The Political Economy of National Defense: Issues and Perspectives.

• Author: Porter, Philip K.

It might be enough to call this a nice collection of papers on the politics and economics of national defense, interesting to those economists and political scientists that study national defense issues, but that would ignore the editor's purpose: to integrate the disciplines of political science and economics in the study of national defense. In the first chapter, the editor, Andrew L. Ross, points out that political science and economics are not separable in any thorough study of national defense issues and attempts to define the realm of political economy as the overarching paradigm in defense research. As such, the interplay of politics and economics is common to each of the papers gathered for this volume. His point is well taken and The Political Economy of National Defense should open one's eyes to the more holistic approach to the study of defense. Following the introductory chapter, there are eight analytical chapters and a chapter that reviews the literature and makes suggestions for future defense research.

Chapters 2 and 3 deal with aggregate defense issues. In Chapter 2, William K. Domke searches for the limiting factors in defense spending. Interestingly, they do not appear to be fiscal. In a cross-sectional analysis, neither the rate of inflation or economic growth, nor the size of the budget deficit or trade balance appear to limit defense spending. The author's opinion, unsupported by empirical evidence, is that the limiting factors are political, involving the time frame and process for defense planning. In Chapter 3, Daniel N. Nelson considers the economic costs of heavy military spending in the Warsaw Pact countries. It is not surprising that high levels of spending for national defense divert resources from domestic consumption. A surprising conclusion is that the need to suppress civil unrest (itself a product of the burden of national defense spending), rather than the need to defend against Western aggression, was the dominant cause of the Soviet defense build-up.

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 deal with specific...