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AbstractThere are a number of influences on how long an agency head serves. The importance of particular influences, in turn, depends on the prospective destination of the agency head: elsewhere in the public sector, the private sector, or retirement. The authors estimate survival models of agency heads' tenure using panel data on British central government executive agencies from 1989 to 2012. Findings suggest that chief executives of poorly performing agencies are encouraged to retire sooner. There is no evidence that a change in political control increases the risk of any form of exit, suggesting that political pressure to leave is not substantial for this type of official. Outsiders—agency heads recruited from outside central government—are relatively difficult to retain for a longer time, such that potential shortfalls in suitable managers caused by retirements in an aging workforce may be difficult to make up by appointing from this source.

AbstractWe normally think of government agencies as acting in a purely rational and instrumental way. In the case of intelligence agencies, we presume they rely on reason and science to protect the national interest. By contrast, the general view of secret societies and occult groups is that they engage in rituals and practices that have little or nothing to do with normal social intercourse, or even with reality. This article shows that these common assumptions are false, and that secret societies and intelligence agencies share many important traits. Our understanding of the CIA's role in supporting the production of Hollywood movies will be enhanced by taking these similarities into account. Intelligence work and the operations of secret societies are shown to overlap in five categories: religious underpinnings, occult practices to control the mind, cryptography, violations of social convention, and cryptic transparency—the ability to carry out secret activities in plain sight. These affinities explain why the CIA can promote movies that are actually quite candid in their revelation of the dark underside of the Agency. In so doing, the CIA projects a subliminal message that whatever questionable actions it takes are justified by a higher good, which can only be known by insiders.

AbstractThe CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense are both engaged in programs to influence the content of movies produced by Hollywood studios. Although they claim their only purpose in these ventures is to guarantee the accuracy of how military and intelligence activities are conducted, it is clear that their agenda goes beyond that goal. Their true aims include ensuring that movies project a positive image of the relevant government agencies. However, the CIA and DoD differ in their understanding of what constitutes good publicity. Films scrutinized and supported by military agencies are primarily evaluated according to whether they provide a vehicle for showing the technical and organizational competence of the Pentagon. To that end, films based on comic book characters or extraterrestrial invaders are viewed positively because they show the war‐fighting capacity of the military without having to name any actual enemy. The CIA, by contrast, prefers to support films that enable citizens to develop a stronger sense of patriotism in a world of moral ambiguities. As a result, the CIA is much less fearful of revealing the dark side of its undertakings, as long as a given movie presents a story that shows the value of the CIA in protecting the security of the nation.

AbstractThis article examines how the latest film in a series of movies about a dinosaur theme park, Jurassic World, became entangled in the politics of military representations in popular culture. Beginning with the ways in which the Pentagon has influenced the film industry in the 9/11 media environment, we go on to detail how Jurassic World enacts the current high‐tech military research into biowarfare—weaponizing animals and defining nature as the ultimate killing machine. In the film, the dino‐stars are harnessed into battle to protect the humans, led by a former Navy soldier who takes a pack of Velociraptors, and filmgoers, on a thrilling hunt to destroy a bioengineered, genetically modified dino‐monster. Though the film offers a commercial critique of designing animals purely for profit, it fails to challenge the profit‐making ties between the military industries, weapons technology, and corporate entertainment media. Character depictions, narrative, and visual and filmic storytelling devices are explored in order to identify the tropes directing the film's message. Ultimately, Jurassic World presents the military's new frontier of biowarfare with enthusiasm, not skepticism, and Hollywood welcomes a "brave new world" in which the biological world has been harnessed for military purposes.

AbstractUntil Umberto Eco developed a semiotic analysis of Ian Fleming's series of novels with James Bond as the protagonist, few literary critics took them seriously. That was a mistake. There are many layers of meaning in Fleming's simple prose, and some of those layers may still elude analysts. The Bond series of books and novels have been mined for ideas about cultural change, sexuality, politics, consumerism, the body as symbol, and other features of the Bond persona. Yet, all of these methods of analysis fail to dig beneath the surface. To fully comprehend the character of James Bond, this article suggests that one must take into account the imperialism of the author, Ian Fleming, who strongly believed in the national destiny of England. Another crucial feature that underlies the motivations of James Bond is the ideology of eugenics, which Fleming wholeheartedly embraced. Finally, some features of the Bond series only make sense if one considers the mystical and alchemical beliefs of Fleming. The heroic archetype of James Bond is not merely a symbol of patriotism. Bond, in a sense, is an alchemist who is able to draw upon elements of fantasy to bring about a purpose that is even higher than nationalism.

AbstractThe "military shooter" (MS) video game is the latest in a long line of video games that immerse the player in a fantasy world. Although the MS video game was once regarded as excessively violent, it has now become socially acceptable, as the virtues of military life have become incorporated in popular culture. That transition has taken place in part because the military has begun to work closely with the producers of MS video games, such as the "Call of Duty" series, to imagine and prepare for future military threats, both on virtual battlefields and on actual terrain. The increasing use of highly paid corporate mercenaries in actual war zones has also influenced game play by introducing players to the potential for large financial rewards by becoming experts in virtual combat. Thus, MS video games incorporate players not only into the technological domain of modern warfare but also into the economic domain of fighting war for profit. In the post 9/11 era, warfare has increasingly become a strategy of risk management, in which the battlefield is less a physical space than a semiotic landscape of conflicting loyalties and financial incentives. The MS shooter game is conditioning the soldiers of the future to fight in this shadowy world that lies between the virtual and the real. All of these changes have political ramifications. In the long run, constant exposure to these games is creating a subculture that is not only immersed in an armament culture but also increasingly allied with current patterns of geopolitical domination and subordination.

AbstractThis article examines how the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and Hollywood collaborated to manufacture the blockbuster films Transformers (T) and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (TRF) to sell in global markets and to sell a positive image of DoD personnel, policy, technology, and practice to the world. T and TRF are global militainment films made by the "DoD‐Hollywood complex" to make money in markets and put the U.S. military before the world in a positive light. To show how, the article's first section defines the "DoD‐Hollywood complex," presents a brief 20th‐century history of its formation, and describes the current DoD institutions, policies, and practices that fuse DoD publicity agencies to Hollywood filmmakers. The second section highlights how DoD assisted T and TRF's production and contemplates why Hollywood solicited DoD support. The third section shows how T and TRF put DoD in a positive light. The conclusion addresses some of the consequences of T and TRF with regard to democratic theory. By showing T and TRF to be global militainment commodities, this article interrogates the nexus of "reel" and "real" U.S. military power and sheds light on how DoD interacts with Hollywood studios to influence how it gets screened by entertainment media and seen by global spectators.

AbstractFictionalized accounts, particularly feature films, about the Soviet‐Afghan War in the 1980s have played a significant role in shaping public opinion about the history of the region and issues related to Islamic militancy. Novels and films in the West have portrayed the Soviet army as brutal and genocidal and the mujahideen who resisted the invaders as "freedom fighters." Russian movies have also portrayed the soldiers in a somewhat negative light and the mujahideen as evil terrorists. No fictional treatment has provided enough background to the conflict to reveal that the Russians entered Afghanistan only to provide support to a communist regime that had gained power on its own, and none have revealed the extent of aid from the United States, the United Kingdom, Iran, Pakistan, and China to the mujahideen. The CIA sponsored Charlie Wilson's War, the movie that comes closest to capturing the larger context of the war, but even in that case, crucial elements were removed from early drafts of the script that presented a more complex and accurate picture of the war. In particular, movies have failed to explore the possible links between U.S. support for mujahideen in the 1980s and violent attacks by Islamic extremists since 2001. The one exception is Charlie Wilson's War, where changes to the script had the result of downplaying and trivializing those links.

AbstractHerbert Kaufman's The Forest Ranger is considered a landmark study of how organizations can be structured to elicit compliance from field officials, yet there have been few attempts to validate Kaufman's claims. The author argues that the outcomes observed by Kaufman resulted from interplay between organizational structure and political context—a variable that Kaufman ignored. This argument is supported by case studies of two agencies with structures similar to Kaufman's U.S. Forest Service but poorer outcomes: the same agency today and India's forest departments. Both differences in organizational structure and poorer outcomes are found to be the result of political context. Specifically, coalitions assembled around agencies use the implementation process to shape outcomes in ways that could not be accomplished solely through changing laws or formal administrative structure. This points to the importance of building supportive field‐level coalitions to complement administrative reforms.