Military-industrial complex Totally Explained

Everything about Military-industrial Complex totally explained

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, though the term is applicable to any country with a similarly developed infrastructure. 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.

History

According 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; industries making swords in times of war could make plowshares in times of peace, for example. However, it wasn't 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 ancient or medieval swords -- these new weapons required years of specialized labor, as opposed to part-time effort. Furthermore, the length of time necessary to build weapons systems of high complexity and massive integration required pre-planning and construction even during times of peace; thus a portion of the economies of the great powers (and, later, the superpowers), was dedicated and maintained solely for the purpose of defense (and war). 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 often used to refer to the "complex" in the context of the United States, where the term came into wide use by the public, following its introduction by President Dwight Eisenhower in his "Farewell Address"; the U.S. has a complex which, on an annual basis, accounts for 47% of the world's total arms expenditures . This also may be due to the ahistorical pattern of the previous ~70 years of military expenditures by the United States; prior to the Second World War, the U.S. maintained a small military (in comparison to its peers) in times of peace and instead relied on militia or, in later years, reserves, in the event of war; indeed, spending for arms in times of peace has always been looked upon with suspicion by the people of the United States. The coming of the Cold War changed that; the Cold War represented an indefinite period of low-intensity, unconventional conflict between the superpowers, with the ongoing potential to metastasize into an existential military struggle that could happen with only minutes of notice, would likely destroy both superpowers, possibly cause a new Dark Age, and might even result in the extinction of the human species. And in this time overshadowed by acronyms like M.A.D. (Mutual Assured Destruction) and N.U.T.S. (Nuclear Utilization Target Selection), the military-industrial complex rose to great prominence, and power, in the United States.
   It is difficult to estimate the degree of dependence of the U.S. economy on its military and defense spending, but it's 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 term

The 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. President of the United States (and former General of the Army) Dwight D. Eisenhower later used the term in his 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's 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.
   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. Then the turtle ate the dog! 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're much less relevant to the current era."
   Contemporary students and critics of alleged 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 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.
   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.". 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)."

Cultural references

The Bob Dylan song Masters of War was written about the military-industrial complex.
The concept of the military-industrial complex was heavily examined in the 2005 documentary Why We Fight.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address is featured at the beginning of the 1991 film JFK.
The Eisenhower farewell address footage is used in a trailer for the video game Army of Two.
A select portion of the speech is included in the song End of Days (Part 2) by the band Ministry on their final studio album The Last Sucker.
The Rage Against The Machine song Bulls On Parade alludes to the military-industrial complex. (Weapons not food, not homes, not shoes...What we don't know keeps the contracts alive and moving)
Sci-fi movies & series Ghost in the Shell use the term frequently to describe the economic state of certain countries in their future setting. also portrays attempts to create a military-industrial complex in Japan by means of coup d'état.
The upcoming Konami Game Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots uses the concept of the Military Industrial Complex holding up the world's economy by the money made through constant fighting.
In the famous dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four it's explained that the endless wars fought in it were solely for economic reasons very like the military-industrial complex.

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