The expression military–industrial complex (MIC) describes the relationship between a country's military and the defense industry that supplies it, seen together as a vested interest which influences public policy. A driving factor behind the relationship between the military and the defense corporations is that both sides benefit—one side from obtaining weapons, and the other from being paid to supply them.
The concept of a military-industrial complex is unique to the United States, or at least use of the term with reference to other countries entails significant ambiguity as to the meaning. The expression gained popularity after a warning of the relationship's harmful effects, in the farewell address of U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961. The term has also been used in relation to Russia, especially since the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war.
Origin of the term
U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower used the term in his Farewell Address to the Nation on January 17, 1961:
The speech was authored by Ralph E. Williams and Malcolm Moos and was foreshadowed by a passage in the 1954 book Power Through Purpose coauthored by Moos. The degree to which Eisenhower and his brother Milton shaped the speech is unclear from surviving documents. Planning commenced in early 1959; however, the earliest archival evidence of a military–industrial complex theme is a late-1960 memo by Williams that includes the phrase war based industrial complex. A wide range of interpretations have been made of the speech's meaning.
While the term military–industrial complex is often ascribed to Eisenhower, he was neither the first to use the phrase, nor the first to warn of such a potential danger. The first known use of military-industrial complex was by Winfield W. Riefler in 1947. Riefler attributed the outcome of the war to the balance of aggregate economic potentials of the belligerents which he termed "military-industrial complexes". C. Wright Mills's 1956 book The Power Elite is thematically similar to Eisenhower's farewell address and was used as a conceptual framework for the military–industrial complex debate in the 1960s and 1970s. Mills said that American society had cleaved into a powerful elite of military and corporate chieftains set against a powerless mass society.
United States
Some sources divide the history of the United States military–industrial complex into three eras.
First era From 1797 to 1941, the U.S. 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.
In World War II, the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the War Production Board to coordinate civilian industries and shift them into wartime production. Arms production in the U.S. went from around one percent of annual Gross domestic product (GDP) to 40 percent of GDP. 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 (Cold War) The second era is identified as beginning with the coining of the term by U.S. 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.
The phrase rose to prominence in the years following Eisenhower's farewell address, as part of opposition to the Vietnam War. John Kenneth Galbraith said that he and others quoted Eisenhower's farewell address for the "flank protection it provided" when criticizing military power given Eisenhower's "impeccably conservative" reputation.
Labor leaders and activists adopted the phrase and imbued it with new meanings. The earliest documented reference to Eisenhower's speech by activists of the New Left appears to be the Port Huron Statement which used military-industrial complex more in the sense of C. Wright Mills's power elite than Eisenhower's sense. According to James Ledbetter, Eisenhower was likely mentioned in the Port Huron Statement to provide gravitas that a direct reference to Mills would have lacked. While the general concerns expressed about a military-industrial complex in the Port Huron Statement share roots with the thinking of Eisenhower's speechwriters, the Port Huron Statement recast the concept of a military-industrial complex in the mold of false consciousness.
Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a sermon in 1963 that depicted the military-industrial complex as a force of fear and coercion:
During the early 1960s, military-industrial complex became a floating signifier associated with populist discontent over collectivism, automation, and elites. Clark Kerr wrote that intellect had become an instrument of the military-industrial complex. Mario Savio predicted that the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley would likely spread to other universities that he said served the military-industrial complex. These pronouncements marked a shift from Eisenhower's future-tense warning that a military-industrial complex might someday threaten liberty, to an assumption that it had already corrupted American universities.
Dow Chemical became synonymous with industrial complicity in the Vietnam War after 1966 when it signed an Air Force contract to manufacture napalm. Although Dow was a relatively minor player in the arms industry, its association with napalm resulted in intense criticism. Ramparts published particularly gruesome accounts of napalm use in Vietnam as part of the magazine's activism opposing the war. Picketers carried signs outside a Dow office saying "Napalm Burns Babies, Dow Makes Money." A Dow executive said, "I would hate for Dow to come out of Viet Nam with the 'Merchants of Death' label that was pinned on du Pont after the first World War; and yet, unless we come to grips with this problem, it is likely to happen."
Opposition to industrial firms and universities became increasingly violent toward the end of the 1960s. Nine shareholder meetings were attacked in 1970 including those of Boeing and Gulf Oil. Marv Davidov started the Honeywell Project on the premise that Honeywell's production of cluster munitions was complicity in war crimes. The Honeywell Project purchased shares of Honeywell to gain access to the 1970 shareholder meeting. Thousands of protestors attended, cutting the meeting short. Hundreds began throwing bottles at the Honeywell headquarters and were then teargassed by Minneapolis police. Following the start of the Cambodian campaign and the Kent State shootings, Honeywell Project members participated in a large-scale strike at University of Minnesota. They demanded that the university evict the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, divest from arms makers, and cease all military research.
University research on chemical and biological weapons faced particular criticism at the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, and MIT. Congress responded by passing the Mansfield Amendment of 1969 to restrict the scope of university research that could be sponsored by the military. Stanford responded by spinning off military-sponsored research to SRI International. MIT did the same by spinning off Draper Laboratory.
Exposure of COINTELPRO and the revelation in 1967 that the National Student Association was involved in overseas activities funded by the CIA contributed to a general sense that society was being militarized. J. William Fulbright said that the military was manipulating public opinion via propaganda to garner support both for itself and the Vietnam War.
The concept of the military-industrial complex expanded among opponents of the Vietnam War to encompass the idea that any association with industry was tantamount to complicity in an unjust war. An intellectual tradition developed that put forth provocative theories and fierce criticism. Activists focused on ties between military spending and the civilian economy. One area of elaboration was a focus on Congress and corporate lobbying. During the 1970s, an academic publishing boom occurred on the subject of the military-industrial complex with specific attention paid to partisan politics, regional military spending, Congressional committees, and defense subcontractors. The most strident critics voiced the opinion that militarism is an inherent aspect of the U.S.
Non-governmental organizations and public intellectuals took up the military-industrial complex concept around the time that two books associated with the Institute for Policy Studies were published: The Economy of Death and The Pentagon Watchers. The latter was written by a group of students including Derek Shearer and Leonard Rodberg and opens by arguing that a growing military-industrial complex was pushing America toward fascism. The Brookings Institution published Government Contracting and Technological Change which described the military as a profligate spender and focused particularly on large budget overruns during the 1950s. SANE lobbied for arms control and nuclear test ban treaties. The Quaker organization NARMIC formed in 1969 for the purpose of distributing and publishing information about the military-industrial complex.
The Council on Economic Priorities debuted in 1969 with the publication of Efficiency in Death which focused on cluster bombs. While the book was presented as a dispassionate presentation of data collected by NARMIC on arms makers, it insinuated that any personal association with these companies was to be complicit in the gruesome napalm killing of Vietnamese civilians. Efficiency in Death is an early example of advocacy for socially responsible investing.
Seymour Melman, co-founder of SANE, devoted his career to advocating for economic conversion. From 1962 until 1970 he published academic analyses focused on the mechanics of converting the military industries to purely civilian economic activities. He argued that the arms industry distracted talented workers from more important civilian work, citing the guns versus butter model. Lloyd J. Dumas likewise said that military spending consumes resources that could instead contribute to economic growth. Melman turned acerbic in 1970 with the publication of Pentagon Capitalism in which he described the American economy as being thoroughly controlled by the military-industrial complex which he described as "parasitic".
Murray Weidenbaum said that the military-industrial complex directly harms defense contractors. His free market perspective was that dependency on government contracts reduces the growth potential of a company. He cautioned against convergence of the military and its suppliers, pointing to his former employer Boeing as an example of a company that owed its success to focussing on commercial, rather than military, customers. John Kenneth Galbraith, on the other hand, said that society would be better off if the arms industry were nationalized because this would save taxpayers money. Proxmire said that contractors such as Lockheed Aircraft were already on "corporate welfare".