War on Terror, Inc.: Corporate Profiteering from the Politics of Fear

British journalist Hughes casts a transatlantic perspective on the phenomenon of privatizing the state's policing and war-making powers. He vividly expands (through often hair-raising illustration) the conventional understanding of the increasingly tangled political and business interests that Eisenhower famously dubbed ""the military-industrial complex"" and updates post-9/11 as the ""security-industrial complex,"" accounting for its vast and unprecedented expansion via privatization schemes begun under Thatcher and Reagan and carried forward by successive UK and US administrations. Again and again-from managing military bases to operations on the battlefield itself-poor job and safety records, repeated public scandals and a consistent pattern of failing to deliver on the vaunted cost-savings of the free market are no hindrance to continued government support for privatization. As Hughes shows, this is as much the result of government helplessness in the face of corporate will as the (frequently literal) investment of state officials in the privatization ideology. Some of the multinational companies discussed, like Halliburton and DynCorp, have been the targets of extensive criticism by now, but Hughes contextualizes them within a larger shift of authorized ""power over people"" from state hands and into those of private enterprise-a historic and far-reaching transformation that has gone forward with little public debate.