Fifty Years After Ike's Farewell Address, The Military Industrial Complex Permeates Our Lives. We Must Reign It In.

         

"In 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. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together." - Dwight D. Eisenhower 1/17/60             
                                                                                                            

January 18, 2011

     Yesterday was not only Martin Luther King Day, it was also the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's farewell address in which he warned against the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex.  Plaudits for Ike seemed to be breaking out everywhere I turned.

     NPR's Morning Edition and On Point  ran  stories on him ( You can access the first here  and the second here. The complete text of the speech is available here.)

     Quaker activist and commentator Chuck Fager sent around favorable comments about Eisenhower avoiding nuclear war during the height of Cold War tension.

     Andrew Bacevich's latest article in The Atlantic, The Tyrany of Defense Inc., (click here) extolled Ike's foresight and lambasted our costly national security state.

     And in my American Studies class, I was segueing into my annual pitch regarding Ike's prescient warning.

     Fifty years following the speech, with staggering, wasteful military expenditures dwarfing those of the world's other nations  (click here for international comparisons ), we have neither peace nor prosperity. Nor do we seem to have the critical mass of "alert and knowledgeable citizenry" that Eisenhower hoped would "compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."   


However, we really have no choice but to press the case against maintaining these ridiculous levels of military spending. By March 4, Congress needs to finalize the US budget for 2011. The current military authorization bill calls for $725,000,000,000 in new spending.  (Note: this does not include the continuing costs, such as veterans' medical care,  associated with prior wars.)  Please call or write your representative and senator  and ask for reductions in defense expenditures such as those described in the recent spate of proposals summarized by Laicie Olson of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation (available here.)  Billions need to be cut from military spending and reinvested into productive new technologies and vitally needed social programs.


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For further insights from Eisenhower, consider the quotation below from a 1953 speech.

"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. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. 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 fifty miles of concrete pavement. 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. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. […] Is there no other way the world may live?" 

      –Dwight David Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr. 16, 1953/ (From: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/11/hbc-90001660)

Gen. Eisenhower speaks with soldiers of the 101st Airborne on the eve of D-Day.  If anyone knew the costs of war, it was Ike.