Military–industrial complex - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.

org/wiki/Military–industrial_complex

Military–industrial complex
The military–industrial complex (MIC) is an informal
alliance between a nation's military and the defense industry that
supplies it, seen together as a vested interest which influences
public policy.[1][2][3][4] A driving factor behind this relationship
between the government and defense-minded corporations is
that both sides benefit—one side from obtaining war weapons,
and the other from being paid to supply them.[5] The term is
most often used in reference to the system behind the military of
the United States, where it is most prevalent due to close links
between defense contractors, the Pentagon and politicians[6][7]
and gained popularity after a warning on its detrimental effects in
the farewell address of President Dwight D. Eisenhower on
January 17, 1961.[8][9]

In the context of the United States, the appellation is sometimes

extended to military–industrial–congressional complex President Dwight D. Eisenhower
(MICC), adding the U.S. Congress to form a three-sided famously warned U.S. citizens
relationship termed an iron triangle. [10] These relationships about the "military–industrial
include political contributions, political approval for military complex" in his farewell address.
spending, lobbying to support bureaucracies, and oversight of the
industry; or more broadly to include the entire network of
contracts and flows of money and resources among individuals as well as corporations and institutions
of the defense contractors, private military contractors, The Pentagon, the Congress and executive
branch.[11]

Contents
Etymology
Post-Cold War
Eras of the United States Military Industrial Complex
The First Era
The Second Era
The Third (Current) Era
Benefits
The military subsidy theory
Current applications
Similar concepts

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See also
References
Citations
Sources
Further reading
External links

Etymology
President of the United States (and five-star general during 0:00 MENU
World War II) Dwight D. Eisenhower used the term in his Eisenhower's farewell address,
Farewell Address to the Nation on January 17, 1961[12] : January 17, 1961. The term
military–industrial complex is used
at 8:16. Length: 15:30.
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military
establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for
instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be
tempted to risk his own destruction...

This conjunction of an immense military

establishment and a large arms industry is new in the
American experience. The total influence—economic,
political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every
statehouse, every office of the federal government. We
recognize the imperative need for this development.
Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave
implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all
involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the
councils of government, we must guard against the
acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether
sought or unsought, by the military–industrial
complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists, and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination

endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We
should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and
knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper
meshing of the huge industrial and military
machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and
goals so that security and liberty may prosper
together. [emphasis added]

The phrase was thought to have been "war-based" industrial complex before becoming "military" in
later drafts of Eisenhower's speech, a claim passed on only by oral history.[13] Geoffrey Perret, in his
biography of Eisenhower, claims that, in one draft of the speech, the phrase was "military–industrial–

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congressional complex", indicating the essential role that the United States Congress plays in the
propagation of the military industry, but the word "congressional" was dropped from the final version
to appease the then-currently elected officials.[14] James Ledbetter calls this a "stubborn
misconception" not supported by any evidence; likewise a claim by Douglas Brinkley that it was
originally "military–industrial–scientific complex".[14][15] Additionally, Henry Giroux claims that it
was originally "military–industrial–academic complex".[16] The actual authors of the speech were
Eisenhower's speechwriters Ralph E. Williams and Malcolm Moos.[17]

Attempts to conceptualize something similar to a modern "military–industrial complex" existed

before Eisenhower's address. Ledbetter finds the precise term used in 1947 in close to its later
meaning in an article in Foreign Affairs by Winfield W. Riefler.[14][18] 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. Friedrich Hayek mentions in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom the danger of a support of
monopolistic organization of industry from World War II 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 of coercive
control and will find it difficult to reconcile themselves with the humbler roles they will
then have to play [in peaceful times]."[19]

Vietnam War–era activists, such as Seymour Melman, referred frequently to the concept, and use
continued throughout the Cold War: George F. Kennan wrote in his preface to Norman Cousins's 1987
book The Pathology of Power, "Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the
ocean, the American military–industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged,
until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the
American economy."[20]

In the late 1990s James Kurth asserted, "By the mid-1980s ... the
term had largely fallen out of public discussion." He went on to
argue that "[w]hatever 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".[21]
U.S. military presence around the
Contemporary students and critics of U.S. militarism continue to world in 2007. As of 2018, the
refer to and employ the term, however. For example, historian United States still had many bases
Chalmers Johnson uses words from the second, third, and fourth and troops stationed globally.
paragraphs quoted above from Eisenhower's address as an
epigraph to Chapter Two ("The Roots of American Militarism") of
a 2004 volume[22] on this subject. P. 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. federal and the Pentagon.[23]

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.

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Linguist and anarchist theorist Noam Chomsky has suggested that "military–industrial complex" is a
misnomer because (as he considers it) the phenomenon in question "is not specifically military." [24]
He asserts, "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)." [25]

Post-Cold War
United States defense contractors bewailed what they called
declining government weapons spending at the end of the Cold
War.[26][27] They saw escalation of tensions, such as with Russia
over Ukraine, as new opportunities for increased weapons sales,
and have pushed the political system, both directly and through
industry groups such as the National Defense Industrial
Association, to spend more on military hardware. Pentagon United States Defense Spending
contractor-funded American think tanks such as the Lexington 2001–2017
Institute and the Atlantic Council have also demanded increased
spending in view of the perceived Russian threat.[27][28]
Independent Western observers such as William Hartung, director of the Arms & Security Project at
the Center for International Policy, noted that "Russian saber-rattling has additional benefits for
weapons makers because it has become a standard part of the argument for higher Pentagon
spending—even though the Pentagon already has more than enough money to address any actual
threat to the United States."[27][29]

Eras of the United States Military Industrial Complex

The Military Industrial Complex has gone through three distinct eras in its existence.[30]

The First Era

From 1797 to 1941 the government only relied on civilian industries while the country was actually at
war. The government owned their own shipyards and weapons manufacturing facilities which they
relied on through World War I. With World War II came a massive shift in the way that the American
government armed the military.

With the onset of World War II President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the War Production Board
to coordinate civilian industries and shift them into wartime production. Throughout World War II
arms production in the United States went from around one percent of the annual GDP to 40 percent
of the GDP.[30] Various American companies, such as Boeing and General Motors, maintained and
expanded their defense divisions.[30] These companies have gone on to develop various technologies
that have improved civilian life as well, such as night-vision goggles and GPS.[30]

The Second Era

The start of the second era of the Military Industrial Complex is said to start with the coining of the
term by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. This era continued through the Cold War period and finally
saw the end of the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1993 the Pentagon urged

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defense contractors to consolidate due to the collapse of communism and shrinking defense
budget.[30]

The Third (Current) Era

The third era of the Military Industrial Complex has seen the most change as defense contractors
either consolidated or shifted their focus to civilian innovation. From 1992 to 1997 there was a total of
US$55 billion worth of mergers in the defense industry. Major defense companies purchased smaller
defense companies and became the major companies that we know today.[30]

In the current era, the Military Industrial

Complex is seen as a core part of American
policy-making. The American domestic
economy is now tied directly to the success of
the MIC which has led to concerns of
repression as Cold War era attitudes are still
prevalent among the American public.[31]

Shifts in values and the collapse of communism

have ushered in a new era for the Military
Industrial Complex. The Department of
Defense works in coordination with traditional
military industrial complex aligned companies
such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop
Grumman. Many former defense contractors
have shifted operations to the civilian market
and sold off their defense departments.[30] A pie chart showing global military expenditures by
country for 2018, in US$ billions, according to SIPRI.

Benefits
Benefits of the Military Industrial Complex of the United States include the advancement of the
civilian technology market as civilian companies benefit from innovations from the MIC and vice
versa.[32]

The military subsidy theory

The Military Subsidy Theory is the theory that the effects of the Cold War era mass production of
aircraft benefited the civilian aircraft industry. The theory asserts that the technologies developed
during the Cold War along with the financial backing of the military led to the dominance of American
aviation companies. There is also strong evidence that the United States federal government
intentionally paid a higher price for these innovations to serve as a subsidy for civilian aircraft
advancement.[33]

Current applications
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, total world spending on military
expenses in 2018 was $1822 billion. 36% of this total, roughly $649 billion, was spent by the United

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States.[34] The privatization of the production and invention of military technology also leads to a
complicated relationship with significant research and development of many technologies. In 2011,
the United States spent more (in absolute numbers) on its military than the next 13 nations
combined.[35]

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.[36]
This does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget.
Overall the U.S. federal government is spending about $1 trillion annually on defense-related
purposes.[37]

In a 2012 story, Salon reported, "Despite a decline in global arms sales in 2010 due to recessionary
pressures, the United States increased its market share, accounting for a whopping 53 percent of the
trade that year. Last year saw the United States on pace to deliver more than $46 billion in foreign
arms sales."[38] The defense industry also tends to contribute heavily to incumbent members of
Congress.[39]

The concept of a military–industrial complex has been expanded to include the entertainment and
creative[40] industries. For an example in practice, Matthew Brummer describes Japan's Manga
Military and how the Ministry of Defense uses popular culture and the moe that it engenders to shape
domestic and international perceptions.

Similar concepts
A similar thesis was originally expressed by Daniel Guérin, in his 1936 book Fascism and Big
Business, about the fascist government ties 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."[41] An exhibit of the trend was made in Franz
Leopold Neumann's book Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism in 1942, a
study of how Nazism came into a position of power in a democratic state.

See also
Animal industrial complex
Companies by arms sales
Corporate statism
Erik Prince and Academi (formerly Blackwater)
Government contractor
List of countries by military expenditures
Militarism
Military budget From the National Archives

Military-entertainment-complex
Military–industrial–media complex
Military-digital complex
Military Keynesianism

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National security state

Politico-media complex
Prison–industrial complex
Project for the New American Century
Rosoboronexport
Upward Spiral
War profiteering

Literature and media

War Is a Racket (1935 book by Smedley Butler)

Why We Fight (2005 documentary film by Eugene Jarecki)
War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (2007 documentary film)
The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (2008 book by Nick Turse)

References

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Further reading
Adams, Gordon, The Iron Triangle: The Politics of Defense Contracting, 1981.
Andreas, Joel, Addicted to War: Why the U.S. Can't Kick Militarism , ISBN 1-904859-01-1.
Cochran, Thomas B., William M. Arkin, Robert S. Norris, Milton M. Hoenig, U.S. Nuclear
Warhead Production Harper and Row, 1987, ISBN 0-88730-125-8
Cockburn, Andrew, "The Military-Industrial Virus: How bloated budgets gut our defenses",
Harper's Magazine, vol. 338, no. 2029 (June 2019), pp. 61–67. "The military-industrial complex
could be said to be concerned, exclusively, with self-preservation and expansion.... The defense
budget is not propelled by foreign wars. The wars are a consequence of the quest for bigger
budgets."
Colby, Gerard, DuPont Dynasty, New York, Lyle Stuart, 1984.
Friedman, George and Meredith, The Future of War: Power, Technology and American World
Dominance in the 21st Century, Crown, 1996, ISBN 0-517-70403-X
Hossein-Zadeh, Ismael, The Political Economy of US Militarism. New York: Palgrave MacMillan,
2006.
Keller, William W., Arm in Arm: The Political Economy of the Glob al Arms Trade. New York:
Basic Books, 1995.
Kelly, Brian, Adventures in Porkland: How Washington Wastes Your Money and Why They Won't
Stop, Villard, 1992, ISBN 0-679-40656-5
Lassman, Thomas C. "Putting the Military Back into the History of the Military-Industrial
Complex: The Management of Technological Innovation in the U.S. Army, 1945–1960," Isis
(2015) 106#1 pp. 94–120 in JSTOR (https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/681038)

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Mathews, Jessica T., "America's Indefensible Defense Budget", The New York Review of Books,
vol. LXVI, no. 12 (18 July 2019), pp. 23–24. "For many years, the United States has increasingly
relied on military strength to achieve its foreign policy aims.... We are [...] allocating too large a
portion of the federal budget to defense as compared to domestic needs [...] accumulating too
much federal debt, and yet not acquiring a forward-looking, twenty-first-century military built
around new cyber and space technologies." (p. 24.)
McCartney, James and Molly Sinclair McCartney, America's War Machine: Vested Interests,
Endless Conflicts. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015.
McDougall, Walter A., ...The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, Basic
Books, 1985, (Pulitzer Prize for History) ISBN 0-8018-5748-1
Melman, Seymour, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War, McGraw Hill, 1970
Melman, Seymour, (ed.) The War Economy of the United States: Readings in Military Industry
and Economy, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1971.
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External links
Khaki capitalism (http://www.economist.com/node/21540985?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/ar/khakicapitalism )
, The Economist, Dec 3rd 2011
Militaryindustrialcomplex.com (http://www.MilitaryIndustrialComplex.com/), Features running
daily, weekly and monthly defense spending totals plus Contract Archives section.
C. Wright Mills, Structure of Power in American Society, British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 9. No. 1
1958 (http://www.csub.edu/~akebede/SOC502Mills2.pdf)
Dwight David Eisenhower, Farewell Address (http://www.panarchy.org/eisenhower/farewelladdr
ess.html) On the military–industrial complex and the government–universities collusion – 17
January 1961

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Military–industrial complex - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military–industrial_complex

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address (https://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/dwightdeise

nhowerfarewell.html) As delivered transcript and complete audio from AmericanRhetoric.com
William McGaffin and Erwin Knoll, The military–industrial complex (http://www.panarchy.org/stati
sm/military.complex.html), An analysis of the phenomenon written in 1969
The Cost of War & Today's Military Industrial Complex (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.
php?storyId=907187), National Public Radio, 8 January 2003.
Leading Defense Industry news source (http://defenseindustrialbase.blogspot.com/)
Human Rights First; Private Security Contractors at War: Ending the Culture of Impunity (2008)
(https://web.archive.org/web/20100508152055/http://www.humanrightsfirst.info/pdf/08115-usls-
psc-final.pdf)
Fifty Years After Eisenhower's Farewell Address, A Look at the Military–Industrial Complex (htt
p://www.democracynow.org/2011/1/20/fifty_years_after_eisenhowers_farewell_address ) –
video report by Democracy Now!
Military Industrial Complex (http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=vie
w&id=277) – video reports by The Real News
Online documents, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library (https://eisenhower.archives.gov/
research/online_documents/farewell_address.html)
50th Anniversary of Eisenhower's Farewell Address (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhJbjdI
XJWY) – Eisenhower Institute
Part 1 – Anniversary Discussion of Eisenhower's Farewell Address (https://www.youtube.com/w
atch?v=gNL2StZNjmM) – Gettysburg College
Part 2 – Anniversary Discussion of Eisenhower's Farewell Address (https://www.youtube.com/w
atch?v=l46uaYk-OpA) – Gettysburg College

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