“The Pentagon’s ‘honeypot’: A webcast.”

Molly McCartney on ‘the stunning numbers.’

MARCH 31—Today The Scrum welcomes the author and journalist Molly McCartney. Given McCartney’s principal subject, I cannot think of anyone more pertinent to invite into our pages. 

Our discussion focused on what I and many others consider the best account of the U.S. military-industrial complex to come out during the past several decades. McCartney wrote America’s War Machine (St. Martin’s Press) with her late husband, Knight-Ridder’s longtime Washington correspondent, James McCartney. The book received widely positive notices when it came out some years ago. Library Journal called it “sobering yet essential account of the defense industry … for anyone curious about the evolution and influence of our contemporary military-industrial complex.” Thomas W. Lippman, the former national security correspondent for the Washington Post, said of America’s War Machine, “Nobody knew the inside of the great Washington machine better than Jim McCartney. His knowledge, fortified by the perceptive reporting and graceful, sensitive writing of Molly Sinclair McCartney, makes a compelling combination and an essential book.”

McCartney’s career as a reporter spanned more than 30 years at five newspapers, including 10 years at the Miami Herald and 15 at the Washington Post, where she wrote under the byline Molly Sinclair. She was a Wilson Center Public Policy Scholar in 2012. McCartney holds a degree in liberal studies from Georgetown University and later received a prestigious Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University.

 McCartney and I discussed the various components of the war machine, as well the role foreign money plays in oiling its cogs and the oftentimes dubious role so-called “think tanks” play in Washington's foreign policy process. 

McCartney also serves on the Board of the Committee for the Republic, one of Washington’s most important and innovative organizations, which seeks to restore sanity and, above all, the precepts of the Constitution to American foreign policy.