@Vance Before WWII, the share of GDP devoted to defense never reached 5% except during the Civil War and WWI (and rarely reached even 3%). After WWII it only rarely dropped below 5%. I find that a substantial difference.

@TF: Your comments lately have not been particularly useful. This one continues that trend.

March 3, 2012 at 1:22 am

Dave

One of the things it might tell us about is the accelerating cost of maintaining a lead in military technology. For the first half of the C20 the USA had one of the world’s great navies, yet appears to have needed to spend almost nothing to do so. But navies back then ran on oil and cordite; now they need billions of dollars’ worth of electronics… I guess you can blame WW2 for the invention of the transistor if you want.

March 3, 2012 at 5:51 am

jim

The aftermath pf the Cold War, surely.

March 3, 2012 at 6:36 am

Main Street Muse

Yes, we are living in the aftermath of WWII, which coincides with our emergence as a global superpower, and our need to protect our borders from that Communist threat. Surprised the Reagan era did not have a bigger bump. Surprised also that it seemed to take a little time for the 9/11 war on terror to bump up military spending.

March 3, 2012 at 1:59 pm

TF Smith

I’m sorry, Dr. Silbey, am I being warned or something?

Expressed jokingly or not (humor, obviously, in the eye of the beholder) however…

Maybe it is a function of age, and having been a cold warrior, and being the child of GI Generation/Depression era parents, but it strikes me as more than a little obvious the observation that the world generally, and the US specifically, in 2012 is as it is (in a geopolitical and economic sense) as a result of the aftermath of the Second World War.

Perhaps this is concept that is debated in the academy, but I wasn’t aware of it – certainly not in my small peice of it. Every chair and a good percentage of the rest of the departments I have dealt with were all GI/Cold War veterans and/or members of that generation; our current chair is the first boomer since the U. was founded in the 1950s. So, the centrality of WW II to the 20th Century was not really something that was questioned. Perhaps it should have been, but not in the Golden State in the second half of the century – or the first couple of decades of the 21st, for that matter.

I should probably do a JSTOR search or something…

Ad astra per ardua

March 3, 2012 at 9:30 pm

dilbert dogbert

Please use the Anglo Saxon: War
Defense is French.

March 4, 2012 at 6:00 am

silbey

am I being warned ?

Yes.

Please use the Anglo Saxon: War
Defense is French.

Defense is apparently American, as well.

March 4, 2012 at 6:54 am

matt w

Main Street Muse: Communist threat yes, but protecting our borders? I don’t believe that communism ever posed a threat to the borders of the US, even if the Sandinistas were two days’ drive from Harlingen.

March 4, 2012 at 8:39 am

Main Street Muse

To Matt W – communism never really posed a threat to our borders, but the fear of such a threat was used to throw vast sums of money at the DoD to protect us from that threat.

Remember the Cuban Missile Crisis? Grenada? Korea? Viet Nam? The “domino theory” of foreign policy? [A theory which reared its ugly head in 2008 during the banking crisis – if one folded, they would all fall, thus let us now throw vast sums of money at the problem….]

I went to the USSR in the early 1980s and realized they were due to be toppled soon – a nation that could not supply toilet paper and tampons to the general populace could not really be considered a true superpower. Supplying the basics is always important in maintaining a sustainable government. And yet Reagan painted the communist threat as a terrifying reason for massive increases in defense department spending at a time when he was also talking about drastically reducing the size and scope of government.

March 4, 2012 at 9:23 am

matt w

communism never really posed a threat to our borders, but the fear of such a threat was used to throw vast sums of money at the DoD to protect us from that threat

Ah yes, that’s absolutely true. I guess the interesting thing is why things happened that way. In theory instead of living in fear of a military threat, we could’ve become afraid that our citizens would decide Communism was more appealing, and thrown vast sums of money at ending poverty so that wouldn’t happen. Perhaps if the USSR had gone that route it would still be around (though that’s a fairly impossible counterfactual).

March 4, 2012 at 11:44 am

DCA

You can get a very similar plot if you show number in the armed forces divided by total population.

I would say that the Cold War fixation on the Soviet threat was not totally bizarre, especially in the 50’s: we were facing a state with a rapidly growing economy (catchup from near-total destruction in WWII, but how
were we to know that this would soon end), that made expansionist noises, and that actually had installed
and maintained communist governments in many places (Eastern Europe). And they had nuclear weapons.
Coming out of dealing with two earlier regimes that had tried military expansion, wariness about another one was perhaps understandable. Of course this all should have evaporated faster than it did, but the view from
the late 40’s and the 50’s had a lot behind it.

How these fears managed to get transferred to a few guys living in caves, and (these days) the Persian Menace, is a different question.

March 4, 2012 at 11:46 am

Dave

Last time I checked, the USA was doing pretty well on ending poverty, until the Cold War ended. Certainly compard to how it’s been doing since.

March 6, 2012 at 9:25 am

ajay

Please use the Anglo Saxon: War
Defense is French.

But most of that spending since 1945 hasn’t been on war. It’s been on tanks that never engaged a target, soldiers who never fired a bullet, bombers that never hit a target. The spikes are fairly easy to explain because that represents buying stuff that was actually going to be used; most of the post-war spending wasn’t…

American Defense Spending from 1792 to 2015

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