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The Permanent Militarization of America
By AARON B. O’CONNELL
IN 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office warning
of the growing power of the military-industrial complex in American
life. Most people know the term the president popularized, but few
remember his argument.
In his farewell address, Eisenhower called for a better equilibrium
between military and domestic affairs in our economy, politics and
culture. He worried that the defense industry’s search for profits would
warp foreign policy and, conversely, that too much state control of the
private sector would cause economic stagnation. He warned that unending
preparations for war were incongruous with the nation’s history. He
cautioned that war and warmaking took up too large a proportion of
national life, with grave ramifications for our spiritual health.
The military-industrial complex has not emerged in quite the way
Eisenhower envisioned. The United States spends an enormous sum on
defense — over $700 billion last year, about half of all military
spending in the world — but in terms of our total economy, it has
steadily declined to less than 5 percent of gross domestic product from
14 percent in 1953. Defense-related research has not produced an
ossified garrison state; in fact, it has yielded a host of beneficial
technologies, from the Internet to civilian nuclear power to GPS
navigation. The United States has an enormous armaments industry, but it
has not hampered employment and economic growth. In fact, Congress’s
favorite argument against reducing defense spending is the job loss such
cuts would entail.
Nor has the private sector infected foreign policy in the way that
Eisenhower warned. Foreign policy has become increasingly reliant on
military solutions since World War II, but we are a long way from the
Marines’ repeated occupations of Haiti, Nicaragua and the Dominican
Republic in the early 20th century, when commercial interests influenced
military action. Of all the criticisms of the 2003 Iraq war, the idea
that it was done to somehow magically decrease the cost of oil is the
least credible. Though it’s true that mercenaries and contractors have
exploited the wars of the past decade, hard decisions about the use of
military force are made today much as they were in Eisenhower’s day: by
the president, advised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National
Security Council, and then more or less rubber-stamped by Congress.
Corporations do not get a vote, at least not yet.
But Eisenhower’s least heeded warning — concerning the spiritual effects
of permanent preparations for war — is more important now than ever.
Our culture has militarized considerably since Eisenhower’s era, and
civilians, not the armed services, have been the principal cause. From
lawmakers’ constant use of “support our troops” to justify defense
spending, to TV programs and video games like “NCIS,” “Homeland” and
“Call of Duty,” to NBC’s shameful and unreal reality show
“Stars Earn Stripes,” Americans are subjected to a daily diet of
stories that valorize the military while the storytellers pursue their
own opportunistic political and commercial agendas. Of course, veterans
should be thanked for serving their country, as should police officers,
emergency workers and teachers. But no institution — particularly one
financed by the taxpayers — should be immune from thoughtful criticism.
Like all institutions, the military works to enhance its public
image, but this is just one element of militarization. Most of
the political discourse on military matters comes from civilians, who
are more vocal about “supporting our troops” than the troops themselves.
It doesn’t help that there are fewer veterans in Congress today than at
any previous point since World War II. Those who have served are less
likely to offer unvarnished praise for the military, for it, like all
institutions, has its own frustrations and failings. But for
non-veterans — including about four-fifths of all members of Congress —
there is only unequivocal, unhesitating adulation. The political costs
of anything else are just too high.
For proof of this phenomenon, one need look no further than the
continuing furor over sequestration — the automatic cuts, evenly divided
between Pentagon and nonsecurity spending, that will go into effect in
January if a deal on the debt and deficits isn’t reached. As Bob
Woodward’s latest book reveals, the Obama administration devised the
measure last year to include across-the-board defense cuts because it
believed that slashing defense was so unthinkable that it would make
compromise inevitable.
But after a grand budget deal collapsed, in large part because of
resistance from House Republicans, both parties reframed sequestration
as an attack on the troops (even though it has provisions that would
protect military pay). The fact that sequestration would also devastate
education, health and programs for children has not had the same impact.
Eisenhower understood the trade-offs between guns and butter. “Every gun
that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in
the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those
who are cold and are not clothed,” he warned in 1953, early in his
presidency. “The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick
school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each
serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped
hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single
fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single
destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”
He also knew that Congress was a big part of the problem. (In earlier
drafts, he referred to the “military-industrial-Congressional” complex,
but decided against alienating the legislature in his last days in
office.) Today, there are just a select few in public life who are
willing to question the military or its spending, and those who do —
from the libertarian Ron Paul to the leftist Dennis J. Kucinich — are
dismissed as unrealistic.
The fact that both President Obama and Mitt Romney are calling for
increases to the defense budget (in the latter case, above what the
military has asked for) is further proof that the military is the true
“third rail” of American politics. In this strange universe where those
without military credentials can’t endorse defense cuts, it took a
former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen, to make the
obvious point that the nation’s ballooning debt was the biggest threat
to national security.
Uncritical support of all things martial is quickly becoming the new
normal for our youth. Hardly any of my students at the Naval Academy
remember a time when their nation wasn’t at war. Almost all think it
ordinary to hear of drone strikes in Yemen or Taliban attacks in
Afghanistan. The recent revelation of counterterrorism bases in Africa
elicits no surprise in them, nor do the military ceremonies that are now
regular features at sporting events. That which is left unexamined
eventually becomes invisible, and as a result, few Americans today are
giving sufficient consideration to the full range of violent activities
the government undertakes in their names.
Were Eisenhower alive, he’d be aghast at our debt, deficits and still
expanding military-industrial complex. And he would certainly be
critical of the “insidious penetration of our minds” by video game
companies and television networks, the news media and the partisan
pundits. With so little knowledge of what Eisenhower called the
“lingering sadness of war” and the “certain agony of the battlefield,”
they have done as much as anyone to turn the hard work of national
security into the crass business of politics and entertainment.
