MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. The term "military-industrial complex" (MIC) was coined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address of 1961. Great and sustained spending for defense and war, he warned, created power groups that could disastrously harm the nation's future. He was referring to the years after 1950 when Cold War military and related budgets reached as high as 10 percent of the gross national product (GNP). Agitation against the MIC became most intense in the 1960s and 1970s as protest against the Vietnam War peaked. The term began to fade in usage during the 1980s, despite huge increases in the armed forces' budgets under the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Even though at the beginning of the twenty-first century the military continued to be comparatively large and expensive—totaling around 3 percent of the GNP—its size and influence was no longer the matter of great controversy that it was in the past.

MIC Theory

According to MIC theorists, prolonged international conflict after World War II produced high levels of military expenditure, creating powerful domestic interest groups that required a Cold War ideology to safeguard their power and prestige with in the state's political and economic structure. These interest groups, which arose among the military services, corporations, high government officials, members of Congress, labor unions, scientists and scholars, and defense societies (private organizations that combine industrialists, financiers, and business people involved in weapons production, acquisition, and the like and members of the armed forces), came to occupy powerful positions with in the state. They became mutually supportive, and, on defense-related matters, their influence exceeded that of any existing countervailing coalitions or interests. Theorists differed over whether civilians or the military dominated a MIC or whether they shared power. But most agreed that civilians could match and even surpass those in uniform in their dedication to military creeds. Most scholars pointed out that MIC operations constituted military Keynesianism, a means of stimulating the economy; others went further, proposing defense spending as an industrial policy, albeit a limited and economically distorting one. Some critics of vast and continued spending on the armed forces worried that military professionalism was under-mined by focusing inordinate attention on institutional growth and the advancement of careers instead of defending the nation.

Since most MIC theorists regarded Cold War ideology as either false or exaggerated, they maintained that its adherents either deliberately engaged in deception in order to further their own interests or falsely believed themselves to be acting in broader public or national interests—or some combination of the two. Whatever the case, proponents of arms without end, so-called hawks, served to perpetuate Cold War ideological strains. The close connection between the MIC and U.S. Cold War ideology not with standing, some MIC theorists maintained that capitalism had no monopoly on defense and war complexes. The former Soviet Union, they argued, had its own complex, and the U.S. and Soviet MICs interacted to perpetuate a mutually advantageous but in fact enormously dangerous and ultimately destructive state of heightened competition.

Opponents of MIC theory insisted that arms spending genuinely reflected, rather than in any way created, national security threats. The armed services and their weapons were essential, they argued, for deterring formidable and aggressive foes. Most analysts, however, believed that an accurate assessment of a MIC rests somewhere between the assessments of proponents and critics of MIC theory. Such a viewpoint asserted that, while national defense spending and the industrial and political interests associated with it can exacerbate tensions between the United States and its adversaries, they do not themselves cause these tensions, nor do they prevent their resolution. It is likely that much of the general population subscribed to this more measured view.

Historical Background

Cold War–era debate over a MIC actually obscured understanding of a critical subject by removing it from its proper historical context. Military spending has created special problems since the nation's origins. Vested interests made it exceptionally difficult to close down, consolidate, or move military and naval bases. Too often, national defense and armed forces' welfare were subordinated to economic and political purposes. These corrupting forces were kept under control principally by limiting—often drastically so—military expenditures during peacetime. Special circumstances began to alter that pattern at the end of the nineteenth century. As the United States began expanding abroad, it built a new navy starting in the 1880s of steel, steam, propeller, armor, and modern ordnance. To build this navy required assembling a production team of political leaders, naval officers, and industrialists. Here are to be found the origins of a MIC. Such teams, which continued to exist at the beginning of the twenty-first century, grew out of the need to apply modern science and technology to weaponry on a continuing basis. Private and public production teams were particularly important in the development and growth of aircraft between the two world wars and aerospace in the post–World War II period. And scientists, of course, were indispensable in nearly all nuclear developments.

During World War I, the United States had to plan its economy to meet the massive and increasingly sophisticated supply demands of the armed services. That reality revealed the country's unique and complicated civil–military relations. Emergency conditions led private interests to combine their power with that of the military in order to influence, and even shape, national defense and war policies. In the absence of a higher civil service system, it fell upon business people, professionals, and others to devise methods of harnessing the economy for war. The ultimate result was the creation of the War Industries Board (WIB) in 1917. The board was staffed and directed largely by private industrialists serving the public for a token salary, while remaining on the payroll of their private firms. Organizing the supply side of economic mobilization, WIB could function properly only after the demand side, and especially the armed services, were integrated into it. Fearful of and unwilling to accept their dependence upon civilian institutions for the fulfillment of the military mission, the armed services resisted joining WIB. They did so only when threatened with losing control of supply operations entirely. Once industrial and military elements joined their operations in WIB, the board was able to maintain stable economic conditions in a planned wartime economy.

Concerned about the military disruption of future economics of warfare, Congress in 1920 authorized the War Department to plan for procurement and economic mobilization. Carrying out these responsibilities with the Navy Department and under the guidance of industry, business, and finance, the army wrote and submitted for public review a series of industrial mobilization plans, the last and most important of which was published in 1939. Based principally on WIB, this plan outlined how the economy would be organized for World War II.

The economics of World War II, however, became intensely controversial. Interwar developments had anticipated this controversy over the formalized alliance between the military and industrial interests. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and culminating in the Senate Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry (Nye Committee) in 1934–1936, antiwar critics insisted that modern warfare was creating an "unhealthy alliance" between economic and military groups that threatened both the peace and the country's economic future. During World War II, New Dealers, organized labor, small businesses, consumer advocates, and others constantly challenged the War Production Board (WPB), which, like its predecessors, was dominated by a conservative coalition made up principally of corporations and the military. These challenges met with little success, although they managed to make war mobilization exceptionally tumultuous. Overall, however, conservative mobilization patterns and wartime prosperity severely weakened New Deal reform instincts.

MIC in Operation

Except in the aircraft, shipbuilding, and machine tool industries, businessmen after World War II favored a return to the familiar American pattern of reducing military spending to minimal levels. Only after the administration of Harry Truman (1945–1953) developed its Cold War containment polices did Department of Defense (DOD) budgets, which had been declining steadily since 1945, begin dramatically rising in 1950. In the context of military expenditures running into the hundreds of billions of dollars, there emerged patterns associated with a full-blown MIC: defense firms such as Lockheed Aircraft Corporation wholly or significantly dependent upon DOD contracts; armed services committed to weapons systems in which military careers are at stake; states like California heavily tied to military spending; "think tanks" such as the Rand Corporation and university research projects funded by the DOD; a high percentage of scientific and engineering talent and research and development dollars devoted to weaponry; industrial executives and military officers circulating among government posts, defense contractors, and related institutions; charges of massive waste, duplication, cost overruns, useless and malfunctioning weapons, some so far as to be dangerous to their users; all while funding for health, education, welfare, and other civilian needs suffered by comparison. Nuclear weapons capable of destroying civilization and creating enormous problems of waste disposal and pollution greatly complicated all MIC problems. So, too, did the fact that the United States emerged as the world's principal exporter of arms, ranging from the simplest to the most sophisticated, and extended its reach throughout the globe. All of these trends raised grave problems for and led to intense disputes about the free flow of scientific information, academic freedom, and matters of loyalty, security, and secrecy in a democratic society.

Although the Cold War ended, numerous experts insisted that the United States did not realistically adjust its defense mission accordingly; strong and entrenched interests tenaciously resist change. Hence, a relatively large military establishment and a vast nuclear arsenal continued to exist to cover the remote possibility of fighting two major regional wars simultaneously, while also engaging in peacemaking. At the same time, the United States pursued highly questionable antimissile defense systems that could end up costing trillions of dollars. Although the issue is no longer headline news, many contended that a military-industrial complex still existed, even thrived, despite the much less hospitable circumstances.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Greider, William. Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace. New York: Public Affairs, 1998.

Koistinen, Paul A. C. The Military-Industrial Complex: A Historical Perspective. New York: Praeger, 1980.

Lowen, Rebecca S. Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Markusen, Ann, and Joel Yudken. Dismantling the Cold War Economy. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

McNaugher, Thomas L. New Weapons, Old Politics: America's Military Procurement Muddle. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1989.

Schwartz, Stephen I., ed. Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1998.

Waddell, Brian. The War against the New Deal: World War II and American Democracy. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001.

Paul A. C.Koistinen

See alsoArms Race and Disarmament ; Defense, National ; andvol. 9:Eisenhower's Farewell Address .