Subscribe
Apple | Spotify | Amazon |iHeart Radio | Castbox | Podcast Republic | RSS | Patreon | Discord | Facebook | IMDB
Podcast Transcript
Before the United States entered the Second World War, it had a problem. The military’s administrative staff was spread out all over Washington, D.C., and struggled to function.
The solution was a new massive building.
Built in just 16 months during the urgency of World War II, the Pentagon began as a temporary solution for the wartime bureaucracy and went on to become the nerve center of the largest military establishment in history.
Learn more about the history of the Pentagon on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
The Pentagon has become so iconic that the very word, which is the name of a shape, has come to signify the American defense establishment.
Yet, why did this building become associated with the American military, and what is the deal with a five-sided shape?
It all goes back to the period before the United States entered World War II. Despite not yet being in the war, the American military was expanding rapidly. In 1941, the U.S. War Department had 24,000 personnel scattered among 17 buildings in Washington, D.C., and that number was expected to reach 30,000 by the following year.
Roosevelt had already approved a new War Department facility in Washington’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood, but by the time it was ready to open, it was deemed far too small. In 1947, this facility would become the headquarters of the U.S. State Department.
Moreover, the Roosevelt administration knew that if the United States entered World War II, the military bureaucracy would further expand almost overnight. Army Brigadier General Brehon B. Sommervell pushed for a single, massive headquarters to consolidate War Department operations and enable the military to function more efficiently.
At the time, it was not imagined as a permanent facility for the American military. It was supposed to be a temporary wartime measure, and some planners assumed it might later be converted into a hospital, warehouse, or other civilian use after the war ended.
The first location that was selected was Arlington Farms, near Arlington National Cemetery. That parcel was bounded by several roads, which meant the building had to be an odd five-sided shape to fit into the space. The original proposal had an awkward five-sided shape that wasn’t symmetric like the current building.
President Roosevelt later shifted the building site slightly, partly to avoid obstructing views from Arlington Cemetery toward Washington, but the idea of a Pentagon-shaped building remained.
The shape turned out to be practical. A five-sided, low-rise structure could hold an enormous number of workers while keeping walking distances manageable. President Roosevelt initially favored a building without windows to protect it from potential air raids, but he was later convinced by engineers that such a facility would be impractical. He eventually supported a five-sided design by architect George Edwin Bergstrom
Construction began on September 11, 1941, a date that would carry enormous historical weight sixty years later.
The building was an engineering marvel built under extraordinary pressure and constraints. Wartime urgency meant the Pentagon was completed in record time, just 16 months, using 15,000 construction workers who worked in shifts around the clock.
Steel was rationed for the war effort, so the Pentagon was built almost entirely of reinforced concrete. The raw materials involved were staggering. Five-and-a-half million cubic yards of earth and 41,492 concrete piles were necessary for the foundation, as well as 680,000 tons of sand and gravel from the Potomac that were processed into 435,000 cubic yards of concrete.
In addition to having five sides, the building has five above-ground stories and consists of five concentric rings. The rings are labeled from the inside outward, A through E, with the E Ring being the outer ring and historically associated with senior offices because it has exterior windows.
There are also 10 spoke-like corridors connecting all the rings. Despite its enormous scale, it is possible to walk between any two points within the building in approximately seven minutes.
The low-rise layout reflected Washington-area planning norms and a desire to avoid creating a skyscraper military headquarters within eyesight of the capital.
The Pentagon’s first employees moved in on April 30, 1942, even as construction continued around them. The building officially opened on January 14, 1943. At its completion at a cost of $83 million, the Pentagon was the world’s largest office building, covering 29 acres, including a 5-acre central court, and containing roughly 3,700,000 square feet of usable floor space for approximately 25,000 people.
During World War II, the Pentagon became the operating center of the War Department. It coordinated a global conflict involving millions of American service members, huge industrial mobilization, and military operations across Europe, North Africa, the Pacific, and Asia. At its wartime peak, it housed more than 33,000 people.
The building was not just office space; it was the administrative machinery of American military power. Decisions, orders, logistics, communications, and planning flowed through it on a scale the United States had never previously attempted.
After the war, the original idea that the Pentagon would be temporary was quickly thrown out the window. The United States did not demobilize back to its prewar posture.
The Cold War, nuclear weapons, NATO, the Korean War, the growth of the Air Force, and various global commitments all required a much larger military establishment.
In 1947, the National Security Act created the modern national military establishment, bringing the military services under a new structure. In 1949, that organization was renamed the Department of Defense.
The Pentagon became the headquarters of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the senior leadership of the armed services.
That postwar transformation changed the building’s meaning. It was no longer just a wartime office complex. It became what is known as a metonym for the American military itself. Saying “the Pentagon” came to mean not only the physical building, but the Department of Defense, senior military leadership, defense policy, and sometimes American power more broadly.
During the Cold War, it was where military planning for Korea and Vietnam took place, as well as for nuclear deterrence, NATO defense, intelligence coordination, arms races, and worldwide contingency planning. The Department of Defense’s own historical office describes it as a building, an institution, and a symbol.
The building also became a focus of protest and public debate. During the Vietnam War, especially, the Pentagon symbolized the military establishment to anti-war activists. The 1967 March on the Pentagon became one of the most famous protests of the era.
Over time, the building aged badly. It had been built in haste during wartime, and many of its systems were outdated by the late 20th century. Electrical systems, communications networks, heating, cooling, plumbing, safety features, and interior layouts all needed major modernization.
Renovation became an enormous challenge because the Pentagon could not simply shut down. It had to remain open as the United States’ military headquarters while it was being rebuilt from the inside.
The Pentagon Renovation Program, known as PENREN, lasted from 1991 to 2011 and worked through the building one wedge at a time, each wedge representing one-fifth of the building. The program replaced building systems, modernized information technology, improved security, relocated tens of thousands of personnel, and renovated the building while the complex remained operational around the clock.
The Pentagon was proclaimed a National Historic Landmark in 1992.
After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the Pentagon’s renovation plans took on a much stronger security focus. The attack showed that a truck bomb could destroy or severely damage a major federal building, so planners began treating the Pentagon not just as an aging office complex, but as a potential target.
The main changes included blast-resistant windows, structural hardening, stronger exterior walls in renovated areas, and the addition of protective materials, such as Kevlar, in some walls.
Plans also called for moving vulnerable public access points farther from the building, including changes to the bus and Metro entrance areas, new security screening facilities, crash gates, pop-up vehicle barriers, and a remote delivery facility where trucks and packages could be inspected before approaching the building.
By September 11, 2001, the renovations were in their final stages. That day, shortly after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City, American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon’s first floor west wall at 9:37 a.m. The date was, with grim irony, the 60th anniversary of the Pentagon’s groundbreaking.
The hijacked jet struck the building at about a 45-degree angle, causing catastrophic damage to support columns on the first and second floors. It penetrated the three outermost rings of the Pentagon, passing from Wedge 1 into Wedge 2 as it disintegrated.
The impact, explosion, and ensuing fire killed all 59 victims on the aircraft and 125 people in the Pentagon, including 29 of the 30 naval officers at work in the new Navy Command Center.
Remarkably, the building’s original construction choices minimized the death toll. The building’s steel-reinforced concrete and brick construction protected most employees in Wedges 1 and 2 from fires and explosions, which saved their lives.
Due to renovations, many who would have been killed were elsewhere in the building at the time of the attack. The section also received the Oklahoma City bombing upgrades, including blast-proof windows and Kevlar in the walls, which helped minimize the death toll.
The damage done by the terrorist attack required yet another renovation, really a rebuilding, of the damaged section.
The Pentagon Renovation team developed a plan called the Phoenix Project: the complete demolition and rebuilding of the 400,000-square-foot damaged section within a year. The renovation of Wedges 2 through 5 would continue, originally scheduled for completion in 2014 but accelerated with emergency Congressional funding.
With the accelerated plan the schedule was reduced to four years. At the peak of activity, more than 3,500 workers toiled away at the site, working wedge to wedge while the Department of Defense continued to function at full strength.
Today, the Pentagon isn’t just an office building. It effectively functions like a small city.
The Pentagon is directly connected to the Washington Metro system at Pentagon Station, served by the Blue and Yellow lines. It is also served by a major bus facility, the Pentagon Transit Center, making it one of the most important commuter transfer points in Northern Virginia.
Inside, movement is mostly horizontal rather than vertical. The Pentagon is not a tower, so people move through corridors, rings, and radial spokes more than they use the elevators. The building has about 17.5 miles of corridors, but the layout is efficient because the rings and spokes create many direct routes.
Stairs are common throughout the building, and elevators are present, but the original building relied heavily on ramps and stairs, in part because steel was scarce during World War II construction.
The Department of Defense has noted that until 2011, there was only one passenger elevator, and it was reserved for the Secretary of Defense. The major renovation program added accessibility and circulation improvements, including additional elevators, as the building was brought up to current standards.
I’ll end with one final oddity about the Pentagon. It has far more restrooms than are necessary for a building of its size. When the Pentagon was built in 1941 and 1942, it was located in Virginia, which still operated under Jim Crow segregation. Because of that, the original plans included separate restrooms and dining facilities for white and Black employees.
On June 25, 1941, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which banned racial discrimination in defense industries and federal defense agencies. Because plans were already underway, the building simply has more restrooms than necessary.
The Pentagon remains one of the most important buildings in the world. With 17.5 miles of corridors and a total floor area of 6.6 million square feet, it is a military complex like no other. It houses the offices of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the leadership of all branches of the U.S. armed forces.
The irony of the Pentagon is that it was built as a temporary solution and became one of the most permanent symbols of the American government.
