Arming the Future

A Defense Industry for the 21st Century

Book
Foreign policy analyses written by CFR fellows and published by the trade presses, academic presses, or the Council on Foreign Relations Press.

The end of the Cold War created a crisis for the American military industrial complex: procurement spending dropped by more than 60 percent in a decade and the export market imploded. In Arming the Future: A Defense Industry for the Twenty-first Century, a group of policymakers, industry-watchers, and scholars, dissects the upheavals of the 1990s, especially the rash of mergers that reduced the defense industry to a few major players.

Looking ahead to imminent transnational mergers and partnerships, Council Senior Fellow Ann Markusen and Columbia International Affairs Online Editor Sean Costigan, the book's editors, warn that the Pentagon will lose market power in such a world. More, rather than less, oversight will be required. They caution against the current fad for privatization and counsel cooperation with European and other allies in rationalizing defense industrial capacity.

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