Is the Military-Industrial Complex Unpatriotic?

Originalists would say yes. In Washington’s farewell address, he cautioned against many dangers to the new country, specifically listing “overgrown military establishments” as a threat to liberty. This cautionary parting was not heeded for long, as the United States became a global power and had to increase our readiness to respond to events in our corner of the world. That corner kept expanding, however, and so did the role of the military and its connection to American industry. Eisenhower, centuries later, acknowledged the necessity of the military-industrial complex to keep up with the demand of the U.S. as a global superpower but reiterated Washington’s concern that extensive military influence on policy and commerce decisions would undermine democratic values and individual liberties, both at home and abroad. He accurately predicted the unending and evolving global ideological threats that the U.S. would face, but held fast that the ultimate goals of U.S. foreign policy should be peace and “human betterment.” This sort of policy double-think, where the military-industrial complex is seen as the most essential tool to achieving world peace, has grown in its influence on U.S. leadership and national security policy-making. The paranoia and pervasive focus on containment during the Cold War conflated the issues of liberty and human betterment with security. And while the Cold War ended almost twenty years ago, the impact of that intertwining of previously competing interests has had a lasting impact on foreign policy and national security. Newer strategic goals reject Washington’s preferred isolationist stance in favor of interventionism. This interventionist strategy has fallen into the trap Eisenhower also warned us of, where our arrogance and lack of preparedness for certain threats hurt us more than the actual enemy. While no one can dispute that the world we live in today is radically different from the world of our founding fathers, it would be a good exercise for evaluating current national security strategy to examine policy and goals through the lens of the originalists. Washington did not make any concerted effort to predict the future or lay down inviolable rules for strategy, but instead hoped that his remarks, “...may now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism…”