I am very grateful to Eva Bertram for her perceptive and thought-provoking review of my book. I will focus my response on the three provocative questions that she raises.

First, I appreciate the opportunity to expand on alternative explanations for U.S. defense spending and the role of overlapping incentives. My central argument in The American Warfare State is that the United States developed and perpetuated the most powerful military in history because World War II military mobilization extended defense benefits widely, and many rural and semirural areas became economically reliant on defense-sector jobs and capital. Meanwhile, policies have shifted the burdens historically associated with large military establishments and warfare onto a small minority of soldiers who volunteer to fight, future generations who will inherit the nation’s war debts, and foreign populations where U.S. wars take place.

Of course, support for large defense budgets is not simply reducible to economic interests. Policymakers also project American military muscle to promote their ideological, partisan, and national security goals. However, I found that these commitments often overlap with economic imperatives and tend to advance mutually reinforcing goals. While presidents exercise force for a variety of reasons, the heightened importance of defense spending reinforces military solutions to foreign policy problems. Nonetheless, Bertram’s insight that economic prerogatives alone cannot determine when or why executives are likely to use force is astute and valid.

Second, Bertram raises incisive queries about the limitations of economic reliance as an explanation for defense spending, and whether the concept is generalizable to other policy realms. The theory of local reliance suggests that defense funds are a particularly important source of jobs, revenue, and capital in geographically remote areas that lack diverse economies. Just as members from agricultural, automobile or oil-dependent districts support widely shared local interests, the most consistent legislative supporters of military spending and war are overrepresented in areas that are inordinately reliant on the defense funds they receive.

Although the size and scale of the defense industry dwarfs most government-funded sectors, the proliferation of one-company towns is likely to have similar economic and political consequences. In fact, evidence suggests that rural reliance on prison infrastructure heightens political support for punitive sentencing laws and militates against criminal justice reforms (Rebecca U. Thorpe, “Perverse Politics,” Perspectives on Politics, 13(3), 2015).

Finally, and perhaps most crucially, are there viable political reforms that might help fortify Congress’s prerogatives and restrain executive independence in matters concerning warfare? On the one hand, I am not particularly sanguine that institutional remedies are sufficient. Rather, I argue that a political system predicated on “ambition . . . made to counteract ambition” has transmogrified to an arrangement where legislators’ interests in large defense budgets consolidate executive authority over the world’s most powerful military. On the other hand, however, I am reminded of James Madison’s enduring eighteenth-century wisdom in his “Universal Peace” (1792): To minimize unnecessary or reckless wars, those responsible for declaring war must be made to incur the direct costs.

Restoring a universal military draft, mandatory tax hikes, and shared public sacrifices may reinforce a “democratic brake” on questionable wars and put more pressure on representatives to reassert their authority over military policy. However, popular opposition may militate against these reforms. It is perhaps worth emphasizing that unrestrained executive military ambition is not the result of a coup, executive power grab, or even a particularly feckless Congress; rather, it is the result of a system that promotes the short-term interests of a critical mass of voters and legislators. Perhaps in a democracy the onus is on the people to demand greater political responsibility and congressional fortitude.