The National Security Act of 1947, establishing the president’s overriding responsibility for both defense and foreign policy, created the Secretary of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, centralizing the armed forces in the Pentagon. The Act aimed to end the rivalry among the military services by combining them under one power, which, theoretically at least, would be able to subordinate parochial interests and economize by ending duplication. Over time, the massive fivesided building in Northern Virginia, with miles of corridors and offices, has become symbolic of the strengths and weaknesses of American military force and planning.

With the president constitutionally enthroned as commander-in-chief, civilian control of the armed forces was secure. But the growth of forces during the Second World War, the prospect of conflicts arising with the Soviet Union and a perceived need to balance political concerns with military strategy led Truman to bolster his position with the establishment of a Cabinet-level Secretary of Defense to oversee all the military.

Korea firmly established the Pentagon within the American political system. While still dominated by military men, the Pentagon began to move towards civilian politics, embodied in the conflict between Secretary of Defense George Marshall (supported by Truman) and General MacArthur in Korea, which led to the latter’s dismissal. By the time President Eisenhower retired from office, a system, which he termed the “militaryindustrial complex,” was firmly entrenched. While this term suggested a threat to a democratic society, it also denoted a system in which the three elements (economic, political and military) of C. Wright Mills’ Power Elite (1956) collaborated in a loose balance.

A more sinister Pentagon emerged in the 1960s under President Kennedy and Robert McNamara, his Secretary of Defense. Kennedy had made the “missile gap” central to his political campaign against Nixon in 1960 and so, following his victory, he emphasized military build-up, unrestrained by economic and political advisability. In addition, McNamara brought to the Department of Defense his experience as the CEO of Ford.

Hence, he promoted approaches that had seemed to be working in the Big Three Automakers and other corporations (many of which produced goods for the Pentagon).

These would soon be shown to be woefully inadequate for a changing political and economic landscape.

McNamara instituted industrial management in the federal government with the Secretary of Defense in control of a huge network of enterprises. As in multi-division firms, a Central Management Office was established to administer the “militaryindustrial empire.” Now the federal government began to direct production of over $44 billion in goods and services aimed for military use, instead of merely contracting out projects. In other words, the federal government did not merely regulate; it actually took over the business.

Moreover, what workers at the Pentagon called “missile-gap madness” legitimized almost any expenditure to complete a project. Cost overruns, malfunctioning parts and basic tools and supplies bought at exorbitant rates became common. The C-5A transport plane came in with a $2 billion cost overrun. Forty percent of Minuteman II missiles were found to be defective after test failures had been covered up. Finally, an electronics unit for the F-III fighter (McNamara’s pet project), budgeted at $750,000 per plane, ended up costing $4.1 million per plane. McNamara had encouraged centralization partly to cut back on waste, but he created the exact opposite.

Civilian control under Kennedy and Johnson also established the number-crunching mentality of McNamara and his technocrats. This mindset even influenced the way engagements were carried out, especially Vietnam. Rather than achieving strategic objectives, securing particular pieces of land or gaining other tactical advantages, American sol-diers were trained to fight wars of attrition. In the language of the industrial world, this meant producing maximum bodies among the enemy at a minimum of cost in bodies for Americans. This gave rise, as Philip Caputo recounted in Rumor of War (1977), to the infamous “body counts.” Monthly goals were set, a ratio calculated that would secure victory (believed to be twelve Vietnamese for every one American) and operations were even designed to ascertain numbers of dead on each side. That this was the period of lowest morale in the history of the American armed forces is not surprising.

Moreover, since the Pentagon was being run as a business, public relations were needed. What Senator J. William Fulbright, Chairperson of the Committee on Foreign Relations, called the Pentagon Propaganda Machine was an extremely elaborate advertising agency selling what the Pentagon was doing to the public. Disaster came not so much on the battle field as in the war of images waged on television. The Pentagon’s campaign was shown to be seriously flawed when slogans like “The Light at the End of the Tunnel” were followed by setbacks like the Tet Offensive, or when General Westmoreland’s roseate news briefings were disturbed by nearby shelling.

The war resulted in the “Vietnam Syndrome,” or the belief that American governments would be reluctant to undertake military engagements in the future. This was not simply due to lack of public support or the media overstepping their bounds. The McNamara-designed Pentagon proved unable to reach even its own distorted objectives, let alone other strategic objectives a president might set. President Carter’s 1980 disaster attempting to rescue the American hostages in Teheran looked worse against the crisp efficiency of the Israelis flying into Entebbe (1976) to rescue their hostages. Hollywood decided to make movies of the Israelis, not the Americans! Reagan attempted to refashion the Pentagon, partly by “throwing money at the problem” in another military build-up. His Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, believing that the problem lay in the extent of civilian control at the Pentagon itself, attempted to diminish this element. In the eyes of many, however, this left a vacuum in place. The armed forces merely continued to think in terms of old foes, like the Soviet Union, rather than reorienting themselves towards new conflicts worldwide.

Engagements in Grenada under Reagan, and then Panama under Bush, re-established a sense of the American armed forces as a viable fighting force. Newer, sophisticated weapons and machines seemed vastly superior to what the Soviets had available, while Soviet forces became mired in their own “Vietnam” in Afghanistan. The long-held belief that the Red Army had western Europe at its mercy was shown to be entirely erroneous.

Towards the end of Reagan’s administration, changes began to occur at the Pentagon.

Frank Carlucci replaced Weinberger as Secretary of Defense and General Colin Powell, a relative military visionary was appointed to head the National Security Council. Carlucci suggested a more conciliatory approach towards the Soviet Union, which was beginning to collapse, while Powell began to plan for what he saw as the likely conflicts of the future, particularly those focusing on resources like oil.

This culminated in the Gulf War in 1991, one of the first military engagements for which American military strategists were actually prepared in advance. In the process, Powell and General Norman Schwarzkopf re-established the superiority of US armed forces. It was not merely the fact that the Americans defeated Saddam Hussein’s forces, it was the manner in which they did so, leaving an army of tanks utterly devastated.

Under President Bill Clinton the Pentagon has once again been subordinated to political considerations. While there were at first hopes of reorienting the economy in the aftermath of the Cold War, the perceived need to intervene abroad militarily has kept the military budget growing, and defense contractors, albeit less in the heavyindustry sector and more in high technologies, have remained producing. In addition, such military intervention, like Clinton’s, has been undertaken with one eye on public reaction, evidenced by the polls. Somalia was a necessary humanitarian intervention until a few American lives were lost; the Rwandan genocide had to be overlooked because of the disaster in Somalia. Similarly intervention in Kosovo was necessary because of the failure to act in Rwanda. All the while, actions against Iraq seemed to occur based on a schedule set by the Independent Counsel Starr, rather than global strategic considerations.

But such politicization is almost inevitable in a world where the old Cold-War certainties no longer remain. Indeed, Powell’s visionary approach to shaping the Pentagon was not simply to prepare for a new kind of war against a new enemy in the Middle East; it was rather to prepare for all kinds of wars against many potential enemies.

As such, the message has not been to diminish civilian control, since this is required of a democracy; rather it is that McNamara’s approach, where everything is subordinated to the bottom line of efficiency or a Clinton approach, where there is no bottom line (as in the debate over gays in the military), are no longer acceptable in a world where allegiances are shifting, people are migrating across boundaries and new kinds of globalization are taking place.