A short, densely footnoted account of how the American arms establishment acquired its grip on Washington - the committee system, the procurement scandals, the propaganda apparatus, and the doctrines from containment to the Guam Doctrine - built almost entirely out of American sources.
Its hundred and seven notes cite C. Wright Mills, Arthur Schlesinger, Samuel Huntington, Morris Janowitz, Maxwell Taylor, Herman Kahn, Ralph Lapp, Hanson Baldwin, Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, the Pentagon Papers, the Congressional Record, Senator Proxmire's Report from Wasteland, Fulbright's The Arrogance of Power, and Melvin Laird's own budget testimony. More than any other single authority it leans on Adam Yarmolinsky's The Military Establishment - the work, as the book itself notes, of a former US Assistant Secretary of Defense, and which it calls the most circumstantial analysis of the complex in American literature.
It is a serious piece of work and its thesis about the United States is broadly correct. What makes it worth reading is that the case is assembled from the testimony of Americans, much of it from inside the government and the Senate, so that a reader can follow every claim back to a source in his own language.
For once the dating is clean: the text closes in 1976, quoting the Twenty-Fifth Congress of that February. Ford appears; Carter, elected that November, does not.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on the argument the book cannot make without erasing every armed institution east of the Elbe.
