Image: 2020 antiwar protest (James O’Keefe, Wikipedia)
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William D. Hartung is one of the most well-known writers and analysts on the U.S. military-industrial complex. He’s authored or co-authored numerous books, including Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex and, most recently, The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home. Hartung appears often as a commentator in mainstream media outlets and popular news shows and podcasts.
What might be less known to some is that Hartung discovered his career path through the divestment and antimilitarist movements of the 1970s and 1980s, where he focused on corporate power research for solidarity campaigns with Chile and South Africa, among other things.
Indeed, Hartung was an undergraduate at Columbia University in the 1970s, just a few years removed from the 1968 generation of activists who advanced movement power research through works like “Who Rules Columbia?” and groups like North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) — a milieu whose legacy lived on to inspire Hartung and others.
Over the past decades, Hartung has worked with different progressive think tanks and policy groups, including the Center for International Policy, and he is currently a Senior Research Fellow with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
Hartung spoke to LittleSis in an extensive interview about his life as a movement researcher, beginning in the 1970s and through his career’s work on the military-industrial complex. (Also check out Hartung’s Substack post that gets into some of this history). Throughout the interview, Hartung emphasizes the critical relationship between research and organizing in the past and present, highlighting ways he’s tried to support activists and lift up important organizations and campaigns — the important work they’re doing, as well as new challenges these movements currently face.
This interview is part of LittleSis’s ongoing series on the history of movement power research. The transcript has been edited for clarity and readability.
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Derek Seidman: Can you talk about how you first got drawn into doing movement power research in the 1970s?
William Hartung: I grew up in a conservative suburb of Buffalo, and I was a bit isolated in high school. I was drawn to the idea of progressive politics from afar — things like the student strikes at Columbia University, Martin Luther King Jr’s speeches, and reading James Baldwin.
I got to Columbia in 1973, and it was a little quiet. There were a few people who had been around in 1968 and would talk about it. Our first campaign was about tuition increases, which fell flat, but soon there was a surge of activism around divestment.
I got interested in researching Columbia’s stock holdings. I met people doing solidarity work with Chile after the 1973 Pinochet coup. There were a lot of Chilean expats around our neighborhood. North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) did a whole piece about ITT and the copper companies’ role in the coup in Chile. And of course, divestment was all about that.
There was also research about what was happening in South Africa. I connected with some non-campus groups, like the Campaign to Oppose Bank Loans to South Africa. A friend of mine did all the research about which U.S. banks were lending to South Africa and how much. She was at Corporate Data Exchange, which was started by Mike Locker, who had been in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1968 along with people like Michael Klare.
We also had a magazine called Southern Africa Magazine, which was run by a collective with a paid editor and volunteers. I wrote about violations of the U.S. arms embargo and the role of U.S. multinationals in propping up the South African regime.
There was a proliferation of divestment work in the 1970s. Students on every campus were doing it. Academically, I took Seymour Melman‘s course on the permanent war economy of the U.S., and I took a course on the history of the colonization of South Africa. I figured if I was doing divestment, I should know more.
My talent is explaining the throughline. I’m good at simplifying complicated information and making it somewhat more accessible. I focused on that. When I was sophomore, I also took nine months off to work with the United Farm Workers boycott. A lot of things I was doing had a corporate nexus.
Can you talk a little more about the influence of the groups doing power research in the late 1960s and 1970s? The researchers at Columbia in 1968, and around NACLA, for example?
I didn’t know all those folks at the time, but they very much inspired me. I read NACLA reports religiously back when it was on the newsprint, and I used to read all the footnotes. I didn’t know that Locker and Klare had written a lot of the Columbia stuff, although I knew about Klare’s books, which were very influential because they were always on target.
I knew about Michael Locker because my friend Tina Simcich did work on companies lending to South Africa with his organization, Corporate Data Exchange. I even applied to work at NACLA after college, but I knew zero about Latin America.
I really viewed NACLA as an amazing organization. They used to have an office about ten blocks from Columbia’s campus, near where I lived. Their influence on me was kind of indirect. I didn’t know exactly where NACLA was coming from at the time, but I knew it was founded by the 1968 activists at Columbia.
Can you talk more about research and organizing that was happening around South Africa and Chile in the 1970s?
The South Africa connection was pretty direct because the African National Congress (ANC) was asking for a corporate and global boycott. So, it was pretty clear what to do. We’d figure out what research we needed to — university stock holdings, research about the companies, and so on.
I was at Columbia, but there were all kinds of groups outside of Columbia, like the American Committee on Africa’s Campaign to Oppose Bank Loans to South Africa. I connected with those efforts while I was still a student. Prexy Nesbitt was a really charismatic organizer for the America Committee on Africa. I was at some event, and he said to me, ‘You got to come join us!’ So I did.
It was small, but there were union folks, independent researchers, people from the American Committee on Africa, Tina Simcich, who did the research on bank loans. We were sort of a little collective dedicated to all that.
On Chile, there was the NACLA stuff about the corporations supporting the 1973 coup and how they would benefit. There were a whole range of Chilean exiles living in my neighborhood at the time. There were people from Allende’s party. There were people from the El Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), which supported armed struggle. There were a lot of demonstrations against the Chilean elite.
There was a resolution at Columbia about supporting trade unionists in Chile, many of whom were murdered by the regime. Our divestment movement asked Columbia to support the resolution, and they said ‘Oh no, we don’t get involved in that. If we have questions about a stock, we’ll sell it.’
Then, a few years later, when we demanded divestment from South Africa, they said, ‘Oh no, we’d rather use our influence from the inside to support shareholder resolutions.’ So, it was the complete opposite within a couple of years. It showed that the earlier refusal to do anything around Chile was just a cover for choosing to not do anything or not feeling enough pressure to do anything.
How do you compare those divestment movements of the 1970s to what we’re seeing today?
Those efforts were different from the current movement around Palestine solidarity. The protesters today are getting hit hard with suspensions. They’re being threatened with losing their jobs. The government is cracking down on free speech and trying to deport people. In that sense, there’s a huge gap between what campus activists are dealing with today and what we were able to do relatively freely.
At Columbia, around five or ten years after our campaign started, the university did actually divest. A year after that, Congress passed comprehensive sanctions against South Africa, overriding Reagan’s veto. That came after I had been doing divestment work for a decade, but there was still a notion that you could win victories, even against conservative governments, if you just stuck with it.
And it was more than just students. There were labor unions. There were churches. Entire municipalities were saying they wouldn’t buy anything from a company that supplies South Africa. The students were a spark — you can grow a student movement quickly, although it doesn’t always persist — but then it spread to all these other institutions.
Of course, people had also been working on this for a while. Students for a Democratic Society staged a divestment demonstration against Chase Manhattan Bank in the 1960s. People had laid groundwork which made it easier to move forward.
What’s important to remember today about the divestment campaign around apartheid South Africa that you were involved in during the 1970s?
The primary reason for the success of the anti-apartheid effort was, of course, the African National Congress (ANC) and its work inside South Africa. They viewed us as a helpful adjunct to what they were doing and were very appreciative of our work in the belly of the beast.
I think the campaign was an important spark and a way to engage students. The research helped us engage more people, but it wouldn’t have had the impact it did without the broader movement — the churches, the unions, local campaigns, and so on.
Divestment is an organizing tool. One of the challenges now for the Palestine solidarity movement, I think, is to get companies to stop supplying Israel even if universities do actually divest. The focus on divestment shouldn’t detract from the broader analysis of what’s really enabling all this. Divestment is a piece of a larger puzzle.
The students know this, and a lot of them are moving into broader research about the wider militarization of their campuses. Often people ask me things, but they know more than I do because they’re on the ground. At the University of Indiana, for example, students showed me detailed research they did on what’s happening on their campus as well as connections to a naval warfare center in southern Indiana that professors are rotating through. If you work with people doing the organizing locally, you can produce much more powerful research than if you do it from afar.
“The research helped us engage more people, but it wouldn’t have had the impact it did without the broader movement — the churches, the unions, local campaigns.”
Can you talk a little bit about how your career evolved?
My first book, which came out in 1994, was called And Weapons for All. It was about U.S. arms sales policy from Nixon to the early Clinton years. Other than a brief moment under Carter, this was a period where the U.S. was really pushing arms sales. A lot of my book was pulling together these little pieces that the press mentions in a one-off and don’t continue to cover.
Once I got the bug of doing this, the next step was building better links to organizations. I wrote a piece for the Nuclear Freeze campaign in the 1980s on the economic consequences of a freeze, trying to combat the notion that our economy would sink if we weren’t making enough weapons of mass destruction. I worked with some labor folks and other advocates, which has colored my approach.
The corporate focus kind of came naturally because the things I was interested in had corporate underpinnings. Not as many people stuck with that angle, so I started doing that. I fed a lot of stuff to activist groups for their public education work. Somebody once called me the “people’s wonk.”
I’ve had kind of a do-it-yourself career. Most of my experience was through the movement, not through school. For years, I’ve done what I can, in whatever time I have, trying to help organizations. It’s intensified now. I talk to organizers a lot about what can help them at this moment.
Can you say more about the role of researchers in movements today? And also, more about the kind of support you’re trying to provide?
I try to help provide context of how local work relates to the bigger picture. I do a lot of public-facing writing and public speaking along with research. I’ve found that if I try to give some sort of exquisite analysis of how powerful the other side is, it’s actually demobilizing. People come away thinking that we can’t take on these powerful forces. I like to focus talks now on victories we’ve had against powerful odds and on people who’ve taken courageous stands.
I try to point out that much of the best work happening now is below the radar. A lot of organizing isn’t going to be on the front page of the New York Times. But the seeds are being sown. The IWW used to say that they were “building the new society in the shell of the old.” I think part of that involves research. It’s also about how we treat each other. We should treat each other the way we want a new society to work.
We have a lot of work to do on that front. I have a lot of younger colleagues whose work is not fully respected. They’re underpaid and having a hard time. Many NGOs are very top-down. Sometimes when we’re in meetings, I think that the old guard really needs to step aside. We need a surge in organizing as well as research.
You’ve been reflecting lately about the legacy of SNCC Research Department and, more broadly, the role of movement power research.
I’ve been trying to learn more about the role of research in the civil rights movement. LittleSis’s article on the SNCC Research Department has been very revealing. I think it was Miles Horton who said that research without organizing is kind of hollow and that you have to have research guided by people on the front lines. Likewise, activism needs to be guided by research and strategy. Ideally, you don’t want somebody like me, sitting in New York, doing the research independently. It should be done by the folks in the organizations. Maybe someone like me can weigh in periodically.
“We need a surge in organizing as well as research.”
Groups like Dissenters, for example, are doing a lot of their own research. They’re using research as a mobilizing tool to engage people. You don’t always want to just hand people research. They need that experience too. And then the research also gets a different focus, because the organizers are really in it.
What kinds of efforts connecting research to action in this current moment do you find inspiring and important to lift up?
Palestinian solidarity and stopping the genocide in Gaza, for one. The initial research into the companies propping up Israel’s occupation was quite impressive. The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), which is kind of reminiscent of NARMIC from back in the day, has a great website on many of the companies. Students have done important independent research into their university portfolios. While obviously not resulting in victory, the movement around Gaza has raised consciousness for a whole generation.
I’ve known a lot of people who put in a few years and then leave. I try to communicate that there’s value in making this work a lifelong commitment.
There’s a lot of movement researchers who are just doing the research on their own. For example, Palestinian Youth Movement did a report on how spare parts get to Israel to keep F-35s going. They found out that some parts go by FedEx out of the San Francisco Airport. They had to go into FedEx’s shipping records, all this stuff that I haven’t really used. I found that quite impressive.
You need to also connect with people on the front lines. A lot of these groups are doing that. For example, there’s a group that was started in New York called Action Corps, a former activist arm of Oxfam. One of their first campaigns was against arming Saudi Arabia during its war in Yemen. Before they got rolling, they talked to all the Yemeni Americans they could find in New York. Academics. Activists. Bodega owners. Their leadership had Yemeni Americans who knew people in Yemen that were suffering. It was a very smart first step.
They pressured Rep. Eliot Engel, who ran the Foreign Affairs committee in the U.S. House back then, and was tight with the Gulf States. They protested his district office. There were a lot of Yemeni Americans in his district that started putting pressure on him. They finally got him to vote against sending arms to Saudi Arabia. He got worried when he had a progressive challenger. Jamaal Bowman defeated him.
That experience, of a relatively small number of people moving an elected official on an issue where there was powerful interest on the other side, is one of the stories I tell people to show that your engagement can matter in ways that you might not even predict.
“I’ve known a lot of people who put in a few years and then leave. I try to communicate that there’s value in making this work a lifelong commitment.”
Are there other issues around militarism that you see as important for power researchers today?
There’s antimilitarist research happening on many issues: the militarization of the border and police, disarmament and military budget, and so on. We know about each other, but we could be better coordinated and more in dialogue, with a better understanding of each other’s priorities.
Nuclear weapons are an existential issue, but so is police violence. We shouldn’t try to make our own causes primary, but rather become educated on the full range of issues, so we can all coordinate as best we can. That could be a beginning to building better connections with the movements more generally.
I’m trying to bring together a loose network of researchers. I’m especially interested in connecting with folks who are doing it on their own. It’s happening. Dissenters did a great webinar with LittleSis about the history of all this. There have been events with the founders of NARMIC. Michael Klare and Mike Locker, who co-wrote “Who Rules Columbia?” in 1968, are still doing research. New activists and researchers are looking back to that stuff now.
I feel like there’s a generational connection developing that didn’t always exist. It makes my work feel somewhat more interesting and valuable, because now there are people who I can really help by speeding up their ability to get the research they need and connect them to the larger historical picture that, maybe while they’re in the crisis of the moment, they haven’t fully taken in.
There’s a lot of power research happening around universities. How do you view institutions of higher education as part of the power structure?
On the one hand, they’re almost more like businesses than they are educational institutions. Most of them will take money from anybody, including the Pentagon and big corporations. A Lockheed Martin board member was, until recently, a trustee of Columbia. A lot of this is hidden, but when it’s exposed it introduces points of contention.
On the other hand, universities historically also house public intellectuals who speak out on issues. For example, the Costs of War Project at Brown University has really thrived. This kind of stuff can happen too.
But now we’re in a period where all the good stuff is being cracked down on viciously. I think much of the best work that will be useful to activists is starting to happen outside of universities. I have friends at universities who are not doing forums on campus anymore and have had funding taken away.
At Columbia, people have been suspended for simply exercising their rights of free speech and assembly. There’s kind of a low-level autocratic regime there now. The crackdown at Columbia was almost like a test run for how Trump is treating people in other areas. It was shameful that administrators caved in so easily.
We had to hit the streets and fight for years to democratize universities a bit. There’s always been this contradiction between where their money comes from and some of their public stances, but there was at least room to do good work. There’s much less room now. We’re disrupting the whole idea that universities are preparing people to participate in a democracy.
I think we have to recapture that terrain of creating spaces for movement education and democracy. It may take a while. I’ve been reading a lot about things like the Highlander School, where research and training of activists was the purpose.
“We had to hit the streets and fight for years to democratize universities a bit. There’s always been this contradiction between where their money comes from and some of their public stances, but there was at least room to do good work. There’s much less room now. We’re disrupting the whole idea that universities are preparing people to participate in a democracy.”
This might sound like a basic question, but why is it important for people organizing against militarism to follow the money?
It can break through the propaganda. For example, my colleagues have done a lot of work on think tanks that receive Pentagon and corporate money. These think tanks present themselves as objective experts and talk about things like the need to “defend against China,” but they’re often just fronts for the weapons’ companies. Instead of the head of Lockheed Martin saying, “Yeah, let’s go to war, I’m going to make a killing on it!”, they instead have think tanks that promote policies that lead to war.
If you look at how much of the money from their defense contracts gets siphoned off into profits, or CEO pay, or involves price gouging – it’s hard to sell that kind of waste and greed as defending anybody. Following the money helps to break through all that.
Also, we need to have solidarity with people inside our own country bearing the brunt of militarism’s harms, like the downwinders in New Mexico who have been fighting for compensation from health problems from the early nuclear tests. My colleague Taylor Barnes’ beat is the local impacts of the Nuclear-Industrial Complex.
When you show people that the military-industrial complex has a direct effect on their lives, and that it’s largely a scam to make money for these corporations, it’s a way to cut through the propaganda. That’s probably more effective in driving a movement than just making theoretical arguments. The money piece can be central.
“If you look at how much of the money from their defense contracts gets siphoned off into profits, or CEO pay, or involves price gouging – it’s hard to sell that kind of waste and greed as defending anybody. Following the money helps to break through all that.”
For organizers up against the military-industrial complex today, what do you think are the most urgent and important things to be focusing on?
The interconnections of how these companies are behind a lot of the problems we face. Palantir is involved in militarization of the border. They provide the algorithm the police used to predict who’s going to commit a crime, which has been shown to have huge racial biases. They’re involved in gutting some civilian agencies under the name of efficiency, similar to what Musk did with the federal government. They’re creating the software for weapons like unpiloted vehicles, unpiloted ships, and unpiloted land vehicles, all of which will make war more likely. Israel uses Palantir software to accelerate its bombing campaigns.
We need to show how there’s a common adversary behind a lot of these issues. More research connecting these dots would be useful.
The Silicon Valley military tech companies have a larger agenda that we need to learn more about. They don’t really believe in democracy. Peter Thiel wants to live forever. Musk wants to colonize space. They have this messianic drive to power. They’re also deeply embedded in the Trump administration. Vance was groomed and funded by Thiel.
It’s not just the Right. The Pentagon’s current approach was heavily influenced by Eric Schmidt, who’s building drones and is a big advocate of AI. He wrote a book about it with Henry Kissinger, The Age of AI and Our Human Future. He’s seen as the more “reasonable” front man for this approach, as opposed to the unhinged tech bros.
I think breaking through all that is important. The new wave tech is particularly challenging because it’s used for surveillance. It’s used to revive the ideology of American primacy. They think once we master the new tech, we’ll restore American greatness and dominate the globe militarily. But that’s never been entirely true. If you look at Vietnam, or the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, technology did not save the U.S. It did huge amounts of damage to people in those countries and to our own veterans.
We need to show how this new wave of tech militarism is not different. They say they’re nimble, cost less, and are the wave of the future. I don’t want them to be the way of the future. I don’t want them making our foreign policy or shaping our democracy. They shouldn’t be some new force trying to rule the country and the world.