UNDERSTANDING THE WAR INDUSTRY.

• Author: Steadman, Hugh

UNDERSTANDING THE WAR INDUSTRY

Author: Christian Sorensen

Published by: Clarity Press, Atlanta, 2020, 417pp, US$29.95.

A recurring question about Western foreign relations is how it is that American tax-payers, beneficiaries of the world's largest economy, willingly accept developing world infrastructure and a dearth of social welfare and health services as the price for such a disproportionate diversion of their nation's wealth into defence. No neighbour in its hemisphere is capable of threatening US territory, yet it chooses to demonise and portray as a real and present danger remote Russia. (Russia has an economy the size of Italy's and a defence budget less than 10 per cent that of the United States. Impossible logistics would rule out any attempt by Russia to invade Alaska across the Bering Strait.) Likewise with China (equally remote from the US heartland) with a defence budget less than 25 per cent of the United States' and showing no signs of military aggression outside its claimed territories. In contrast to the United States, with its 800 odd military bases encircling Russia and China, there is no evidence that the Russian and Chinese military postures, in the face of Washington's publicly declared and demonstrated hostility, are anything other than defensive. In regard to China's debatable claims (shared with Taiwan) over much of the South China Sea, China wishes to maintain freedom of navigation for its Asian neighbours, whereas, as China has good reason to believe, the United States would see China denied that freedom.

Understanding the War Industry sets out to solve the above enigma. Its author, Christian Sorensen, has an MSc in Arabic language and an MA in international relations. In 2011, he retired from his position as a language expert in the United State Air Force. He works as an independent journalist, concentrating primarily on the US defence industry.

This book contains an updated guide to what President Eisenhower famously described as the United States' 'military industrial complex'. The author, according to his view of the extent to which Congress has been suborned, upgrades that description to the 'military-industrial-congressional complex'. Sorensen has devoted several years to monitoring and cataloguing the daily contracts issued by the Pentagon and drawn conclusions accordingly. His salient premise is that the Department of Defense 'is not the predominant decision-maker on matters of war and peace. The...