Upcoming Events

Guest Lecture—A. J. Murphy, Pentagon Capitalism: How the Cold War US Military Modeled Itself on Private Business

Please join the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities and the Van Hunnick History Department for a guest lecture by A.J. Murphy on their new book, Pentagon Capitalism: How the Cold War US Military Modeled Itself on Private Business (Harvard University Press, 2026). More details to follow.

ABSTRACT: In the wake of World War II, leaders in the U.S. defense bureaucracy routinely looked to private industry for assistance in running the emerging national security state. Over the decades that followed, officers were sent to study at business schools, clerical workers were subjected to time and motion studies, and base commanders struggled with accounting as they were instructed for the first time to keep track of resources and labor in terms of dollars. While the Vietnam War led many military leaders to denounce “managerialism” in favor of traditional concepts of command and leadership, by that time the language and values of business management had become thoroughly embedded in the institutional structure of the military. In Pentagon Capitalism, A.J. Murphy shows how the remaking of the defense bureaucracy in the image of the profit-seeking firm changed the experience of work in the military, redefined what it meant to be an officer, and facilitated the privatization of many of the defense establishment’s functions.

BIO: A.J. Murphy is an assistant professor of History at Brandeis University, where they teach courses on military history, the history of capitalism, and the history of gender and sexuality. They are the author of Pentagon Capitalism: How the Cold War US Military Modeled Itself on Private Business (Harvard University Press, 2026).