Military–industrial complex

The military–industrial complex (MIC) is a phrase originally coined by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower to describe the relationship between the military and the defense industry that supplies it with weapons, equipment, and services.

Originally, the military-industrial complex referred to the nexus of defense contractors and policymakers that existed in the United States during the early Cold War, but it has since been applied to similar arrangements in other countries and time periods. The phrase implies a commonality of interest and action between MIC actors that influences public policy, and it is often applied in a critical or pejorative sense. Conceptually, it is closely related to the ideas of the iron triangle (the three-sided relationship between Congress, the executive branch bureaucracy, and interest groups) and the defense industrial base (the network of organizations, facilities, and resources that supplies governments with defense-related goods and services).

Etymology

In his farewell address, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned U.S. citizens about the "military–industrial complex".

Eisenhower's farewell address, January 17, 1961. The term military–industrial complex is used at 8:16. Length: 15:30

U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower originally coined the term in his Farewell Address to the Nation on January 17, 1961:

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. Geoffrey Perret, in his biography of Eisenhower, claims that, in one draft of the speech, the phrase was "military–industrial–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. 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". Additionally, Henry Giroux claims that it was originally "military–industrial–academic complex". The actual authors of the speech were Eisenhower's speechwriters Ralph E. Williams and Malcolm Moos.

The MIC and the Cold War

The 20 largest US defense contractors as of 2022 ranked by their defense revenue.

Attempts to conceptualize something similar to a modern "military–industrial complex" did exist before 1961, as the underlying phenomenon described by the term is generally agreed to have emerged during or shortly after World War II. For example, a similar phrase was used in a 1947 Foreign Affairs article in a sense close to that it would later acquire, and sociologist C. Wright Mills contended in his 1956 book The Power Elite that a democratically unaccountable class of military, business, and political leaders with convergent interests exercised the preponderance of power in the contemporary West. Some sociologists have also connected it to Harold Lasswell's concept of the "garrison state" and James Burnham's notion of the "managerial revolution."

However, following its coinage in Eisenhower's address, the MIC became a staple of American political and sociological discourse. Many Vietnam War–era activists and polemicists, such as Seymour Melman and Noam Chomsky employed the concept in their criticism of U.S. foreign policy, while other academics and policymakers found it to be a useful analytical framework. The MIC was often advanced as both a symptom and a cause of broader dynamics such as militarism, economic centralization, and the influence of the private sector over public policy. Writing in 1968, for example, one economist argued that, in the case of the MIC:

Government not only permits and facilitates the entrenchment of private power but serves as its fountain-head. It creates and institutionalizes power concentrations which tend to breed on themselves and to defy public control... Lacking a network of government-owned arsenals, such as produced the shot and cannon in the days of American innocence, or having dismantled the arsenals it did have, the government is forced to buy what it no longer can make. It becomes a monopsonistic buyer of products which are not yet designed or for which production experience is lacking. It buys at prices for which there is little precedent and hardly any yardsticks. It deals with contractors, a large percentage of whose business is locked into supplying defense, space, or atomic energy needs. It confronts powerful oligopolists in a market where technical capability rather than price is the controlling variable in an atmosphere shrouded by multilateral uncertainty and constant warnings about imminent aggression.

Although the MIC was bound up in its origins with the bipolar international environment of the Cold War, some contended that the MIC might endure under different geopolitical conditions (for example, George F. Kennan wrote in 1987 that "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."). The collapse of the USSR and the resultant decrease in global military spending (the so-called 'peace dividend') did in fact lead to decreases in defense industrial output and consolidation among major arms producers, although global expenditures rose again following the September 11 terror attacks and the ensuing global war on terror, as well as the more recent increase in geopolitical tensions associated with strategic competition between the United States, Russia, and China. Through to the present, the military-industrial complex has continued to be seen by many as an analytically sound and important concept.

Eras

Some sources divide the history of the military–industrial complex into three distinct eras.

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 U.S. 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 annual GDP to 40 percent of GDP. Various U.S. companies, such as Boeing and General Motors, maintained and expanded their defense divisions. These companies have gone on to develop various technologies that have improved civilian life as well, such as night-vision goggles and GPS.

Second era

The second era is identified as beginning with the coining of the term by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. This era continued through the Cold War period, up to the end of the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the Soviet Union. A 1965 article written by Marc Pilisuk and Thomas Hayden says 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. In 1993, the Pentagon urged defense contractors to consolidate due to the fall of communism and a shrinking defense budget.

Third (current) era

A pie chart showing global military expenditures by country for 2019, in US$ billions, according to SIPRI. Note that this is not shown as a percentage of GDP.

In the third era, 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, with major defense companies purchasing smaller competitors.

The U.S. 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.

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.

Military subsidy theory

According to the military subsidy theory, 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 U.S. 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.

Current applications

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), total world spending on military expenses in 2022 was $2,240 billion. 39% of this total, or $837 billion, was spent by the United States. China was the second largest spender, with $292 billion and 13% of the global share. 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 countries combined.

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

President Joe Biden signed a record $886 billion defense spending bill into law on December 22, 2023.

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." The military and arms industry also tend to contribute heavily to incumbent members of Congress.

Similar concepts

See also: Industrial complex, List of industrial complexes, Medical–industrial complex, and Prison–industrial complex

A thesis similar to the military–industrial complex 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." 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.

Within decades of its inception, the idea of the military–industrial complex gave rise to the ideas of other similar industrial complexes, including:

• Animal–industrial complex;
• Prison–industrial complex;
• Pharmaceutical–industrial complex;
• Entertainment-industrial complex;
• Medical–industrial complex;
• Corporate consumption complex.

Virtually all institutions in sectors ranging from agriculture, medicine, entertainment, and media, to education, criminal justice, security, and transportation, began reconceiving and reconstructing in accordance with capitalist, industrial, and bureaucratic models with the aim of realizing profit, growth, and other imperatives. According to Steven Best, all these systems interrelate and reinforce one another.

The concept of the military–industrial complex has been also expanded to include the entertainment and creative industries as well. 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.

An alternative term to describe the interdependence between the military-industrial complex and the entertainment industry is coined by James Der Derian as "Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment-Network". Ray McGovern extended this appellation to Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex, MICIMATT.

See also

Economics of national defense efforts

• List of defense contractors
• List of countries by military expenditures
• Top 100 Contractors of the U.S. federal government
• Corporate statism
• Erik Prince and Academi (formerly Blackwater)
• Government contractor
• Marketing of war
• Militarism
• Military budget
• Military-civil fusion
• Military-entertainment complex
• Military–industrial–media complex
• Military-digital complex
• Military Keynesianism
• National security state
• Private military company
• Project for the New American Century
• Rosoboronexport
• Upward Spiral
• War profiteering

Literature and media

• War Is a Racket (1935 book by Smedley Butler)
• The Power Elite (1956 book by C. Wright Mills)
• 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)

Other complexes or axes

• List of industrial complexes

References

Sources

• DeGroot, Gerard J. Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War, 144, London & New York: Longman, 1996, ISBN 0582061385
• Eisenhower, Dwight D. Public Papers of the Presidents, 1035–1040. 1960.
• Eisenhower, Dwight D. "Farewell Address." In The Annals of America. Vol. 18. 1961–1968: The Burdens of World Power, 1–5. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1968.
• Eisenhower, Dwight D. President Eisenhower's Farewell Address, Wikisource.
• Hartung, William D. "Eisenhower's Warning: The Military–Industrial Complex Forty Years Later." 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, 440–442. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Mills, C. Wright."Power Elite", New York, 1956
• Nelson, Lars-Erik. "Military–Industrial Man." In New York Review of Books 47, no. 20 (December 21, 2000): 6.
• Nieburg, H. L. In the Name of Science, Quadrangle Books, 1970

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 1904859011.
• Cochran, Thomas B., William M. Arkin, Robert S. Norris, Milton M. Hoenig, U.S. Nuclear Warhead Production Harper and Row, 1987, ISBN 0887301258
• 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."
• Cockburn, Andrew, "Why America Goes to War: Money drives the US military machine", The Nation, vol. 313, no. 6 (20–27 September 2021), pp. 24–27.
• 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 051770403X
• Good, Aaron (2022). American Exception: Empire and the Deep State. New York: Skyhorse Publishing. ISBN 978-1510769137.
• 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 Global 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 0679406565
• 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
• 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 0801857481
• 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.
• Mills, C Wright, The Power Elite. New York, 1956.
• Mollenhoff, Clark R., The Pentagon: Politics, Profits and Plunder. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1967
• Patterson, Walter C., The Plutonium Business and the Spread of the Bomb, Sierra Club, 1984, ISBN 0871568373
• Pasztor, Andy, When the Pentagon Was for Sale: Inside America's Biggest Defense Scandal, Scribner, 1995, ISBN 068419516X
• Pierre, Andrew J., The Global Politics of Arms Sales. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982.
• Preble, Christoper (2008). "Military-Industrial Complex". In Hamowy, Ronald (ed.). The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage; Cato Institute. pp. 328–329. ISBN 978-1412965804.
• Sampson, Anthony, The Arms Bazaar: From Lebanon to Lockheed. New York: Bantam Books, 1977.
• St. Clair, Jeffery, Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror. Common Courage Press, 2005.
• Sweetman, Bill, "In search of the Pentagon's billion dollar hidden budgets – how the US keeps its R&D spending under wraps", from Jane's International Defence Review, online
• Thorpe, Rebecca U. The American Warfare State: The Domestic Politics of Military Spending. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
• Watry, David M., Diplomacy at the Brink, Eisenhower, Churchill, and Eden in the Cold War, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2014.
• Weinberger, Sharon, Imaginary Weapons, New York: Nation Books, 2006.

External links

From the National Archives

• Khaki capitalism, The Economist, December 3, 2011
• 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
• Dwight David Eisenhower, Farewell Address On the military–industrial complex and the government–universities collusion – January 17, 1961
• Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address As delivered transcript and complete audio from AmericanRhetoric.com
• William McGaffin and Erwin Knoll, The military–industrial complex, An analysis of the phenomenon written in 1969
• The Cost of War & Today's Military Industrial Complex, National Public Radio, January 8, 2003.
• Human Rights First; Private Security Contractors at War: Ending the Culture of Impunity (2008)
• Fifty Years After Eisenhower's Farewell Address, A Look at the Military–Industrial Complex – video report by Democracy Now!
• Online documents, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library
• 50th Anniversary of Eisenhower's Farewell Address – Eisenhower Institute
• Part 1 – Anniversary Discussion of Eisenhower's Farewell Address – Gettysburg College
• Part 2 – Anniversary Discussion of Eisenhower's Farewell Address – Gettysburg College