Military industrial complex

In 1961, Eisenhower warned of what he called the military industrial complex, which is the industrial empires that profit from war (for anyone who has read George Orwell's 1984, the military industrial complex is a slightly less successful version of the authoritarian government of the novel). An example of this is if the Ford Motor company makes tanks for the US army. The government pays the company a great deal to satisfy orders from the military, which means that the company has an interest in the keeping the US in war, because the longer the war, the more tanks and therefore the more money Ford can make at the expense of the public purse. As the war drags on and the company receives more and more money, it can afford to lobby in Congress for the continuation of war and the provocation of future wars.

Eisenhower asked for future leaders to use a combination of military defense and diplomacy to avoid the creation of strong defense lobbyists. Essentially, Eisenhower knew that defense spending was necessary, but he also knew that if the American government continued on the way it had defense spending would become too significant a part in the economy.

One could say that the military industrial complex began to take control during World War 2. The reasoning behind this claim is that because FDR was so harsh on business during the Depression with his New Deal, he had to create a pro-business environment during the war. In doing so, FDR paved the way for the military industrial complex to control politics for the rest of the century. Harold Ickes, the head of the Department of the Interior under FDR critiqued Roosevelt's policies for war production, saying that the defense contractors were using public funds to make a guaranteed profit for themselves.

From our present situation we can see that political domination by the military industrial complex is not a laughing matter; in 2014, the US spent 610 billion dollars on defense. The amount the US spent was greater than the following 7 nations combined (the sum total of defense spending in 2014 for China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, UK, India and Germany was 600.6 billion USD to our 610). Clearly the phrase "nothing exceeds like excess" has not for a moment left the minds of American leadership.

I will be the first to tell you that ours is not a good position to be in. Our defense spending has decreased over the past few years, but in truth we are still feeling financial aches that are left over from the Cold War; the largest part of our defense budget is used for the maintenance of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, most of which were constructed as part of the nuclear arms race. The tricky thing going forward will be to decrease spending without damaging the economy. I say that this will be challenging because defense spending is such a large part of our economy that if we were to scale it back by a third, we would lose 1% of our GDP, which would be approximately 174 billion dollars that would no longer go into the economy. It is hard to say what the exact effect of such a withdrawal would be, but we can say that consumers would have trouble making up that sum in increased spending.

Effectively, the military industrial complex is dominant in our society, both politically and economically. We must find a way to diminish defense spending without causing an economic crisis, and the longer the status quo is upheld, the more difficult it will be to rid ourselves of the influence of the military industrial complex.

Sources:
history
statista
worldbank
marxists
britannica