War Is Their Business

The title is a promise the book does not keep, and that is the first thing worth saying.

It sounds like a pamphlet - a moral indictment of arms manufacturers for a reader who wants to be angry rather than informed. What Georgi Tsagolov actually wrote is a densely footnoted study of American corporate finance: more than two hundred notes across nearly three hundred pages, a full historiographical survey of the American literature on the subject, and an explicit, repeated refusal of the conspiracy theory the cover invites.

Its real subject is structural rather than moral: how defence contracting is financed, which banking and industrial groups stand behind the major contractors, how procurement decisions are made, and what the relationship between the Pentagon and the corporations actually consists of. He argues with the American literature by name and declines the easy explanations.

Somewhere between the manuscript and the jacket a serious book acquired a shouting cover, and it has cost the volume readers it deserved.

The text closed around the middle of 1984: the latest event named is the invasion of Grenada in October 1983, and the most recent Soviet authority quoted is Chernenko, in February and March 1984. Gorbachev does not appear. The later years that occur in the text are forward projections of budgets and contracts rather than citations.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.