Guest Post: James Ledbetter on 50 Years of the “Military-Industrial Complex”

James Ledbetter is the author of Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex and the editor in charge of Reuters.com.

Few presidential phrases have been more honored linguistically than the term “military-industrial complex,” introduced by Dwight Eisenhower fifty years ago this month.

The suffix “-industrial complex” has become a convenient (if overused) way to describe the meshing of public and private interests, usually in a manner suggesting that profit motivations have trumped rational policy assessments.  Critics of the dramatic expansion of the United States penal system often refer to the “prison-industrial complex.” The Times’s David Leonhardt and others dubbed the high-risk housing bubble market of the early 21^st century a “real estate-industrial complex.” Global warming deniers speak of a “climate-industrial complex.” One reads of a pharmaceutical-industrial complex, a medical-industrial complex, even an “organic-industrial complex” of mass-produced food marketed as healthy.

But where, exactly, did the phrase come from? It is generally believed, but not entirely true, that military-industrial complex did not exist in public discourse until Eisenhower used the phrase. I have located three previous uses of the phrase “military-industrial complex” prior to Eisenhower’s 1961 speech. In two of those instances, the term is used to describe a specific physical part of a country, a “compound” as much as a “complex.” In the earliest case, this was a steel-producing region east of the Ural Mountains in the Soviet Union; in the second case, a Confederate arms and shipping stronghold around the port of Shreveport during the Civil War.

The third usage, however, refers to World War II, and is much closer to the sense in which Eisenhower used the term. The author — the economist and diplomat Winfield W. Riefler, writing in Foreign Affairs in 1947 — specifically discusses the role of industrial output in determining the outcome of the war, and lays out the intersection between civilian and military components of an economy necessary for “a military-industrial complex to function.” Given the subject matter, the prominence of the author, and the prestige of the journal involved, it seems likely that someone in Eisenhower’s advisory circle — including Eisenhower himself — would have read this article, though I have found no specific connection between it and Eisenhower’s farewell speech.

Perhaps the most stubborn misconception about the phrase is that it began life with an attached third term that was excised prior to the speech’s delivery on Jan. 17, 1961. Eisenhower biographer Geoffrey Perret wrote that Eisenhower “originally intended to include Congress in this indictment and deliver a blast at the ‘military-industrial-congressional complex.’ At the last minute, he struck out ‘congressional.’” By contrast, historian Douglas Brinkley tells us that the phrase was originally “military-industrial-scientific complex,” but that Eisenhower’s science advisor James Killian advised the president to change it.

The historical evidence for both claims is essentially nil. Killian’s memoir, for example, discusses the speech, but never mentions any objections to its proposed content, nor even hint that Killian saw the speech prior to its delivery; neither did Killian bring this up in the archival oral history. While we may never know exactly who had or changed what idea prior to the speech’s delivery, there is no extant draft of the speech that contains any other version of the phrase except the one we know today.

Moreover, a speechwriter staff memorandum [PDF] dated Oct. 31, 1960 — before the speech had been drafted — referred to the “war based industrial complex,” very close to the phrase Eisenhower eventually said out loud. It seems unlikely that an additional term would be added to, and then subtracted from, that concept while leaving no trace in any of the existing drafts. At a minimum, if any change to the speech’s central phrase was made, it was not “at the last minute”; the Eisenhower Library has posted online a draft of the speech dated nearly a month before it was delivered [PDF], and the phrase military-industrial complex is intact, just as in every other draft.

Why the persistent belief in a phantom missing term? Both are very plausible extensions of the speech’s central theme. While Congress is not explicitly a target in the farewell address, Congressional complicity in the malign influence of the military-industrial complex was very much in the minds of the Eisenhower brain trust. Similarly, a major section of the speech does indeed warn about the dangers of scientific research becoming too large and too government-directed. In a way, the mythical third term is a tribute to the scary strength of Eisenhower’s thought and the eloquence of its expression; people want to believe the phrase was longer because the idea itself seems so far-reaching.