Guardians of the Warfare State
05/10/2019T. Hunt Tooley
[Editor's Note: Trump is reportedly set to nominate Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing executive, as Secretary of Defense. Given his background, Shanahan looks to fit the typical bill for the job. In this 2013 article, historian Hunt Tooley discusses where secretaries of state come from, and why they are all so similar in background.]
An analysis of the U.S. secretaries of war and defense (the name was changed from secretary of war to secretary of defense in 1947) gives us some insight into the nature of the relationships within the “military-industrial complex.†Though these secretaries are not the only gatekeepers of the warfare-welfare state (and perhaps not even the most important ones), they do perform a crucial function in coordinating the collectivist, rent-seeking corporate entities with the political parties and their largely social-democratic agendas.
https://mises.org/library/guardians-warfare-state
