STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We've been exploring the world America made. Eighty years ago, the United States emerged victorious in World War II. It set up institutions that have influenced the world ever since, many of which Americans are questioning now. In this series, we've talked about the United Nations and free trade. We heard how the desire for a better image abroad led to civil rights at home. Today, we explore the defense industry, and our guide is Christopher Leonard. He's an investigative journalist who has written for years about the U.S. economy and is now researching defense contractors. Leonard traces the industry's modern origins back to the war in the 1940s.
CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: The government went to the aircraft companies and said, essentially, thank you. Your factories are ours now. You're going to be making bombers, not passenger planes. They placed military personnel inside the factory.
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FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT: We must be the great arsenal of democracy.
INSKEEP: President Franklin Roosevelt made a promise.
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ROOSEVELT: As planes and ships and guns and shells are produced, your government, with its defense experts, can then determine how best to use them to defend this hemisphere.
INSKEEP: The U.S., then the world's leading manufacturer, made warplanes, tanks and ships at rates never seen in history. Leonard is writing a book on what he calls the rise of the military-industrial complex. He says that when the fighting ended 80 years ago, the U.S. kept right on telling industry what to do in ways that have affected American life ever since.
LEONARD: For the first time, the United States did not demobilize. We had always kind of built up a large war industry, fought a war and then dismantled the war industry, but you had these thinkers inside the Truman administration that said, you know, hey, wait a minute, the world's not safe. We have a rising threat we see in the Soviet Union, and so we're going to keep this system in place. That was the critical decision. And so we essentially established a permanent military-industrial complex in the United States that remains with us today.
INSKEEP: Is this where we get the origins of the government sponsoring research and development at universities and for companies that then led to products that changed the world?
LEONARD: That is exactly where this came from. And there was this push toward more and more technology. The theory here was you don't necessarily just win wars by making more airplanes. You win it by staying a step ahead technologically of all your opponents. I mean, run down the list from the atomic bomb to missile defense systems to later laser-guided missiles. These scientists truly are working at the far horizon of human knowledge, and the spin-off products from that really are almost endless.
INSKEEP: Yeah, I'm thinking of a few obvious ones - nuclear bombs become civilian nuclear power, better communications for the Pentagon becomes the internet for everybody. Satellite guidance systems become GPS that people use every day. And those are just some big ones.
LEONARD: Those are just the big ones, down to small things like Velcro and so many things like that. But they start as a technological solution to a military problem, and then those advances bleed out through the rest of the economy.
INSKEEP: Across 80 years, the military-industrial complex has changed. Leonard says that after the Cold War, the Pentagon pressured scores of defense contractors to merge and become more efficient. That left them with less flexibility to respond to a crisis like the need to supply Ukraine after Russia's invasion.
LEONARD: It's been remarkable to watch. I mean, even back in 2022 and 2023, sort of at the captain or colonel level inside the Pentagon, there were people raising real concerns that we were burning through the stockpiles of the munitions we had, which turned out to be true. There's now an 18-month wait on very important tactical missiles that are used on kind of the battlefield level, and now we're staring over the horizon to think about a potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific over Taiwan, which would require also just huge stockpiles of missiles and other munitions that we are having a hard time producing now.
INSKEEP: As you're talking, I'm thinking of so many actions in the early days of the Trump administration that might relate in some way to this narrative and add another chapter to this narrative. The administration has been canceling research grants to universities and taking a very different stance generally toward universities. The administration wants to cut spending in many ways, and the administration talks of innovation at the Pentagon, but it's not clear what they mean. How does this administration relate to the problems you see?
LEONARD: Wow. So the administration, as you know, is kind of laser-focused on rebuilding manufacturing in the United States, and its primary tool to do that, apparently, is this tariff regime. When you talk to people inside the Pentagon, they are wrestling with an incredibly complicated, thorny problem. One theory is that, OK, hey, if we just dump a lot more money into the Pentagon, it can start ordering more products, and that will stimulate more industrial production in the U.S. You know, we'll create more jobs. But the task is enormous. I mean, when we built the so-called arsenal of democracy in 1940, about 40% of the U.S. labor force was engaged in manufacturing. There was this deep pool to draw from.
Now about 8% of the population is engaged in manufacturing. So there needs to be government investment, there needs to be cross-platform government policies to help try to rebuild some kind of manufacturing and research base, and you just see this conflict. I mean, tariffs alone right now seem like a very uncertain tool to really stimulate manufacturing in the economy, not least of which because there's so much uncertainty about how deep the tariffs will be, how long they're going to last.
INSKEEP: Christopher Leonard, it's a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much.
LEONARD: Thank you for the time.
INSKEEP: We're exploring the world America made 80 years ago at the end of World War II, much of which we're questioning today, and we have more conversations and reports to come.
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