Radomir Bogdanov's The US War Machine and Politics is an institutional history of the American national security state — the 1947 National Security Act, the unification of the armed services, the making of nuclear strategy, and the political weight of the Secretary of Defense — written from inside the Soviet Americanist establishment and built almost entirely out of American sources. It came out of the Academy of Sciences press, and it cites Georgi Arbatov and Genrikh Trofimenko as authorities in the way one cites colleagues. It is a serious book. It is also, on the evidence of its own footnotes, a book about 1983 wearing a 1986 jacket, and the gap between those two dates is where most of what is wrong with it lives.
Start with the date, because this series has been caught by it before. The copyright page carries two claims, one of which the catalogue has silently dropped. The first is © Издательство Наука, 1983 — Nauka, the Academy of Sciences press. The second reads "English translation of the revised Russian text © Progress Publishers", with the 1986 date of the imprint. So the Russian original is 1983, and there was a revision. How much of one can be measured. The latest events named anywhere in the text are the invasion of Grenada (October 1983), the mining of Nicaraguan harbours (early 1984) and the shelling of Lebanese villages (1983–84). The most recent Soviet authority quoted at length is Chernenko, in February 1984. Of the endnotes, the last-dated are Pravda of 5 April 1984 and Pravda of 12 March 1985. The single reference to Mikhail Gorbachev in the entire book is a quotation from the March 1985 Central Committee plenum, dropped into the final pages of the conclusion. That is the whole of the updating: a 1983 monograph, revised through 1984, with one 1985 paragraph welded to the end.
What this means in practice can be stated as an absence. The book does not contain the words "Strategic Defense Initiative". It does not contain "Star Wars". It does not contain "Reykjavik", which is fair enough — the summit came in October 1986 and the English text was closed before it. But SDI was announced by Reagan on 23 March 1983, and by 1986 it was the single obstacle around which every arms-control negotiation in the world was organised. A book published in Moscow in 1986, whose subject is the political power of the American war machine, and which asks in its closing pages "Will the US war machine be able to control politics?", never mentions the largest and most politically consequential American military programme of the decade. The one gesture toward it is a phrase in the grafted Gorbachev quotation about "ever new weapon systems, whether in space or on earth" — and the reader who does not already know what that refers to will not learn it here.
This is a different fault from the one committed by Vyacheslav Nikitin's The Ultras in the USA, a companion volume in this series which carries a 1981 date, is really a mid-1970s text, and manages a history of the American right in which the words "Reagan", "New Right" and "Moral Majority" appear precisely zero times. Bogdanov does know Reagan exists — the name occurs thirty-four times, Weinberger four — and he knows what the Reagan build-up is for. He simply does not know what year it is by the time his book reaches an English reader. The Progress export operation is here doing what it habitually did: shipping a book of the late Brezhnev interregnum into a world that had already moved.
It has to be said plainly, because it is unusual: this is a well-sourced book, and its source base is overwhelmingly American. The endnotes run to nearly five thousand words and cite, among others, John Lewis Gaddis on containment and on the origins of the Cold War; Bernard Brodie's War and Politics; Samuel Huntington's The Soldier and the State; Alain Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith's How Much Is Enough?; Maxwell Taylor's The Uncertain Trumpet and Swords and Plowshares; Roger Hilsman's To Move a Nation; Vincent Davis on the admirals' lobby; Etzold and Gaddis's documentary collection Containment; and the Pentagon Papers as published by the Government Printing Office in United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967. There are Senate hearings — Department of Defense appropriations for 1962, and the Foreign Relations subcommittee's US–USSR Strategic Policies of 4 March 1974. There is the Center for Defense Information's Defense Monitor. There are five separate Government Printing Office citations. Soviet works are cited too, but they are a minority, and the arguments do not rest on them.
The most technically substantial chapter — on nuclear targeting — is built out of Desmond Ball's "Counterforce Targeting: How New? How Viable?" in Arms Control Today of February 1981, and it reproduces the declassified architecture accurately: NSDM-242, the Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy, the SIOP-5 that took effect on 1 January 1976, Carter's PD-18 of 24 August 1977 reaffirming the earlier guidance. It notes, correctly, that the NUWEP required American strategic forces to be able to destroy 70 per cent of Soviet industry in all circumstances, and it observes in a footnote that the exemption of cities from declared targeting was a distinction without a difference, "since the planned destruction of industrial and military targets would inevitably cause enormous casualties among the civilian population, particularly from fall-out." That is not propaganda. That was the argument of the American strategic-studies community itself.
On the political economy of the thing Bogdanov is often exact. He gives the growth of the American military burden as rising "from 1 per cent of the GNP before the war to 5-13 per cent during the postwar period". He notes that the Secretary of Defense administers "the military budget, which amounts to more than 25 per cent of Federal expenditure" — which for the mid-1980s is right. He traces the defence budget from never exceeding $650 million in 1931–40 to "$12 billion in fiscal 1948 to $80 billion in 1970 and to a staggering $200 billion in 1982". He records that Eisenhower "considered it necessary in his farewell speech to warn his fellow countrymen of the danger of the increasing power of the military-industrial complex" — Eisenhower did, in January 1961, and the phrase is his. And Bogdanov's account of who actually constitutes that complex is not crude:
The group includes the bosses of the military-industrial corporations, the higher ranks of the military-industrial bureaucracy, and legislators from the states whose well-being depends on a militarized economy. The sources of power of the military-industrial complex are not limited to the industrial sphere — they are widely rooted in the regional, political and economic layers of American society.
That is the correct description. It is a description of a coalition with an electoral geography, not a conspiracy of arms manufacturers, and it anticipates a great deal of later American scholarship on the politics of defence procurement. The parallel passage on the lobbying superstructure — "the think tanks, the University centres and the various lobbyist organizations represent a kind of superstructure over the military-industrial complex" — is equally sound, and his observation that these groups derive their unusual authority from privileged access to classified information supplied by the services they lobby for is both true and, in 1983, less widely said than it is now.
He is good, too, on the missile gap. He quotes Daniel Ellsberg: "Many people in the Air Force and the Pentagon were very proud of the missile gap hoax. They said there was no other way they could get enough tax money for the necessary weapons to maintain our superiority." And he quotes Kissinger, speaking to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London in 1979, conceding that "Our strategic doctrine has relied extraordinarily, perhaps exclusively, on our superior strategic power." The Soviet critique of the American military-industrial complex was, in its broad outline, substantially accurate, and this book is one of its better statements. Eisenhower named the thing; the revolving door, the cost overruns and the manufactured threat assessments are documented in the American record; the Pentagon's weight in American politics has never seriously been in dispute. A reader who wants a competent, footnoted account of how the American national security apparatus was assembled between 1947 and 1975 can get one here.
Where the analysis fails, it fails by reduction. Having built a careful institutional and regional account, Bogdanov periodically collapses it into the till: "One of the most important reasons for this nuclear madness lies in the fact that the banks and the shareholders of the military corporations demand investment profitability from the military-industrial complex." This is the weakest sentence in the book, and it is weak in a specific way — it explains too much and therefore nothing. It cannot distinguish between the strategic choices it is supposed to explain, and it is flatly contradicted by Bogdanov's own better account, in the same book, of a coalition rooted in state bureaucracy, congressional districts and ideology as much as in profit. He had the sophisticated answer and reached for the vulgar one whenever the argument needed a moral.
One thing above all. Discussing NSC-68, Bogdanov quotes an American source on the document's political problem — "NSC 68 called for a substantial increase in defense expenditures... The problem was how to sell a substantial increase in the defense budget without an imminent threat... The problem was solved on June 25, 1950..." — and then adds, in brackets and over his own initials, a gloss: "(i. e. when the United States began the Korean War.— R.B.)". A page earlier he has written that the directive was approved on 30 September 1950, "i. e. after the beginning of US aggression in Korea."
On 25 June 1950 the Korean People's Army crossed the 38th parallel in force. It did so with Stalin's authorisation, given in April 1950 after months of requests from Kim Il Sung, and with Soviet operational planning assistance. This is not a matter of interpretation or of Western claims; it is documented in the Soviet archival material released after 1991 and published through the Cold War International History Project, including Stalin's own cables. Bogdanov was writing in 1983 and could not have seen those documents. But he was not repeating an honest error of the available record — he was asserting, as a bracketed authorial correction to an American text, a claim that the Soviet state knew to be false when it was first made, and had known for thirty-three years.
The passage is also self-defeating. Bogdanov's own evidence is that the Korean War rescued NSC-68 from a Congress and a Defense Secretary unwilling to fund it; he notes accurately that Louis Johnson opposed the increase for fear of inflation and that "Congress was also very restrained". The war was, in other words, precisely the "imminent threat" the Truman administration needed and had not been able to manufacture. That the North Korean attack was the gift which unlocked the American rearmament of the 1950s is a serious and defensible historical argument. Bogdanov cannot make it, because making it requires naming who fired first.
There is a smaller falsification of the same family. On the Czechoslovak coup of February 1948, Bogdanov writes that American reaction tried to exploit "the events in Czechoslovakia in 1948 which, however, ended with the complete victory of the democratic forces." What ended in February 1948 was Czechoslovak parliamentary democracy. The non-Communist ministers resigned; the Communist Party, holding the Interior Ministry and its police, mobilised armed workers' militias and action committees to purge the state apparatus; Jan Masaryk was found dead beneath a window of the Foreign Ministry on 10 March. Bogdanov's supporting evidence — Ambassador Steinhardt's report that there were no Soviet troop concentrations on the border, and Marshall's remark that the events would not "materially alter" the international situation — is accurate and beside the point. Nobody serious argues that the February coup was carried out by the Red Army. It was carried out by the Czechoslovak Communist Party, which is why it worked.
Now the part that costs this book most, and it can be established by counting.
The following do not appear anywhere in The US War Machine and Politics: any figure for Soviet military expenditure; any figure for Soviet defence spending as a share of Soviet national income or GNP; the Soviet defence industry; the SS-20; Afghanistan.
The last of these is the largest. This book was published in English in 1986, in the seventh year of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan — an occupation which by then involved something over a hundred thousand Soviet troops, had driven several million people out of the country, and was being prosecuted with the same instruments the book spends its whole length describing in American hands: aerial bombardment of villages, counterinsurgency, a client government sustained by foreign force. The word does not occur once. A book whose entire argumentative structure is that a great power's military apparatus acquires political weight and then drives policy, published by a state seven years into a war its own general staff had advised against and its own leadership could not end, is the case where the silence costs everything. It is not a gap in coverage. It is the disqualification of the method.
The SS-20 is nearly as bad, because the book does discuss the Euromissiles. It opens by condemning "the deployment of medium-range nuclear missiles in Western Europe" as a chief cause of the crisis, and returns to "improvements in the medium-range missiles deployed in Europe which are capable of delivering a pre-emptive strike". The RSD-10 Pioner, which NATO called the SS-20 and whose deployment from 1976 produced the NATO double-track decision of December 1979, and therefore Pershing II and the cruise missiles, is absent. So is the double-track decision itself. The reader is given a causal chain with its first link removed.
Then there is the metric. Bogdanov possesses, and uses well, the correct analytical tool: the share of national product absorbed by the military, and the share of the state budget it commands. He applies it to the United States and gets 5–13 per cent of GNP and over 25 per cent of federal expenditure. He never applies it to the Soviet Union. Had he done so honestly he would have arrived at a number several times the American one. The range is genuinely contested — Western estimates of 15 per cent of Soviet GNP were current in the early 1980s, the CIA revised its own figures upward more than once, and Soviet officials after 1988 published numbers far above anything admitted before — but no serious estimate put the Soviet burden below double the American. On the book's own measure, the USSR was much the more militarised society.
Nor is there any Soviet military-industrial complex, though the institutional resemblance is close enough to be embarrassing. Soviet arms production was run through nine defence-industrial ministries coordinated by the Military-Industrial Commission of the Council of Ministers, a structure with first call on the best materials, the best plant and the best engineers in the country, and with a political representation in the Central Committee that no civilian ministry could match. It had its own revolving door between the general staff, the design bureaux and the ministries. It had its own institutional interest in threat inflation. What it did not have was Bogdanov's Congress, his Congressional Record, his Government Printing Office hearings, his Center for Defense Information, or his Daniel Ellsberg — which is precisely why he could write this book about America and not about home. Every American source in his footnotes is evidence of something his own state did not permit.
The nearest the book comes to acknowledging that the USSR builds weapons at all is a sentence in the conclusion: "A challenge thrown down by the American side only means the Soviet Union will have to answer in kind—by building its own weapons systems." The Soviet arms programme thus appears once, in the last pages, purely as reflex — an effect with no domestic cause, no constituency, no cost and no interests behind it. The book's whole thesis is that armaments generate politics. Crossing the frontier, they become inert.
And one further silence, smaller but telling. The phrase "peace movement" does not occur in this book. The Western anti-nuclear mobilisations of 1981–83 — the largest street demonstrations in postwar European history, the ones Soviet diplomacy was investing enormous effort in that very year — get a single clause in the conclusion, about "the antiwar, anti-nuclear movement" taking "vigorous, purposeful action". Bogdanov has no interest in it. His subject is states, apparatuses and elites, and his hope, stated repeatedly, is for "realistically minded" members of the American ruling class to reassert themselves. That is a diplomat's book, not a socialist's.
Everything this book could not say was being said in English, in print, in the years it was written and revised, by a left that opposed both war machines at once.
The most direct answer to it is a document that predates the English edition by three years. On 27 June 1983 Intercontinental Press printed "No to war, no to nuclear missiles!", the statement of the Bureau of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, co-signed by eleven European sections and distributed at the disarmament conference held in Berlin on 9–14 May 1983 by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and European Nuclear Disarmament. It reaches Bogdanov's conclusion about the United States and reaches it with numbers: "From 1980 to 1983 American military spending increased by 12 percent a year in real terms, going from $142 billion to $257 billion"; SIPRI's finding that NATO accounted for 43 per cent of world arms spending in 1980 against the Warsaw Pact's 26 per cent; and the verdict, "Imperialism is still the principal warmonger and the main threat to peace." Then it does the thing Bogdanov's book is built not to do. It applies the metric to both sides — "While declared American arms spending is 7 percent of the GNP and estimated USSR spending 15 percent of the GNP, the American GNP is double the Soviet GNP" — and draws the consequence Bogdanov cannot: "Soviet military expenditure is a great burden on the Soviet Union, to the point of worsening economic and food supply problems." Under the heading "Solidarity with peace movement in eastern Europe" it characterises Soviet policy abroad as resting not on internationalism but on "pacts and agreements of coexistence or division of the world with imperialism", and at home on "the negation of the most elementary political, trade-union, or national rights — as shown by the Soviet intervention in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Jaruzelski's tough crackdown on the Polish workers (1981)." Its demands include both "say no to Pershing and cruise missiles!" and "For a nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal, from Sicily to Scandinavia!" — and the observation that an independent Eastern antiwar movement "would strike a blow against imperialism 1,000 times more deadly than a few more Soviet missiles."
Put the two documents side by side and it is obvious which is doing analysis and which is doing diplomacy.
The same current was equally willing to criticise the West's own peace movement and, more to the point here, the official Soviet bodies working inside it. A report on the independent peace movements of Eastern Europe in International Viewpoint no. 79 (July 1985), bylined Jacqueline Allio, describes the hostility that "the very 'official' Soviet Committee for Peace was subjected" to throughout the Perugia convention: "Any attempts by this committee to win conference round were a dismal failure, particularly since the authorities in the 'socialist' countries had refused to allow independent peace movement supporters visas to come to the convention. Enquiries about the cases of independent activists imprisoned for several years because of their activity for peace were met with the reply that, 'They are hooligans'." The report then weighs, seriously, the counter-argument of the Moscow Group for the Establishment of Trust between the USSR and the United States — that a Western break with the official committees would only deepen the independents' isolation. Those people existed while Bogdanov was writing. They are not in his book, and neither is the committee.
On the Euromissiles specifically, John Ross's dissection of Reagan's zero option in International Viewpoint no. 21 (10 January 1983) is the model of what Bogdanov could not attempt. Ross sets out exactly what the proposal required — the Soviet Union to dismantle the SS-4, SS-5 and SS-20, in return for which the United States would forgo Pershing II and cruise while retaining every existing warhead and its entire missile submarine force in the surrounding seas, with Britain and France free to keep and modernise theirs — and calls it one of the most grotesque offers in the history of imperialist peace talks, ranking with the Gulf of Tonkin. He then explains, technically, why the SS-20 was a replacement for two fixed-site liquid-fuelled missiles two decades old and useless against an American first strike. That is the argument. Ross could name the SS-20 and still oppose Pershing II. Bogdanov had to erase the missile in order to make his case, and the erasure is why his version persuades nobody who is not already persuaded.
On SDI, note the dates. International Viewpoint no. 75, in May 1985, carried a full treatment of Reagan's Star Wars speech of 23 March 1983 — SDI as "a skillful ideological camouflage job designed to conceal from American and international public opinion the objectives and the manifold consequences of this new program of militarization, the most ambitious and expensive of all the military programs ever conceived by the Pentagon." That is a year before the Progress edition of a book on the political power of the American war machine went to press without the subject in it at all.
There is one more point on which this literature is sharper than Bogdanov, and it goes to theory rather than politics. A Fourth International document printed in Intercontinental Press on 8 February 1982 warned against precisely the reflex that produces his "banks and shareholders" sentence. Reagan's election, it argued, "amplifies the tendency to the growing militarization of the crisis-ridden capitalist economy, characterized by the diversion of research towards military ends, by an unprecedented growth in military spending" — but then: "Certain neutralist currents, while understanding this tendency of the capitalist economy to transform itself into a gigantic military-industrial complex, underestimate the political will that is part and parcel of it, and therefore only partially grasp the meaning of the capitalist's remilitarization effort." The militarisation was real. Reading policy straight off the balance sheet was not Marxism but a shortcut around it, and Bogdanov takes the shortcut at exactly the moments his own institutional evidence would have carried him further.
For the long history, Ernest Mandel's The Meaning of the Second World War was published by Verso in the same year as this translation and is its natural counterweight. In the final chapter, "The Legacy" (pp. 171–73), Mandel gives the account of the military-industrial complex that Bogdanov gestures at and never completes — an expanding military establishment "means a burgeoning sector of industry and capitalist firms geared to weapons production. These have a vested interest in such production, for they receive a large slice of the profits, guaranteed by the state, thanks to constantly escalating armaments output. Hence the birth of the 'military-industrial complex', to quote the phrase aptly coined by Eisenhower, himself a general turned President of the United States." Mandel also notes what Bogdanov's chapter on alliances circles without saying: that the American military machine served to keep allies within "certain bounds of financial, commercial and industrial autonomy within the alliance."
None of these writers doubted that the Pentagon was what Bogdanov says it is. They simply declined to believe that the Soviet general staff was something else.
Read it as the best available statement of the Soviet case against American militarism, made by someone who had read the American literature closely and could quote it accurately. On the architecture of the national security state, on nuclear targeting doctrine, on the political economy of the defence coalition and on the manufactured threat assessments of 1957–61, it is a competent and honest guide, and there were Western commentators in 1986 who were less exact.
Read it also for what a Soviet Americanist of the highest rank was permitted to write, and was not. Bogdanov had the concepts. He had the method. He had, in his own footnotes, a working demonstration of what an open society's documentary record makes possible for a critic of its armed forces. He applied every one of these to a foreign country and none of them to his own, and the book he produced is therefore evidence of two war machines: the one it describes, and the one that commissioned it.