As with so many other laws and norms, President Donald Trump has shattered that tradition. The war he launched against Iran in February 2026 involved no effort to explain to voters why we were fighting. Even after the fact, Trump showed little belief that there was any need to persuade the public that he was justified or correct. It was a war of pure presidential whim.
There is, of course, a long history of capitalist greed driving U.S. foreign policy. The Marine Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, for example, who led military interventions throughout the Western Hemisphere in the early 1900s, later lamented that he “helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in” and “helped make Mexico … safe for American oil interests.” Taking the oil has always been the goal. Trump is, in some ways, a supercharged version of the kleptocracy that came before.
Without a large and well-armed military, presidents wouldn’t have the ability (or the temptation) to deploy force at will. And to control that enormous military apparatus, the United States has gravitated toward the model of private enterprise, organizing the national security state on the template of a multidivision, for-profit corporation. These days, military officers who want to get promoted earn MBAs to round out their résumés. It’s the accountants scattered throughout the sprawling defense bureaucracy who often set policy for the most powerful military in history.
As Murphy brilliantly narrates in Pentagon Capitalism, the national security state increasingly embraced corporate-style management in the wake of World War II. To compete with the Soviet Union, the United States established a huge standing Army for the first time in its history and maintained hundreds of bases around the world. But the cost of that new defense establishment created tension. During World War II, the United States was willing to spend whatever it took to win. In the quasi-peacetime of the Cold War, the military no longer got a blank check. In the late 1940s, Murphy explains, conservative politicians who were opposed to the “expanded government capacity” of the New Deal state attacked defense spending as “creeping socialism” and “a betrayal of the free enterprise foundations of the American system.” In response, “the architects of the Cold War defense apparatus increasingly invoked business as both a practical resource and a legitimizing model for organizing American military power.” Defense planners rearranged the military like a private enterprise to make it more efficient and to fend off charges that centrally planned defense spending was state socialism.
Congress agreed. The National Security Act Amendments of 1949 reorganized how the Pentagon handled funds. In particular, the military shifted to “consumer funding.” Under this new model, instead of unit commanders requisitioning as much materiel as they could get, each unit—say, an Army base—received a set amount of funds. That unit could then use its funds as a “consumer” to buy gear from other military units—say, a supply depot with food or winter coats. Supply units wouldn’t receive any funding directly from the federal budget: Their funds would only come from “selling” supplies to other military units. This system simulated a free market, shaped by supply and demand, and it theoretically increased efficiency by incentivizing bases to “buy” only what they needed and supply depots to stockpile only what they could “sell.”
The sudden centrality of accounting turned military officers into corporate managers. Generals who had led combat troops in World War II now found themselves balancing budgets at bases, choosing how to spend limited funds on equipment, housing, or medical care. As a result, officers began trying to maximize the productivity of their workers, using popular new techniques for managing personnel. Starting in the 1940s, business school professors and management consultants developed theories for how to control the increasingly large and decentralized corporate conglomerates that dominated the U.S. economy—multidivision companies like GE. These business intellectuals achieved surprising cultural salience in the 1950s—as Murphy says, “management celebrities disseminated their ideas far and wide.” The military listened.
Workers didn’t like this intrusive control. In fact, laborers at the Watertown Arsenal had gone on strike in 1911 when the Army tried to introduce Taylorist production controls, leading Congress to temporarily ban such management techniques in federal workplaces. But as the post–World War II military expanded, it hired more female workers, and as the United States built hundreds of bases abroad, it hired local workers for jobs like cooking and cleaning. The white male officers overseeing this increasingly female and nonwhite workforce sought to extract maximum productivity from the people under their control. Murphy concludes that both “racialized views” and gender politics “structured the military’s Cold War transformations” into a businesslike bureaucracy. Racialized and gendered systems of workplace power built the infrastructure for U.S. military hegemony.
That process reached its infamous apotheosis during the Vietnam War, when the Pentagon used a “body count” metric of enemy deaths to track progress. Critics have argued that the body count metric both encouraged “indiscriminate violence” and “blinkered American military leadership to the realities of the war” by treating statistics on total deaths as a proxy for strategic gains. Similarly, Gen. William Westmoreland, who studied at Harvard Business School and commanded U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, launched a program in 1967 to bring down the “high cost per individual casualty” (at the time, it took six tons of munitions to kill one enemy combatant). Westmoreland called this economizing project “a matter of highest priority.” It produced such tangible results as “changes to the process of sweater procurement.” President Johnson praised the program for employing “innovative management improvements” amid the “most trying conditions conceivable in a combat zone.” At least LBJ had his priorities straight.
Indeed, contemporary business practices have been influenced by the history of managerialism in the military. Management consulting firms used defense work during World War II to build their cachet, while Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program, which still trains executives today, grew out of a program for defense management in World War II. In the 1960s, budgeting techniques that were developed in the military to control costs spread to other parts of the federal government, bringing what Murphy calls “military-incubated economic analysis” to bear on public “health, education, welfare, and housing.” At a more pervasive, ideological level, key elements of neoliberal economics, including an infatuation with rational choice theory and cost-benefit analysis, trace their lineage partly to Rand and the experiences academic economists had with the military. The Defense Department, Murphy writes, “served as a breeding ground” for the ideas that shaped neoliberal capitalism and its radical free-market beliefs.
The use of military contractors to fight the war on terrorism is another product of the trend toward privatization that Pentagon Capitalism narrates. The drive to cut costs that inspired new methods of “sweater procurement” in Vietnam also led to the deployment of mercenaries in Afghanistan and Iraq. As Murphy emphasizes, this “outsourcing changed the nature of war,” because private contractors are less accountable for causing civilian harm, and they enable the public to ignore the wars being fought in our name. Privatizing the infrastructure of war incentivizes more war.
This “echo system” arose because federal law bans domestic propaganda. The U.S. government ran propaganda campaigns in both world wars—the poet Archibald MacLeish famously worked in the Office of War Information in World War II. But Americans have been wary of state propaganda. Since 1919, an anti-lobbying statute has barred the executive branch from using federal funds to pay for any “advertisement, telegram, telephone, letter, printed or written matter, or other device, intended or designed to influence in any manner a Member of Congress … to favor, adopt, or oppose” any “law” or “policy.” As a result, the White House can’t run publicity campaigns to pressure Congress. To get around that, Levinson shows, presidents have built an entire ecosystem of private groups that “launder” the president’s foreign policy proposals as their own.
Facing an isolationist Congress, Roosevelt used outside groups to promote his plans like “cash-and-carry” and “lend-lease.” In particular, the Committee to Defend America, or CDA, placed articles and ads in newspapers across the country. The White House helped manage that campaign. At one point, one of FDR’s aides asked the CDA to delay a petition, and the CDA said it was “very glad to comply” and would take “no action on it until such time as mutually agreed.” FDR himself thanked the CDA’s chair for a “grand job” on cash-and-carry. After Pearl Harbor, the CDA shut down. But the CDA’s director, Clark Eichelberger, in close consultation with the White House, ran the American Association for the United Nations, or AAUN, to generate public pressure on Congress to ratify the U.N. Charter. One of the last things Roosevelt did before he died was to release a statement, written by Eichelberger, backing the AAUN’s work.
The foreign policy echo system intensified during Vietnam. In 1967, as the antiwar movement took off, White House aides organized the Committee for Peace with Freedom in Vietnam, or CPF. The CPF was co-chaired by former presidents Truman and Eisenhower and endorsed Johnson’s conduct of the war. The White House aide who steered the project told LBJ that Eisenhower’s involvement helped because it “automatically takes suspicion off the White House.” That same aide wrote that “for obvious reasons,” it would be “wise” to keep the CPF files “locked up.”
The war on terrorism followed a similar script. In 1992, the CIA provided startup funds for the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmed Chalabi. Then, in 2003, Chalabi helped justify invading Iraq. George W. Bush promoted the invasion in a speech at AEI a month before U.S. bombs started to fall. Dick Cheney praised the Iraq War two months later at the Heritage Foundation. Private organizations that owed their power, prestige, and sometimes their very existence to government backing proceeded to support the White House’s plans for war.
The national security state modeled itself on private enterprise, ultimately outsourcing war, while the presidency came to rely on private organizations to launder interventionist plans to the public.
The Trump administration has radically embraced that privatization. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using private companies to build and run mass immigrant detention centers. Trump proposed removing Palestinians from Gaza so that the United States could “own” it and construct a “Riviera” on “a beautiful piece of land.” Trump-aligned companies like Palantir have won huge contracts with the Defense Department and ICE. Trump donor—and defense contractor—Elon Musk headed the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, potentially contributing to hundreds of thousands of deaths abroad. After the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” demanded a “review” of “all general and flag officer promotions” to weed out “critical race theory” and concern for “climate change” in the military, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has begun purging women and nonwhite officers from the upper ranks.
More broadly, it will be necessary to combat the ideology of privatization that has swallowed foreign affairs. Democracy is not a private enterprise. If we want to rein in the excesses of the national security state, we will need to reawaken the sense that foreign policy is a public good.
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