The Origins of the Military Industrial Complex and It’s Historically Pernicious Influence on U.S. War and Foreign Policy
by Natylie Baldwin, Antiwar.com, 7/15/21
As the Biden administration has illegally bombed Syria and Iraq — two countries that pose absolutely no threat whatsoever to the United States or Americans — the familiar policy of militarism has been reinforced by yet another U.S. president. However, it was a previous president who, on his way out of office in 1961, coined the term “military-industrial complex,” and warned of the potential pernicious effects of the increasingly outsized influence of defense contractors over the budget and foreign policy of the United States.
Though the Cold War saw the expansion of an institutional defense industry, the seeds had actually been planted long before and a conscious decision to nurture them further was taken before World War II ended.
The Roots of the Military Industrial Complex
In 1864, President Lincoln expressed profound concern over the rise of corporations that had resulted from the Civil War and what it portended for the political and economic future of the country. Eventually, advancements in industrialization led to more mechanized and phenomenally more destructive warfare in the 20th century, with the outcomes increasingly dependent upon material production and technology. As a result, major corporations would emerge to provide the material of war and, in the process, became incentivized to keep wars and war budgets in place.
In World War I, military officers still played a critical role in the decisions to wage war which were based on previous strategies that were soon rendered outmoded due to a lack of technological expertise and inability to manage the more complicated industrial economics crucial to sustaining modern warfare. For expediency, government allowed responsibility for the war economy to be transferred from the Army to private industrialists who controlled the terms of war organization and procurement through the War Industries Board (WIB), a body composed primarily of corporate executives and bankers.
Once this arrangement was established it was difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. Many of the major anti-competitive trusts running the war economy through the WIB had long desired a relationship with the state that would facilitate public subsidy of their interests. The war effort had proven a convenient means to this end.
Between 1918 and 1941, formal patronage was fostered between the War Department and big business for the first time outside the context of an actual war. Drawing on the WIB model, the War Production Board instituted favorable tax and profit standards for major industrialists who again dictated policies within their own economic sectors during World War II, usurping substantial decision-making from state actors.
World War II and the major economic mobilization it necessitated greatly increased the incentives for war industries to maintain a militarist stance by the U.S. As detailed by historian Stephen Wertheim in his book, Tomorrow the World, foreign policy planners in the U.S. — led by members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) — were alarmed by the Nazi takeover of France in June of 1942. The idea that Britain could also fall was seriously entertained for the first time. This prompted a major realignment in internationalist thought within the U.S. political class, from a rather restrained hegemony mostly confined to the western hemisphere and support for international law and disarmament, to a world order dominated by U.S. military supremacy. American national security was broadened to incorporate the objective of not allowing the U.S. to be denied action and influence around the world. This included free economic exchange with the acknowledgment that “trade would extend no further than force allowed, but force would be committed as far as trade necessitated.”
The Soviet Union had largely been ignored in these planners’ thinking until the Soviets began turning the tide on the Germans in 1943. It was then recognized that the Soviet Union would emerge from the war as a significant world power that would have to be accommodated to some degree within the new U.S. global order. It was initially accepted that the Soviets would have a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. This was permissible as long as enough economic and political openness was afforded to those countries so as not to undermine newly defined U.S. interests. Additionally, anti-Soviet hardliners, such as Leslie Groves and James Byrnes now occupied influential positions within the Truman administration. This set of circumstances increased the likelihood of a Cold War.
Since 1945, the power, reach and ambition of multinational corporations have expanded, including encroachment into areas traditionally considered part of the public interest and outside of its domain.
James Forrestal, a former Wall Street financier who served as Secretary of the Navy during WWII and later as the first Secretary of Defense, had come to the view that policy should be an instrument of maintaining capitalist investment. According to Nikhil Pal Singh’s in depth expose in The Boston Review: “Forrestal framed his own deference for hierarchy in terms of the prerogatives of corporate capitalism — the idea that practical men of business, rather than reformers and intellectuals, had won World War II and needed to be running the world going forward.”
During a tense White House meeting in 1945, Forrestal advocated — against the advice of former Vice President Henry Wallace and then-Secretary of Defense Henry Stimson — the position of not sharing information on the atomic bomb with the Soviet Union. Forrestal persuaded Truman to agree to his view, thereby averting a possible trust-building exercise with the Soviets and encouraging the creation of a Cold War and an arms race.
All too happy to push this new arms race and maintain high military budgets were the executives of defense contractors, such as Lockheed, Northrup and Douglas. Defense spending had increased during WWII by over 13,000 percent and after the war’s end these companies had to scheme to maintain government subsidies for their industries and the huge profits that went along with them. A panel with representatives of the defense industry was created to lobby congress. After hearings that gave voice to defense executives’ gloomy forecasts of how the U.S. could fall behind economically and squander its hard-won position of global military superiority without continued largesse from the federal government, Truman was sympathetic but did not actually agree to significant defense budget increases until the Korean War erupted.
Unfortunately, this emphasis on running foreign policy with the mindset of a businessman — with little accountability — would be encouraged by the national security apparatus created by the 1947 National Security Act and Forrestal’s influence. It would later be exemplified by Robert McNamara, a former executive at Ford Motor Company, who presided over the disastrous Vietnam War as Defense Secretary.
Read the full article here.
