President
Dwight Eisenhower famously referred to the "military-industrial complex" in his farewell address.
(
MIC) is a concept commonly used to refer to
policy relationships between
governments, national
armed forces, and
industrial support they obtain from the
commercial sector in political approval for research, development, production, use, and support for military training, weapons, equipment, and facilities within the national defense and security policy. It is a type of
iron triangle.
The term is most often played in reference to the military of the
United States, where it gained popularity after its use in the of President
Dwight D. Eisenhower, though the term is applicable to any country with a similarly developed infrastructure.
It is sometimes used more broadly to include the entire network of contracts and flows of money and resources among individuals as well as institutions of the
defense contractors,
The Pentagon, and the
Congress and
Executive branch. This sector is intrinsically prone to
principal-agent problem,
moral hazard, and
rent seeking. Cases of
political corruption have also surfaced with regularity.
A similar thesis was originally expressed by
Daniel Guérin, in his 1936 book
Fascism and Big Business, about the
fascist government support to heavy industry. It can be defined as, “an informal and changing coalition of groups with vested psychological, moral, and material interests in the continuous development and maintenance of high levels of weaponry, in preservation of colonial markets and in military-strategic conceptions of internal affairs”
History
Technology has always been a part of
warfare.
Neolithic tools were used as weapons before recorded history. The
bronze age and
iron age saw the rise of complex industries geared towards the manufacture of weaponry. These industries also had practical
peacetime applications, as well; industries making swords in times of war could make plowshares in times of peace, for example. However, it was not until the 19th or 20th century that military weaponry became sufficiently complicated as to require a large subset of industrial effort solely dedicated to warfare.
Firearms,
artillery,
steamships, and later
aircraft and
nuclear weapons were markedly different from ancient or medieval
swords -- these new weapons required years of specialized labor, as opposed to part-time effort.
The first modern MICs arose in
Britain,
France and
Germany in the 1880s and 1890s as part of the need to defend their respective empires either on the ground or at sea.
The naval rivalry between
Britain and
Germany and
France and their revenge sentiment against
German Empire that followed the
Franco-Prussian war was of utmost significance in the inception, growth and development of these MICs.
Conversely, the existence of these three nations' respective MICs may have been the source of these military tensions. Officers like Admiral
Jackie Fisher influenced the shift toward faster technological integration (which meant closer relationships with private, innovative companies). Similar MICs soon followed in nations like
Japan and the United States.
Industrialists who played a part in the arms industry of this era included
Alfred Krupp,
Samuel Colt,
William G. Armstrong,
Alfred Nobel, and
Joseph Whitworth.
Furthermore, the length of time necessary to build weapons
systems of high
complexity and massive integration required pre-planning and construction even during times of peace; thus a portion of the economies of the
great powers (and, later, the
superpowers), was dedicated and maintained solely for the purpose of defense (and war). This trend of coupling some industries towards military activity gave rise to the concept of a "partnership" between the military and
private enterprise.
The term is often used to refer to the "complex" in the context of the
United States, where the term came into wide use by the public, following its introduction by
President Dwight Eisenhower in his "Farewell Address"; the U.S. has a complex which, on an annual basis, accounts for 47% of the world's total arms expenditures . This also may be due to the historical pattern of the previous ~70 years of military expenditures by the United States; prior to
World War I, the U.S. maintained a small military (in comparison to its peers) in times of peace and instead relied on
militia or, in later years,
reserves, in the event of war; indeed, large-scale spending for arms in times of peace has always been looked upon with suspicion by the people of the United States.
Though the United States never completely demobilized following
World War I, and standing forces were maintained to a greater extent in the years that followed it,
World War II was the driving force that utterly changed this historical pattern of general neglect of the military. During the Second World War, the United States underwent total mobilization of all available national resources to fight and win, alongside her allies, a
total war against
Nazi Germany and
Imperial Japan, a mobilization of resources far greater than that which took place during the entire previous history of the United States. At the end of the war, East Asia was gravely damaged, and Europe was devastated and literally decimated; several European states abandoned their colonial empires, faced by a loss of moral legitimacy, national will, and military strength; and the United States and the
Soviet Union stood as the two remaining great powers left in the world, from that point, known as superpowers.
The United States and the Soviet Union grew suspicious and hostile to one another; faced with a threat immediately following the Second World War, the U.S. only partially demobilized, and left in place a sizable apparatus of military production and large naval, air, and land forces. This period, called the
Cold War, represented a 45-year period of low-intensity, unconventional conflict between the superpowers, with the ongoing potential to metastasize into a
nuclear conflict that could happen with only
minutes of notice, could possibly destroy both superpowers, cause a new
Dark Age, and might even result in the extinction of the human species. And in this time overshadowed by acronyms like M.A.D. (
Mutual Assured Destruction) and N.U.T.S. (
Nuclear Utilization Target Selection), the military-industrial complex rose to great prominence, and power, in the United States.
It is difficult to estimate the degree of dependence of the U.S. economy on its military and defense spending, but it is clearly enormous, and legislators fiercely resist defense cuts that affect their districts. In
Washington State, an economist estimated in 2002 that in Western Washington 166,000 jobs, or about 15% of the workforce, depended directly or indirectly on military installations alone, not counting defense industries. In Washington State overall in
FY2001, about $7.06 billion arrived in
U.S. Department of Defense payroll, pensions, and procurement contracts—and Washington State was only seventh among the fifty states in this regard. Overall, U.S. spending on defense acquisitions and research is equal to 1.2% of the
GDP.
In 1977, after the Vietnam war and the Watergate crisis, President Jimmy Carter began his presidency with what historian Michael Sherry has called "a determination to break from America's militarized past" (
In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s [New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995], p. 342). However, increased defense spending in the era of President
Ronald Reagan is seen by some to have brought the military-industrial complex back into prominence.
Origin of the term
![Eisenhower's farewell address, January 17, 1961. Length 15:30.]()
Eisenhower's farewell address, January 17, 1961. Length 15:30.
(and former
General of the Army)
Dwight D. Eisenhower used the term in his
Farewell Address to the Nation on January 17, 1961:
In the penultimate draft of the address, Eisenhower initially used the term
military-industrial-congressional complex, and thus indicated the essential role that the
United States Congress plays in the propagation of the military industry. But, it is said, that the president chose to strike the word
congressional in order to placate members of the legislative branch of the federal government. The actual authors of the term were Eisenhower's speech-writers
Ralph E. Williams and
Malcolm Moos. Shortly after Eisenhower's address, the issue of military-industrial-congressional influence came to the forefront after Kennedy canceled the
B-70 bomber on March 28, 1961. After appropriations bills had been passed and signed with B-70 funding that Kennedy would not use, the
House Armed Services Committee (with 21 members having B-70 work in their districts) subsequently attempted to "
direct" -- by law—the Executive Branch to use "
the full amount" appropriated for the B-70. However, a March 19, 1962 eleventh hour
White House Rose Garden agreement by chairman
Carl Vinson retracted the language from the appropriations bill, and the B-70 cancellation remained permanent.
Attempts to conceptualize something similar to a modern "military-industrial complex" existed before Eisenhower's address. In 1956, sociologist
C. Wright Mills had claimed in his book
The Power Elite that a class of military, business, and political leaders, driven by mutual interests, were the real leaders of the state, and were effectively beyond democratic control.
Also F. A. Hayek mentions in his 1944 book
The Road to Serfdom the danger of a support of monopolistic organisation of industry from WWII political remnants:
"Another element which after this war is likely to strengthen the tendencies in this direction will be some of the men who during the war have tasted the powers if coercive control and will find it difficult to reconcile themselves with the humbler roles they will then have to play [in peaceful times]."
Vietnam War-era activists, such as
Seymour Melman, referred frequently to the concept. In the late 1990s
James Kurth asserted, "[b]y the mid-1980s the term had largely fallen out of public discussion... whatever the power of arguments about the influence of the military-industrial complex on weapons procurement during the
Cold War, they are much less relevant to the current era."
Contemporary students and critics of American
militarism continue to refer to and employ the term, however. For example, historian
Chalmers Johnson uses words from the second, third, and fourth paragraphs quoted above from Eisenhower's address as an
epigraph to Chapter Two ("The Roots of American Militarism") of a recent volume on this subject.
Peter W. Singer's book concerning
private military companies illustrates contemporary ways in which industry, particularly an information-based one, still interacts with the U.S. Government and the Pentagon.
The expressions
permanent war economy and war corporatism are related concepts that have also been used in association with this term.
The term is also used to describe comparable collusion in other political entities such as the
German Empire (prior to and through the first world war), Britain, France and (post-Soviet)
Russia.
Noam Chomsky has suggested that "military-industrial complex" is a misnomer because (as he considers it) the phenomenon in question "is not specifically military." He claims, "There is no military-industrial complex: it's just the industrial system operating under one or another pretext (defense was a pretext for a long time)."
Current Applications
Total world spending on military expenses in 2006 was $1.158 trillion US dollars. Nearly half of this total, 528.7 billion US dollars, was spent by the United States. The privatization of the production and invention of military technology also leads to a complicated relationship with significant research and development of many technologies.
The
Military budget of the United States for the 2009 fiscal year was $515.4 billion. Adding emergency discretionary spending and supplemental spending brings the sum to $651.2 billion.
[http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy09/pdf/budget/defense.pdf] This does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget. Overall the United States government is spending about $1 trillion annually on defense-related purposes.
Cultural references
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address is featured at the beginning of the 1991 film JFK.
- The Eisenhower farewell address footage is used in a trailer for the video game Army of Two.
- A select portion of the speech is included in the song "End of Days (Part 2)" by the band Ministry on their final studio album The Last Sucker.
- The Rage Against The Machine song "Bulls on Parade" alludes to the military-industrial complex. (Weapons not food, not homes, not shoes, not need just feed the war cannibal animal... What we don't know keeps the contracts alive and moving)
- In the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four it is explained that the endless wars fought in it were solely for economic reasons very like the military-industrial complex.
- The Matthew Reilly novel Scarecrow has as its major antagonists a group of leaders of a worldwide military-industrial complex, hellbent on starting a worldwide war to increase its profits.
- The video game Civilization Revolution contains the Military-Industrial Complex as one of its wonders, which you can build after discovering The Corporation.
- The Juan Bosch book: El Pentagonismo, Sustituto del Imperialismo (Pentagonism, substitute of the imperialism), refers constantly to the military-industrial complex and is based around the theory or fact that the United States is a Pentagonized society which international policy is not controlled by the civil government, it is controlled by the Pentagonism that needs frequent wars anywhere so it can generate wealth by the creation of industries, and jobs created by the weapon manufactury contracts, etc.
- The cinema-concert Prophecies of War uses Eisenhower's inaugural and military industrial complex speech as the basis for the production.
- The dad from Dharma and Greg frequently referred to this.
See also
Sources
- DeGroot, Gerard J. Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War, 144, London & New York: Longman, 1996, ISBN 0-582-06138-5
- Eisenhower, Dwight D. Public Papers of the Presidents, 1035-40. 1960.
- ________. "Farewell Address." In The Annals of America. Vol. 18. 1961-1968: The Burdens of World Power, 1-5. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1968.
- Hartung, William D. World Policy Journal 18, no. 1 (Spring 2001).
- Johnson, Chalmers The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004
- Kurth, James. "Military-Industrial Complex." In The Oxford Companion to American Military History, ed. John Whiteclay Chambers II, 440-42. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
- Nelson, Lars-Erik. "Military-Industrial Man." In New York Review of Books 47, no. 20 (Dec. 21, 2000): 6.
- Mills, C.Wright."Power Elite", New York,1956
