Eisenhower’s phrase and its afterlife
The term enters the excerpts through Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address, which Sterling Burnett dates to 1960 and calls very famous for its discussion of the military-industrial complex. Burnett’s point is that the speech’s audience remembers only that half: in the second half, he says, Eisenhower warned of a scientific-technological elite taking over and directing public policy, a warning Burnett says is playing out today in the climate field. How to Spot Tabloid Climate Science (2018)
John Mueller also invokes Eisenhower, but to argue the opposite of far-sightedness. Eisenhower, he says, had met with these guys and believed through his whole presidency that the Soviets were never going to want another war, having flown to Moscow in 1945 and seen the destruction from one end to the other. Yet when he left the presidency, Eisenhower argued that defense spending was driven by the machinations of the military-industrial complex—while, in Mueller’s account, remaining a political coward who would not say what he truly believed and let the complex have the argument that made its efforts a success. China & the Stupidity of War (2022)
A political industry, not a strategic one
Ivan Eland’s account is structural. Eisenhower mentioned the military-industrial complex, Eland says, and of course also helped to create it: after the Korean War the defense industry did not go away as it usually did but stayed on in peacetime. Large defense contractors do most of their work for the government, and they choose subcontractors on the basis of which states they are in rather than best value for money. The most important briefing slide, Eland says—speaking from experience of having worked in Congress—is always the last one, showing where the subcontractors are, so that members vote for a program because a subcontractor sits in or near their state or district even though they do not really want to. Members from areas with defense industries and military bases gravitate toward the committees where the money is appropriated. Eland’s name for the result is a military-industrial and congressional and even media complex. The Return of Big Spending Republicans? (2017)
He illustrates the appetite with Madeleine Albright’s remark to Colin Powell—that he had this big beautiful military, so why not use it—and with the absence of an overall strategy: after World War II the Soviet Union served as a rationale for policing the world, and after the Soviet Union fell in 1991 it got much worse because there was no counterweight. Eland also cites the bill: the United States pays 75% of NATO defense spending, one country out of 28 members. The Return of Big Spending Republicans? (2017)
Threat inflation as the funding mechanism
John Glaser supplies the threat side of the ledger. The United States, he says, is probably the most secure great power in history—giant oceans east and west, weak and friendly neighbors north and south, a massive nuclear deterrent, and almost 40% of worldwide military spending—in an era of decreased interstate war and violence. Yet terrorism, which killed about a thousand Americans since 1968, is treated as a war to be won rather than a manageable problem for law enforcement and intelligence; more people per year are struck by lightning. Russia’s threat is always exaggerated, China’s massively so, North Korea’s threats are essentially defensive, and the focus on Iran is hugely ironic given that 94% of Islamic terrorism attacks on Americans since 9/11 have been Sunni and Wahhabi, funded and furthered by allies like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Glaser’s conclusion is that exaggerating threats helps fund and keep budgets high for the massive national security establishment, whether it is the military-industrial complex, the Defense Department itself, or proliferating agencies that suck from the public trough. Rethinking Pax Americana with John Glaser (2017)
John Mueller makes the same argument historically. The most impressive case, he says, was the Cold War: because the Soviet Union allowed North Korea to attack South Korea, the argument ran that it was hell-bent on conquest and would soon attack Western Europe, which is why NATO, previously a thing on paper, suddenly escalated massively. Analysts such as George Kennan and Bernard Brodie said at the time that the Soviets had no interest in anything resembling World War II again; Soviet archives later indicated they had no plans whatever to attack Western Europe. Mueller’s calculation is that spending on nuclear weapons and delivery systems during the Cold War was about enough to buy everything in the United States except the land. He quotes Khrushchev on who could fail to be afraid of war, and notes that Eisenhower agreed with his position. On terrorism he adds a figure: counter-terrorism expenditures in the United States of about $2 trillion, against which success would require stopping one $4 billion attack every two weeks since 9/11, while deaths from Islamist terrorism in the United States run about five per year. China & the Stupidity of War (2022)
Alternatives and adjacent complexes
Amity Shlaes offers the private-sector counterexample. Profiling three companies from the 1960s, she describes Fairchild Camera, where Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore discovered that science could work in the private sector, did not need to be part of the military-industrial complex, and could improve lives—the microchip business, which became Intel. Against government as a sort of Murphy’s Law, she sets Moore’s Law, Gordon Moore’s idea that the quality and efficacy of chips increases geometrically. Close Enough to Socialism: Amity Schlaes on The Great Society (2019)
Sterling Burnett’s extension runs in a different direction: the same Eisenhower speech that warned of the military-industrial complex warned of a scientific-technological elite, and Burnett argues that government dominance of science funding now directs research, citing climate science as a small field that received more money in the past decade than in its entire prior history. How to Spot Tabloid Climate Science (2018)
Across episodes: the same question, sharpened
The same question—whether the complex is a conspiracy or an incentive structure, and whether threats are real or sold—runs across the episodes, and what changes is the specificity of the mechanism. Eland in 2017 gives the procurement account: subcontractors distributed by state, the last briefing slide, committee self-selection. Glaser in 2017 and Mueller in 2022 supply the demand side, threat inflation, with Mueller adding the Cold War archival evidence and the counter-terrorism cost-benefit arithmetic. Burnett in 2018 and Shlaes in 2019 widen the term beyond weapons, to federally directed science and to the private sector that did not need the complex at all. The later treatment is not a reversal but a sharpening: Eland and Glaser describe how the machine works, Mueller how it was sold.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the complex’s formal organization, its budget lines, or any statute or case bearing on it, and they name no legislation. Eisenhower’s farewell address is dated only by Burnett, who says 1960 and hedges with “I believe.” The Albright–Powell exchange is reported by Eland at second hand, and the Khrushchev quotation reaches Mueller through translation. No excerpt states what, if anything, should replace the arrangement beyond Eland’s call for allies to pay more and Glaser’s call to deflate threats.