Congratulations to Bryan Bender and the Boston Globe for an excellent investigative story on the now-prevalent pattern of flag-rank military officers going to work for defense contractors as soon as they retire.

The story illustrates the pattern I discussed several weeks ago when Peter Orszag, a few months out of a Cabinet-level role with the Obama administration's economic team, took a top-level job with Citibank, which of course owed its survival to federal intervention. I said this was an instance of "structural corruption" in public life that had become so taken for granted that DC insiders considered it beneath mention or notice. (The Washington Post did not run any newspaper item about the move.*)

This graphic, at left, from Bender's story illustrates the everyone-knows-it, few-discuss-it parallel in the defense world. Twenty years ago, fewer than half of retired three- or four-star generals went to work for firms that directly depended on Defense Department business. And back then, in the early 90s, the "revolving door" problem was hardly unknown. (Ten years before that, it was so familiar that I could allude to it as a recognized problem, in my book 'National Defense.' Twenty years before that Dwight Eisenhower had given his famous warning about the "military industrial complex.") Now, around 80% do.

So a problem that's been recognized for at least half a century seems to have become worse than ever -- and yet it's not discussed at all by politicians and rarely in the press. I think this has something to do with the distortions of the "narrow sliver of the population" era of the American military. As SecDef Gates and countless others have pointed out, the whole American nation is in no sense "at war," but the minority who serve (again and again) in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere most definitely have been, for years. Some background sense of unease or guilt may make it harder for politicians to do more than compete in saying that they "support the troops."