Nation: What Is the Military-Industrial Complex?

The military-industrial complex is at once more and less than the name implies. As a catch phrase, it may be on its way to surpassing in notoriety “merchants of death,” the term that grew out of Senator Gerald Nye’s investigation of the arms industry in 1934. But the complex is not a well-organized, centrally directed entity. It is a vast, amorphous conglomeration that goes far beyond the Pentagon and the large manufacturers of weapons. It includes legislators who benefit politically from job-generating military activity in their constituencies, workers in defense plants, the unions to which they belong, university scientists and research organizations that receive Pentagon grants. It even extends to the stores where payrolls are spent, and the landlords, grocers and car salesmen who cater to customers from military bases.

Any important shift of defense spending thus affects many interests and individuals. In fiscal 1968, the Defense Department contracted for $38.8 billion in goods and services, plus $6.5 billion for research and development, amounting to 5.3% of the 1968 G.N.P. These funds went to many thousands of prime contractors and subcontractors.

According to a recent estimate, 21% of skilled blue-collar workers and 16% of professional employees are on payrolls that rely on military spending. Entire communities depend almost totally on a military installation, defense plants, or both. Junction City, Kans. (pop. 20,500), lives off Fort Riley. The post pumps $143 million into the state’s economy, most of it in the Junction City area. When an Army division left in 1965, business plummeted 30%.

Communities in this situation grow panicky. Yet some towns have survived the loss nicely. Presque Isle, Me., and Greenville, S.C., for instance, both managed to use land and facilities previously occupied by military installations for industrial development.

Generally, the effect of the M-I complex is to foster heavy defense spending and impede cutbacks, even in an inflationary period. Not at all by coincidence, the legislators who have the most to say about military spending—the chairmen of the Senate and House Armed Services and Appropriations Committees—have been blessed over the years with substantial military business in their states and districts. Congressman George Mahon (House Appropriations) can point to the fact that Texas gets more business from the military than any other state except California (which gets $6.6 billion a year). South Carolina’s Mendel Rivers (House Armed Services) can, and frequently does note that his home town of Charleston thrives as a result of its huge shipbuilding facilities and naval installations.

The Defense Department spends al most $4,000,000 a year on congressional liaison, employing about 340 people for the task. One of their functions is to keep in close touch with members of Congress, providing such information as announcements of new contracts or construction in a particular member’s bailiwick. Representatives of the big firms, sometimes called MICs (for military-industrial complex), are often corporate vice presidents with six-figure salaries and generous expense accounts. They are usually not registered lobbyists, and they tend to be discreet in their operations, keeping their names out of the newspapers and avoiding lavish soirees. At private clubs in town, on country-club golf courses, sometimes on a farm in Maryland or Virginia, occasionally on a yacht, they entertain—and gather intelligence. To compete successfully, their companies have to know what the military is likely to want, what project is popular on Capitol Hill, who is really the best man to deal with.

The big contractors find the military an excellent source for such experts. Senator William Proxmire, one of the Pentagon’s most persistent and effective critics, notes that 2,072 retired, highranking military officers are now on the payrolls of the 100 top defense contractors, a threefold increase in the past ten years. While Proxmire does not charge any overt impropriety, he and others wonder whether an officer dealing with a particular company is going to drive a very hard bargain if he may go to work for it soon.

What is the overall effect of the M-I complex? That depends on the viewpoint. Dwight Eisenhower warned of its “grave implications,” while acknowledging the nation’s “imperative need” for a vigorous defense industry. V. J. Adduci, vice president of the Aerospace Industries Association, says that it is not diabolical or secretive but exemplifies the “open, dynamic, fail-safe relationship between two viable segments of our society.” Economist Arthur F. Burns, now a senior White House aide, has argued that the complex “has been affecting profoundly the character of our society as well as the thrust and contours of economic activity.” The effects, according to Burns, have been mostly negative: promoting excess government spending, stoking inflation, diverting resources from civilian needs, warping college curriculums, luring professors from teaching into research and breeding a class of civilian managers and scientists whose sole orientation is toward the government. The M-I complex is not really a complex; it is certainly no demon, no Mafia. But in view of the manifold problems it manages to create, without necessarily meaning to, it clearly bears close and constant surveillance.