The US and international defense industrial sectors have faced many challenges over the last twenty years, including cycles of growth and shrinkage in defense budgets, shifts in strategic defense priorities, and macroeconomic volatility. In the current environment, the defense sector faces a combination of these challenges and must struggle with the need to maintain critical aspects of the defense industrial base as defense priorities change and as defense budgets reduce or plateau. Moreover, the defense sector in the US is interconnected both with defense sectors in other countries and with other industry sectors in the US and global economies. As a result, strategic decisions made in one defense sector impact the defense sectors of other countries, as well as other areas of the economy. Given her academic, corporate, and Department of Defense experience as a leading economist and policy-maker, Dr. Nayantara Hensel is perfectly positioned to examine the interrelationship between these forces both historically and in the current environment, and to assess the implications for the future global defense industrial base.

In this wide-ranging study Peter Custers seeks to highlight the importance of the production and consumption of arms as a form of social waste within the capitalist world order. The study encompasses critical economic theory, historical studies of the rise of capitalism, conceptualizations of international trade, and analyses of the inequities spawned by globalized militarism. Drawing especially on Volume 2 of Marx's "Capital," Custers creatively develops some of Marx's classical themes. The individual circuit of capital outlined in that work is utilized by Custers to demonstrate the generation of various types of waste at each step in the military-nuclear and civilian-nuclear production chains. He also proposes the new concept of negative use-value to highlight the adverse consequences, for human beings and the environment, of products that are churned out by the military-nuclear complex. In opposition to the view that the capitalist system in its earlier phases operated as a market system governed by 'internal' exchanges, Custers produces historical evidence to demonstrate that this system always incorporated a vital 'external' agent, namely, the capitalist state, which has played a significant role in capitalism's evolution at crucial junctures.

An expert explains why the security needs of the twenty-first century require a transformation of the defense industry of the twentieth century. New geopolitical realities—including terrorism, pandemics, rogue nuclear states, resource conflicts, insurgencies, mass migration, economic collapse, and cyber attacks—have created a dramatically different national-security environment for America. Twentieth-century defense strategies, technologies, and industrial practices will not meet the security requirements of a post-9/11 world. In Democracy's Arsenal, Jacques Gansler describes the transformations needed in government and industry to achieve a new, more effective system of national defense. Drawing on his decades of experience in industry, government, and academia, Gansler argues that the old model of ever-increasing defense expenditures on largely outmoded weapons systems must be replaced by a strategy that combines a healthy economy, effective international relations, and a strong (but affordable) national security posture. The defense industry must remake itself to become responsive and relevant to the needs of twenty-first-century security.