What Military-Industrial Complex?

Any chance you, too, remember the military-industrial complex? How’s about the national security state or, to summon the ghost of C. Wright Mills, the power elite? Maybe the term “establishment” comes to mind, that pejorative popularized by Henry Fairlie, in his 1955 description of how and by whom political influence was exercised in Great Britain. 

If you remember any of those terms, you might also recall that they symbolized structures of government that every respectable progressive—the nonce word for liberals—once opposed. The military-industrial complex, et al., referred to institutions of government, business and education that worked together toward common goals, often out of sight and beyond the control of the rest of us. The existence of such collaboration—and the collaborating institutions themselves—was something to be exposed and struggled heroically against. 

Then came the Trump administration, and everything changed. When Donald Trump and his toadies said they were out to destroy what they call “the deep state,” those cozy arrangements were suddenly to be struggled heroically for.

There are differences, sure, but these seem almost to be quibbles. Steve Bannon has referred to “the administrative state,” for example, and the need for its “destruction.” There’s talk of “the Swamp,” which must be drained, ASAP.  That, apparently, means federal bureaucrats who are suddenly (we’re told) doing the people’s business, and are not part of the institutions that, in decades past, all self-respecting critics of the military-industrial complex considered their oppressors. 

There’s the program director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former State Department who, during the first Trump administration, accused former Secretary Rex Tillerson of an “inherent distrust of the State Department and career officers.” (And that’s bad?)

Incoming administrations have never had much use for employees of the agencies they now hope to run. “Democrats historically have been as reluctant to work with careerists as Republicans,” NYU’s Paul Light told Government Executive, “not because of the ideology but because of the desire for speed.” This goes back to the Cretaceous Period at least, leading to the 1883 Pendleton Act and the end of the “spoils system.” There were about 130,000 federal employees back then, excluding the Postal Service and the military. Today there are more than 2 million, again excluding mail carriers and grunts. 

It is okay—or was—to criticize the Pentagon, even to attempt its levitation, as Norman Mailer and other publicity-mad Vietnam War protestors did in 1967. Republicans in those days, wanting the Pentagon to remain where it was, considered it unpatriotic to criticize the military. They wanted to beef up the “defense budget”—and they also campaigned on pledges to reduce the size of the federal workforce. Which, to some degree, they made legitimate efforts to do. Under the Reagan presidency, for example, the jobs of a great number of blue-collar workers were privatized. 

But, according to the University of Maryland’s Don Kettl, a professor of public policy, also quoted in Government Executive, there’s a paradox here: “The paradox is that there were more federal bureaucrats at the end of [the Reagan] administration because of his defense buildup.” 

That’s no paradox. That growth of government is exactly what is to be expected of any administration, given as much power as we give them, no matter what they say when they take over.

The red-hot Broadway musical these days is Operation Mincemeat, scheduled in early 2025 for a 16-week run. Now at the Fortune Theater, it has proven so popular that there have been something like 18 extensions and performances will continue until at least February 2027. 

It’s one of those exuberant productions in which every song is a showstopper. Much of the story is told through lyrics that are so verbose and so frantically rendered that it is hard to figure out exactly what is happening. Even fans say they could have benefited from having a libretto in their hands, though reading it might have interfered with the light show, which was as bombastic as any other part of this boffo production.

If you really want to know the story, you can consult Operation Heartbreak, Duff Cooper’s 1950 novel about the subject, Ewen Montagu’s The Man Who Never Was, or one of the movies abstracted from the books. 

None of these treatments are farces like this musical, which is no surprise. It’s a wonderfully grisly story about a 1943 MI5 operation designed to trick the Germans into thinking the British were going to invade Sardinia rather than Sicily. 

This requires procuring a corpse, which is found on a back street in North London. This particular corpse, which had died from eating rat poison, is set adrift to float ashore where it did, with deceptive documents for the Germans to discover, which they did. The operation succeeds, and one of the MI5 masterminds describes the dead man as “a bit of a ne’er-do-well, and that the only thing he ever did he did after his death.”

Technically, as mentioned, Operation Mincement is a tour de force, almost exhausting in its ebullience. The cast is small, and several of the leads play more than one role. There are giddy dances galore, and the requisite gender-swapping, with the two lead male roles played by females. A plump female plays the slender Ian Fleming.

And there’s this. The dead man, whose body is swept off the streets, is referred to as “homeless.” This seems unlikely. The word dates to the 1600s, apparently, but putting it in the mouths of wartime Brits seems a stretch all the same. Americans back then, and for some decades to come, would have called the man a “hobo” or “bum.” “Hobo” never crossed the Atlantic, evidently, so Brits would have said “bum.”

But in a musical these days? That would be hurtful—even to a corpse. 

Nonstop claims that President Donald Trump’s mental condition is continuing to worsen calls to mind what Dorothy Parker said when told that Calvin Coolidge had died. She asked, “How can they tell?”