Gregory D. Foster is a professor at the National Defense University’s Eisenhower School (historically known as the Industrial College of the Armed Forces), a West Point graduate, and a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War. The views expressed here are his own.

“The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”

“What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have 

never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”

  – G.W.F. Hegel

The military-industrial complex, a term brought to life by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address to the nation, is widely acknowledged, quoted, and even embraced today.Yet, ironically, the ubiquity of this embrace hasn’t actually affected the outsized influence of that complex.

“In the councils of government,” Eisenhower warned, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex [‘military-industrial-congressional complex’ in the original text]. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” 

He had prefaced these words in the same address by observing: “The total influence [of the then-new conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry] – 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.” 

If we were blessed with an ideal state of civil-military relations in this country, its distinguishing characteristics would include – in addition to a strategically effective military and strategically competent civilian overseers – what we might call a properly subordinated military-industrial complex. This complex would, accordingly, be subordinated to and supportive of national interests, aims, and responses. Quite the opposite has been the case, though, throughout the almost six decades since Eisenhower alerted the American people the centrality of military industries to civilian life. Today, it is a mammoth, strategically distorting, even strategically dysfunctional confluence of political, ideological and, yes, economic interests that warrants renewed attention, if not alarm. This is especially important as the military-industrial complex has been given new, unfettered life and license by the 2018 National Defense Strategy document, now in place, that has assumed the de facto position of representing America’s current strategic posture.

Roughly 13% of the U.S. federal budget now goes to private-sector contractors, 63% of those contracts beingfor defense. Some 51% of defense contracts are for products, 41% for services, the rest for R&D. Defense contracts represent 52% of overall defense spending. In FY 2018 alone, the Defense Department awarded over $358 billion in contracts. The top 10 defense contractors– Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics, United Technologies, L3 Technologies, Huntington Ingalls, Leidos, Booz Allen Hamilton – collectively receive some $167 billion a year in defense revenues. That amount exceeds the GDPs of more than 130 of the world’s countries. Lockheed’s defense revenues alone – $48 billion – exceeds the annual military expenditures of all but six countries; while numbers 2 and 3 – Raytheon and Northrop Grumman – each receive over $20 billion in defense revenues, thereby exceeding military expenditures of all but 13 countries. 

To be fair, economically speaking, overall defense expenditures represent 3.5% of U.S. GDP; the defense sector provides over 4 million jobs; and roughly 10% of the $2.2 trillion in U.S. factory output goes to arms production. These are not inconsequential considerations for the politically minded and politically motivated among us. At the same time, the United States claims the dubious honor of ranking first in the world in international arms transfers, commanding 36% of the global market. This also isn’t inconsequential for thestrategically minded among us who recognize the potentially destabilizing, arms-race-inducing effects of such transactions.

Because Eisenhower’s warning conveyed concern about the well-being of democracy, it is especially important to note thatthe defense sector of industry assiduously exercises its First Amendment rights through lobbying and campaign contributions: $128 million spent on the former, $30 million on the latter in the 2017-18 federal campaign cycle alone. Since 1990, the defense sector has accounted for nearly $200 million in campaign contributions – dwarfed, in comparison, by other sectors, but nonetheless more than mere “beanbag,” as they say.

Eisenhower’s April 1953 “Chance for Peace” speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, delivered almost immediately after he took office, is even more telling even than his 1961 farewell address. Also broadcast nationwide, it is worth quoting at some length for the examples it affords:

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.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. 

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.  

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Of course, that was then, when a destroyer cost something on the order of $6 million apiece, a bomber $2.4 million, a fighter jet $211,000. This is now, when an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer runs $1.2 billion (and a Zumwalt-class destroyer $4.5 billion), a B-21 stealth bomber $564 million, an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter $141 million. Thanks to the National Priorities Project, we can see what some selected tradeoffs akin to those Eisenhower offered might look like:

For the $19.95 billion we are paying for nuclear weapons and associated costs, we could create, for example, 359,099 infrastructure jobs for a year, or pay 246,838 elementary school teachers for a year.

For the $11.45 billion we are paying for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, we could provide, for example, 1.11 million military veterans VA medical care for a year, or 344,676 scholarships for university students for four years.

For the $1.51 billion we are paying for Predator and Reaper drones, we could provide, for example, 638,124 children or 424,963 adults low-income healthcare for a year.

These aren’t just incongruent apples-and-oranges tradeoffs; they are strategic tradeoffs. Those, most notably, who either produced or zealously support the NDS consider such tradeoffs anything but strategic, precisely because the types of domestic spending alternatives offered aren’t militarily relevant. 

The NDS is a retro, militaristic call for a self-reaffirming, self-serving, self-fulfilling New Cold War that implicitly bows to and embraces a dominant and domineering military-industrial complex.The NDS claims that (a) the world we face today is determined by Great Power competition, defined in predominantly military terms, in which “revisionist powers” China and Russia seek to unseat us; (b) our supremacy in every domain of warfare – air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace – is now contested and begs restoration; (c) peace (through strength) is achievable primarily, if not solely, by being prepared for war; and (d) the primary line of effort for carrying out this “strategy” is heightened lethality. 

The NDS would have us believe that the preferred vehicle for restoring America’s deserved primacy in all the aforementioned domains of warfare is the technological superiority provided by what is now labeled the “National Security Innovation Base.”  Such labeling seemingly implies that national security and defense are essentially synonymous, and that a future-oriented Innovation Base is somehow different (at least rhetorically) than a backward-looking Defense Industrial Base. Irony again intrudes here, by the way, since mobilization is implicitly given new life, but mobilization in the most parochial World War II, giant on-off switch terms. 

For the various parties that make up the military-industrial complex, the New Cold War ideology put forth in the NDS is a boon of inestimable consequence, an incestuously preserved warfighting profiteer’s dream. It is also a tacit guarantee that defense industry, not government of, by, and for the people, will continue to call shots most of us don’t even acknowledge it calls on strategic priorities and commitments, military doctrine, the perversely irreversible American Way of War, technology, force structure and disposition, and manpower requirements. And, lest we forget, there is the massive international traffic in conventional arms that ensures the perpetuation and expansion of the arms industry (to “keep the industrial base warm,” of course), even as it feeds provocation, escalation, and destabilization abroad.

Though it may seem hyperbolic, even alarmist, one is tempted to harken back to the post-World War I period, when soul-searchingly pejorative “merchants of death” rhetoric was in vogue. With irony again our guide for the moment, one of the most outspoken critics of war profiteering was Marine Major General Smedley Butler, a two-time Congressional Medal of Honor recipient who had spent his 34-year career in uniform dutifully fighting various colonial wars at the turn of the 20th century. His highly publicized 1935 speech/short book War is a Racket spoke bluntly in terms worth remembering today: 

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

Let us now, if we are to restore or establish strategic sanity in this post-post-Cold War era, revisit these words and those of President Eisenhower. We – the taxpayers, the citizenry, the source of citizen-soldiers, the repository of popular sovereignty – owe ourselves, our progeny, and our future nothing less.

Gregory D. Foster는 국방 대학의 아이젠 하워 학교 (역사적으로 국군 산업 대학으로 알려짐)의 교수이자 웨스트 포인트 졸업생이며 베트남 전쟁의 장식 베테랑입니다. 여기에 표현 된 견해는 자신의 견해입니다.

"우리가 역사에서 배우는 유일한 것은 역사에서 아무것도 배우지 않는다는 것입니다."

“경험과 역사가 우리에게 가르치는 것은 사람들과 정부가

역사에서 어떤 것도 배우지 않았거나 그로부터 추론 된 원칙에 따라 행동하지 않았습니다.”

  – G.W.F. 헤겔

1961 년 드와이트 D. 아이젠 하워 대통령이 국가에 대한 작별 사에서 생명을 불어 넣은 용어 인 군-산업 단지는 오늘날 널리 인정되고 인용되며 심지어 받아 들여지고 있지만, 아이러니하게도이 포용의 보편적 인 존재는 실제로는 아닙니다. 그 단지의 거대한 영향력에 영향을 미쳤습니다.

아이젠 하워는“정부 협의회에서 우리는 군사-산업 단지 [원문에서 '군-산업-의회 단지']가 추구하든 원하지 않든간에 부당한 영향력을 획득하지 않도록 경계해야합니다. 잘못 배치 된 권력의 비참한 상승 가능성이 존재하며 지속될 것입니다.”

그는 같은 연설에서 다음과 같은 말을 전했습니다.“[당시에는 거대한 군사 시설과 대규모 무기 산업의 새로운 결합의] 경제적, 정치적, 심지어 영적인 영향이 모든 도시, 모든 스테이트 하우스에서 느껴집니다. , 연방 정부의 모든 사무실. 우리는 이러한 개발의 필요성을 인식하고 있습니다. 그러나 우리는 그 중대한 의미를 이해하는 데 실패해서는 안됩니다.”

우리가이 나라에서 이상적인 민군 관계 상태로 축복을 받았다면, 그 구별되는 특징에는 전략적으로 효과적인 군대와 전략적으로 유능한 민간 감독자 외에도 적절하게 종속 된 군사-산업 단지라고 부를 수있는 것이 포함될 것입니다. 따라서이 복합 단지는 국익, 목표 및 대응에 종속되고 지원 될 것입니다. 하지만 아이젠 하워가 미국인들에게 군사 산업의 중심이 민간인 생활에 있다는 것을 경고 한 이후 거의 60 년 동안 그 반대의 경우가있었습니다. 오늘날, 그것은 놀라지 않더라도 새로운 관심을 가져야하는 정치적, 이데올로기 적, 예, 경제적 이익의 거대한, 전략적 왜곡, 심지어 전략적으로 역기능적인 합류입니다. 이것은 군사-공업 단지가 현재 미국의 현재 전략적 태세를 대표하는 사실상의 위치를 ​​차지한 2018 년 국방 전략 문서에 의해 새롭고 자유로운 생명과 라이센스를 부여 받았기 때문에 특히 중요합니다.

현재 미국 연방 예산의 약 13 %가 민간 부문 계약자에게 전달되고, 이러한 계약의 63 %는 국방을위한 것입니다. 국방 계약의 약 51 %는 제품, 41 %는 서비스, 나머지는 R & D입니다. 국방 계약은 전체 국방 지출의 52 %를 차지합니다. 2018 회계 연도에만 국방부는 3,580 억 달러 이상의 계약을 체결했습니다. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics, United Technologies, L3 Technologies, Huntington Ingalls, Leidos, Booz Allen Hamilton 등 상위 10 대 방위 계약 업체는 총 1,760 억 달러의 방위 수익을 받고 있습니다. 그 금액은 전 세계 130 개국 이상의 GDP를 초과합니다. 록히드의 국방 수입 만 – 480 억 달러 – 6 개국을 제외한 모든 국가의 연간 군사 지출을 초과합니다. 2 위와 3 위인 Raytheon과 Northrop Grumman은 각각 200 억 달러 이상의 국방 수입을 받아 13 개국을 제외한 모든 국가의 군사 지출을 초과합니다.

공정하고 경제적으로 말하면 전체 국방비는 미국 GDP의 3.5 %를 차지합니다. 국방 부문은 4 백만 개 이상의 일자리를 제공합니다. 미국 공장 생산량 2 조 2 천억 달러의 약 10 %가 무기 생산에 사용됩니다. 이것은 정치적으로 생각하고 정치적으로 동기를 부여받은 사람들에게 중요하지 않은 고려 사항이 아닙니다. 동시에 미국은 국제 무기 이전 부문에서 세계 시장의 36 %를 차지하는 세계 1 위라는 의심스러운 영예를 주장합니다. 이는 또한 그러한 거래가 잠재적으로 불안정하고 군비 경쟁을 유발하는 효과를 인식하고있는 우리 중 전략적 사고를 가진 사람들에게도 중요하지 않습니다.

아이젠 하워의 경고는 민주주의의 안녕에 대한 우려를 전달했기 때문에 산업의 방위 부문이 로비와 캠페인 기부를 통해 제 1 차 수정안 권리를 성실히 행사하고 있다는 점에 주목하는 것이 특히 중요합니다. 2017-18 연방 캠페인 주기만. 1990 년 이래로 국방 부문은 캠페인 기부에서 거의 2 억 달러를 차지했습니다. 다른 부문에 비해 드워프지만 그럼에도 불구하고 그들이 말하는 것처럼 단순한“콩백”이상입니다.

Eisenhower가 취임 한 직후에 전해진 미국 신문 편집자 협회 (American Society of Newspaper Editors)에 대한 1953 년 4 월의“Chance for Peace”연설은 훨씬 더 많은 것을 말해줍니다.