Eisenhower and the Threat of Military Overreach

In a timeless and ominously prophetic speech, Eisenhower left the nation after his eight years in office with a warning that no one at the time understood the significance of. Although Eisenhower had been at the very heart of America’s military might during World War II, he believed that what he and other American Americans had witnessed during that time was fundamentally different from the military industrial complex of the early 1960s. He started his speech with a warning against overly simplistic constructivist ideologies that replaced the slow relentless drive required to maintain freedom with a short term sprint that would supposedly catapult the world into a new era through either innovation or social progress. He denied that government research and coercive innovation were the solutions to safeguarding the liberties that had been paid for so dearly. He cautioned that the military industrial complex created a peacetime infrastructure of combat that had never existed before. While he recognized that the threat of the Soviet Union needed a counterpart, he also realized that the tension of keeping a massive operational arm of the government alive in peacetime while also maintaining liberty required a strong and educated populace who could push back on potential over-reach.

Eisenhower‘s first point to push back on quick fixes and portray good governance as the long and painful process that it is is a needed message for today. Agricultural progress, social growth, and military strength all come secondary to the maintenance of individual and communal liberties. He was clearly picturing technocrats who held a dream of progress above the traditional liberal principles of freedom. He recognized that rather than being one breakthrough away from the end of history, rather we are only one generation away from dissolution of all the liberties that World War II was fought for. His long-term, rather than short-term utopian mindset is exactly the sort of message that is needed today to walk our financial system slowly and painfully back to reality and to connect civic ambitions with the needs of citizens.

His watchfulness of the military industrial complex was stated with some restraint, yet it was easy to tell of his deep and underlying concerns. No one who understands the military industrial complex today could listen to the speech without seeing how it precisely predicted the unbounded growth of these companies and their associated bureaucratic arms within the Federal government. Eisenhower grounded his critique in the understanding that there was no armaments industry in America for many years after our founding and the plow share makers were able to turn their production to swords when it was required. He believed that even in World War II, our technology was primarily a re-orientation of non-military production and technologies turned towards them in time of need. The existence of numerous defense companies even in times of peace, can only be sustained by the government, and Eisenhower recognized how different this was from the militia model that was established at the founding. He saw that it was necessary to be able to compete with other existential threats, but he had no illusions about the potential for overreach. Eisenhower thought this tension could only continue fruitfully if the people were constantly vigilant and responsible, yet the populace that exists today is far from that. His nightmare scenario of an ever-increasing defense budget with more and more detachment from the oversight of the people has come to pass.

Although his speech was at only the beginning of what the military industrial complex would become today, he saw the structural and political-economic threat that it presented. His promotion of slow and hard earned liberty being maintained through an active and educated populace is even more important today. We have lost ground from where he was, and to get it back will require people with principle and strategy. As much as the modern right likes to send money to the military industrial complex, it must be remembered that only a generation ago a republican president was fully aware of the dangers that it presented. Although the military industrial complex holds great power now, it does so out because it is allowed to by the state, and ultimately the state must return to the people for approval. This approval can be taken away in just a generation if people are aligned across parties about the massive threat that it presents. Eisenhower would have spoken far more urgently today, but the least we can do is stop the situation from descending even further into power imbalance.