Military–industrial complex
[5] The term is most often used in reference to the system behind the armed forces of the United States, where the relationship is most prevalent due to close links among defense contractors, the Pentagon, and politicians.
[8][9] Conceptually, it is closely related to the ideas of the iron triangle in the U.S. (the three-sided relationship between Congress, the executive branch bureaucracy, and interest groups) and the defense industrial base (the network of organizations, facilities, and resources that supplies governments with defense-related goods and services).
[10][11] U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower originally coined the term in his Farewell Address to the Nation on January 17, 1961:[12] A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment.
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.
[13] Geoffrey Perret, in his biography of Eisenhower, claims that, in one draft of the speech, the phrase was "military–industrial–congressional complex", indicating the essential role that the United States Congress plays in the propagation of the military industry, but the word "congressional" was dropped from the final version to appease the then-currently elected officials.
[17] Attempts to conceptualize something similar to a modern "military–industrial complex" did exist before 1961, as the underlying phenomenon described by the term is generally agreed to have emerged during or shortly after World War II.
Many Vietnam War–era activists and polemicists, such as Seymour Melman and Noam Chomsky employed the concept in their criticism of U.S. foreign policy, while other academics and policymakers found it to be a useful analytical framework.
There is also strong evidence that the United States federal government intentionally paid a higher price for these innovations to serve as a subsidy for civilian aircraft advancement.
[31] In a 2012 story, Salon reported, "Despite a decline in global arms sales in 2010 due to recessionary pressures, the United States increased its market share, accounting for a whopping 53 percent of the trade that year.
A thesis similar to the military–industrial complex was originally expressed by Daniel Guérin, in his 1936 book Fascism and Big Business, about the fascist government ties to heavy industry.
It can be defined as, "an informal and changing coalition of groups with vested psychological, moral, and material interests in the continuous development and maintenance of high levels of weaponry, in preservation of colonial markets and in military-strategic conceptions of internal affairs.
"[35] An exhibit of the trend was made in Franz Leopold Neumann's book Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism in 1942, a study of how Nazism came into a position of power in a democratic state.
Within decades of its inception, the idea of the military–industrial complex gave rise to the ideas of other similar industrial complexes, including:[36]: ix–xxv Virtually all institutions in sectors ranging from agriculture, medicine, entertainment, and media, to education, criminal justice, security, and transportation, began reconceiving and reconstructing in accordance with capitalist, industrial, and bureaucratic models with the aim of realizing profit, growth, and other imperatives.
For an example in practice, Matthew Brummer describes Japan's Manga Military and how the Ministry of Defense uses popular culture and the moe that it engenders to shape domestic and international perceptions.
[40] In his 2025 farewell address, outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden warned of a 'tech-industrial complex' , stating that "Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power.
