The American Warfare State: The Domestic Politics of Military Spending.

• Jurisdiction: United States
• Date: 01 January 2015
• Author: Preble, Christopher A.

The American Warfare State: The Domestic Politics of Military Spending

Rebecca U. Thorpe

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014, 248 pp.

In The American Warfare State, Rebecca Thorpe attempts to answer what she calls "the fundamental puzzle" of American politics: "Why a nation founded on a severe distrust of standing armies and centralized power developed and maintained the most powerful military in history."

The answer isn't as obvious as it might seem. Thorpe, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Washington, traces the creation of a permanent war economy back to World War II, when war production expanded into new locales, especially the suburbs of major cities and the agricultural or underdeveloped areas of the South and West. "Widespread economic dependence on war investments," Thorpe writes, "became an unintended consequence of a national mobilization strategy where multiple actors pursued their own independent goals."

The legacy of that inadvertent geographic shift is a number of predominantly rural and sparsely populated areas that have grown disproportionately dependent on military expenditures. A subset of members of Congress representing these areas are, all other factors being equal, more likely than their fellows to support weapons expenditures, even if those weapons are not necessary to U.S. national security. Those same members are also more likely than other members of their own party to support the wars in which...