Military-industrial complex
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A military-industrial complex (MIC) is composed of a nation's armed forces, its suppliers of weapons systems, supplies and services, and its civil government. The term "MIC" is most often used in reference to the United States, where it gained popularity after its use in the farewell address of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It is sometimes used more broadly to include the entire network of contracts and flows of money and resources among individuals as well as institutions of the defense contractors, The Pentagon, and the Congress and Executive branch. This sector is intrinsically prone to Principal-agent problem, moral hazard, and rent seeking. Cases of political corruption have also surfaced with regularity. A similar thesis was originally expressed by Daniel Guérin, in his 1936 book Fascism and Big Business , about the fascist government support to heavy industry.
HistoryAccording to historian William H. McNeill, the first modern MICs arose in Britain and France in the 1880s and 1890s. The naval rivalry between these two powers was of utmost significance in the fermentation, growth and development of these MICs. Conversely, the existence of these two nations' respective MICs may have been the source of these military tensions. Officers like Admiral Jackie Fisher influenced the shift toward faster technological integration (which meant closer relationships with private, innovative companies). Similar MICs soon followed in nations like Germany, Japan, and the United States. Industrialists who played a part in the arms industry of this era included Alfred Krupp, Samuel Colt, William G. Armstrong, Alfred Nobel, and Joseph Whitworth. Technology has always been a part of warfare. Neolithic tools were used as weapons before recorded history. The bronze age and iron age saw the rise of complex industries geared towards the manufacture of weaponry. These industries also had practical peacetime applications, as well. However, it was not until the 19th or 20th century that military weaponry became sufficiently complicated as to require a large subset of industrial effort solely dedicated to warfare. Firearms, artillery, steamships, and later aircraft and nuclear weapons were markedly different from medieval swords -- these new weapons required years of specialized labor, as opposed to part-time effort. Furthermore, the length of time necessary to build large weapons required pre-planning and construction even during times of peace. This trend of coupling some industries towards military activity gave rise to the concept of a "partnership" between the military and private enterprise. The term is used often in the case of the United States currently, which has by far the largest arms industry in the world. It is difficult to estimate the degree of dependence of the U.S. economy on its military and defense spending, but it is clearly enormous, and legislators fiercely resist defense cuts that affect their districts. In Washington State, an economist estimated in 2002 that in Western Washington 166,000 jobs, or about 15% of the workforce, depended directly or indirectly on military installations alone, not counting defense industries. In Washington State overall in FY2001, about $7.06 billion arrived in U.S. Department of Defense payroll, pensions, and procurement contracts—and Washington State was only seventh among the fifty states in this regard. Overall, U.S. spending on defense acquisitions and research is equal to 1.2% of the GDP. Origin of the termThe first public use of the term was by the Union of Democratic Control, formed by Sir Charles Trevelyan in the United Kingdom on 5 August 1914. Point Four of their pacifist manifesto declared: 4. National armaments should be limited by mutual agreement, and the pressures of the military-industrial complex regulated by the nationalisation of armaments firms and control over the arms trade.[1] President of the United States (and former General of the Army) Dwight D. Eisenhower later used the term in his Farewell Address to the Nation on January 17, 1961:
In the penultimate draft of the address, Eisenhower initially used the term military-industrial-congressional complex, and thus indicated the essential role that the United States Congress plays in the propagation of the military industry. But, it is said, that the president chose to strike the word congressional in order to placate members of the legislative branch of the federal government. The actual authors of the term were Eisenhower's speech-writers Ralph Williams and Malcolm Moos.[2] Attempts to conceptualize something similar to a modern "military-industrial complex" existed before Eisenhower's address. In 1956, sociologist C. Wright Mills had claimed in his book The Power Elite that a class of military, business, and political leaders, driven by mutual interests, were the real leaders of the state, and were effectively beyond democratic control. Vietnam War-era activists, such as Seymour Melman, referred frequently to the concept. In the late 1990s James Kurth asserted, "[b]y the mid-1980s the term had largely fallen out of public discussion... whatever the power of arguments about the influence of the military-industrial complex on weapons procurement during the Cold War, they are much less relevant to the current era." Contemporary students and critics of American militarism continue to refer to and employ the term, however. For example, historian Chalmers Johnson uses words from the second, third, and fourth paragraphs quoted above from Eisenhower's address as an epigraph to Chapter Two ("The Roots of American Militarism") of a recent volume[3] on this subject. Peter W. Singer's book concerning private military companies illustrates contemporary ways in which industry, particularly an information-based one, still interacts with the U.S. Government and the Pentagon.[4] The expressions permanent war economy and war corporatism are related concepts that have also been used in association with this term. The term is also used to describe comparable collusion in other political entities such as the German Empire (prior to and through the first world war), Britain, France and (post-Soviet) Russia. Noam Chomsky has suggested that "military-industrial complex" is a misnomer because (as he considers it) the phenomenon in question "is not specifically military."[5]. He claims, "There is no military-industrial complex: it's just the industrial system operating under one or another pretext (defense was a pretext for a long time)."[6] Cultural references
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cs:Vojensko-průmyslový komplex da:Militær-industrielt kompleks de:Militärisch-industrieller Komplex es:Complejo industrial-militar fr:Complexe militaro-industriel it:Complesso militare-industriale nl:Militair-industrieel complex ja:軍産複合体 ru:Военно-промышленный комплекс simple:Military-industrial complex sh:Vojno-industrijski kompleks fi:Sotateollinen kompleksi sv:Militärindustriella komplexet |
