which is surely part of the explanation) (e.g. Hogan 1998; Sherry, 1996), there is
also a need to examine the development of liberal militarism as a broader political project, that
formed part of a liberal order-building based on the discourse of national security. Therefore, the
development of a specifically liberal militarism was also subsumed into a political-economic
project of liberal restructuring that was embedded in a specific discourse of national security,
which aimed not only keeping military threats at bay, but also threats to the specific ordering of
American society, be that against established class, gender or race relations. That such ordering
also took on an international dimension in the early-Cold War period is also a crucial part of the
development of liberal militarism.
The argument of the paper is therefore that not only do we need to see the importance of
militarism in its relation to the changing character of war and the needs of geopolitics, but also
the embedding of militarism within discourses of security that are much more than about the
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Revisiting the US ‘National Security State’
creation of threat, that concern the reproduction of political and social order. The paper begins by
creating a typology of accounts of the national security state, in order to demonstrate core
emphasises and gaps in three main positions. It is argued that all avoid a clearer engagement with
the issue of militarism, in terms of its overall relations with domestic society and geopolitics. The
paper next charts the role of militarism in thinking about the character of states, arguing that most
accounts of militarism in IR are too predicated on structural arguments, or reductionist economic
arguments, and need to situate militarism in a broader historical sociology of war. The paper
argues that understanding the links between militarism and national security requires moving on
from both ‘threats’ and a focus on the external relations of states to a broader focus on the
relationship between the ‘international’ and ‘domestic realms’, in terms of what can be described
as a historical sociology of militarism. The final section returns to the US case to examine the
national security state as an example of ‘liberal militarism’.
The US as a National Security State
Today the US as a military power is very much taken for granted. However, prior to World War
II the US was only an industrial power with potential: its military forces were dwarfed by the
other major powers of the world, its liberal-republican traditions pushed the military to the side
during peacetime, eschewing both large standing armies and more robust coordination and
organization of the military by civilian authorities. All of this changed in wake of World War II,
and by the time of the Korean War, a fully blown national security state was in place: this
consisted of a more coordinated focus on the defence of the ‘national security’, with a main focus
on military might. While there is a consensus that the US did develop a ‘national security state’
post-World War II, there is much less consensus on how to read this particular postwar moment:
was it a compromise between the security needs of the state balanced against American liberal
traditions?; was it the product of liberal ordering of domestic and international society based on
the needs of economic security?; or the product of a profound moment of state-building, requiring
a new legitimating ideology? The following contrasts and compares these three views – the
4
Revisiting the US ‘National Security State’
‘exceptionalist’, the ‘critical materialist’ and the ‘ideological’ – demonstrating that the national
security state incorporates important elements of all three views, but what is necessary is to
integrate different conceptions of militarism itself to better understand the core content of
militarism in the US context, both internally and externally.
The ‘exceptionalist’ view takes umbrage at the idea of a national security state while
accepting that there were degrees of militarisation of US foreign policy during the period. Here,
however, in opposition to more radical theses that saw the US becoming Lasswell’s nightmare
vision of the ‘garrison state’, where military professionals determined policy, US antistatist
traditions tempered the scope of the national security state, leading to a capital intensive strategy
that fit well within US traditions. While such views are apparent in a variety of conceptions of the
US in the Cold War, they are most cogently expressed by Aaron Friedberg. In an earlier article,
Friedberg asked the question, ‘why did the US not become a garrison state?’. The basic answer
was due to a variety of external and internal constraints. As he stated, ‘even in the presence of a
compelling external threat, the openness of American political institutions to interest group
pressures and the content of American ideology combined to place very real limits on the power
of the state over society and the economy’ (Friedberg, 1992: 110). The external constraints had to
do with the overall grand strategy chosen by the US: by the late-1960s deterrence was heavily
relied upon, to the extent that the kinds of things that would require more extractive measures and
intensive labour were no longer necessary. So the solution to the ‘manpower’ problem was
solved through the application of technology seen in the reliance on strategic weapons.
Overall, the national security state was based on a capital intensive not labour intensive
strategy. The main internal constraint was forms of anti-statism. That this is so is seen in a variety
of internal developments in the postwar period, such as the rejection of Universal Military
Training (UMT) by Congress; the rejection of high defence budgets by presidents; the rejection
of centralised defence-industrial planning; and the rejection of industrial location planning. In
more positive terms, the reliance on private research and design and arms manufactures over the
5
Revisiting the US ‘National Security State’
possible public arsenals that had been prevalent in the interwar period showed a continued
commitment to private enterprise and civil society in leading defence.
Overall, it is this strategic synthesis that leads to what Friedberg refers to as the ‘contract
state’: ‘the contract state extracted money and manpower for military purposes, but it did so at
levels lower than those Lasswell had anticipated and certainly far lower than came to be common
during the same period in the Soviet Union’ (Friedberg, 1992: 113). He further notes that the
economy did become important in terms of management, but more for domestic welfare than for
defense, and was monitored by economic experts, not Lasswell’s ‘specialists in violence’. Three
distinguishing characteristics of the contract state: its constrained extractive scale; its limited
directive scope; its reliance on the contract mechanism to harness private resources to national
purposes: ‘through its action, the contract state created what amounted to a private arsenal system
in which weapons were developed and produced at public expense’ (Friedberg, 1992: 141).
What is core to this thesis in terms of militarism is that the US state is merely responding to
security threats via the militarised system of geopolitics: that the domestic organization takes on
the peculiarities of American political traditions is important, but the needs of security cannot be
resisted either. There are real limits to the account. Internationally, it is uncritical of the idea of
threat and the response. Domestically it mainly focuses on issues to do with antistatism: budgets
and mobilization. As Sherry notes, Friedberg ‘ignores government’s mobilization of and
intervention into personal lives, ideas, and freedoms and the work of intelligence agencies at
home and abroad’ (Sherry, 2003: 165).
However, this account is very much challenged by what I refer to as a ‘critical materialist’
critique of the national security state. Here the focus on the national security state contextualises
its emergence in the larger context of postwar order building: that the national security state
provided the coercive leverage for what was essentially a political-economic project for
protecting and reproducing the conditions for capital accumulation. Again, these critiques can be
found in a variety of revisionist views on the Cold War (particularly in more radical theses on the
development of a ‘military industrial complex’ and the ‘Wisconsin School’ of William Appleman
6
Revisiting the US ‘National Security State’
Williams), but they are very well synthesised in the recent work of Mark Neocleous (2008).
Though Neocleous has a larger target in mind – a critique of the concept of security itself – the
core empirical focus of his book is the development of a doctrine and articulation of national
security in the US postwar. His core articulation is that national security is premised on economic
security, not in the narrow mercantilist sense of prosperity, but in an economic security that
sought to preserve the conditions for capitalist modernity, both in its domestic dimensions
(through an analysis of New Deal ‘social security’) and internationally through the new found
focus on ‘national security’: ‘far from merely “reacting” or “responding” to events, under the
guise of national security, the USA has sought to reshape international society, administrating
global order according to a security doctrine behind which lies a commitment to capital
accumulation’ (380).
While the international dimension of this particular critique is fairly well-established in IR
through ‘revisionist’ Cold War histories (e.g. Williams; the Kolkos; c.f. Saull, 2008), the
domestic side is less well-integrated. While the ideology of national security linked on to
conceptions of ‘loyalty’ (especially through anti-communism, mainly focused against internal
subversion), it also took aim at other disruptive domestic forces: ‘the new ideology of security
worked against trade union radicalism, improved the position of the well-paid middle class,
preserved the notion of the paternalistic employer, and helped sustain levels of capital
accumulation despite the supposedly stringent demands made on business by the state’ (373).
Of particular importance in Neocleous’ account is also how national security builds on the
role of ‘prerogative powers’ as articulated in liberal political thought: that security often requires
executive establishment of ‘emergency powers’ to deal with particular threats. Neocleous focuses
on the importance of FDR’s use of ‘security’ talk to establish the depression as a particular
emergency in need of extreme measures. That executive power becomes a fundamental part of
the national security ideology is not made explicit, but is an important part of the critique of
security.
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Revisiting the US ‘National Security State’
The ‘critical materialist’ approach is a core challenge to the ‘exceptionalist’: instead of seeing
the national security state as a justified reaction to external security needs, played out within US
traditions, the security state is developed as a means to foster US ‘exceptionalism’ in terms of
capital accumulation. However, there are several difficulties with this account. First, in terms of
the international dimension, like the ‘exceptionalist’ account, it rather presumes an unchanging
context of militarism, but one here as an expression of economic security, rather than the needs of
geopolitics. As Balakrishnan (2009: 100) has argued, ‘if the domestic organization of public
power has been subject to the ongoing imperative of creating a socially acceptable environment
for capital accumulation, the alignment of statecraft to the pursuit of external conditions for
accumulation has been a far less systematic process, one typically over-determined by episodic
compulsions of inter-state competition for highly variable security goals’ (100).
Second, in terms of the domestic imperatives, it underplays the real social (and ideological)
conflict that played out during the New Deal era through to the start of the Cold War (Brinkley,
1995; Harbutt, 2002; Patterson, 1996), and the perceived (and possibly actual) radicalism of the
New Deal itself (Waddell, 2001). As Griffith (1989)notes, ‘the power and reach of the national
government had grown enormously during the Depression and war, but the question of how and
in whose interest that power would be used remained largely unanswered’ (59). The war had
certainly created major uncertainties for the American political economy, as the immediate
postwar period saw huge divisions between workers and business, with major strikes and the
overall rising militancy of unionised labour (a product of the 1930s and WWII) caused fear
amongst employers (Griffith, 1989; Liechtenstein, 1989 and 2003).
The final model of the national security state manages to integrate some of the core insights
of both of the above accounts, while maintaining a focus on the importance of militarism. I call
this approach the ‘ideological’ version of the national security state, as its focus is on how a
transformative ideology of national security manages to foster some domestic consensus on the
needs of national security in a changed international context, stressing the role of ideology in
state-building. While the ideological account shares some features of both of the above accounts
8
Revisiting the US ‘National Security State’
– the way in which antimilitarism and antistatism shape US statebuilding, and how the national
security state was built in the context of real battles over the shape of society – it reasserts the
militarism of the new ideology and state form, showing that its victory came with many
compromises that were perhaps rather unpalatable to many, both conservative and left alike. As
Michael Hogan argued, the national security ideology and the state it fostered ‘sacrificed
humanity on a cross of iron’: the demise of New Deal liberalism in favour of the warfare state.
Hogan is the best representative of this viewpoint, though others have argued different
aspects of this as well.4 The development of a national security ideology is crucial to Hogan’s
account, where ideology is conceived of as a worldview, and also a broader sense of identity (c.f.
Campbell, 1992). Such a view chimes well with Michael Hunt’s important study of ideology in
US foreign policy: ‘ideologies are important because they constitute the framework in which
policymakers deal with specific issues and in which the attentive public understands those issues’
(?). Hogan’s account of the national security state stresses viewing the changes in the US after
WWII the product of a contest between two visions of national security: a conservative
republican one (anti-statist, anti-militarist); and a national security ideology that drew on much of
the same traditions, but saw the need to contextualise them in a new changed international
environment. Much of the post-World War II moment was about state-building along these new
lines, and a kind of compromise between the two ideologies. The conservatives lost somewhat,
but did get to stress fiscal responsibility which endangered the New Deal. As discussed in
Friedberg’s account, the battles played out in a variety of contexts: debate over defence
unification; UMT; military budget; and the national role of science. All of which were much to
do with the centralization of political activity over security.
The real core of Hogan’s position concerns how the implications of preparation for total war
and an increased internationalism could be resolved within the confines of American traditions.
4
Sherry’s (1996) account of US militarism is largely complementary; Waddell’s (2001) focus on businesslabour relations misses out the international dimension, but keeps in the real social conflict underlying the
development of the national security state.
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Revisiting the US ‘National Security State’
Although he is keen to note the overall compromise position that developed – a centralisation but
one that was mitigated by traditional anti-statist concerns – there is still a real rise in the centrality
and institutionalisation of defence planning after the Cold War. Hogan (along with May), notes
the comparative rise in political importance of defence, in a number of areas: the role in the
Executive branch; the retooling of the Congressional committee system; local defence business
interests and congress; increased defence budgets; the increased importance of defence issues in
the media; and an overall rise in the importance of defence in the policy-making arena, and the
relative decline of other executive departments. The real involvement of civilian managers in
defence also changed the constitution of the civil-military balance: it wasn’t just that civilians
controlled or oversaw the military, there was a real fusion of these functions.
This broader sense of blurring lines is discussed by Sherry (1997; 2003), who is much more
explicit about the link between militarism and political development in the case of the US.
Overall, Sherry is keen to argue the continued and persistent historical role militarism has played
in the US state, with World War I really setting the foundations for the national security state that
development in the postwar period. The legacy of World War II was the use of coordinating
mechanisms, institutions and other forms of centralisation that institutionalised a form of
militarism in national politics. Sherry stresses that though the postwar debates on the unification
of the armed forces took much precedence in the national discourse, some of the most important
institutions in the security state were less noted (at the time), such as the NSC, CIA, National
Security Resources Board; plus the development of many other aspects of civil society devoted to
this enterprise (e.g. think tanks, universities).
Overall, the ensuing debates about militarism and antimilitarism, the broader influences of
civil society, and the resolution of crisis made the postwar American state what it was. While not
turning into the garrison state that traditional antimilitarists feared, it did set the foundations for a
more militarized American state, but one led by civilians. As such, Sherry notes that the issue is
really more to do with what type of garrison state the US became: ‘perhaps antistatism made the
United States the kind of garrison state it became—oriented to air power, high technology, and
10
Revisiting the US ‘National Security State’
quasiprivate initiative—rather than less of a garrison state’ (Sherry, 2003: 164). It contained what
he refers to as an un-quantifiable hidden-hand state power. This echoes the claims of Grossman
(2002), who argues that a form of garrison state surely did develop because of the changing role
of power and conception of security: the search for absolute security was not just seen in terms of
military power, but in subversion within society: ‘the result was an enormous expansion of
central-state power that penetrated all spheres of life in the name of national security, collapsing
the public-private divide’ (Grossman, 2002: 475).
However, with the deepening of the conception of the national security state to go beyond the
ways in which the state institutionally prepared for war (Friedberg), liberal-capitalist order
building (Neocleous), but through the existence of a legitimating ideology (Hogan) and the
deeper role of militarism (Sherry), we find a rather all-pervasive form of militarism, that links on
to many facets of state power, including the relationship between war and society, and the
development of increased executive power. Contra Friedberg, it is not that the national security
state allowed a degree of militarism within the confines of US traditions, but actually developed a
particular form of militarism that was adapted institutionally. Contra Neocleous, the US state did
not seamlessly attempt to reproduce American forms of capital accumulation with militarism
trailing in its wake. Militarism was at the heart of the transformation of the US state. To get a
better theoretical sense of why this is so, we need to step back and reconceived militarism in
order to bring these accounts back together.
Explaining Militarism in International Relations
Militarism – conceptualised broadly as preparations for and ideology of war – is often seen as
endemic to the international system. Political realists have long expressed a ‘tragic’ account of
international politics that sees state-based preparation for war as a consequence of the
competitive nature of international relations (e.g. Mearsheimer, 2001; Waltz, 1988; c.f. Leffler,
1992). Historical sociologists such as Michael Mann (1993) have also insisted on the importance
of this logic, while stressing the different institutional manifestations of militarism (and other
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Revisiting the US ‘National Security State’
sources of social power) over time. However, even with the structural imperative of geopolitical
competition as a base, it still does not help explain variations in state militarism either across time
or for individual states: i.e. the specific forms of war preparation that individual states pursue,
and how these reflect a particular historical logic. Indeed the explanation that is necessary for the
national security state is not why a state such as the US might prepare for war, but why it
prepares in a particular fashion.
Another prominent explanation for the development of increased militarism in the postwar
American state has been through the theory of the ‘military industrial complex’ (MIC) (Roland,
2007; c.f. Koistinen, 1980; Rosen, 1973; Sarkesian, 1972). The theory itself exists in a variety of
forms, from the original focus on the undue pressures of defence lobbyists in the case of
President Eisenhower’s original warning (Eisenhower, 1961); through concerns about the
excessive influence of elites focused on security and war (Lasswell, 1941; Mills, 1956); to a
Marxian focus on the economic productivity of defence firms (Coulomb and Bellais, 2008;
Mackenzie, 1983). Though the overall postulation of burgeoning ‘military establishment’
(Yarmolinksy, 1971) with ties to business has been highly accurate in describing an institutional
form, there are issues with causation that make the account problematic for understanding the
national security state.
The MIC theory mainly suffers from the opposite problem of the international-structural
perspective: that it is based entirely on an internal economic logic, where the dynamics of
international relations play no part (Buzan and Herring, 1998). All states are militarized in
various degrees through war preparations, which are not easily explained just by domestic
political economy (Mackenzie, 1983). The avoidance of the international dimension of
militarization results in a limited account of militarism, even as applied directly to the US state.
The MIC also does little to explain the peculiarities of the American system; as Koistinen (1980)
has noted, the MIC should really just be part of a broader political economy of American warfare,
not just explaining the postwar period. Or, as E. P. Thomson more polemically stated, modern
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Revisiting the US ‘National Security State’
societies ‘do not have military industrial complexes – they are military-industrial complexes’
(quoted in Shaw, 1988: 41).
The key problem with these accounts of militarism is that they are both too general in terms
of causation (i.e. the structural accounts relying too much on the permissive nature of the
international system; the domestic MIC argument relying too much on the capriciousness of the
arms industry) while also being reductionist. While it is clear that both the character of
international relations and geopolitics are crucial for understanding military competition between
states (and hence state militarism), the internal political economy of militarism is crucial for
understanding specific manifestations of militarisms. As Smith (1983: 24) argues, ‘Militarism
cannot be explained in terms of the objectives of the state alone because these are constrained by
the nature of the environment in which the state operates. In particular the nature of the prevailing
class relations, the nature of each conflict, and the nature of the instrument itself, military force,
all influence the process. Each of these has dynamics of their own which in interaction lead to the
development of the various distinct aspects of militarism’.
This leads us back to militarism itself, especially in thinking more clearly about the concept
itself, how it might be both historicised and set in the broader context of society. Historical
sociologists, especially those in the Weberian tradition, have had much focus on militarism in just
this fashion. Alfred Vagts, in his classic study of militarism (Vagts, 1959) distinguishes between
the ‘military way’ (i.e. normal state preparations for war combined with Huntington style civilmilitary relations with the ‘objective control’ by civilians) and ‘militarism’ (everything beyond
the former). Obviously, this is immediately problematic, in that the distinction puts a normative
value on a particular liberal (and American) conception of militarism without looking for the
broader links with society. Mann has a clearer definition, seeing militarism as ‘the persistent use
of organised military violence in the pursuit of social goals’ (1996: 224). Shaw takes the
definition even further, noting that the ‘military describes all social relations, institutions and
values relating to war and war preparation. Militarism is the tendency of these relations,
institutions and values to influence social relation, institutions and values in general’ (2003: 106).
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In this fashion militarism is not just an ideology glorifying war, but a particular constellation of
social forces surrounding the military. While this might lead to a proclivity towards war, it also
relates to other factors within society, and can be seen as the outcomes of particular
configurations of societal relations.
Going back to the particularities of the US national security state, we can see that to
determine exactly what militarism means in the context of the postwar period requires a further
analysis of the internal dynamics of militarism and how it operates in the external environment of
international relations. This double-sidedness to militarism points to broader issues with
militarism that go beyond the mere provision of protection for the state: that militarism (and the
concomitant concept of ‘national’ security) go to the heart of the politics of the state. In Weber’s
pessimistic view, ‘the whole course of the state’s inner political functions, of justice and
administration, is repeatedly and unavoidably regulated by the objective pragmatism of “reasons
of state”. The state’s absolute end is to safeguard (or to change) the external and internal
distribution of power… This fact has held and still holds, even more so, for foreign policy. It is
absolutely essential for every political association to appeal to the naked violence of coercive
means in the face of outsiders as well as in the face of internal enemies. It is only this very appeal
to violence that constitutes a political association’ (1946: 334). But we can see this outlook on the
state and its relation to military power even more clearly in Foucault (2004: 15-16): As Foucault
has argued, ‘power relations . . . are essentially anchored in a certain relationship with force that
was established in and through war at a given historical moment that can be historically specified.
. . . the role of political power is to perpetually to use a sort of silent war to reinscribe that
relationship of force, and to reinscribe it in institutions, economic inequalities, language, and
even in the bodies of individuals’. As such, we should see the relation between actual war to
militarism in politics in the production and reproduction of a particular coercive order.
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Liberal Militarism
That leaves the task of specifying the particular historical conjuncture that we can link with
the development of a particularly American militarism. Mary Kaldor and Martin Shaw have both
provided powerful ways of bringing war back into social theory, in a manner conducive to the
perspective on state theory and war taken above. Kaldor developed an account of the historical
development and changing character of war through a war and society approach that focuses on
what she refers to as ‘modes of warfare’ (Kaldor, 1982, 1999). For Kaldor, the mode of warfare is
parasitic on the mode of production, and potential crises exist where war and war-preparation
becomes an interruption to accumulation. As the concept of the mode of warfare links explicitly
to Marxist notions of the mode of production, it brings a potentially dialectical reading of the
relationship of warfare to the state and capitalism that could play a role in better understanding
the potential contradictions driving changes in the character of war itself.5
For Shaw, Kaldor’s mode of warfare provides an excellent start to bringing war back into
social theory, by delinking it from the logic of capitalism, and showing ways in which warfare
itself can have an autonomous logic (Shaw, 1988; 2000). However, as Shaw argues, Kaldor does
not go far enough with the mode of warfare, as it becomes too separated from the mode of
production in her analysis. As Shaw argues, war and militarism are separate from the logic of
capitalism, but feed off the productive capacities of states, and as such war has to be seen as part
of the totality of society. As he describes it, ‘we are talking about the role of socialised warfare in
a militarised economy and society’ (1988: 24). Thus, total war itself was a ‘mode of warfare’,
that fed off of the development of industrial societies. As Shaw sees it, ‘once economy and
society had been incorporated directly into the supply side of war, as a “home front”, then
military logic (with the aid of aerial technology) transformed them into a part of the battlefield.
The logic of the warfare–production relationship made first “strategic” industries and then whole
urban populations into targets’ (2000: 175). Shaw brings warfare into a broader structural logic of
5
In Kaldor’s more recent work (1999) on globalization and the ‘new wars’, the role of crises and contradictions
is less apparent, though she is more explicit in defining different historical typologies of modes of warfare.
15
Revisiting the US ‘National Security State’
modern societies: it is not just parasitic on the mode of production, or instrumental in the
expansion of capital. War has its own logic that feeds off of society as a whole, and militarism is
deeply implicated in states and societies writ large (Shaw, 1988; c.f. Giddens, 1987; Mann, 1987,
1993).
For both Shaw and Kaldor, one of the key problematics of the development of total war is the
disjuncture between the means of warfare and the rational-instrumental pursuit of war. That is,
the means of destruction have made war as a tool of statecraft impossible; or, as Shaw puts it,
‘the means of war have outstripped any rational use for them’ (1988: 19). In very general social
theoretic terms, the key contradiction of warfare in the mid-twentieth century can be seen in the
final stages of total war, in the logic of exterminism that war developed. Exterminism in the sense
that the aims of war had increasingly become tied to the ability to destroy societies more broadly,
rather than just fought on the battlefield. For example, the use of strategic bombing during World
War II, and the eventual deployment of nuclear weapons both attest to this point. However, this is
not to say that such developments were just a part of military strategy: they were allied with a
broader sense that whole societies were part of war, as supporters, facilitators and producers.
However, the recognition of a contradiction between the rational pursuit of war and the means
of warfare is not enough. A key part of Shaw’s critique of strategic studies is precisely that we
have to go beyond the mere recognition of the absurdity of deterrence, and reconnect the means
of warfare with societal relations more generally. As such, the important factor in examining
changes in the national security is how particularly constellations of military institutions,
governmental bureaucracies, and civil-military interactions (across government and civil society)
actually form, reproduce, and transform. Shaw (1988) notes that ‘war does not express the
common purposes of “society” as a whole, but arises out of particular relationships and
institutions in society’ (21). As such, it is plausible to examine distinctive forms of militarism
that are embedded in particular states. In general the key to understanding total war in terms of its
interaction with society is in terms of the relationship between war and the mobilising powers of
the state.
16
Revisiting the US ‘National Security State’
David Edgerton’s account of British ‘liberal militarism’ is the most important manifestation
of a peculiarly liberal-capitalist response to militarist dynamics. Edgerton (1991) points to the
development of four aspects of liberal militarism in the British context: an aversion to mass
conscript armies; investment in technology and professionalism to make up for the lack of
‘manpower’; that militaries are not just directed at enemies abroad, but at civilian populations and
economic capacity; and finally ‘advances under the banner of its own universalist ideology and
conception of a world order’ (141). Mann (1997) has discussed this at a more abstract level,
noting that liberal polities developed two forms of militarism that reinforced one another: a
rarefied ‘deterrence-science’ militarism, focusing on the abstract (if frightening) calculations
dealing with nuclear strategy; and ‘spectator sport militarism’, the consequence of
professionalization, seeing military adventures abroad a rather divorced from direct participation.
What is striking is that all of these ideas about liberal militarism point to a US national security
state that looks much more like a composite of the three views put forward in the first section.
How they fit together will be expanded upon in the final section.
Liberal Militarism and the National Security State
The liberal militarism described above has four key components: an antimilitarism resistant to
standing armies; a focus on technology and professionalism; the involvement of militarism more
generally in society; and a unifying ideology. To start with the latter first, in many ways key to
understanding the development of the national security state, total war placed strain on the
American traditions of anti-militarism and anti-statism, as the potential solution to this crisis
could lead to a strongly militarized and centralized state. The recognition of crisis coincided with
the development of a new vision for security, which enabled state managers to push the American
state upon on a new direction. Hogan described this new vision as the ‘national security
ideology’, which was crucial in challenging an older discourse of the role of the state in
American life. As Stuart (2003) sums up, ‘Over time, the concept of national security displaced
national interest as the leitmotif of American foreign policy, and it became increasingly difficult
17
Revisiting the US ‘National Security State’
for U.S. policymakers to calculate American interests unless they were framed, and justified, by
reference to national security’ (303).
As Hogan (1998) summarises, on ideological grounds, the debate was really between an
increased centralization of military-civilian power over ‘national security’, and those who were
against such centralization on the grounds that it could lead to a ‘garrison state’ (Lasswell, 1941;
c.f. Friedberg, 2000). The actual ways in which these positions played themselves out politically
varied from issue to issue, but the main ideological justifications surrounded these two positions.
New Deal liberals tended to approve of centralization to the extent to which the new ‘warfare
state’ did not jeopardize the ‘welfare state’; traditional conservatives loathed the idea of
centralization for reasons that it looked like the totalitarianism that was just defeated (not to
mention a antipathy to the New Deal as well), that both ‘welfare state’ and ‘warfare state’ were
un-American (Hogan, 1998).
The new consensus was well reflected in President Truman’s calls for increased sensitivity to
America’s global role. In a speech to Congress that was explicitly about the unification of the
armed forces, he stated ‘but all nations . . . know that desire for peace is futile unless there is also
enough strength ready and willing to enforce that desire in any emergency. Among the things that
have encouraged aggression and the spread of war in the past have been the unwillingness of the
United States realistically to face this fact, and her refusal to fortify her aims of peace before the
forces of aggression could gather in strength’ (Truman, 1945). As the context of Truman’s speech
confirms, the new globalist mentality led to renewed pressure for a more coherent system of
political-military coordination of American foreign policy. The need for some kind of unification
of the military (the Departments of Navy and Army were then separate organizations, with
cabinet level secretaries), and better coordination across the civilian-military divide (especially
between the Department of State and the military Departments) was seen as vital, not only for
preventing future surprises, but also to engage more coherently with the world.
The new security globalism was founded not just in an idealist internationalism that looked
towards the development of collective security though the newly instituted United Nations, but
18
Revisiting the US ‘National Security State’
was also grounded in the realities of power. What had changed was the limits to thinking that
America’s security interests could be served while ignoring what was going on outside its
immediate surroundings. As Senator Arthur Vandenberg, who prior to the Pearl Harbor attacks
was a noted isolationist, stated, ‘I do not believe that any nation hereafter can immunize itself by
its own exclusive action’ (cited in Graebner, 1986: 7).
Hogan argues that it is this ideology that actually explains the ability of state managers to turn
the US into a national security state. However, as has been noted, this was done within more
liberal confines. If the ideology provided a justification and sense of purpose, the content of
militarism still followed along liberal lines. The longstanding ‘anti-militarist’ tradition in the US
– conceived of in terms of a distrust of standing armies – was one important element. As Sherry
describes, Americans’ ‘distrust of professional “standing armies”—of their origins in a decadent
Europe, of their power to corrupt or overawe the Republic—was deep’ (Sherry, 1997: 1; c.f.
Weigley, 1977). This distrust manifested itself in the long-term resistance to centralization and
increased militarization. The separation of the Army and Navy into two executive departments –
War and Navy – demonstrated this in principle: that wars were fought sporadically, and ended
when peace was sought (Sherry, 1997; Stuart, 2003).
The development of a national security ideology provided some change for the idea of war
and peace, but did not overcome the aversion to standing armies. Postwar, there was a large
debate about how the US would be able to cope with the labour requirements of a large standing
military. With demobilisation from 1945-47 accounting for a dramatic decrease in armed service
personnel from approximately 14 million to 1.5 million, President Truman wanted to develop a
program of universal military training (UMT) in order to increase numbers in the military.
However, this also caused friction with the anti-militarist tradition, and the debates about UMT
provided another focal point for the kind of state the US would be postwar (Hogan, 1998: chap.
4).6
6
The solution to the ‘manpower’ issue was also influenced by predicates of economic order – the demise of a
proposed UMT meant the question of conscription (partially kept on through ‘selective service’, later used to draft
19
Revisiting the US ‘National Security State’
[capital and professionalism]
The domestic interventions of the new militarism were also very pronounced, and the
immediate postwar labour unrest had an important foundation for the relationship between
business and labour in the national security state. As Waddell (2001; c.f. Pollard, 1989) has
argued, the war also inaugurated a war against the New Deal, in terms of the ways in which civil
society actors managed to re-orientate the state towards military institutions as a way of curtailing
the New Deal. As Waddell (2001: 17) notes, ‘corporate executives helped to channel state power
into military institutions precisely because expanding military authority did not increase class
tensions’. The fear that the domestic political economy would be increasingly hostile to business
was a major concern.
As Griffith (1989: 63) notes, business ‘entered the postwar era fearing that the continued
popularity of New Deal liberalism at home and the spread of socialism abroad foreshadowed
drastic and undesirable changes in the U.S. economic system. The political mobilization of
business was designed to arrest such alarming possibilities and to create instead a secure and
orderly environment for the expansion of business enterprise’. The passage of the Taft-Hartley
Act in 1947 put an end to the uncertainty, effectively quashing the hopes of labour for a more
corporatist state: ‘Taft-Hartley represented the definitive end of the brief era when the state
served as an arena in which the trade unions could bargain for the kind of tripartite
accommodation with industry that had been so characteristic of the New Deal years’
(Lichtenstein, 1989: 142).
In this context it is telling that many of the civilians from corporate America who worked in
the wartime economic management bureaucracies (e.g. the War Production Board) carried on to
be major figures in the national security state. For example, Ferdinand Eberstadt, who was vicechairman of the War Production Board, was also a key figure in the Navy’s proposal for defence
soldiers to Vietnam), but by the 1970s, the idea of the ‘citizen-soldier’ had been replaced by a libertarian notion of
professional soldiering: a job rather than a duty. Unsurprisingly, the gradual switch to the AVF in 1973 had been
heavily influenced by Milton Friedman’s investigations into the matter: Friedman saw conscription as a form of
taxation (Cowen, 2006).
20
Revisiting the US ‘National Security State’
unification (Hogan, 1998; Dorwart, 1991). Indeed the influence and connection between a
particular economic vision of America and the national security state comes through quite readily
(Hogan, 1998: 32-33). Many of these figures believed that national security was crucial, and
much coordination was necessary, but drew lessons from corporate America rather than the
hierarchical structures of the Army. As Hogan notes, in a Congressional committee, Charles E.
Wilson, president of General Electric, made the case that such centralization led to large
inefficiencies in corporations, and also led to authoritarianism (Hogan, 1998: 44). All in all, the
continuity between corporate America and government is important, but also in terms of how
civilian management of defence, and the development of ‘defence intellectuals’ becomes a key
part of the national security state. Though it should be stressed, as Grossman (2002) points out,
this is not to say that there was a conspiracy between Wall Street and the military, but rather the
compromise that was developed between new and old political traditions tended to synthesise the
military and civilian, in the same way that total war blurred the distinction between war and
peace.
Conclusion
-i) importance of historical specification of militarism
-ii) national security ideology as part of militarism of states more generally
-iii) internal/external order-building
Overall, the solution to the crisis of the state was to effectively institutionalise a peculiarly
American form of the ‘garrison state’, where security became paramount in the institutions of
national governance, but was not led by a ‘general staff’ of military elites, instead it was a civilmilitary synthesis, drawing on lessons of past organisation of the political economy of security,
and the discursive limits of American politics. The lasting effects of the state-building exercise
during the Cold War are well-known, but include the increasing militarization of foreign policy
(especially as the Department of State was increasingly relegated to the sidelines of foreign
policy making) (May, 1992), the development of a military-industrial complex (as an effect of
21
Revisiting the US ‘National Security State’
militarism rather than a cause) (Mills, 1956), the increased role of Presidential power if foreign
policy (as the NSC system brought foreign policy squarely into the White House) (Destler, 1981;
Grossman, 2002), and in increase in presidential power overall (Gould, 2003).
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