"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.

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.

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

The privatization of defence assets and the outsourcing of military services from the armed forces to the private sector is an increasing trend. This book approaches the issue of military privatization by linking it to the transformation of the defence industries since the early 1990s, and shows the extent to which many military functions and activities, ranging from military research to military consulting/training to operational support services, have already been outsourced in the US and in Europe. This detailed study provides new and updated information on the ongoing privatization of the defence sector and offers an original theoretical explanation as to why the most modern armed forces throughout the world have come increasingly to rely on private companies for nearly everything they do. Contributing to a better understanding of military privatization and its close connection to technological change, the book explains the complexity of the whole phenomenon and discusses its implications for national and international security.

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.

This book provides a long-overdue account of online technology and its impact on the work and lifestyles of professional employees. It moves between the offices and homes of workers in the knew "knowledge" economy to provide intimate insight into the personal, family, and wider social tensions emerging in today’s rapidly changing work environment. Drawing on her extensive research, Gregg shows that new media technologies encourage and exacerbate an older tendency among salaried professionals to put work at the heart of daily concerns, often at the expense of other sources of intimacy and fulfillment. New media technologies from mobile phones to laptops and tablet computers, have been marketed as devices that give us the freedom to work where we want, when we want, but little attention has been paid to the consequences of this shift, which has seen work move out of the office and into cafés, trains, living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms. This professional "presence bleed" leads to work concerns impinging on the personal lives of employees in new and unforseen ways. This groundbreaking book explores how aspiring and established professionals each try to cope with the unprecedented intimacy of technologically-mediated work, and how its seductions seem poised to triumph over the few remaining relationships that may stand in its way.

Winner of both the National Book Award for Arts and Letters and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was one of the most original and gripping volumes ever written about the First World War. Frank Kermode, in The New York Times Book Review, hailed it as "an important contribution to our understanding of how we came to make World War I part of our minds," and Lionel Trilling called it simply "one of the most deeply moving books I have read in a long time." In its panaramic scope and poetic intensity, it illuminated a war that changed a generation and revolutionized the way we see the world. Now, in Wartime, Fussell turns to the Second World War, the conflict he himself fought in, to weave a narrative that is both more intensely personal and more wide-ranging. Whereas his former book focused primarily on literary figures, on the image of the Great War in literature, here Fussell examines the immediate impact of the war on common soldiers and civilians. He describes the psychological and emotional atmosphere of World War II. He analyzes the euphemisms people needed to deal with unacceptable reality (the early belief, for instance, that the war could be won by "precision bombing," that is, by long distance); he describes the abnormally intense frustration of desire and some of the means by which desire was satisfied; and, most important, he emphasizes the damage the war did to intellect, discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity and wit. Of course, no Fussell book would be complete without some serious discussion of the literature of the time. He examines, for instance, how the great privations of wartime (when oranges would be raffled off as valued prizes) resulted in roccoco prose styles that dwelt longingly on lavish dinners, and how the "high-mindedness" of the era and the almost pathological need to "accentuate the positive" led to the downfall of the acerbic H.L. Mencken and the ascent of E.B. White. He also offers astute commentary on Edmund Wilson's argument with Archibald MacLeish, Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine, the war poetry of Randall Jarrell and Louis Simpson, and many other aspects of the wartime literary world. Fussell conveys the essence of that wartime as no other writer before him. For the past fifty years, the Allied War has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by "the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty." Americans, he says, have never understood what the Second World War was really like. In this stunning volume, he offers such an understanding.