It was 50 years ago today that we were warned of the Military Industrial Complex and the war state. It wasn’t some hippie or liberal that gave us that warning but a war hero and Republican President.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”
NPR had a short piece on Ike’s Warning this morning, you can listen to it here. One of the guests on the show was Defense Secretary Robert Gates who asked at least some of the right questions:
“Does the number of warships we have, and are building, really put America at risk, when the U.S. battle fleet is larger than the next 13 navies combined — 11 of which are our partners and allies?
Is it a dire threat that by 2020, the United States will have only 20 times more advanced stealth fighters than China?
These are the kinds of questions Eisenhower asked as commander-in-chief. They are the kinds of questions I believe he would ask today.”
Over at Newshoggers author, journalist and blogger Gareth Porter has some excellent observations, From Military-Industrial Complex To Permanent War State.
The military budget doubled from 1998 to 2008 in the biggest explosion of military spending since the early 1950s – and now accounts for 56 percent of discretionary federal spending.
The military leadership used its political clout to ensure that U.S. forces would continue to fight in Afghanistan indefinitely, even after the premises of its strategy were shown to have been false.
Those moves have completed the process of creating a “Permanent War State” — a set of institutions with the authority to wage largely secret wars across a vast expanse of the globe for the indefinite future.
But the power of this new state formation is still subject to the same political dynamics that have threatened militarist interests twice before: popular antipathy to a major war, broad demands for reduced military spending and the necessity to reduce the Federal budget deficit and debt.
The percentage of Americans who believe the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting has now reached 60 percent for the first time. And as the crisis over the federal debt reaches it climax, the swollen defense budget should bear the brunt of deep budget cuts.
It was only 10 years after Ike’s warning that the US was creating false intelligence on the strength of the Soviet Union to justify increasing defense spending. None of this should come as a surprise. Employees of defense contractors get jobs at the Pentagon – retired military officers get jobs with the defense industry – elected officials depend on contributions from the defense industry to finance their campaigns and a position on the Armed Services Committee all but guarantees a well paying job when they leave the congress.