The Global War on Terror (GWOT) has yielded to the “long war” as a description of the current US struggle against its enemies. The term, Andrew J. Bacevich believes, is a better description of the US since World War II than the more familiar (and now merely nostalgic) Cold War. The American obsession with national security survived the demise of the Soviet Union, as did the American way of dealing with that obsession: a standing army, a huge supply of weapons of mass destruction, military bases everywhere, and a conviction that “only the capacity and willingness to assert all of the instruments of hard power, instantly and without hesitation, could keep America's enemies at bay” (viii). The Long War, evolving in the shadow of World War II, is not attached to any particular place, temporality, or specific adversary. It is “amorphous, malleable, infinitely expansible,” the “ultimate blank check” for the national security elite (x). 11 September was not its inception and there is no end in sight.

In pursuit of a better understanding of the phenomenon that has shaped the world as we know it, Bacevich has collected twelve free-standing essays whose authors answered to only one charge: that they “take a broad view … and, if they were so inclined … be willing to break some interpretive china” (xi). Some do, some don't, but all contribute, one way and another, to the overarching scheme Bacevich himself lays out in the introduction: first, that it is necessary to examine the enduring impact of World War II rather than starting one's history, de novo, with America Victorious in 1945; second, that classic Cold War periodizations obscure the history Bacevich and his collaborators wish to examine; third, that the power to make policy resides in the hands of a “small, self-perpetuating, self-anointed group of specialists” (xii); and finally, and in consequence, that national security policy as it is formulated is fundamentally undemocratic, sterile and hostile to the possibility of alternatives.

The essays that follow this setting out of the main themes are, by and large, less critical than Bacevich himself, or perhaps they are reticent about following through on their own analyses. For example, a rich and useful essay by Tami Davis Biddle, “Shield and Sword: U.S. Strategic Forces and Doctrine since 1945,” begins with the important observation that the US–Soviet strategic arms competition took on a “life of its own, developing its own language and grammar, and its own self-sustaining elements” (139). In time the weapons became the medium “in which a grand narrative of intense political competition was played out,” with only the most tenuous connection to any actual warfighting plan. In short, the weapons had little value as weapons, even as they retained their value “as symbols of prestige, of technological prowess, of national power and identity” (140). In her conclusion, Biddle calls for a strategic arsenal tailored “to the requirements of deterring a new kind of enemy,” and implies that “Americans managed to pick their way through the many hazards of the Cold War” by “debating their choices and revisiting their assumptions” (195).

Alex Roland's sprightly account of “The Military–Industrial Complex” credits that complex with having won the Cold War by, and here he hedges a bit, “for better or for worse” producing an “arsenal that sustained deterrence long enough for the democratic, free-market system to prevail over the authoritarian, command economy of the Soviet Union” (360). Yet, a few pages later, he observes that that same military–industrial complex “exaggerated the external threat, shaped national politics to suit parochial interests, stoked the arms race … impelled the government towards unwise and unnecessary military acquisitions, and inflated the cost of defense through corruption, mismanagement, and cronyism” (363). Perhaps this is not a “yet.” Both things are true, after all, and Roland's examination of the military–industrial complex as both trope and lobby is among the best discussions of it I have read. John Prados reviews the evolution of the instruments of intelligence developed by the national security state, Benjamin Fordham discusses the costs and benefits of the military spending that state entailed, and, in a brilliant summary of fifty years of movements for peace, Charles Chatfield reminds the reader that all along there were those who dissented. Bacevich's own contribution to the volume is an extended discussion of the changing civilian–military relationship from World War II to the present. James Kurth on the “American way of war,” George Quester's discussion of the politics of conventional warfare and Arnold Offner's solid introduction to “The Ideology of the U.S. National Security State” add to the value of the book as a thorough review of the subject. Anna Nelson's succinct account of “The Evolution of the National Security State: Ubiquitous and Endless” comes closest to Bacevich's own judgements and her conclusion is worth quoting in full: “Ironically, it is doubtful that the national security state has ever made the American people feel safer as they faced their enemies. A nation obsessed with national security necessarily must continue to promote crises and incite fear. After all, that is its raison d'être” (298). Finally, bringing the volume around to its World War II origins, William O'Neill in his discussion of “The ‘Good’ War: National Security and American Culture,” observes that the “national security state forges ahead, protected by images of the Good War,” and we are borne back into a phoney past that justifies and rationalizes the permanent war on which the US is now embarked.

Andrew Bacevich has produced a volume that illuminates the present as much as it does the past. In other words, a fine work of history.