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Fifty Years Later: Ike on the Military Industrial Complex

By: Ben Domenech (Diary)  |  January 17th, 2011 at 11:29 AM  | 

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Today on Coffee and Markets Francis Cianfrocca and I discuss the fiftieth anniversary of Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex” warning, Defense spending and cuts, and the challenges of Fed policy on inflation.

We’re brought to you as always by Stephen Clouse and Associates. You can find our iTunes feed at CoffeeandMarkets.com. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Looking Back on Ike’s Farewell Address
Bromund on the Constitutional Mandate for Defense
RCW: Tea Party Views on Afghanistan
The Philly Fed’s Plosser: Speech in Chile
McArdle and Tamny: A Debate on Fed Policy

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COMMENTS

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  • aesthete

    Money quote: “as I’ve sat down in a room with a number of people running in 2012, and who, or who are possibly running in 2012, and every single one of them has said that defense spending has to be on the docket as something that can be cut…” This is interesting to me, as it means that (more likely than not) we will be talking about *what* should be cut in the future, not whether the military budget will be cut or not. IMO, we (and the folks at AEI and Heritage) should be looking at 1) more narrowly (and more critically) defining our objectives on the national stage, and at 2) looking for cuts which least impact (or even help in achieving) our ability to attain our national priorities.

  • victrola

    I’m one of those conservatives that believes we need to make major cuts in military spending. I supported Reagan’s buildup of the military during the Cold War, but the world has changed and the US military still has yet to adapt to a post-Cold War era.

    What we spend on defense is astonishing, and most of our equipment (like multi-billion dollar submarines) has almost zero use in our current conflicts.

    We need a leaner and meaner military, and I would welcome bipartisan deals where we can exchange cutting defense spending for also cutting entitlements.

    I’m very pro-military and hawkish on defense issues, but that doesn’t mean we should allow taxpayers to be fleeced. There is very little competition with Defense contractors (they’ve all merged, so there’s very few companies to compete with one another). They play games by setting up the factories in different districts so they have broader political support, etc. It’s become a form of pork-barrel projects for Congressman.

    Conservatives shouldn’t have a knee-jerk reaction to the idea of downsizing the military.

    • Locked and Loaded

      “bipartisan deals where we can exchange cutting defense spending for also cutting entitlements.”

      Any cuts in defense spending should stand on their own merits, and we are now talking about our side proposing those cuts. Cuts to entitlements already stand on merit.

  • jamesmackey

    Has changed and not for the better.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY

    A serious debate on foreign policy is needed inside the Republican party. Do we want to continue with the Bush, Cheney, Bolton and Kristol policies of the past 10 years??

  • persiflage

    significant cuts that can be made in our “defense” budget. I would begin by calling an end to FDR’s war, and bringing the boys home from Okinawa, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Great Britain, Scandinavia, etc…it’s been, what, 65 years? Three generations of FDR’s war? That’s enough. We can’t afford it anymore. Time for those others to grow up, be adults, and defend themselves.

    • ss396

      Aren’t we also overdue for an up-or-down vote on closing superfluous domestic military bases? As I recall there were supposed to be three rounds of them, but Congress has only accomplished 1-1/2 of them.

    • http://impudent.edublogs.org/ kyle8

      bring em home from those old cold war bases and put some of them on the southern border. Forgive me for thinking we ought to protect Americans before we protect Germans, Japanese, and and the Spanish. (we have over 2000 troops in Spain!)

    • exitsfunnel

      I’m all for closing down all of those bases but unless you’re talking about disbanding the units stationed there altogether, it’s really not much of a savings as the lion’s share of the costs associated with the facilities are paid for by the host countries.

      -exits

  • ss396

    I am delighted that we have the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower’s Farewell Address because, well, because I had never actually read it before. I’ve long know about the warnings against the military-industrial complex, but I never before realized that that was only the first half of his speech.

    I was shaken, because it was downright eerie to read his concerns for the nation’s Universities:

    “In this revolution, research has become central…A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government”;

    “[A] government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity”;

    “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment…is gravely to be regarded”;

    “[W]e must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite”;

    Does this not accurately describe the difficulties we have with the AGW crowd? their cap-and-trade children? the embryonic stem cell folks? the transformation to ‘diploma mills’? the debates of credentialed vs. educated?

    Ike’s feared military-industrial complex did not come to pass, not in any uncontrolled, Strangelovian way – perhaps because of his warning. Imagine today’s academic world if we had taken his warnings to the Universities equally to heart.

  • persiflage

    Today, Ike would be warning us, not about the dangers of the Military-Industrial Complex, but rather those of the Medical-Industrial Complex, and the Educational-Industrial Complex …

  • greeneyeshade

    Hmm….