Military–industrial complex

• 1. Introduction

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  The military-industrial complex entered American public consciousness on the 17th of January, 1961, in the final speech of a five-star general turned president. Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his Farewell Address to the Nation, warned of something he called "the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." The man who commanded Allied forces in Europe, a figure of impeccably conservative credentials, was telling his country to fear an entanglement between its armed forces and the corporations that armed them. The phrase landed hard. It has never quite left.

  What Eisenhower was naming was a relationship, not a conspiracy. On one side sat the military, hungry for weapons and hardware. On the other sat the defense industry, paid handsomely to supply them. Both sides benefited. Both sides, in his view, had a shared interest that did not always align with the public's. The question the rest of this documentary will examine is what that relationship has looked like in practice, who has tried to expose it, why the Soviet experience complicates the picture, and what happens when a phrase once reserved for arms factories starts being applied to video game studios and Silicon Valley.

• 2. Before the Phrase

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  Winfield W. Riefler used the phrase "military-industrial complexes" in 1947, more than a decade before Eisenhower made it famous. Riefler was describing the outcome of World War II in terms of the aggregate economic potentials of the nations that fought it. He saw the war's result as less about battlefield genius and more about which side could marshal its industrial base.

  The intellectual groundwork for the concept ran deeper still. C. Wright Mills published The Power Elite in 1956, five years before Eisenhower's address, arguing that American society had split into two unequal parts. On top sat a powerful elite composed of military and corporate chieftains. Below them lay what Mills called a powerless mass society. His framework became the conceptual lens through which academics and activists interpreted Eisenhower's warning throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

  Eisenhower's speech itself was not a solo act. It was authored by Ralph E. Williams and Malcolm Moos, and foreshadowed by a passage in Moos's 1954 book Power Through Purpose. Planning for the address began in early 1959. The earliest archival evidence of the military-industrial complex theme, however, is a late-1960 memo by Williams that includes the phrase "war based industrial complex." The precise degree to which Eisenhower and his brother Milton shaped the final text remains unclear from surviving documents.

• 3. The American Machine

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  From 1797 to 1941, the United States only turned to civilian industry when the country was actually at war. Between conflicts, the government ran its own shipyards and weapons facilities. World War II ended that arrangement for good.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt established the War Production Board to redirect civilian factories toward military output. Arms production climbed from roughly one percent of annual GDP to forty percent. Companies like Boeing and General Motors expanded their defense divisions rather than surrendering them, and some of the technologies those divisions produced, including night-vision goggles and GPS, eventually found their way into ordinary life.

  The Cold War deepened the entanglement. Scholars J. Paul Dunne and Elisabeth Sköns argued that the arms market during this period had a monopsonistic structure, meaning the government was essentially the only buyer, which gave defense firms both high potential profits and significant incentive to understate risk and cost when competing for contracts. Risk stayed with the government; emphasis fell on performance rather than price. The military kept requesting additions and improvements to existing programs, a practice Dunne and Sköns called gold-plating, and that practice gave contractors ongoing opportunities to renegotiate deals in their favor. Many of those contractors held near-monopoly positions in their corners of the market.

  In 1993, the Pentagon itself urged defense contractors to consolidate, responding to a shrinking budget after the end of the Cold War. Between 1992 and 1997, mergers in the defense industry totaled $55 billion. Companies like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman emerged from that consolidation as the dominant players in the third era of the American military-industrial complex.

• 4. The Proxmire Years

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  William Proxmire became the most visible critic of defense contracting excess during the Cold War era. In 1968, he appeared on the front page of the New York Times after a press conference in which he named twenty-three defense contractors he accused of "shocking abuse." Proxmire said directly: "I think this is an excellent example of the military industrial complex at work, with the victim being... the taxpayer."

  His primary target was the C-5A Galaxy jet transport, which he called "one of the greatest fiscal disasters in the history of military contracting." He secured the congressional testimony of U.S. Air Force whistleblower A. Ernest Fitzgerald, who testified in 1968 that cost overruns on the C-5A would reach $2 billion, driven by underestimated costs, ineffective controls, and perverse incentives built into the contract's repricing formula. The Air Force disputed this, arguing the actual overrun was half what Fitzgerald claimed. Proxmire responded by pressing the Government Accountability Office to investigate the entire program.

  James Ledbetter later observed that Proxmire's attacks were widely read as opposition to the Vietnam War by another name. That reading was not entirely off base. John Kenneth Galbraith acknowledged that he and others quoted Eisenhower's farewell address for the "flank protection it provided" when criticizing military power, because Eisenhower's conservative reputation made the critique harder to dismiss. Activists and polemicists including Seymour Melman and Noam Chomsky used the concept to challenge U.S. foreign policy, while scholars and policymakers treated it as a genuine analytical framework.

• 5. The Soviet Counterpoint

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  Stalin actively blocked the formation of a military-industrial complex in the Soviet Union, even as the Red Army sought control over Soviet industry during Lenin's reign in the 1920s. Stalin's strategy was deliberate: he used divide and rule tactics to prevent collusion between military and industrial factions, structuring incentives so that military and industrial actors gained more from competing with and undermining each other than from working together. He feared that a united bloc of military and industrial power could challenge his authority.

  The result was an economy that was heavily militarized in practice but lacked the vested-interest coalition that the term implies. Secrecy was pervasive. Resource allocation was rigidly centralized. Economic isolation and unquestioning acceptance of government decisions were all justified under the banner of national security. The true costs of this arrangement were rarely tracked, and when they were, they were kept from the public.

  When the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia transitioned to a market economy, the hidden costs of decades of militarism became visible all at once. Many Russians blamed the market system for creating those costs, because that was the moment the costs appeared. The actual source lay in the Soviet era's refusal to account for them.

  The Russian term commonly translated as "military-industrial complex" does not mean the same thing as the English phrase. In Russian, the modifier refers to a complex of military industries taken together, not to a coalition of military and industrial interests. This linguistic gap has produced significant ambiguity whenever observers apply the concept to Russia or the Soviet Union.

• 6. Russia After 2022

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  Russia's Military-Industrial Commission oversees a sector of roughly 6,000 companies employing about 3.5 million people, or approximately 2.5 percent of the Russian population. Following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, that sector shifted into a war footing that has not let up.

  Andrei Chekmenyov, head of the Russian Union of Industrial Workers, acknowledged that "practically all military-industrial enterprises" were requiring workers to put in additional hours without their consent. In January 2023, Vladimir Putin declared that Russia's large military-industrial complex would ensure victory over Ukraine. By 2025, nearly forty percent of Russian government spending was directed toward national defense and security, a record-high allocation of 13.5 trillion rubles, equivalent to $133.63 billion, exceeding the combined spending on education, healthcare, social programs, and economic development.

  Philip Luck of the Center for Strategic and International Studies has argued that the war created a new class of economic beneficiaries, industries and individuals whose profits depend on the war's continuation. Russian political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann calls this a new "military-industrial class." Luke Cooper of the Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform describes it as a rent-based military-industrial complex whose elites have a vested interest in large-scale military spending, suggesting that even a hypothetical end to the war would not necessarily reverse the militarization of the Russian economy.

  At the same time, international sanctions have exposed Russia's dependence on Western components. The military-industrial base has shown resilience, but analysts regard its current pace as unsustainable over the long term.

• 7. Expanding the Concept

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  George F. Kennan wrote in 1987 that "were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented." He was right that the complex survived the Cold War's end, even if the form it took kept shifting.

  Since the 1990s, traditional defense contractors have faced competition from Silicon Valley companies including Anduril Industries and Palantir for Pentagon contracts. Venture capital funding for defense technologies doubled between 2019 and 2022. The shift reflects a broader reorientation of defense strategy toward cloud computing and cybersecurity rather than conventional armaments.

  Scholarship has tracked how the concept has bled into adjacent domains. James Der Derian's book Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network examines how video games, war movies, and media spectacles have merged with military institutions to produce what he describes as a mirage of high-tech, low-risk warfare. The U.S. Army developed America's Army, a video game created explicitly for recruitment and public outreach, as a concrete example of this overlap.

  In his 2025 farewell address, Joe Biden warned of a "tech-industrial complex," invoking the original Eisenhower formulation in response to Elon Musk's role in the second Trump administration and the public alignment of technology leaders including Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos with that administration. The phrase, which entered the language as a warning about arms factories, has now been applied to anime studios in Japan, pharmaceutical firms, prison systems, and the technology platforms that shape public information. David S. Rohde has noted that the phrase functions in U.S. politics today as a Rorschach test: its meaning, as one observer put it, "is in the eye of the beholder."