The term military-industrial complex dates back to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address to the nation. The concepts set out in that speech remain relevant, more than fifty years later. But although the military-industrial complex is a powerful force, it is not an immovable obstacle. It is a product of society and it can be dismantled by society, given adequate focus, determination, and commitment.
Why did Eisenhower, a general, a war hero, and the first Republican president of the Cold War era, choose to focus his last remarks as president on the issue of the military-industrial complex? The first reason Eisenhower gave the speech was that he thought the military-industrial complex was a relatively new phenomenon of unprecedented power that we ignored at our peril: “The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.”1
He went on to utter the most famous phrase from the speech, the need to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”2 It was necessary to do something about this new development. It could not be allowed to grow unchecked to the point that it became the dominant force in our society. Ultimately, Eisenhower felt the military-industrial complex was a threat to democracy, saying, “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”3
Without the development of nuclear weapons, the military-industrial complex would not exist in the form that it exists today. We should note that the Manhattan Project of the 1940s was one of the largest government-funded research and manufacturing projects in history, and today’s nuclear warhead complex is built largely around facilities and locations that date back to that time.4 The Manhattan Project was the first building block of the “permanent arms establishment” that concerned Eisenhower.
But it wasn’t just that the nuclear weapons complex was one of the first important elements of the military-industrial complex. The nuclear arms race was a central part of the rationale for sustaining a permanent arms establishment in the first place. Eisenhower noted in his speech that we developed a “permanent arms industry of vast proportions” because “we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense.”5 We could no longer “improvise” because in an era of potential nuclear warfare our society could be destroyed in a matter of hours; there would be no time to mobilize for war.
The logic of the time was that the entire military establishment, most important our nuclear arsenal, had to be on a hair trigger to prevent the other side from acting first. While there was an overall dangerous illogic in the Cold War nuclear weapons buildup, I am addressing only the specific role of nuclear weapons in the genesis of the military-industrial complex as a whole.
There were some very specific ways in which nuclear weapons and nuclear delivery vehicles drove Eisenhower to give his military-industrial complex speech. One of Eisenhower’s biggest fights with the arms establishment was over whether to build a new nuclear bomber. The air force and the industry wanted one. Eisenhower thought it was a waste of money, and redundant, given all the other nuclear delivery vehicles the United States was building at that time.6 Eisenhower ultimately won the battle over the bomber, but he and his administration lost the larger war to rein in the nation’s nuclear buildup.
At the same time as the fight over the new bomber, there were rumblings in the intelligence community, the military establishment, the media, and Congress about a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union—the notion that Moscow was poised to jump ahead of the United States in developing and building long-range ballistic missiles. There was no definitive intelligence to prove this claim, but a wave of worst-case scenarios emanating from intelligence analysts in the air force and other agencies brought the notion of a missile gap into the public discourse. These fears were then exaggerated and widely disseminated, aided by hawkish journalists such as Joseph Alsop and prominent Democratic senators such as John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Stuart Symington of Missouri, and Lyndon Johnson of Texas. Kennedy gave a widely circulated speech about the missile gap on the Senate floor, and made it a central theme of his 1960 campaign for the presidency. Symington was a friend and former colleague of an executive at Convair, and he lobbied on behalf of a plan to build more of the company’s Atlas ballistic missiles.7
Eisenhower viewed the missile gap as a fiction, but he saw the issue as “a useful piece of political demagoguery” for his opponents. Eisenhower said that “munitions makers are making tremendous efforts toward getting more contracts, and in fact seem to be exerting undue influence over the Senators”—a situation that continues to this day.8
Kennedy had another reason for promoting the missile gap thesis: pork-barrel politics. In his book on Kennedy, Christopher Preble noted that “Kennedy intended his message tying foreign policy and national security to domestic economic issues to resonate particularly well with one group of voters, defense workers.”9 There was only one problem—there was no missile gap. In fact, once Kennedy took office, it became apparent that any missile gap that might exist was in favor of the United States.10
Historians differ on whether Kennedy knew that the missile gap was a fiction during his campaign for president, or if he only learned of it once he took office.11 Regardless of when Kennedy knew, it was clear that a combination of fear, hyped intelligence, and special-interest pleading had set the stage for a new military buildup. This pattern repeated itself throughout the Cold War and on into the 2000s.
The end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union offered a possibility to dramatically scale back, if not eliminate, the military-industrial complex. Colin Powell, in 1991, as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted, “I’m running out of enemies.”12 There were no threats on the horizon that could justify spending the kind of money that was spent when the Soviet Union was U.S. adversary number one. But a solution was soon found. The Pentagon focused on smaller potential adversaries like Iraq and North Korea, and argued that in the event that the United States had to fight two of these powers simultaneously, it would need almost as large a military as it would take to deal with the Soviet Union. Pentagon spending still came down substantially—about one-third during the first half of the 1990s—but it didn’t come down nearly as far as it should have given the state of the world. The “regional threats” argument kept the Pentagon budget much higher than it needed to be to defend the country.13
As post–Cold War Pentagon spending came down, the seeds of the next buildup were being sown. During the administration of George W. Bush, an internal Pentagon strategy document suggested that rather than seek a peace dividend at the end of the Cold War, the United States should double down on military spending to ensure that it had unrivaled dominance, not just over potential adversaries but over potential allies as well. When this information was leaked, it caused great consternation among U.S. allies in Europe, and the Pentagon essentially renounced the findings of its own internal document. But the architects of that document, many of whom went on to join the Bush administration, never gave up their vision of unrivaled U.S. military dominance.
During the latter half of the 1990s, advocates of a more aggressive U.S. foreign policy and a huge boost in Pentagon spending organized themselves into groups like the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which called for things like a return to a “Reaganite policy of military strength” and an active military campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. Members of the project included future officials of George W. Bush’s administration Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle. But PNAC was composed of more than just pro-Pentagon ideologues. Its original director was Bruce Jackson, a vice president at the Lockheed Martin Corporation.14
Even members of PNAC could not have imagined how much of their agenda would be carried out in the following decade. In one of their documents they suggested that the only thing that would motivate the public to support their agenda in full would be a “catastrophic event” like a “new Pearl Harbor.”15 September 11 was that event. The advocates of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and ratcheting up Pentagon spending seized on the atmosphere of fear that followed the September 11 attacks to promote the invasion of Iraq—sold, as we now know, on false claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. This was not a case of conspiracy—it was a case of a group with a preexisting agenda seizing a historical moment that was favorable to the promotion of their views, a particularly costly case of political opportunism. In parallel with the Iraq and Afghan war buildups, U.S. military spending increased to its highest levels since World War II. From 1998 to 2010, the Pentagon budget increased every year, the longest uninterrupted string of budgetary growth in its history.16
When we think of special-interest lobbies today, we often focus on the flood of private money that is corrupting our political process, from the Koch brothers and their radical right-wing agenda to the financial and pharmaceutical industries that are at the top of the list of corporate campaign donors. The arms industry is also a major campaign donor, but its contributions are relatively small compared to those of Wall Street or individuals like the Koch brothers.17 It has so many other avenues of influence that it need not rely as heavily on political giving as some other sectors. Let’s look at what some of those tools are, starting with campaign spending and then moving on to even more powerful, insidious forms of leverage exerted by the arms industry.
In campaign financing, the defense sector has contributed nearly $50 million to candidates for Congress in the past three election cycles, since 2009. The bulk of these funds go to members of the armed services and defense appropriations subcommittees—members who can make a difference in funding decisions about particular weapons programs or military facilities. The second most favored group—which overlaps substantially the first—is members who have significant weapons factories or military bases in their state or congressional district. Together these members make up a formidable coalition in favor of high Pentagon budgets and specific weapons programs.
The biggest recipient of campaign cash from the arms lobby in recent years has been former House Armed Services Committee chair Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-CA), who received three-quarters of a million dollars from arms companies in the last three election cycles, and whose top donors routinely included major defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.18 When McKeon announced his retirement in 2014, the industry immediately shifted gears and started pouring contributions into the coffers of his successor as Armed Services Committee chair, Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX).19 The arms industry’s campaign spending strategy is as much about targeting the most powerful members as it is about the absolute amounts of money contributed.
The largest area of expenditures designed to exert influence over Congress and the executive branch is direct lobbying funding. The defense industry as a whole spent $680 million on lobbying over the past five years, and has on average anywhere from eight hundred to over one thousand lobbyists—nearly two lobbyists for every member of Congress.20 The vast majority of these lobbyists formerly worked at the Pentagon, the Department of Energy, or on key congressional committees. This brings us to the issue of the revolving door—a long-standing practice of companies and other interest groups that want an inside track on influencing government. The late senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin gave one of the best explanations of the insidiousness of the revolving door:
The easy movement of high ranking military officers into jobs with major defense contractors and the reverse movements of top executives in major defense contractors into high Pentagon jobs is solid evidence of the military-industrial complex in action. It is a real threat to the public interest because it increases the chances of abuse. . . . How hard a bargain will officers involved in procurement planning or specifications drive when they are one or two years from retirement and have the example to look at of over 2,000 fellow officers doing well on the outside after retirement?21
Proxmire was speaking in 1969, so this is hardly a new phenomenon. A few years back, Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe did an analysis of what happened to three- and four-star generals and admirals once they left the government, and he found that thirty-four of thirty-nine of them went to work for Pentagon contractors or set up defense consulting firms.22 At the high end of the scale, it’s not a question of who is going through the revolving door, it’s more a question of who is not.
Another way the nuclear weapons industry in particular and the military-industrial complex in general try to control the public debate is by funding hawkish, right-wing think tanks. The advantage to contractors of operating in this fashion is that the think tanks can serve as front groups that pose as objective policy analysts when in fact they are carrying water for the industry. It’s sort of like political money laundering—but it’s political idea laundering. There are many examples of think tanks that are funded by the weapons industry.
My favorite industry-funded right-wing think tank is Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, which has been the biggest booster of the Star Wars program since shortly after Ronald Reagan announced it in the mid-1980s. Mr. Gaffney served with Richard Perle, known informally as the “Prince of Darkness” because of his gloomy view of the Soviet Union. Gaffney left the Reagan administration because they weren’t anti-Soviet enough for him once they started talking about things like reducing nuclear weapons in Europe. It didn’t take him long to set up his center with funding from Boeing, Lockheed, and other major defense contractors.23
Another key industry-backed think tank in the nuclear policy field is the National Institute for Public Policy. When the George W. Bush administration was coming into power, this institute released a report on nuclear weapons policy that was adopted in large part by the Bush administration in its first nuclear posture review. It included things like increasing the number of countries targeted by U.S. nuclear weapons and building new, more “usable,” bunker-busting weapons. At that time NIPP had an executive from Boeing on its board, and its director was Keith Payne, infamous in the annals of nuclear policy for a 1980 article he co-authored for Foreign Policy magazine entitled “Victory Is Possible,” about how the United States could win a nuclear war while “only” losing 30 to 40 million people.24 This is the kind of person the nuclear weapons industry funded to promulgate its views.
Last but not least is the Lexington Institute, the think tank that never met a weapons system it didn’t like. Their key front man, Loren Thompson, is frequently quoted in news stories on defense issues. It is rarely pointed out that he is funded by Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and other weapons contractors.25
When traditional lobbying methods don’t get the job done, the industry’s argument of last resort is jobs—in particular, jobs in the states and districts of key members of Congress. The industry routinely exaggerates the number of jobs its activities creates—virtually any other activity will create significantly more jobs than Pentagon spending. A study by economists at the University of Massachusetts found that a tax cut would create 25 percent more jobs than Pentagon spending; infrastructure investment would create one and one-half times as many jobs; and education spending would create more than twice as many jobs.26 But even if the industry exaggerates the numbers, the jobs argument is still potent in states and communities that depend on Pentagon spending for a significant portion of their economic activity.
Nuclear weapons facilities are spread throughout the country. There are nuclear weapons labs in California and New Mexico; a nuclear weapons test site and research site in Nevada; a nuclear warhead assembly and disassembly plant in Texas; a factory in Kansas City, Missouri, that builds the nonnuclear parts of nuclear weapons; a plant in South Carolina that reprocesses nuclear-weapons-grade materials to create fuel for nuclear reactors; and a plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, that enriches uranium for nuclear weapons. There are factories or bases for ICBMs, nuclear bombers, and ballistic missile submarines in Connecticut, Georgia, Washington State, Southern California, Ohio, Massachusetts, Louisiana, North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming.27 That’s a lot of members of Congress to stand up in favor of spending on nuclear weapons.
But it’s important to know that the majority of states and districts do not contain nuclear weapons activities. The challenge is to organize members from these states, a task that may be made easier by the fact that the Pentagon currently plans to spend an astounding $1 trillion on researching, building, and operating nuclear weapons over the next three decades.28 That money will have to come from somewhere—members whose districts are starved for basic services and deficit hawks who want to shrink the government could build a “strange bedfellows” coalition to stop this spending.
Finally, there are what could be called party favors—things the companies do to advance the personal interests of members. For example, the late representative Jack Murtha, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, was considered the king of pork-barrel politics in the House of Representatives. He could steer Pentagon spending to your district if you got on his good side, and he could try to cut it off if you opposed him on things he cared about. And what he cared about most was getting Pentagon money to companies in his district.29 So he got hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions from Pentagon contractors, and companies like Lockheed Martin put factories in his district. But one of the most interesting strategies had nothing to do with building weapons—it had to do with making music.
Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in Murtha’s congressional district, had one of the best symphony orchestras in the country. There was a reason for that. It was the favorite charity of Jack Murtha’s wife, and it got major contributions every year from big Pentagon contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman as a way to curry favor with Murtha.30 Perfectly legal, but clearly a form of influence peddling.
Another case was the Trent Lott Leadership Institute at the University of Mississippi. When Mississippi’s Lott was Senate majority leader, the university set up an institute in his honor. One of the biggest contributors to the institute was Lockheed Martin, to the tune of $1 million.31
One more example will underscore the point. Until 2014, Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-CA) was the head of the House Armed Services Committee. His district was full of factories and research facilities that worked on everything from drones to the stealth coating on the F-35 fighter plane. His top campaign donors were Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and the other major Pentagon contractors. He was practically a one-man military-industrial complex. As with Jack Murtha and Trent Lott, the traditional methods of influence weren’t enough for these companies. They found another way to get in Buck McKeon’s good graces. His wife Patricia decided to run for the California state legislature, and Lockheed Martin contributed generously to her campaign.32 The company swore that this had nothing to do with influencing Buck McKeon, that they had just taken a sudden interest in state and local issues. As Patricia McKeon’s main issue was an effort to repeal a ten-cent tax on plastic bags, Lockheed Martin’s explanation that it somehow cared about this issue didn’t pass the laugh test.33 Still, everything they did to help Patricia McKeon was legal—just another form of influence peddling.
There is a common assumption that the military-industrial complex is all-powerful—that it will always get what it wants and there’s nothing we can do about it—therefore, we shouldn’t even bother trying to fight it. This is not true. There have been a number of cases in recent years where activists have been able to stop the complex from getting what it wants.
One example was the F-22 fighter plane—the most expensive fighter plane ever built by the Pentagon. When the Obama administration wanted to end the program, Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor on the plane, jumped into action. They got forty-four senators and two hundred members of the House of Representatives to send letters to President Obama asking him to keep funding the plane. They also got the governors of twelve states to weigh in, including the Democratic governors of New York and Ohio. They made the usual claims that the F-22 was a major jobs program—95,000 jobs nationwide, they claimed. They also conducted a major ad campaign touting the plane.34
Normally all of this activity would have been enough to keep the F-22 going years beyond when the Pentagon wanted to end the program. But a coalition of peace and arms control groups organized against the plane, and the president and the secretary of defense spoke out against it. John McCain agreed with Obama that the F-22 should be stopped—one of the few things they agreed on. And President Obama threatened to veto any defense bill that included funding for the F-22. As a result, Lockheed Martin lost the vote to save the plane by a healthy margin—58 to 40 in the Senate. A lot of senators didn’t buy the jobs argument, didn’t think the plane was needed, or, in the case of some Republican deficit hawks—including Tea Party favorites like Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina—just thought it was too expensive. So Lockheed Martin, the biggest weapons contractor in the world, lost this battle.35
More recently, the arms industry has lost the battle over how much to spend on the Pentagon. The Pentagon’s base budget has come down by over 10 percent in the past few years, despite a campaign by the Aerospace Industries Association claiming that the country would lose a million jobs if the cuts went through.36 But the cuts did go through, by and large, and national employment actually increased. So the arms lobby’s credibility took a hit on Capitol Hill.
It’s important to look at the context of recent cuts in Pentagon spending; the Department of Defense base budget is still about one-half trillion dollars a year, so the Pentagon is hardly starved for funds. As of early 2016, the department was on track to get over $500 billion less over a decade’s time than was projected in Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s Fiscal Year 2012 budget. But that will still leave the Pentagon with well over $5 trillion for the decade. That’s a lot of money even by Pentagon standards. But even at those enormous levels of spending, the Pentagon will not be able to afford its wish list, so it will have to give something up.37
As a result, in recent years the Pentagon has offset some of the cuts in its base budget by adding equipment and activities to the war budget that have nothing to do with fighting wars. The war budget—known in Pentagon-ese as the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account—is supposed to pay for items directly related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the past few years the Pentagon has added $20 billion to $30 billion a year to the OCO account that is completely unrelated to supporting or carrying out current conflicts. The war budget has in essence operated as a “slush fund” to soften the blow of cuts in the Pentagon’s base budget.38 Even allowing for the OCO slush fund, Pentagon spending is on course to be many hundreds of billions of dollars less over the next decade than the Pentagon was expecting just a few years ago. As a result, the Pentagon can no longer afford all of the weapons and activities in its long-term plan.
Why has the Pentagon’s base budget gone down? Because of political gridlock in Washington. When Republicans threatened to shut down the government in the summer of 2011, a compromise was reached, in the form of the Budget Control Act. The Budget Control Act said that Pentagon and domestic spending other than entitlements like Medicare and Social Security would be capped for a ten-year period, unless the Congress and the president could agree on a major deficit reduction plan. The theory was that the caps would be so unattractive to both parties that they would come together and agree on a mix of revenue increases and program cuts that would reduce the deficit without having to cap Pentagon and domestic spending. But over three years later, there has been no such agreement. Republicans refuse to raise taxes and Democrats by and large oppose cuts in Medicare and Social Security. So the reductions in Pentagon spending were carried out, and there was little that the arms lobby could do about it. If the caps continue, it will be impossible for the Pentagon to afford things like its $1 trillion nuclear weapons spending plan, which will have to be substantially reduced.
This is not to say that the military-industrial complex isn’t powerful, just that it’s not all-powerful. An upsurge of citizen pressure combined with a “strange bedfellows” coalition of liberal Democrats and deficit hawk conservatives can force further cuts in Pentagon spending. The first thing to go has to be the Pentagon’s $1 trillion plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, submarines, and bombers over the next three decades. Despite issues relating to the special-interest politics of Pentagon spending decisions in Washington and around the country, as this book suggests, there is much more at stake than money. We are talking about the future of humanity, and people will ultimately need to be moved to action by that reality if we are going to reverse the nuclear buildup.