Private Warriors - Hardcover

Silverstein, Ken

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1859847560 ISBN 13: 9781859847565

Publisher: Verso, 2000

Synopsis

In offering explanations for the US’s enormous post-Cold War military budget—nearly $280 billion for the year 2000—most defense critics point to the influence of weapon makers pork-barrel politics. Those are certainly factors.

But in this eye-opening book, Ken Silverstein looks at another, all but unexamined force: private warriors, the generals, gunrunners and national security staffers who were cast adrift by the end of the Cold War and are now continuing business in the private sector. Private Warriors moves from an arms dealer’s estate in Vienna to a weapons show in Rio de Janeiro to a Soldier of Fortune convention in Las Vegas. It introduces little known figures such as Ernst Werner Glatt, a right-wing German who for many years was the Pentagon’s preferred gunrunner, and Andrew Marshall, an aging but still sprightly Cold Warrior who ardently promotes the development of needless new weapons systems.

Other encounters are with more recognizable names such as General Alexander Haig, the former Secretary of State who now lobbies for China and sells weapons to Turkey, and Frank Gaffney, an ex-Pentagon official who has grown rich by promoting the biggest boondoggle of them all, Star Wars. Today’s private warriors have one thing in common: a financial interest in war, and the connections to push for a continuation of Cold War military policy.

About this title

Review:

Journalist Ken Silverstein delivers a broadside against the modern military-industrial complex in Private Warriors. In the post-cold-war world of rising defense budgets and arms proliferation, Silverstein finds plenty to worry about: "Former Defense Department officials serve as consultants to the arms industry, helping lobby for needless Cold War-era weapons systems and promoting greater arms sales to foreign regimes. Retired generals form private corporations that train the armies of foreign nations and encourage U.S. entanglements abroad. Arms dealers linked to U.S. intelligence agencies still trot the globe hawking their wares, sometimes in support of government operations, sometimes acting strictly as private businessmen. Intellectuals who gained their names by hyping the Soviet threat still counsel our political leaders. The advice they offered during the Cold War was of dubious value, and it has decidedly less merit today." Silverstein wisely populates his book with real-life characters such as German arms dealer Ernst Werner Glatt, Nixon- and Reagan-administration veteran Alexander Haig, and missile-defense advocate Frank Gaffney. He also has an eye for vivid anecdotes: the B-2 bomber, he notes, literally "costs more than its weight in gold." Silverstein's on-the-scene reporting includes visits to a weapons bazaar in Rio de Janeiro and a Soldier of Fortune convention in Las Vegas. At bottom, however, Private Warriors is a polemic rather than a piece of journalism; it aims to make a forceful argument against transplanting the mindset of a cold-war hawk into the security policies of the 21st century. Not everyone will be convinced--attitudes on this subject are famously inflexible--but Silverstein's portrait of the industry and people who profit from military buildups will give pause to all its readers. --John J. Miller

About the Author:

Ken Silverstein is Washington editor for Harper’s Magazine and was previously based in Rio de Janeiro.

About this edition

• Publisher: Verso
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1859847560
• ISBN 13: 9781859847565
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224