Delta of Power: The Military-Industrial Complex by Alex Roland

Abstract

Reviewed by: Delta of Power: The Military-Industrial Complex by Alex Roland Jonson Miller (bio) Delta of Power: The Military-Industrial Complex By Alex Roland. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. Pp. x + 291. Delta of Power is partly an updating of Alex Roland's 2001 Military Industrial Complex, published in the joint AHA/SHOT Historical Perspectives series. The second half of the book is a new analysis of the military-industrial complex (MIC) after the Cold War. As part of the SHOT/Johns Hopkins University Press Technology in Motion series, Delta of Power is directed significantly at students, providing a full, detailed history of the MIC, as well as presenting the state of the field by engaging the principal historiographic questions and debates. The book succeeds in that purpose, but Roland goes further, also contributing an argument about the continuation of a transformed post–Cold War MIC. Though there have been many books and articles identifying military-industrial complexes in pre–Cold War America and around the world, Roland pushes back on them, saying America's MIC was unique. It "cut a swath through American history unmatched by the experience of any other nation." Moreover, "no country was shaped as forcefully by the science and technology of war" (p. 39). Drawing on policy and social science literature, Roland argues that the MIC survived the Cold War but as a smaller part of the American economy, contributing much less research and development and provoking fewer concerns among an increasingly promilitary American [End Page 632] public. Despite decreased spending relative to gross domestic product, the current MIC is in fact bigger than ever, spending more money in real dollars and having expanded to include a post-9/11 intelligence-industrial complex. Roland argues that while the MIC continues to be wasteful and corrupt, it nonetheless works. It has produced expensive, unnecessary weapons systems, but it has also produced real successes, including the AEGIS ship defense system, drones, MRAP vehicles to protect troops from improvised explosive devices, and intelligence-gathering and processing systems that have protected the United States from foreign terrorist attacks. Echoing military historian Russell Weigley's argument about the "American Way of War," via Thomas Mahnken's 2010 Technology and the American Way of War, Roland places technological decision-making in a post–World War II American military culture that emphasized the quality of the military over quantity. Being unable or unwilling to build a military the size of Soviet or Chinese adversaries, the United States overcame the differences by remaining a generation ahead in weapons design. Moreover, in the post–Cold War period, the United States used an overwhelming technological advantage to minimize American casualties with the use of "stand-off" weapons, such as drones and guided missiles that avoided putting servicemembers in harm's way at all. Nonetheless, the United States recently lost its generational leap over potential peer adversaries, such as China, which now produces "good enough" weapons systems, partly through industrial espionage against the United States. Delta of Power is not, however, primarily a history of technology, or at least it does not make an argument about the construction of technology. Instead, Roland draws on the history of technology to engage and contribute to the MIC literature of journalists, policy scholars, and American political and military history. To do so, he draws on the work of several historians of technology, including Paul Edwards, Paul Forman, David Hounshell, Thomas Hughes, Stuart Leslie, David Noble, Merritt Roe Smith, and, of course, his own considerable contributions, having previously written about the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), military aerospace programs, and military technology in general. Nonetheless, there is no thorough argument in this book about the nature of technology that is equivalent to his 2010 Technology and Culture article, "Was the Nuclear Arms Race Deterministic?" Instead, Roland briefly draws on insights about technological momentum, nontechnical factors in technological decision-making, path dependency in technological development, and more to generate insights into decision-making within the MIC. Although Delta of Power does not—nor do I think it is intended to—provide an argument about technology itself, it is an essential book for historians of technology interested in either...