The Deep State

Brad Simpson posts to the H-Diplo list (July 22, 2010):

"I would just like to open a discussion thread on the important new Washington Post series by Dana Priest and Bill Arkin on "Top Secret America." ...

How do we as historians even get an analytical handle on this phenomenon, when the vast majority of 'evidence' needed to understand and analyze it will never be declassified? We are talking about a vast and growing National Security State that few can even begin to grasp, which has incredibly important (and in my view deeply
disturbing and anti-democratic) implications. Its hard enough to try and write about discrete CIA operations for which job files are still secret, something else entirely to account for and describe a "top secret america" larger than the entire executive branch was during the early Cold War. What sort of methodological tools are going to be appropriate here? ...

To the extent people accept the existence (even as a form of short-hand) of a "military-industrial complex" - to which some might add Congress, the mass media of other institutions, is it appropriate to speak of a separate "national security-industrial complex" or National Security State that is analytically distinct? Is this merely the evolution of the DIA-CIA-NSA nexus of the early Cold War or something qualitatively new? Perhaps as important, how do we start teaching this?

...

The second of these articles, on private contractors, reinforces a profound shift that others have noted over the last 10-20 years towards the increasing privatization of core state functions and, increasingly, core national security functions. It seems we need to be thinking much more seriously about what sorts of theories of business-state-society relations might be useful for apprehending this phenomenon. Is this virtual fusing of the public and private sector a sort of 'national security corporatism'? Organized labor is, of course, nearly absent from this equation, but is corporatism as Michael Hogan, David Painter and others have utilized it of any theoretical value? If not, what sorts of theory might be useful? Of what use are the theoretical or descriptive models most of us use to describe decision-making, democratic accountability, the relationship between 'the branches of government,' etc. in dealing with these phenomena?"