> First, military procurement takes up about 2% of U.S. manufacturing
> production; does that qualify as a "military-industrial accumulation
> model"?
I said "had", not "has". Military spending averaged 6-8% of GDP in the US economy for most of the Cold War, peaking in the 1950s at around 10%, falling in the 1970s, then increasing in the 1980s. Military Keynesianism, as we both know, built Silicon Valley, as well as the US aerospace and communications industries; the 1990s, to be sure, were the decade of Bubble Keynesianism, backed by huge inflows of foreign capital.
> electronics, much to the industry's benefit. It'd be kind of hard to
> argue that East Asia and the EU broadling and consistently outperform
> U.S. firms in high-end high-tech.
That's because they only recently got into the high-end tech (early 1990s), as opposed to the low and medium-end, where their performance has been impressive indeed. Interestingly, the Nikkei Shimbun ran a story saying that Japan's trade balance on patents has turned positive for the first time ever.
I once visited this missile silo in Arizona near Tucson, a decommissioned Nike rocket turned into a museum. It was amazing to walk through the bunker and see all the wiring, machinery, etc.; you could read the labels, all these firms based in Connecticut, Illinois, etc., which have since been swallowed by the same market forces they once benefited from. Totally creepy, it was truly the natural history museum of the Pax Americana.
-- Dennis