The Military-Industrial Complex Is Killing Us All

Eisenhower famously warned Americans about it in his 1961 farewell address, calling it for the first time "The military-industrial complex," or the MIC. Start with the fact that, thanks to the MIC's ability to hijack the federal budget, total annual military spending is far larger than most people realize: around $1,500,000,000,000.

Contrary to what the MIC scares us into believing, that incomprehensibly large figure is monstrously out of proportion to the few military threats facing the United States.

The MIC was born after World War II from, as Eisenhower explained, the "Conjunction of an immense military establishment" - the Pentagon, the armed forces, intelligence agencies, and others - "And a large arms industry." Those two forces, the military and the industrial, united with Congress to form an unholy "Iron Triangle" or what some scholars believe Eisenhower initially and more accurately called the military-industrial-congressional complex.

As a system, the MIC ensures that Pentagon spending and military policy are driven by contractors' search for ever-higher profits and the reelection desires of members of Congress, not by any assessment of how to best defend the country.

These transfers conveniently allow the Pentagon and its contractors to ask Congress for replacement purchases, further fueling the MIC. Seeking new profits from new markets, contractors have also increasingly hawked their military products directly to SWAT teams and other police forces, border patrol outfits, and prison systems.

Of course, even thinking about cutting the Pentagon budget is difficult because the MIC has captured both political parties, virtually guaranteeing ever-rising military spending.

Though all too many of us will continue to believe that dismantling the MIC is unrealistic, given the threats facing us, it's time to think as boldly as possible about how to roll back its power, resist the invented notion that war is inevitable, and build the world we want to see. 

https://tomdispatch.com/the-military-industrial-complex-is-killing-us-all/