December 13, 2010
What Ike Got Right
By JAMES LEDBETTER
LAST week the National Archives released a trove of drafts and notes
that shed new light on President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell
address, in which he warned America about the "military-industrial complex."
The release comes just in time for the speech's 50th anniversary next
month. And so while scholars and historians use these documents to
scrutinize the evolution of the speech's famous phrase, it's worth
asking a broader question: does America still have a military-industrial
complex, and should we be as worried about it as Eisenhower was?
By one measure, the answer to the first question is yes. Over the past
50 years there have been very few years in which the United States has
spent less on the military than it did the year before.
This has remained true whether the country is actively fighting a war,
whether it has an obvious and well-armed enemy or whether Democrats or
Republicans run the White House and Congress. Despite regular
expectations that the United States will enjoy a peace dividend, we
continue to spend more on the military than the countries with the next
15 largest military budgets combined.
Such perpetual growth seems to confirm Eisenhower's concern about the
size and influence of the military. It used to be, he said, that armies
should grow and shrink as needed; in the Biblical metaphor of the
speech, he observed that "American makers of plowshares could, with time
and as required, make swords as well."
But World War II and the early cold war changed that dynamic, creating
what Eisenhower called "a permanent armaments industry of vast
proportions." It is not a stretch to believe that this armaments
industry - which profits not only from domestic sales but also from tens
of billions of dollars in annual exports - manipulates public policy to
perpetuate itself.
But Eisenhower was concerned about more than just the military's size;
he also worried about its relationship to the American economy and
society, and that the economy risked becoming a subsidiary of the
military. His alarm was understandable: at the time the military
represented over half of all government spending and more than 10
percent of America's gross domestic product. Today those figures are not
quite as troubling. While military spending as a percentage of gross
domestic product has been going up as a result of 9/11 and the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, the overall trend since 1961 is substantially
down, thanks to the tremendous growth in America's nonmilitary economy
and the shift in government spending to nonmilitary expenditures.
Yet spending numbers do not tell the whole story. Eisenhower warned that
the influence of the military-industrial complex was "economic,
political, even spiritual" and that it was "felt in every city, every
statehouse, every office of the federal government." He exhorted
Americans to break away from our reliance on military might as a
guarantor of liberty and "use our power in the interests of world peace
and human betterment."
On this score, Eisenhower may well have seen today's America as losing
the battle against the darker aspects of the military-industrial
complex. He was no pacifist, but he was a lifelong opponent of what he
called a "garrison state," in which policy and rights are defined by the
shadowy needs of an all-powerful military elite.
The United States isn't quite a garrison state today. But Eisenhower
would likely have been deeply troubled, in the past decade, by the
torture at Abu Ghraib, the use of martial authority to wiretap Americans
without warrants and the multiyear detention of suspects at Guantanamo
Bay without due process.
Finally, even if the economy can bear the immediate costs of the
military, Eisenhower would be shocked at its mounting long-term costs.
Most of the Iraq war expenses were paid for by borrowing, and Americans
will shoulder those costs, plus interest, for many years to come. *
A strong believer in a balanced budget, Eisenhower in his farewell
address also told Americans to "avoid the impulse to live only for
today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious
resources of tomorrow." Too many of today's so-called fiscal
conservatives conveniently overlook the budgetary consequences of
military spending.
Eisenhower's worst fears have not yet come to pass. But his warning
against the "unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex" is as urgent today as ever.
James Ledbetter is the author of the forthcoming "Unwarranted Influence:
Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/opinion/14ledbetter.html?_r=1&nl=to
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