Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Cheaper by the Dozen

Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
F-105 Thunderchiefs refueling midair from a KC-135 Stratotanker. The Boeing-built Stratotanker debuted in 1957 and is still in service today.
The military-industrial complex. The chilling phrase conjures up rows of gleaming ICBM's and B-52 Stratofortress bombers and nuclear submarines—or the mad Gen. Jack Ripper in the movie "Doctor Strangelove." Most people know that the phrase comes from President Eisenhower's Farewell Address of Jan. 17, 1961, in which he declared: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." He warned that "only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry" could keep America's "huge industrial and military machinery of defense" from becoming a potential threat to liberty and peace.
For liberals, Eisenhower's speech, especially that encapsulating phrase, turned Ike from a figure of fun into a revered prophet. Even the radical Port Huron Statement, issued in 1962, picked the phrase up. The "military-industrial complex" became a part of the rhetoric of the student movement—and has remained a part of the thought process of America's intelligentsia ever since.
Figuring out what Eisenhower meant by the military-industrial complex—and whether he was right to see it as something to be guarded against—is one of James Ledbetter's many tasks in "Unwarranted Influence." Exactly how the MIC (as we might abbreviate it) operates is the avowed subject of William Hartung's "Prophets of War," a scathing portrait of Lockheed Martin, America's largest defense contractor.
After World War I, it became popular to assert that the world's munitions makers, "the merchants of death," promoted wars to enhance their own profits—the most glaring example of how "capitalism kills." Mr. Ledbetter recognizes that such claims were ill-founded, even absurd: after all, the country that wound up with the biggest and costliest MIC of all was the communist Soviet Union. Still, he cannot resist joining the chorus of those who see the expansion of the Pentagon's budget during the Cold War as a grotesque and menacing development, one that made the world more perilous at the time and makes the future dangerously uncertain now.
What Mr. Ledbetter cannot explain is how this military buildup managed to check Soviet and Chinese expansion around the world, allowed Western Europe to unite and live in peace, and provided a nuclear deterrence without triggering the end of civilization (as critics predicted)—or ever once interrupted the flow of butter as well as guns.
Some would say it was an amazing achievement rather than a source of shame. But not Mr. Ledbetter. Instead, he insists that the MIC has blunted our moral sense and enabled adventurism. In recent years it has led to "the controversial detention center at Guantanamo Bay, the torture revealed in the Abu Ghraib prison; the privatization of security and combat as represented by the Blackwater firm; and the overruns in cost, length of engagement, and American lives" in Iraq.
It is hard to see what this litany has to do with the MIC per se, especially when the Pentagon's weapons-spending programs have steadily shrunk as a percentage of the federal budget to less than 20%, compared with 60% in Eisenhower's day, and when the defense industry itself is far from a dominant force in the nation's economy. Today you could buy all the Big Six defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing, for roughly a 10th of the value of Microsoft. In any case, it is hard to imagine Eisenhower—the man who approved the CIA's overthrow of governments in Guatemala and Iran— losing much sleep over Gitmo.

Unwarranted Influence

By James Ledbetter
Yale, 268 pages, $26
It is true, though—as Mr. Ledbetter shows—that Ike was a bundle of contradictions. He was the son of Mennonite pacifists who went to West Point and became the Army's top expert on logistics and war mobilization. As the supreme commander in Europe he achieved victory by means of planes and weapons from companies like Boeing, Lockheed, Dow and DuPont that he would excoriate as props of the military-industrial complex. The president who pumped America's defense dollars into a nuclear-armed fleet of B-52's took time in his Farewell Speech to dub nuclear disarmament the country's "continuing imperative."
In the end, Mr. Ledbetter is forced to conclude that Eisenhower's worry about the MIC was part of a larger fear—about the growth of an arrogant and expensive federal government and the growth of federal debt. Would building more and bigger weapons systems, Eisenhower wondered, bankrupt the country?
In fact, it is social programs that now have the federal budget firmly in their grip and keep our deficits soaring. One could call the Pentagon's $685 billion measly compared with the continuing costs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Today the MIC barely registers at 4% of GDP; in Eisenhower's day it was nearly 10%, even after the Korean War. By Ike's own standards we should be spending at least twice what we are now spending on defense.
For Keynesians eager to push up aggregate demand with more "stimulus" money, defense spending is a win-win: Unlike high-speed rails to Las Vegas and windmill farms, the money spent on weapons and armaments goes directly into real economic goods and into the pockets of defense workers, including those at Lockheed Martin.
This public-private nexus bothers observers like Mr Hartung. Indeed, his picture of Lockheed in "Prophets of War" reads like the stuff of 19th-century muckraker journalism. Not that Lockheed has not encouraged such an approach: In 1974, a scandal broke about Lockheed executives bribing foreign officials, including Prince Bernhardt of the Netherlands and a Japanese prime minister, who wound up with a stiff prison sentence. But more generally Mr. Hartung paints a portrait of a company with tentacles everywhere, from the Pentagon and Congress to agents in foreign governments, a company that feeds the forces of militarism around the world and enriches itself in the process, especially through cost overruns.

Prophets of War

By William D. Hartung
Nation Books, 296 pages, $25.95
Yet profit is of course why businesses exist, even arms businesses (just ask Bofors, peace-loving Sweden's venerable arms giant, bought in 2005 by BAE). And most cost overruns these days have less to do with corruption than with constant new "add on's" and bureaucratic fiddling, including safety-standard requirements, emanating from Washington. This is one reason why a device like the MDARS, a golf-cart-size sensory robot envisaged in 2000 as a cheap way to patrol warehouses and air bases, now costs 50 times more than planned.
Norman Augustine, a former Lockheed Martin president, is Mr. Hartung's bête noire. He portrays him as a "tough behind-the-scenes lobbyist" who has enriched himself and his company at the public trough. Yet it was Mr. Augustine, seeing the absurdity of the government's procurement process, who quipped that in the year 2054 the entire Pentagon budget will be spent to buy exactly one airplane, to be shared on alternate days by the Army, Navy and Air Force. It was not meant as a happy prediction.
As it happens, America's military- industrial complex developed in World War II as a way to save money, not squander it. Industrialists and military men learned that working together on plane and weapons designs made for better weapons at a faster pace, as battlefield experience got incorporated into existing designs. It also speeded the development of technologies that continue to spin off from the MIC, from radar and cellphones to the Internet (an outgrowth of the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency). Everyone complains about a bloated defense budget, yet history shows that a continuous, functioning MIC costs far less in lives and dollars than having to ramp up our military from scratch when a crisis hits.
From 1946 to 1950 a drastic downsizing of our military almost left us helpless to halt a communist takeover of Korea. After Vietnam, we were ill-prepared to confront the Soviets' Third World adventurism and its new interest in sea power. After the fall of the Berlin Wall there was a similar attempt to claim a "peace dividend." Each time the critics of "empire" argued that, at last, we could beat our swords into ploughshares. Those who disagreed were dismissed as alarmists or, more routinely, as shills with a vested interest in the status quo.
But we all have a vested interest in the status quo—a world in which the U.S. military assumes the awesome burden of acting as the world's policeman, from fending off rogue nations and knocking off terrorists with Predator drones to defending the sea lanes and global commons from pirates and assorted bad guys. The task of rebuilding a hollowed-out military is a daunting one. If we manage to appreciate the virtues of the "military-industrial complex," we won't have to face it again.
—Mr. Herman, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is writing a book on the arsenal of democracy.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Companies to Colonies -- Privatizing the business of empire.

BOOKSHELFDECEMBER 9, 2010.

On the morning of June 23, 1757, the armies of Bengal, in what is now eastern India, engaged English soldiers under the command of Robert Clive. The battle took place near a village north of the British imperial stronghold of Calcutta. Siraj- ud- Daula—the ruler of the entire Bengal region—had marshaled forces reportedly numbering 50,000, to Clive's mere 3,000. But Clive's tactical audacity and conspiratorial guile won the day. Having secretly sowed treason in the Bengali ranks, he seized the high ground and cannonaded his disoriented enemy. Siraj-ud-Daula was deposed, murdered and replaced by a puppet prince. Britain secured the riches of Bengal.
More than a century later, in the fall of 1893, a rout of similar dimensions unfolded in the southern African kingdom of Matabeleland. European settlers, already glutted with recently discovered diamonds and gold, invaded the primitive kingdom seeking more. The settlers marched at the bidding of Cecil Rhodes, the diamond oligarch and prime minister of Britain's Cape Colony. Outnumbered perhaps five to one, they enjoyed a complete victory. The Matabele fell by the thousands beneath a hail of machine-gun fire, and their lands were soon rechristened Rhodesia. As the English writer Hilaire Belloc mordantly versified around this time: "Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not."
Robert Clive and Cecil Rhodes are iconic figures in the annals of imperial history. Few did more to keep the sun from setting on the British Empire. It is thus remarkable to remember that neither man commanded royal troops or acted as an official of the British Government. Both, in fact, owed their power to private companies. They were ardent British patriots, but it was nonetheless the interests of the East India Co. and the British South Africa Co. respectively that they served.
History tends to portray the European empires as the creations of kings and nation-states. But as Stephen Bown's "Merchant Kings" reminds us, private economic interests did as much as statesmen to colonize the globe on behalf of Europe. Particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries, when European states struggled to modernize themselves while burdened by the costs of war, monarchs regularly privatized the business of empire. They chartered national trading companies, granting them valuable monopoly rights to do business in far-flung locales—and to outfit private armies, conduct diplomacy and negotiate treaties.

Merchant Kings

By Stephen R. Bown
Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, 314 pages, $26.99
The British and Dutch, with their advanced commercial economies, were particularly fond of the device. The original intent was to organize trade, but the temptation toward direct conquest and rule often raised the "animal spirits" of the trading companies. In an age when correspondence between Bombay and London could take six months, states could do little to tame the companies. The results could be staggering. Private trading interests founded important colonies such as Massachusetts and Virginia. For generations the Royal Africa Co. monopolized the British slave trade. The Dutch East India Co. ruthlessly dominated the Asian spice trade for decades. In Bengal, the English East India Co. governed and taxed nearly thirty million natives long before Queen Victoria was crowned Empress of India. Until 1870, England's Hudson's Bay Co. governed nearly 1.5 million square miles of Canada on behalf of a few hundred investors.
This was private colonizing on a scale to make Halliburton and Blackwater blush. Lenin once called imperialism the "last stage of capitalism," but in many respects it was the first. Of course, as Adam Smith observed, the great chartered companies were not free-marketeers but venal monopolists. And unlike trade, the companies' governing efforts rarely turned a profit. The temptation to tax and administer rather than barter usually ruined the bottom line. And the human costs of company rule could be catastrophic. The ruinous taxes collected in Bengal by the East India Co. exacerbated a famine that killed perhaps 10 million Bengalis in the early 1770s. Rhodes's South Africa Co., seeking docile black laborers, laid the legal groundwork for apartheid.
Nevertheless, for a remarkably long run, European trading cartels were major imperial players on three continents. It is fascinating and forgotten history, and we could use a good general account. Mr. Bown, unfortunately, has not provided one. A successful popular writer, he chooses to tell the history of the great trading companies by sketching six of the major personalities who dominated them. Clive and Rhodes are among his subjects, but so too are lesser known figures, such as Aleksandr Baranov, who ruled as "Lord of Alaska" for the Russian American Co., and Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the sea captain who served the Dutch East India Co. with the brutality of a warlord.
Mr. Bown writes smoothly, but he appears to have done no original research and his potted biographies are linked by the barest of thematic threads. He establishes that the grandees of the trading companies were uniformly men of ambition and rapacity, but this is hardly news. He provides no broader account of the political and commercial conditions that propelled the rise of the trading companies. How profitable were these enterprises? Who were their investors and financiers? How and when did they cooperate or clash with the sovereigns who chartered them?
The author does what he can, but the biographical vignettes allow him little space for such questions. "Merchant Kings" is not a robust popular history but a flimsy one, a collection of anecdotes strung together by generalizations. That's a shame, because the heyday of the chartered trading companies may have passed, but the unsavory alliance of bankrupt states and crony capitalists is a topic that never gets old.

Mr. Collins, a professor of history at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, is currently a visiting fellow at Cambridge University.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Islamist Turkey vs. Secular Iran?

Early in the sixteenth century, as the Ottoman and Safavid empires fought for control of the Middle East, Selim the Grim ruling from Istanbul indulged his artistic side by composing distinguished poetry in Persian, then the Middle East's language of high culture. Simultaneously, Ismail I ruling from Isfahan wrote poetry in Turkish, his ancestral language.


Selim the Grim (r. 1512-20) wrote poetry under the name Mahlas Selimi; his arch-rival Ismail I (r. 1501-24) wrote poetry as Khata'i.
This juxtaposition comes to mind as the populations of Turkey and Iran now engage in another exchange. As the secular Turkey founded by Atatürk threatens to disappear under a wave of Islamism, the Islamist Iranian state founded by Khomeini apparently teeters, on the brink of secularism. Turks wish to live like Iranians, ironically, and Iranians like Turks.

Turkey and Iran are large, influential, and relatively advanced Muslim-majority countries, historically central, strategically placed, and widely watched; as they cross paths, I predicted back in 1994, racing in opposite directions, their destinies will affect not just the future of the Middle East but potentially the entire Muslim world.
That is now happening. Let's review each country's evolution:
Turkey: Atatürk nearly removed Islam from public life in the period 1923-38. Over the decades, however, Islamists fought back and by the 1970s they formed part of a ruling coalition; in 1996-97, they even headed a government. Islamists took power following the strange elections of 2002, when winning a third of the vote secured them two-thirds of the parliamentary seats. Ruling with caution and competence, they got nearly half the vote in 2007, at which point their gloves came off and the bullying began, from a wildly excessive fine levied against a media critic to hare-brained conspiracy theories against the armed forces. Islamists won 58 percent of the vote in a September referendum and appear set to win the next parliamentary election, due by June 2011.


Atatürk excluded Islam from Turkey's public life and Khomeini made it central in Iran's.
Should Islamists win the next election, that will likely establish the premise for them to remain enduringly in power, during which they will bend the country to fit their will, instituting Islamic law (the Sharia), and building an Islamic order resembling Khomeini's idealized polity.

Iran: Khomeini did the opposite of Atatürk, making Islam politically dominant during his reign, 1979-89, but it soon thereafter began to falter, with discordant factions emerging, the economy failing, and the populace distancing itself from the regime's extremist rule. By the 1990s, foreign observers expected the regime soon to fail. Despite their populace's growing disillusionment, the increased sway of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps and the coming to power of hardened veterans of the Iran-Iraq war, as symbolized by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, imbued it with a second wind.
This reassertion of Islamist goals also increased the people's alienation from the regime, including a turn away from Islamic practices and toward secularism. The country's growing pathologies, including rampant drug-taking, pornography, and prostitution point to the depths of its problems. Alienation sparked anti-regime demonstrations in the aftermath of fraudulent elections in June 2009. The repression that followed spurred yet more anger at the authorities.
A race is underway. Except it is not an even competition, given that Islamists currently rule in both capitals, Ankara and Tehran.


Erdoğan and Ahmadinejad, in sync at last.
Looking ahead, Iran represents the Middle East's greatest danger and its greatest hope. Its nuclear buildup, terrorism, ideological aggressiveness, and formation of a "resistance bloc" present a truly global threat, ranging from jumping the price of oil and gas to an electro-magnetic pulse attack on the United States. But if these dangers can be navigated, controlled, and subdued, Iran has a unique potential to lead Muslims out of the dark night of Islamism toward a more modern, moderate, and good neighborly form of Islam. As in 1979, that achievement will likely affect Muslims far and wide.

Contrarily, while the Turkish government presents few immediate dangers, its more subtle application of Islamism's hideous principles makes it loom large as future threat. Long after Khomeini and Osama bin Laden are forgotten, I venture, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his colleagues will be remembered as the inventors of a more lasting and insidious form of Islamism.
Thus may today's most urgent Middle Eastern problem country become tomorrow's leader of sanity and creativity while the West's most stalwart Muslim ally over five decades turn into the greatest source of hostility and reaction. Extrapolation is a mug's game, the wheel turns, and history springs surprises.
Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
Nov. 30, 2010 updates: Two points that did not fit in the main body of my column
(1) Ankara and Tehran work together ever closely these days but I predict that they will soon be rivals for Islamist leadership. Historical pride, sectarian ambition, and geo-strategic competition all suggest that the current moment of harmony will not last long Look for the Turks to dispute Iranian leadership in such arenas as commercial prowess, military power, and religious potency.
(2) I sketched out this rivalry in a 1994 article in the National Interest, "[Turkey vs. Iran and] Islam's Intramural Struggle," in which I noted "a long, deep, and difficult fight" likely brewing "between two of the great countries of the Middle East, Turkey and Iran." Turks , I wrote, "seem not yet to realize what the mullahs know: that fundamentalist Islam will rise or fall depending on what Turks do, and that Iran and Turkey are therefore engaged in a mortal combat. Will Turks wake up in time to hold their own? Much hinges on the result."

伊斯兰主义的土耳其和世俗的伊朗

Friday, December 3, 2010

Engines of Commerce -The unheralded machine power that moves manufactured goods and raw materials around the world.

The unheralded machine power that moves manufactured goods and raw materials around the world.

It's no secret that Al Gore and other hard-line environmentalists hate the internal-combustion engine. In 1992, Mr. Gore in his book "Earth in the Balance" called for a program that would lead to the engine's elimination by 2017. He believed this was no fanciful goal; it was just a matter of practical engineering harnessed to political will.

Vaclav Smil doesn't mention Mr. Gore in "Prime Movers of Globalization," a detailed, fascinating account of, as the subtitle has it, "The History and Impact of Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines." But somehow I suspect that the Nobel laureate and scourge of fossil-fuel consumption was not far from the author's mind. For if the story of these remarkable machines reveals anything, it is that Mr. Gore's vision is utterly untethered to reality.
The technological achievement alone is extraordinary, never mind (for the moment) the commercial effect. In the late 19th century, the German engineer Rudolf Diesel developed an engine that operated by injecting fuel into cylinders containing air compressed by pistons (fuel ignites more easily in compressed air). The pistons, in turn, were driven by the gases released in the fuel's ignition. The inventor himself imagined something on the scale of diesel-powered sewing machines. These days the engines power almost all sizable ocean-going vessels as well as major rail and truck transport. "When measured in tons per kilometer," Mr. Smil notes, "about 94 percent of global trade is now diesel-powered." The engines dominate global trade because "the cost, efficiency, reliability, and durability of diesel engines offer a combination that has not been surpassed by any other energy converter."
The gas turbine—invented by Frank Whittle, a British engineer, in the early 20th century—relies on a process of continuous combustion, with spinning fan-blades driving a compressor or turning a shaft (e.g., a ship's propeller) or producing powerful thrust through a nozzle, enough to send an airplane into the sky. Orville and Wilbur Wright are the first fathers of flight, but Frank Whittle is the mostly unheralded father of globe-spanning air travel.

"In 1930," Mr. Smil writes, "there could be no such thing as a non-stop transatlantic commercial flight." But the gas turbine dramatically changed that state of affairs. "In 1950, the crossing took twelve hours," he notes. Eight years later, it could be made in six hours, though only a small number of first-generation jetliners were in operation. By 1960, such flights "became an increasingly common event, and so, figuratively, the world shrank by half in a single decade."

bkrvmovers

Prime Movers of Globalization

By Vaclav Smil
(The MIT Press, 261 pages, $29.95)


These two internal-combustion engines—diesel and turbine—soon became "prime movers" as Mr. Smil dubs them. They are now the "indispensable driving forces of the global economy." Without them, "trade would not have achieved its truly planetwide scope or have done so at such massive scales, at such rapid speed, and at such affordable costs."

When most Americans think of the internal- combustion engine, they naturally think of the one under the hood of their car. And indeed, gasoline- powered engines are "the most common prime mover of modern civilization. . . . There are now roughly 1 billion of these engines installed in cars, trucks, motorcycles and garden machines, boats, snowmobiles" and so on.

Why did this "impressive machine" fail to become the force behind globalization, moving goods long distances? It is "not practical in very large sizes," Mr. Smil says. The global transport of large quantities of goods and people requires much more massive engines. The inventions of Messrs. Diesel and Whittle—refined, modified and extended countless times by later engineers—picked up where the conventional gasoline engine left off.

Mr. Smil's account of the engineering advances throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries— advances that brought the world large marine diesels and gas turbines—is first-rate history, both thorough and compelling. It is also fairly technical for the lay reader. But the rich detail doesn't just explain the intricacies of the engines and how they work. It also helps to show how easily we take for granted machine-power of such marvelous sophistication and, relatedly, why an environmental dreamer might mistakenly imagine its disappearance within a quarter-century.

"Who does not know (indeed, has not seen) a Boeing 747, the first wide-body jet?" Mr. Smil asks. "Who is not aware of Wal-Mart's China supply pipeline, and who has not seen the images of container ships laden with what seem to be gravity-defying layers of steel boxes? But for how many people would the JT9D or the K98MC7 (the engines that have made those remarkable airplanes and vessels possible) ring any bell, and how many educated adults could cogently and accurately describe how a turbofan works . . . or why diesels endure?"

Readers of "Prime Movers of Globalization" will know the answers to such question better than most when they are done, and they will understand why these massive machines will not disappear soon. It is true that diesels and jet turbines are not without their problems. They have added to environmental pressures by enabling the release of large quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the dumping of plastic debris into the North Pacific; and, with the creative destruction caused by global trade, they have created social disruptions that their inventors could hardly have imagined. Mr. Smil acknowledges such problems; he is no Pollyanna and is even something of an environmentalist. But he has been mugged by the reality of physics and engineering.

Mr. Schulz is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of American.com.