There is a crisis in the American state. Congress continually refuses to control federal debt and borrowing, draining billions of taxpayer dollars every year. The U.S. defense budget is no exception. And yet, this money fails to be spent wisely. From inefficiencies with procurement to wasted resources on DEI initiatives, there appears to be much in the defense budget needing trimming. This is despite the increasingly volatile geopolitical environment in which the United States finds itself.
Defense researchers have, rightly, looked at the processes that are holding back a robust defense strategy. But such an analytical frame examines symptoms without investigating root causes. Our present day defense failures are not just a problem with a process, but a problem with the elites leading the nation’s defense establishment. It is to building and enshrining a new defense elite capable of taking on America’s challenges that the surging Tech Right should turn its efforts to.
What has changed since the heyday of the early Cold War? We can use the remarkable presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower as a benchmark. Often overlooked by historians and politicians, Eisenhower’s presidency was an enormously successful period for the United States in economic, social, military, and diplomatic terms.
Among the central lessons to learn from the Eisenhower years is the need for a strong elite culture that enabled effective and productive collaboration among defense officials, academics, and businessmen towards common national goals. This turns on more than who serves as Secretary of Defense, whether it be a leader in the case of a Peter Hegseth, a Ron DeSantis, or a James Mattis. There is a much more systemic problem afflicting the nation’s approach to defense. Eisenhower himself was a phenomenal World War Two general and born leader. Figures like this only spring up occasionally in history. But what ensured Ike’s larger success was a broader and vibrant elite culture that could plan for the future and make daring decisions.
Industrial-Defense Policy, 1950s Style
The emerging Tech Right has understandably picked defense procurement as one of its hobby horses. Distrustful of authority, it sees the military-industrial complex as a threat to be suppressed, rather than a beast to be tamed. This is also the case in the UK where former Boris Johnson advisor and mastermind behind the Brexit vote, Dominic Cummings, has banged the drum for overhauling defense procurement. Any advocates for state capacity worth their salt should be concerned with the wasteful and flawed bureaucracy that holds back the ability for the military to efficiently acquire the munitions it needs to win. However, the problems with procurement should be seen as downstream of a bigger problem with elite culture. Put simply, the wrong people are in charge, or least leaders are following the wrong incentives.
The incredibly different elite culture in place that prevailed during the Eisenhower administration provides us with indicators of what needs to be in place for U.S. defense to thrive. First, Eisenhower and his advisors had a collaborative approach towards the military and corporate America that helped them to sustain investment and cooperation in research and development. His cabinet was filled with corporate executives and one labor leader, leading to the quip about “eight millionaires and one plumber”. Elon Musk joining the Trump administration through DOGE is certainly dramatic, but it is not unprecedented for the nation’s chief executive to tap business talent to deliver good governance. We have yet to see what Musk achieves, and how long his partnership with Trump will last, but Eisenhower’s cabinet is a testament to the importance of setting a culture that champions – rather than hides – military and corporate collaboration. Office seekers and career bureaucrats do not always deliver the best results. Eisenhower relied on a crack team to support him and his policies.
Second, Eisenhower had a clear, realist strategy for his presidency that set the agenda and tone for how the defense elite should solve global problems. He hoped to end the Korean War, restore and consolidate national strength through a balanced budget and the nuclear deterrent. This was not a misty-eyed utopian vision for foreign policy. There were of course ideals and a strong conviction in American values as the superior system to Soviet communism. But there was also a humility and recognition of the limits of American power. Korea could not be unified under democratic capitalism, so Ike settled for half a country instead. This is an approach to foreign affairs that prioritizes American interests first, and pragmatism in how to achieve those goals.
Third, the defense elite readily accepted a willingness to engage in genuinely novel experiments in government organization. . The Eisenhower defense elite can and did support new organizational structures to get things done, DARPA being perhaps the most obvious example. DARPA successfully allowed investment and collaboration at a very high level to nurture cutting-edge technologies that could have military utility but would also have civil applications. Rather than becoming obsessed with procedures, DARPA focused on outcomes. From this point, we can trace the origins of the internet among other technologies that have transformed our lives.
NASA also provides another useful example. When the Soviets launched Sputnik, they appeared to be winning the Space Race and provide the system of the future. Eisenhower made the first moves to get a man on the moon by supporting a dedicated agency to space exploration. Appetite for space declined in the 1970s and 1980s but it is firmly back on the agenda. Trump oversaw the creation of Space Force and the Artemis Accords and will have to face the growing geopolitical tension in space as China works towards mining asteroids and the moon. But again, Eisenhower succeeded with NASA because he put the right people in charge and connected the best scientific talent with government.
Fourth, the Eisenhower era elite cultivated a close relationship with academia that oriented these institutions towards the needs of defense. The National Defense Education Act was introduced to promote science-based subjects, fostering the next generation of engineers and scientists and innovators. Defense was well plugged into the academy, at places like Stanford, when academics were less squeamish about working with the military. Contrast this with the modern situation, where academia has resisted an alignment with national and military objectives. Academia has been overrun with HR middle managers and humanities professors who have made careers in steering these institutions away from these aims. Woke dogma has been inflicted on the STEM disciplines. What the Tech Right, and traditional conservatives, recognize is that there is such a thing as an objective and comprehensible truth that can be observed. Just as the humanities must be returned to this fact, and the managers defunded, so must resources go back into training a new generation of Americans capable of pursuing scientific truth and make the new discoveries that will strengthen American power and bring new benefits to the world.
Eisenhower is the unsung hero of a lost art of state capacity on the right. It is more obvious to look towards FDR or LBJ for innovations in organizing the federal government. But Eisenhower proved that conservatives can bring their own distinctive style to managing and reforming the administrative state. We live in the shadow of the bankruptcy of leftwing visions of state capacity. Bureaucratic managers have their place in the federal government, but they must be harnessed to an elite culture that can drive forward change. In this sense, constructing a new, effective defense elite to replace the old is a critical linchpin in the drive to restore the dynamism of the American project.
Forging a New Defense Elite
State capacity has eroded as elite culture shifted towards the hegemony of bureaucratic managerialism and capture by interest groups in the decades following the Eisenhower administration. The declining quality of American statesmanship is clear for all to see. Congress has allowed its authority and power to be siphoned off to the administrative state and the judiciary. Only the executive provides any means for the American people to voice their concerns and hold officials and judges accountable. Even if Congress was willing to assert itself, instead of preening on social media and cable TV, the nation needs a higher caliber of people in charge. In defense, the rise of the military-industrial complex warned of by Eisenhower in his Farewell Address has brought the same dysfunctions to defense.
James Burnham famously saw our modern age come into view in The Managerial Revolution. Conservatives tend to focus on the expansion of bureaucratic managerialism’s oversight over the environment, healthcare, and education. But they seem content to let the same corrosive phenomenon to occur in defense simply because it is right-coded. The free-market dogma that rewired conservative thinking in the 1980s also caused them to neglect the need for state capacity. Why put thought into redesigning the state when you could just cut tax rates and hope the state could figure itself out? Starving the beast has not happened. Instead, the state continues to grow in size while failing in more of its basic functions.
More creative thinking is needed around the right’s vision for state capacity. Niskanen and proponents for the ‘abundance agenda’ have dedicated serious thought to issues such as tech, permitting, energy, and so on, but little has been done on defense. Given its crucial role in the nation’s manufacturing base, addressing these questions is long overdue. What I propose here is that this is not just about better policy and better procedure. It is about the elites that dictate policy and procedure. The United States is brimming with talent and ideas with tremendous economic and cultural results, but they are not organized in a manner that ensures success for defense.
We need is a new defense elite to emerge and take control that draws on the lessons of the defense elites of old. Instead of sniping from the sidelines, we need a new generation to come in and get things done. This is undoubtedly will be a disruptive experience – the new must literally supplant the old. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is a promising start. DOGE can put a spotlight on the problems with the Pentagon that need to be resolved. But a spotlight alone cannot fix these problems. Something longer-term and more impactful is needed.
Donors on the Tech Right can really shift the dial by moving beyond simply advocating for procurement reform and nurturing the creation of a new defense elite that puts American interests first. Managerialism has had its day. It is more comfortable with making concessions to the identitarian left rather than doing what is needed to win wars. An effective defense establishment needs creative solutions and leaders willing to think the unthinkable. To start, tech donors should support a long-term program of talent cultivation and intellectual development, a kind of Federalist Society for defense. Decades of training, investment, and promotion of originalist legal scholars through their careers has undoubtedly transformed the judiciary, regardless of whether you support their rulings. It is merely an example of how essential personnel is for political change.
Over time, such a project of creating a new defense elite can extend to scholarships, internships, academic programs, journals, and research centers. Good ideas, especially new ones, require an institutional ecosystem in which people can securely make the right arguments and elaborate them over time. The Tech Right as a business and entrepreneurial coalition cannot succeed alone, it requires a legion of defense specialists alongside scientists and venture capitalists to get things done. This is the kind of movement building that leaves a legacy, attracting younger generations to fight for their country, ensure the United States can continue as a great power, and defeat a rising China’s bid for global hegemony.
