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Book Review: Technology and the American Way of War since 1945. By Thomas G. Mahnken. Columbia University Press. 2008. 256 pp. US$29.50/£17.50 cloth. ISBN 978 0 231 12336 5

The result, within the context of centralized planning, was a bargaining system which frequently required third-party arbitration in order to be made to work at all. The whole framework of planning therefore accommodated constant trade-offs, and Markevich in a separate chapter explores the ‘decentralized contracting’ that in reality made the system work. This was accepted and embraced by the Soviet leadership, with Stalin himself acknowledging that ‘planning only begins with compiling the plan’ (p. 107). As Markevich summarizes, ‘defense planning did not escape the general problem of Soviet planning, that in principle the plans were intended to overcome the supply constraints, but in practice the constraints tended to take precedence and the plans had to adapt to the constraints’ (p. 108). As a final example of the book’s insights, Mark Harrison contributes a further fascinating chapter on the market for inventions in Soviet military industry during the 1930s. The market for technological innovations in the Soviet command economy again carries some striking parallels. In an era of rapid technological change in military affairs, the Soviet military faced serious dilemmas about where to target scarce and inherently limited economic and material resources. The very process of supporting innovation, even in a centralized command economy, inevitably led to sinking resources into fields that proved to be technological dead ends as well. By choosing how many designers to employ in various fields, Soviet planners also inevitably entered into an inherently riskprone ‘market for inventions’ (p. 213). Between 1932 and 1946 there were roughly thirty major Soviet projects on new kinds of aviation propulsion, of which rocketry was actually the smallest cluster. Ten major projects were devoted to steam-turbine development, a technological dead end, and thirteen projects to jet engine development, of which only two would produce workable engines by the end of the period (p. 216). Harrison makes an effective argument that this ‘internal market for inventions’ was actually driven by the inventors themselves, with successful designers even in the Soviet system also tending to be effective social networkers and lobbyists. With so many topics of ongoing relevance covered, this fascinating book carries multiple potential applications for students not only of Soviet military history, but of economics, defence planning, and military industry generally, and comes highly recommended.