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In
his farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned
U.S. citizens about the “military–industrial complex” – Public Domain
The military-industrial complex (MIC) that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned
Americans about more than 60 years ago is still alive and well. In
fact, it’s consuming many more tax dollars and feeding far larger
weapons producers than when Ike raised the alarm about the “unwarranted
influence” it wielded in his 1961 farewell address to the nation.
The statistics are stunning. This year’s proposed budget for the
Pentagon and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy is $886 billion — more than twice as much, adjusted for inflation, as at the time of Eisenhower’s speech. The Pentagon now consumes more than half the
federal discretionary budget, leaving priorities like public health,
environmental protection, job training, and education to compete for
what remains. In 2020, Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in Pentagon
contracts, more than the entire budget of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined.
This year’s spending
just for that company’s overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat
aircraft equals the full budget of the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. And as a new report
from the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy
Studies revealed recently, the average taxpayer spends $1,087 per year
on weapons contractors compared to $270 for K-12 education and just $6
for renewable energy.
The list goes on — and on and on. President Eisenhower characterized such tradeoffs in a lesser known speech,
“The Chance for Peace,” delivered in April 1953, early in his first
term, this way: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every
rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who
hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This
world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of
its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…”
How sadly of this moment that is.
New Rationales, New Weaponry
Now, don’t be fooled. The current war machine isn’t your
grandfather’s MIC, not by a country mile. It receives far more money and
offers far different rationales. It has far more sophisticated tools of
influence and significantly different technological aspirations.
Perhaps the first and foremost difference between Eisenhower’s era
and ours is the sheer size of the major weapons firms. Before the
post-Cold War merger boom of the 1990s, there were dozens of
significant defense contractors. Now, there are just five big (no,
enormous!) players — Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop
Grumman, and Raytheon. With so few companies to produce aircraft,
armored vehicles, missile systems, and nuclear weapons, the Pentagon has
ever more limited leverage in keeping them from overcharging for
products that don’t perform as advertised. The Big Five alone routinely
split more than $150 billion
in Pentagon contracts annually, or nearly 20% of the total Pentagon
budget. Altogether, more than half of the department’s annual spending
goes to contractors large and small.
In Eisenhower’s day, the Soviet Union, then this country’s major
adversary, was used to justify an ever larger, ever more permanent arms
establishment. Today’s “pacing threat,”
as the Pentagon calls it, is China, a country with a far larger
population, a far more robust economy, and a far more developed
technical sector than the Soviet Union ever had. But unlike the USSR,
China’s primary challenge to the United States is economic, not
military.
Yet, as Dan Grazier noted in a December 2022 report for
the Project on Government Oversight, Washington’s ever more intense
focus on China has been accompanied by significant military threat
inflation. While China hawks in Washington wring their hands about that
country having more naval vessels than America, Grazier points out that
our Navy has far more firepower. Similarly, the active American nuclear
weapons stockpile is roughly nine times as large as China’s and the Pentagon budget three times what Beijing spends on its military, according to the latest figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
But for Pentagon contractors, Washington’s ever more intense focus on
the prospect of war with China has one overriding benefit: it’s
fabulous for business. The threat of China’s military, real or imagined,
continues to be used to justify significant increases in military
spending, especially on the next generation of high-tech systems ranging
from hypersonic missiles to robotic weapons and artificial
intelligence. The history of such potentially dysfunctional high-tech
systems, from President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars”
missile defense system to the F-35, does not bode well, however, for
the cost or performance of emerging military technologies.
No matter, count on one thing: tens, if not hundreds, of billions of
dollars will undoubtedly go into developing them anyway. And remember
that they are dangerous and not just to any enemy. As Michael Klare
pointed out in an Arms Control Association report: “AI-enabled systems may fail in unpredictable ways, causing unintended human slaughter or an uncontrolled escalation crisis.”
Arsenal of Influence
Despite a seemingly never–ending list of overpriced, underperforming weapons systems developed for a Pentagon that’s the only federal agency never to pass an audit,
the MIC has an arsenal of influence propelling it ever closer to a
trillion-dollar annual budget. In short, it’s bilking more money from
taxpayers than ever before and just about everyone — from lobbyists
galore to countless political campaigns, think tanks beyond number to
Hollywood — is in on it.
And keep in mind that the dominance of a handful of mega-firms in
weapons production means that each of the top players has more money to
spread around in lobbying and campaign contributions. They also have
more facilities and employees to point to, often in politically key
states, when persuading members of Congress to vote for — Yes!– even
more money for their weaponry of choice.
The arms industry as a whole has donated
more than $83 million to political candidates in the past two election
cycles, with Lockheed Martin leading the pack with $9.1 million in
contributions, followed by Raytheon at $8 million, and Northrop Grumman
at $7.7 million. Those funds, you won’t be surprised to learn, are
heavily concentrated among members of the House and Senate armed
services committees and defense appropriations subcommittees. For
example, as Taylor Giorno of OpenSecrets, a group that tracks campaign
and lobbying expenditures, has found,
“The 58 members of the House Armed Services Committee reported
receiving an average of $79,588 from the defense sector during the 2022
election cycle, three times the average $26,213 other representatives
reported through the same period.”
Lobbying expenditures by all the denizens of the MIC are even higher — more than $247 million in the last two election cycles. Such funds are used to employ 820 lobbyists,
or more than one for every member of Congress. And mind you, more than
two-thirds of those lobbyists had swirled through Washington’s infamous
revolving door from jobs at the Pentagon or in Congress to lobby for the
arms industry. Their contacts in government and knowledge of arcane
acquisition procedures help ensure that the money keeps flowing for more
guns, tanks, ships and missiles. Just last month, the office of Senator
Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) reported
that nearly 700 former high-ranking government officials, including
former generals and admirals, now work for defense contractors. While a
few of them are corporate board members or highly paid executives, 91%
of them became Pentagon lobbyists, according to the report.
And that feverishly spinning revolving door provides current members
of Congress, their staff, and Pentagon personnel with a powerful
incentive to play nice with those giant contractors while still in their
government roles. After all, a lucrative lobbying career awaits once
they leave government service.
Nor is it just K Street lobbying jobs those weapons-making
corporations are offering. They’re also spreading jobs to nearly every
Main Street in America. The poster child for such jobs as a selling
point for an otherwise questionable weapons system is Lockheed Martin’s
F-35. It may never be fully ready for combat thanks to countless design
flaws, including more than 800 unresolved defects detected by the Pentagon’s independent testing office. But the company insists that its program produces no less than 298,000 jobs in 48 states, even if the actual total is less than half of that.
In reality — though you’d never know this in today’s Washington — the
weapons sector is a declining industry when it comes to job creation,
even if it does absorb near-record levels of government funding.
According to statistics
gathered by the National Defense Industrial Association, there are
currently one million direct jobs in arms manufacturing compared to 3.2
million in the 1980s.
Outsourcing, automation, and the production of fewer units of more
complex systems have skewed the workforce toward better-paying
engineering jobs and away from production work, a shift that has come at
a high price. The vacuuming up of engineering and scientific talent by
weapons makers means fewer skilled people are available to address
urgent problems like public health and the climate crisis. Meanwhile,
it’s estimated that spending on education, green energy, health care, or infrastructure could produce 40% to 100% more jobs than Pentagon spending does.
Shaping the Elite Narrative: The Military-Industrial Complex and Think Tanks
One of the MIC’s most powerful tools is its ability to shape elite
discussions on national security issues by funding foreign policy think
tanks, along with affiliated analysts who are all too often the experts
of choice when it comes to media coverage on issues of war and peace. A
forthcoming Quincy Institute brief reveals that more than 75% of the top
foreign-policy think tanks in the United States are at least partially
funded by defense contractors. Some, like the Center for a New American
Security and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, receive
millions of dollars every year from such contractors and then publish articles and reports that are largely supportive of defense-industry funding.
Some such think tanks even offer support for weapons made by their
funders without disclosing those glaring conflicts of interest. For
example, an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholar’s critique
of this year’s near-historically high Pentagon budget request, which,
she claimed, was “well below inflation,” also included support for
increased funding for a number of weapons systems like the Long Range
Anti-Ship Missile, the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, the B-21
bomber, and the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile.
What’s not mentioned in the piece? The companies that build those
weapons, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, have been AEI funders.
Although that institute is a “dark money” think tank that doesn’t
publicly disclose its funders, at an event last year, a staffer let slip that the organization receives money from both of those contractors.
Unfortunately, mainstream media outlets disproportionately rely on
commentary from experts at just such think tanks. That forthcoming
Quincy Institute report, for example, found that they were more than
four times as likely as those without MIC funding to be cited in New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journalarticles
about the Ukraine War. In short, when you see a think-tank expert
quoted on questions of war and peace, odds are his or her employer
receives money from the war machine.
What’s more, such think tanks have their own version of a feverishly spinning revolving door, earning them the moniker “holding tanks” for future government officials. The Center for a New American Security, for example, receives millions of dollars from defense contractors and the Pentagon every year and has boasted
that a number of its experts and alumni joined the Biden
administration, including high-ranking political appointees at the
Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Shaping the Public Narrative: The Military-Entertainment Complex
Top Gun: Maverick was a certified blockbuster, wowing audiences that ultimately gave that action film an astounding 99%
score on Rotten Tomatoes — and such popular acclaim helped earn the
movie a Best Picture Oscar nomination. It was also a resounding success
for the Pentagon, which worked closely with the filmmakers and provided,
“equipment — including jets and aircraft carriers — personnel and
technical expertise,” and even had the opportunity to make script
revisions, according to the Washington Post. Defense contractors were similarly a pivotal part of that movie’s success. In fact, the CEO of Lockheed Martin boasted that his firm “partnered with Top Gun’s producers to bring cutting-edge, future forward technology to the big screen.”
While Top Gun: Maverick might have been the most successful
recent product of the military-entertainment complex, it’s just the
latest installment in a long history of Hollywood spreading military
propaganda. “The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have
exercised direct editorial control over more than 2,500 films and
television shows,” according to Professor Roger Stahl, who researches propaganda and state violence at the University of Georgia.
“The result is an entertainment culture rigged to produce relatively
few antiwar movies and dozens of blockbusters that glorify the
military,” explained journalist David Sirota, who has repeatedly called
attention to the perils of the military-entertainment complex. “And
save for filmmakers’ obligatory thank you to the Pentagon in the
credits,” argued Sirota, “audiences are rarely aware that they may be watching government-subsidized propaganda.”
What Next for the MIC?
More than 60 years after Eisenhower identified the problem and gave
it a name, the military-industrial complex continues to use its
unprecedented influence to corrupt budget and policy processes, starve
funding for non-military solutions to security problems, and ensure that
war is the ever more likely “solution” to this country’s problems. The
question is: What can be done to reduce its power over our lives, our
livelihoods, and ultimately, the future of the planet?
Countering the modern-day military-industrial complex would mean
dislodging each of the major pillars undergirding its power and
influence. That would involve campaign-finance reform; curbing the
revolving door between the weapons industry and government; shedding
more light on its funding of political campaigns, think tanks, and
Hollywood; and prioritizing investments in the jobs of the future in
green technology and public health instead of piling up ever more
weapons systems. Most important of all, perhaps, a broad-based public
education campaign is needed to promote more realistic views of the
challenge posed by China and to counter the current climate of fear that
serves the interests of the Pentagon and the giant weapons contractors
at the expense of the safety and security of the rest of us.
That, of course, would be no small undertaking, but the alternative —
an ever-spiraling arms race that could spark a world-ending conflict or
prevent us from addressing existential threats like climate change and
pandemics — is simply unacceptable.
This column is distributed by TomDispatch.