Cheyenne Tretter: Private Arms, Public Consequences: Rethinking Arms Competition and War in the Age of U.S. Defense Industry Privatization

This talk will feature Cheyenne Tretter, PhD Candidate at Columbia University, in conversation with BRSL Senior Research Scholar Dr. Cameron Tracy. The post-Cold War transformation of the U.S. defense industry has fundamentally altered the dynamics of global arms competition and the connection between arms racing and the risk of war. Cheyenne Tretter argues that increasing levels of privatization have transformed U.S. arms production by shifting arms racing from an episodic to a continuous phenomenon, and that this shift increases the risk of war by creating information problems that hinder adversaries’ ability to assess each other’s capabilities and intentions. To evaluate this argument, Tretter constructs a large-N dataset of U.S. weapons systems from 1900 to the present, with each system coded by domain, level of private involvement, and whether its development or modernization was initiated during a period of heightened tensions or relative peace. This dataset demonstrates a structural break: pre-1991 arms development clustered around crises and intense rivalries, whereas post-1991 development occurs continuously. Complementing this, qualitative case studies of Cold War missile racing, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and U.S.–China competition in the Taiwan Strait test whether privatization increases the likelihood of war initiation, and further examine how privatization influences wartime adaptation.