I mean, It’s the Pentagon. It obviously has all sorts of leverage, as well as personal connections and influence. “If you cut our funding then we won’t do X” is enough to put pressure. I’m not saying this is not the case, I’m saying this is… not particularly surprising. Like, anyone who thinks that the true challenge of politics is to figure out the precise orders to give once you’re elected, then you can sit back and see your will be enacted as if the entire apparatus of the state was a wish-granting genie is deluded. Obviously the challenge is getting organizations that hold significant power to actually do the thing you want them to.
A leftist would talk about the military-industrial complex, or about corporate lobbying (I’m sure the influence of the various big suppliers also matters, as much and more as that of the Pentagon himself). Again, in this sense, if you want to call it “deep state”, it’s a trivially true thing, and a constant of all polities in history (the military especially! Consider how often personal loyalty of the troops to this or that commander was essentially all that the political stability of a country hinged on). I just don’t see much the usefulness of the concept, and I think the word is misleading. None of this is secret or particularly hidden. It’s not even just a property of the state. You see the same things play out on a small scale in everyday office politics—the CEO wants one thing, but Team A who’s supposed to do it is already busy so they resist it, etc. etc. Organizations at all scales are made of people, people have goals and agency to pursue them. Politics is mostly cat-herding.
I mean, It’s the Pentagon. It obviously has all sorts of leverage, as well as personal connections and influence. “If you cut our funding then we won’t do X” is enough to put pressure. I’m not saying this is not the case, I’m saying this is… not particularly surprising. Like, anyone who thinks that the true challenge of politics is to figure out the precise orders to give once you’re elected, then you can sit back and see your will be enacted as if the entire apparatus of the state was a wish-granting genie is deluded. Obviously the challenge is getting organizations that hold significant power to actually do the thing you want them to.
A leftist would talk about the military-industrial complex, or about corporate lobbying (I’m sure the influence of the various big suppliers also matters, as much and more as that of the Pentagon himself). Again, in this sense, if you want to call it “deep state”, it’s a trivially true thing, and a constant of all polities in history (the military especially! Consider how often personal loyalty of the troops to this or that commander was essentially all that the political stability of a country hinged on). I just don’t see much the usefulness of the concept, and I think the word is misleading. None of this is secret or particularly hidden. It’s not even just a property of the state. You see the same things play out on a small scale in everyday office politics—the CEO wants one thing, but Team A who’s supposed to do it is already busy so they resist it, etc. etc. Organizations at all scales are made of people, people have goals and agency to pursue them. Politics is mostly cat-herding.