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Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex
Yale University Press
January 2011
On Sale: January 17, 2011
280 pages
ISBN: 0300153058
EAN: 9780300153057
Hardcover
$26.00
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Non-Fiction
In Dwight D. Eisenhower’s last speech as president, on
January 17, 1961, he warned America about the
“military-industrial complex,” a mutual dependency between
the nation’s industrial base and its military structure that
had developed during World War II. After the conflict ended,
the nation did not abandon its wartime economy but rather
the opposite. Military spending has steadily increased,
giving rise to one of the key ideas that continues to shape
our country’s political landscape.
In this book, published to coincide with the fiftieth
anniversary of Eisenhower’s farewell address, journalist
James Ledbetter shows how the government, military
contractors, and the nation’s overall economy have become
inseparable. Some of the effects are beneficial, such as
cell phones, GPS systems, the Internet, and the Hubble Space
Telescope, all of which emerged from technologies first
developed for the military. But the military-industrial
complex has also provoked agonizing questions. Does our
massive military establishment—bigger than those of the next
ten largest combined—really make us safer? How much of our
perception of security threats is driven by the
profit-making motives of military contractors? To what
extent is our foreign policy influenced by contractors’
financial interests?
Ledbetter uncovers the surprising origins and the even more
surprising afterlife of the military-industrial complex, an
idea that arose as early as the 1930s, and shows how it
gained traction during World War II, the Cold War, and the
Vietnam era and continues even today.
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