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An Organizational Perspective on the Military-Industrial Complex

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Robert D. Cuff
Robert D. Cuff
Affiliation:
Professor of History, York University, Toronto
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Abstract

Is there a “military-industrial complex” in the United States? What is the relationship between business, government, and the military with its needs for vast quantities of goods and services? How has organization for war and defense changed since the demands of World War I first made such questions important? How much do we know about what actually happened between World War I and Vietnam to change the relationship between private and public organizations? Professor Cuff discusses the complexities involved in trying to answer such historical questions, and prescribes a professional historian's regimen for future work on this subject.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , Summer 1978 , pp. 250 - 267
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1978

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References

1 Galambos, Louis, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review, 44 (Autumn, 1970), 279–290CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Paul Koistinen is the chief exception to this rule among historians. See Koistinen, Paul A. C., “The ‘Industrial-Military Complex’ in Historical Perspective: World War I,” Business History Review XLIV (Winter, 1967), 378–403CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “The ‘Industrial-Military Complex’ in Historical Perspective: The Inter-War Years,” Journal of American History, LVI (March, 1970), 819–839Google Scholar; “Mobilizing the World War II Economy: Labor and the Industrial-Military Alliance,” Pacific Historical Review, XLII (November, 1973), 443–478Google Scholar. See also Cooling, Benjamin F., ed., War Business and American Society: Historical Perspectives on the Military-Industrial Complex (Port Washington, N.Y., 1977)Google Scholar.

2 From Pursell, Carroll W. Jr., ed., The Military-Industrial Complex (New York, 1972), 206.Google Scholar

3 Ibid.

4 Meeker, Thomas A. provides a useful bibliography in The Military-Industrial Complex: A Source Guide to the Issues of Defense Spending and Policy Control (Los Angeles, 1973)Google Scholar. On the issue of definitions, metaphors, and typologies, see Stackhouse, Max L., The Ethics of Necropolis (Boston, 1971), 25–42Google Scholar; Nelson, Keith L., “The ‘Warfare State’: History of a Concept,” Pacific Historical Review, XL (May, 1971), 127–143CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moskos, Charles C. Jr, “The Concept of the Military-Industrial Complex; Radical Critique or Liberal Bogey?”, Social Problems, XXI (Spring, 1974), 498–512CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Rosen, Steven, Testing the Theory of the Military-Industrial Complex (Lexington, Mass., 1973)Google Scholar and Sarkesian, Sam C., ed., The Military-Industrial Complex: A Reassessment (Los Angeles, 1972)Google Scholar.

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13 Patterson to George W. Healy, September 10, 1946, Ibid.

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25 Luther Gulick made a pioneering attempt at charting and explaining the changing administrative structure of World War II in Administrative Reflections from World War II (Birmingham, Ala., 1948)Google Scholar, but it was not followed up.

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40 A controversial point to be sure. See Melman, Seymour, ed., The War Economy of the United States, Readings in Military Industry and Economy (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; Baldwin, William L., The Structure of the Defense Market 1955-1964 (Durham, N.C., 1967)Google Scholar; and Weidenbaum, Murray L., The Modern Public Sector: New Ways of Doing the Government's Business (New York, 1969) for relevant readings.Google Scholar