There's an excellent new book in this subject area by Rosa Brooks "How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything" that I just heard about on C-SPAN Book TV.  But here are seven former press releases I chose to bundle together on this issue.  The first two are basic natural cycle understandings, the next gives a defense strategy for the fact that military depletes the economy, then two issues about the executive branch roles.  The last two are classic Peace Economics with a variety of unusual observations of the economic record about war and a refutation of the much overstated case that war produces important innovations.

War Cycle, 54 Years Long

This first piece needs the important additional information that the long cycle, after extensive research, clearly seems to come about because the land of the planet heats up much faster than the ocean.  This happens because evaporation is by some estimates up to 85% of the solar radiation hitting the Earth's surface.  By simple algebra using the fact that land is 29% and ocean 71% of the Earth's surface suggests that evaporation is 90% over ocean and 73% over land.  Then the remainder of solar radiation directly warms the land 27% and the ocean 10%, confirmed by a variety of effects.  Thus the land warming much faster than the ocean leads to 27 years of warming ending in severe droughts followed by the ocean rebalancing the Earth with floods at first in the next 27 years of cooling.  These effects drive economic changes which drive the war cycle as detailed in the article.

Major Wars Happen in Cold Years

The midpoint and end of the economic growth cycle tend to have major wars, and amazingly these wars tend to start after a two or three year burst of cooling hits a relative low in the Earth's temperature cycle.  For some reason the wars tend to start in these low temperature episodes, as detailed in this article.

Low Level Military Defense

National defense in the long run depends on a strong economy.  But military spending depletes capital investment and the manufacturing sector.  What then becomes too much military in the long run and too little military in the short run?  This was the basic issue in the Defense Strategy chapter of my 1986 book Peace Economics.  This is also the essence of this article published in December 2015, still the most popular press release of the last two years, although the July 2016 "Nature of Military Spending" is a close second and might end up passing "Low Level Military Defense."

National Security State

This classic was born in a sociology class I took in about 1985 from Val Burris of the University of Oregon on power structure.  I compared Secretaries of State and Defense since World War Two back then and the pattern continues today.  State tends to be hawkish and Defense tends to be dovish.  The reasons why are enumerated in this article.  This is the reverse of most public opinion.

CIA Presidents: Obama Clinton 

This piece cites the post-Cold War experience of electing presidents.  The Cold War experience is that all 11 elections were won by candidates from high per capita military spending states.  The other prominent CIA president would be the first George Bush elected in 1988.  There is a picture of a man that looks just like George Bush watching the Kennedy assassination in 1963.  He later became CIA head under Ford, inventing the A team and B team CIA estimates to inflate the Soviet threat.  He was important in the October Surprise of 1980 and Iran Contra in 1986, although he escapes serious scrutiny in all these cases.  But this piece is mainly about Clinton and Obama showing that covert militarism has replaced overt military spending in the presidential candidate's home state for Democrats in the post-Cold War environment.  The powers that be aren't about to let someone be elected "emperor" of the world without some important connection to the national security state.

War and Occupy Economics  

This account goes over a variety of lessons learned from examining the year by year record of the last century or so regarding war and the economy.  All war "booms" are followed by post war "busts."  What creates a war boom is usually a large deficit, so most wars are borrowing sprees and post war paying off the debt will depress the economy.  Economies under occupation under-perform by about 40% and neutral countries have flat economies while their neighbors are at war.

The Worthlessness of War  

This is a retort to the puff piece book that inflates the record of innovations during wartime.  Much research originates in the civilian sector and then gets used in wartime "innovations."  What would modern warfare be like without the civilian inventions of the railroad, the automobile, and the airplane?  Inventions like fire and the wheel were not for warfare.  Even the internet came after inventions by British and Swiss scientists led the way.

For the complete text of the seven press releases:

https://www.academia.edu/28245203/WAR_Decision_Mechanisms_2013-2016_8p