In a nation, those industries that provide materiel for the military, together with the military establishment itself. As defined by M. L. Stackhouse (1971) with reference to the USA, ‘a specific set of impersonal, interlocking institutional structures, rooted in the history of urban industrial society and in the specific conflicts in America’s emergence as a world power. It is governed by generalized value patterns that transcend ordinary political ideology; it is undergirded by a matrix of personal, contractual, and fiscal linkages, and it is centred in the relationships of the Department of Defense to major corporations’. Barnes (2008) Geoforum 31, 9, 3 refers to it as a ‘cyborg entity’.