In his long and distinguished public career – including as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe in World War II and two terms as president of the United States – a single phrase of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s has entered and remained in the language: the military-industrial complex. He spoke those words on January 17, 1961, in a Farewell Address to the American public, noting that “the conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.” It followed, he said, that “[i]n the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
The term “military-industrial complex” entered the American political lexicon as a danger, as Eisenhower intended, but also, to some, as an established fact of American public life that led to self-perpetuating and unduly high expenditures on defense. The end of the Cold War demonstrated that a permanent and powerful military-industrial complex did not, in fact, exist. The share of US gross domestic product devoted to defense fell by half, from six percent in the 1980s to three percent in the late 1990s. In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States faced no aggressive, well-armed adversary and thus had no need of a defense establishment of Cold-War dimensions. Now, however, it does.
Both the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Republic are pursuing aggressive foreign policies that threaten American interests and American allies: China seeks to take over democratic Taiwan; Russia is waging a destructive war of conquest against Ukraine, a conflict that has thus far lasted more than three years. Both aggressive powers devote a large share of their economic output to expanding their armed forces. Each of them, therefore, is engaging in an arms race with the United States, which is in both cases a one-sided contest because America itself is not racing. The gap between the military forces the United States needs and the forces it actually has is already alarmingly wide and is growing steadily.
Specifically, America is short of weaponry, evidence of which is the difficulty it has experienced in equipping Ukraine with the rockets and artillery shells it needs to stave off the Russian onslaught. The American military also has too few ships and planes, and many of those it has are decades old. The war in Ukraine has demonstrated the importance of drones in twenty-first-century warfare, and the United States is far too slow in designing, improving, and manufacturing them. Nor does it have the industrial base required to produce the armaments that it and its friends and allies need. In a confrontation with China over Taiwan, the United States now risks being badly outgunned.
Weakness invites aggression. American military weakness makes a Chinese assault on Taiwan more likely. Military strength, by contrast, can have a deterrent effect. A militarily more capable United States can discourage Chinese adventurism – provided that Taiwan makes a comparable effort to enhance its own preparedness to resist an attack from the mainland. Similarly, a more robust program of military assistance to Ukraine might push Russia into serious peace talks. Certainly, that is the only kind of initiative with a chance of doing so.
The world has for some time been a more dangerous place than it was in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. The United States has failed to respond appropriately, for three major reasons. First, such a response requires substantially increasing the defense budget, but federal finances are already overstretched because of the large annual budget deficits and a huge and growing national debt. To practice fiscal responsibility – not, to be sure, something that the United States has done in recent years – spending more on defense would require spending less on other things, a politically difficult goal to accomplish.
Second, where defense spending is concerned, the Trump administration has devoted its attention to the underperformance of America’s allies, particularly in Europe. In this the administration is correct, and presidents before Mr. Trump have made the same point. Even, however, if the Europeans do increase their defense spending as they have promised (and not for the first time), the present challenges will still require the United States to produce more weapons of many kinds, more ships, planes, and drones, and to have more private firms in the business of making them. This, in turn, requires undertaking the Sisyphean task of reforming the procedures of the Department of Defense for procuring such weaponry, to which what Mark Twain said about the weather unfortunately applies: everybody talks about it but nobody ever does anything about it.
Third, and most important, the public has not demanded the expansion of the country’s defense establishment. Historically, the United States has substantially increased its efforts in defense and foreign policy in response to the conviction on the part of the American people that this was needed for American security, a conviction that has usually come about through a galvanizing event that made the world suddenly seem to Americans to be far more perilous.
Sometimes such events have propelled the United States into war. Because of the Japanese attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor Hawaii on December 7, 1941, America formally became a combatant in World War II. In the wake of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001, the United States fought two wars – in Afghanistan and Iraq. On three occasions during the Cold War, an event beyond North America prompted a sharp rise in the American defense budget: the North Korean attack on South Korea of June 25, 1950 (which also embroiled the United States in a shooting war); the launch by the Soviet Union of the first earth-orbiting satellite, Sputnik, on October 4, 1957; and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, has not, thus far, had the same impact on American public opinion and the American defense budget.
Perhaps the most instructive historical parallel to the present moment came in June 1940, when Nazi Germany unexpectedly defeated and occupied France. The German victory had a seismic effect on the United States. Previously, most Americans favored Great Britain and France over Germany in the European war that had begun on September 1, 1939 but were above all determined to stay out of the fighting and not even to play an indirect part in the conflict. The failure of World War I, which the United States had entered in 1917, to bring about the kind of lasting peace that President Woodrow Wilson had sought, and had indeed promised, had disillusioned the American public – in something like the way that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have produced an aversion to becoming involved in twenty-first century conflicts.
The shock of the German military success in 1940 created political space for President Franklin D. Roosevelt to repeal the Neutrality Acts of the 1930s, which had limited the military assistance the United States could provide to any foreign country, to inaugurate programs supplying such assistance to Great Britain and to the Soviet Union, which Germany attacked on June 22, 1941, and to launch a program of rearmament, which accelerated rapidly after Pearl Harbor.
To follow the logic of this particular historical analogy, a Russian defeat of Ukraine, or a forcible Communist Chinese occupation of Taiwan, would administer the kind of shock required to generate broad support for the revival and expansion of the American military-industrial complex. That would represent a very high price to pay for setting in motion the political, economic, and military developments that should already be under way. It is always better, and cheaper, to fix the roof before the downpour arrives.
