Eisenhower made the phrase military-industrial complex famous, but he did not invent it
On 17 January 1961, departing president Dwight Eisenhower, a retired five-star general, warned Americans to guard against the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex. The line became one of the most quoted in American politics. Yet the words were largely drafted by two speechwriters, and the phrase itself had surfaced fourteen years earlier.
The earliest known use belongs to economist Winfield Riefler in 1947, who used military-industrial complexes to describe the combined economic war potential of nations fighting each other. The idea of a danger was not new either. C. Wright Mills's 1956 book The Power Elite argued that military and corporate chiefs had formed a ruling group over a powerless public, a theme close to the farewell address.
The speech itself came from Ralph Williams and Malcolm Moos, with a passage in Moos's 1954 co-written book Power Through Purpose foreshadowing it. Work began in early 1959, but the first archival trace of the theme is a late-1960 memo by Williams mentioning a war based industrial complex. How much Eisenhower and his brother Milton shaped the final text remains unclear.
The background was a dramatic change in how America armed itself. From 1797 until 1941 the government leaned on private industry only during actual wars, relying on its own shipyards and arsenals even through the First World War. Then Franklin Roosevelt's War Production Board converted civilian factories, and arms production leapt from about one percent of national output to 40 percent. Firms such as Boeing and General Motors kept their defence divisions afterward.
The phrase took on a life of its own during the 1960s. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith admitted that critics quoted Eisenhower for protective cover, since nobody could call the conservative old general a radical. Student activists, labour leaders and Martin Luther King Jr., in a 1963 sermon, gave it broader meanings, shifting it from a warning about the future into a claim that the damage was already done. Congress responded to campus pressure with the Mansfield Amendment of 1969, limiting military-funded university research, after which Stanford spun off SRI International and MIT spun off Draper Laboratory.
Source: Military–industrial complex
