It is hard to think of any U.S. president that Donald Trump resembles less than Dwight D. Eisenhower. Yet Trump managed to evoke the comparison this week, when he charged that senior American military officials are more interested in serving the interests of arms manufacturers than in serving the interests of the U.S. The military, he said, advocates war “so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”
For some observers, the allegation brought to mind Eisenhower’s farewell address in January 1961, in which he cautioned that a mighty “military-industrial complex” could “endanger our liberties” and strangle the American economy. Since then, Eisenhower’s speech has been cited by critics who warn that an expansive foreign policy will ruin the nation’s prosperity and freedom alike.
Yet just as Trump was wrong in arguing that Pentagon officials are motivated by greed rather than patriotism, Eisenhower — a far wiser leader — was more wrong than right about the military industrial-complex.
It helps to understand the context in which Ike delivered his warning. The Cold War was in its most intense and dangerous phase. U.S. defense spending had skyrocketed to nearly 14 percent of gross domestic product during the Korean War. During the 1950s, Ike had brought the total down to around 9 percent, mostly by relying on nuclear weapons for deterrence and defense. But the fears of the period, including the Sputnik shock of 1957, set off calls from Congress and the Pentagon for far higher outlays.
Eisenhower was worried that America risked becoming a “garrison state” — a country that was so focused on security that it would inadvertently destroy the economic and political liberties it was waging the Cold War to protect. He believed that an informal alliance between arms manufacturers, the military services and Congress might bring that outcome about.
Eisenhower wasn’t entirely off base. It was possible that the specter of total war, or simply a perpetual Cold War, would lead the U.S. toward a more regimented economy and society. During the Korean War, skyrocketing military spending had indeed led to higher taxes and inflation controls, while the government engaged in large-scale industrial planning and severely limited production of consumer goods.
That experience led Eisenhower to push military spending downward, stay out of draining wars in the Third World, and otherwise make the Cold War more sustainable for the U.S. Yet when the president left office, he still worried that the military-industrial complex might undermine the American way of life it was meant to defend. And here, his warnings were not so prescient.
For one thing, unless Washington simply gave up on containing Soviet influence, it needed some system for procuring the means of defense. The military-industrial complex —a contracting system in which private firms bid to produce arms for the government — was the best of imperfect choices.
That system did, admittedly, produce a certain amount of waste, patronage and corruption: The “pork hawk” became a distinctive species within Congress. Yet as the Princeton University international affairs scholar Aaron Friedberg has argued, the obvious alternative — a system in which the government itself made weapons or controlled the means of production — would probably have been worse. It would have distorted a free-market economy far more severely, while producing less efficiency and innovation than an approach that required private firms to compete.
It is also hard to credit the idea that the Cold War made the military-industrial complex an all-powerful behemoth. Eisenhower feared that the combination of military interests, corporate interests and congressional interests would drive ever-higher levels of defense spending. Yet the broad trend, from the mid-1950s through the end of the Cold War, was toward decreasing military budgets as a portion of GDP.
Moreover, the pleas of the Pentagon and defense contractors didn’t stop Congress from sharply rolling back the defense budget in the wake of the Vietnam War, and again after the Cold War. “When the Cold War ended, there were 107 major defense firms,” writes Christian Brose, former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “By the end of the 1990s, there were five.”
If the military-industrial complex was so formidable, one might have expected more of its members to survive.
Finally, while Cold War defense spending did reshape the American economy, it was mostly in a good way. Military outlays supported industries, such as aerospace, that altered the economic landscape of entire regions. By one estimate, over $50 billion in defense dollars flowed into California alone during the 1950s; the rise of Orange County and other areas around Los Angeles was a byproduct of the Cold War. Federal funding allowed private firms to push the frontiers of innovation: In 1959, nearly 85 percent of American research and development in electronics was funded by the government.
These investments led to fearsome feats of weaponry. They also led to commercial spinoffs including computers, semiconductors and the internet — the technologies that would propel the U.S. to the forefront of the information-age economy.
“Ike was wrong,” the historian Diane Kunz wrote, because he “failed to recognize that it was precisely the American defense spending he condemned that brought unheard-of-prosperity to the United States.”
There is a larger lesson here. The argument that an active foreign policy is a threat to American liberty and prosperity is a timeless refrain of those who advocate a more circumscribed role in the world. Indeed, it often goes hand-in-hand with critiques that “merchants of death” or malevolent authority figures are scheming to get the U.S. into wars that don’t serve its national purposes. Yet the latter claim doesn’t really hold up, and the former is not nearly as convincing as it might intuitively seem.
Yes, democracies confront dangers to their way of life as a result of war and rivalry, and Ike deserves great credit for helping America navigate between the twin perils of disarmament and the garrison state. But the irony is that the country thrived in part because of the defense measures the Cold War required.
As the 60th anniversary of Ike’s Farewell Address approaches, and as the U.S. enters another long struggle with China, perhaps it is time to acknowledge that the military-industrial complex was neither as powerful nor pernicious as Trump and others would lead us to think.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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