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Private Warriors
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 382
EAN: 9781859847565
ISBN: 1859847560
Label: Verso
Manufacturer: Verso
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: 2000-07
Publisher: Verso
Release Date: July 27, 2000
Studio: Verso
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Editorial 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
Widely-researched and fast-paced, Private Warriors surveys the generals, gun-runners and national security staffers who were cast adrift at the end of the Cold War and who now operate in the private sector. In these pages we encounter Ernst Werner Glatt, a right-wing German who was for many years the Pentagon's preferred gun-runner; ex-Secretary of State Alexander Haig who now lobbies for China and assists in selling 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 a direct financial interest in war and the connections to push for the maintenance of bloated military budgets.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Great Intro to Military/Industrial Stranglehold
This book brilliantly summarizes how the legacy of the Cold War, the self-sustaining military industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about, has thoroughly corrupted American politics and its foreign policy. The wretched results are too obvious in the wastelands of Iraq and Afghanistan. The author gives brief examples of how the US uses private contractors to do its dirty work (go see the movie "Lord of War" for a wonderful cinematic treatment) and how the revolving door between the Pentagon and ... Read More
Rating:  - Great Book, Very Interesting
This was a very interesting and eye opening book. The book is broken into chapters that look at different aspects of the current war / armaments industry. We get the full picture from arms dealers, armaments companies and their lobbyists to private mercenary companies. The author gives the arms dealers some extra mystery by introducing us to two of the more successful ones, both of which were ex-Nazis. We also get a who's who name run down of past government officials who are now employees or ... Read More
Rating: - A great militiary book
I thought this book was great.I think that Private Militiary
Compinies are the Futuer of warfare.I think America should train fomer Soviet countries against terrorism.I found this book very informative.It was great.
Rating: - War, Incorporated
Ken Silverstein's "Private Warriors" is an excellent resource -- I wish we had more journalists like him, willing to delve deep into a story and present just the facts, and leave it to the reader to connect the dots. Silverstein doesn't preach: he just offers an incredible amount of information -- all but the most diehard reactionary will find it persuasive.
He names names, and provides an exhaustive account of the ongoing American policy of permanent military mobilization, which was conveniently ... Read More
Rating: - Eisenhower Warned: Beware of the Military-Industrial Complex
Ken Silverstein's excellent book `Private Warriors' exposes the underside of that vile, despicable trade the making and marketing of implements to destroy wholesale-lives, properties, cities, countries--yes, civilization itself. WAR!
It is a megabillion dollar business and with big money at stake greed prevails and morality is easily compromised. Just imagine the size of the business. Start with a US defense budget for next year of $305 billion (that is $8,000 per second) and add what other countries ... Read More
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