The expression military–industrial complex (MIC) describes the relationship between a country's military and the defense industry that supplies it, seen together as a vested interest which influences public policy. A driving factor behind the relationship between the military and the defense corporations is that both sides benefit—one side from obtaining weapons, and the other from being paid to supply them. The term is most often used in reference to the system behind the armed forces of the United States, where the relationship is most prevalent due to close links among defense contractors, the Department of Defense, and politicians. The expression gained popularity after a warning of the relationship's harmful effects, in the farewell address of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961. The term has also been used in relation to Russia, especially since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Origin of the term
U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower used the term in his Farewell Address to the Nation on January 17, 1961:
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction... This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together. [emphasis added]
The speech was authored by Ralph E. Williams and Malcolm Moos and was foreshadowed by a passage in the 1954 book Power Through Purpose coauthored by Moos. The degree to which Eisenhower and his brother Milton shaped the speech is unclear from surviving documents. Planning commenced in early 1959; however, the earliest archival evidence of a military–industrial complex theme is a late-1960 memo by Williams that includes the phrase war based industrial complex. A wide range of interpretations have been made of the speech's meaning.
While the term military–industrial complex is often ascribed to Eisenhower, he was neither the first to use the phrase, nor the first to warn of such a potential danger. The first known use of military-industrial complex was by Winfield W. Riefler in 1947. Riefler attributed the outcome of the war to the balance of aggregate economic potentials of the belligerents which he termed "military-industrial complexes". C. Wright Mills's 1956 book The Power Elite is thematically similar to Eisenhower's Farewell Address and was used as a conceptual framework for the military-industrial complex debate in the 1960s and 1970s. Mills said that American society had cleaved into a powerful elite of military and corporate chieftains set against a powerless mass society.
United States
Some sources divide the history of the United States military–industrial complex into three eras.
First era
From 1797 to 1941, the U.S. government only relied on civilian industries while the country was actually at war. The government owned their own shipyards and weapons manufacturing facilities which they relied on through World War I. With World War II came a massive shift in the way that the U.S. government armed the military.
In World War II, the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the War Production Board to coordinate civilian industries and shift them into wartime production. Arms production in the U.S. went from around one percent of annual Gross domestic product (GDP) to 40 percent of GDP. U.S. companies, such as Boeing and General Motors, maintained and expanded their defense divisions. These companies have gone on to develop various technologies that have improved civilian life as well, such as night-vision goggles and GPS.
Second era (Cold War)
The second era is identified as beginning with the coining of the term by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. This era continued through the Cold War period, up to the end of the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The phrase rose to prominence in the years following Eisenhower's farewell address, as part of opposition to the Vietnam War. John Kenneth Galbraith said that he and others quoted Eisenhower's farewell address for the "flank protection it provided" when criticizing military power given Eisenhower's "impeccably conservative" reputation.
Following Eisenhower's address, the term became a staple of American political and sociological discourse. Many Vietnam War–era activists and polemicists, such as Seymour Melman and Noam Chomsky employed the concept in their criticism of U.S. foreign policy, while other academics and policymakers found it to be a useful analytical framework. Although the MIC was bound up in its origins with the bipolar international environment of the Cold War, some contended that the MIC might endure under different geopolitical conditions (for example, George F. Kennan wrote in 1987 that "were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military–industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented."). The collapse of the Soviet Union and the resultant decrease in global military spending (the so-called 'peace dividend') did in fact lead to decreases in defense industrial output and consolidation among major arms producers, although global expenditures rose again following the September 11 attacks and the ensuing "War on terror", as well as the more recent increase in geopolitical tensions associated with strategic competition between the United States, Russia, and China.
A 1965 article written by Marc Pilisuk and Thomas Hayden says benefits of the military–industrial complex of the U.S. include the advancement of the civilian technology market as civilian companies benefit from innovations from the MIC and vice versa. In 1993, the Pentagon urged defense contractors to consolidate due to the fall of communism and a shrinking defense budget.
Third era
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In the third era, U.S. defense contractors either consolidated or shifted their focus to civilian innovation. From 1992 to 1997 there was a total of US$55 billion worth of mergers in the defense industry, with major defense companies purchasing smaller competitors. The U.S. domestic economy is now tied to the success of the MIC which has led to concerns of repression as Cold War-era attitudes are still prevalent among the American public. Shifts in values and the collapse of communism have ushered in a new era for the U.S. military–industrial complex. The Department of Defense works in coordination with traditional military–industrial complex aligned companies such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Many former defense contractors have shifted operations to the civilian market and sold off their defense departments. In recent years, traditional defense contracting firms have faced competition from Silicon Valley and other tech companies, like Anduril Industries and Palantir, over Pentagon contracts. This represents a shift in defense strategy away from the procurement of more armaments and toward an increasing role of technologies like cloud computing and cybersecurity in military affairs. From 2019 to 2022, venture capital funding for defense technologies doubled.
Proxmire
William Proxmire was the chief advocate for the idea of the military-industrial complex as an unaccountable bureaucracy that wastes resources in order to turn a profit. He achieved prominence in this role in 1968 when he was featured on the front page of the New York Times after giving a press conference where he named 23 defense contractors who he said were engaged in "shocking abuse". Proxmire was quoted as saying: "I think this is an excellent example of the military industrial complex at work, with the victim being ... the taxpayer". James Ledbetter said that Proxmire's attacks on the military-industrial complex were interpreted as a proxy for opposition to the Vietnam War. Proxmire said that the C-5A Galaxy jet was "one of the greatest fiscal disasters in the history of military contracting. He secured the testimony of U.S. Air Force whistleblower A. Ernest Fitzgerald before Congress. Fitzgerald testified that cost overruns on the C-5A were due to underestimation of costs, ineffective cost controls, and perverse incentives inherent in the repricing formula of the contract. The Air Force responded by saying that the actual overrun was half what Fitzgerald claimed. Proxmire said the Air Force was concealing the full extent of the overrun and pressed the Government Accountability Office to investigate the entire project.
Military subsidy theory
A debate exists between two schools of thought concerning the effect of U.S. military spending on U.S. civilian industry. Eugene Gholz of UT Austin said that Cold War military spending on aircraft, electronics, communications, and computers has been credited with indirect technological and financial benefits for the associated civilian industries. This contrasts with the idea that military research threatens to crowd out commercial innovation. Gholz said that the U.S. government intentionally overpaid for military aircraft to hide a subsidy to the commercial aircraft industry. He presents development of the military Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker alongside the Boeing 707 civilian jetliner as the canonical example of this idea. However, he said that the actual benefits that accrued to the Boeing 707 from the KC-135 program were minimal and that Boeing's image as an arms maker hampered commercial sales. He said that Convair's involvement in military aircraft led it to make disastrous decisions on the commercial side of its business. Gholz concluded that military spending fails to explain the competitiveness of the American commercial aircraft industry.
Connotations in U.S. politics
James Ledbetter and certain other scholars describe the phrase military–industrial complex as pejorative. Some scholars suggest that it implies the existence of a conspiracy. David S. Rohde compares its use in U.S. politics by liberals to that of the phrase deep state by conservatives. Ledbetter further describes the phrase:
In the half century since Eisenhower uttered his prophetic words, the concept of the military–industrial complex has become a rhetorical Rorschach blot—the meaning is in the eye of the beholder. The very utility of the phrase, the source of its mass appeal, comes at the cost of a precise, universally accepted definition.
Russia
Russia's military–industrial complex is overseen by the Military-Industrial Commission of Russia. As of 2024, Russia's military–industrial complex is made up of about 6,000 companies and employs about 3.5 million people, or 2.5% of the population. In 2025, nearly 40% of Russian government spending will be on national defense and security. This record-high allocation of 13.5 trillion rubles ($133.63 billion) is more than the spending allocated to education, healthcare, social programs and economic development.
Russia ramped-up weapons production following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and factories making ammunition and military equipment have been running around the clock. Andrei Chekmenyov, the head of the Russian Union of Industrial Workers, said that "practically all military–industrial enterprises" were requiring workers to work additional hours "without their consent", to sustain Russia's war machine. In January 2023, Russia's president Vladimir Putin said that Russia's large military–industrial complex would ensure its victory over Ukraine.
According to Philip Luck of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Russia's war against Ukraine has "created a new class of economic beneficiaries—industries and individuals profiting from the war—who now have a vested interest in sustaining Putin's war economy". Russian political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann refers to this as a new "military–industrial class" whose welfare depends on the continuation of the war. Likewise, Luke Cooper of the Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform writes that "Russia has created a rent-based military industrial complex whose elites have an interest in large scale military spending". He says that while this military–industrial complex would have an incentive to oppose peace negotiations, "it seems plausible that the militarisation of the economy would remain a priority in a post-war situation regardless", justified by the "threat" from the West.
However, Russia's military–industrial complex has been severely hindered by international sanctions and by the demands of the war in Ukraine. This has highlighted Russia's dependence on Western components. Although Russia has bypassed some sanctions, and its military industry is resilient, this is not sustainable for long.
Soviet Union
The Red Army sought control over Soviet industry in the 1920s during Lenin's reign, but Stalin actively prevented the formation of a military-industrial complex that could have challenged his power. He used a divide and rule strategy to prevent collusion between military and industrial factions. Although Stalin needed a strong military to defend himself against external threats and used the Soviet military command to execute industrialization and the transition to a command economy, he also came to fear military and industrial leaders. Stalin structured incentives so that military and industrial actors gained more from rivalry and cheating one another than from cooperation.
While the Soviet Union lacked a military-industrial complex, in the sense of a powerful vested interest, its heavily militarized economy illustrates the dangers inherent in militarism. A climate of secrecy and control, rigid centralized allocation of resources, economic isolation from the rest of the world, and unquestioning acceptance of government actions were all predicated on national security. The economic and societal costs were in many cases not tracked, or were withheld from civilians. Because these costs were hidden in the Soviet system, but exposed by the transition to a market economy, many Russians blame the new market economy of the Russian Federation for creating these costs in the first place.
Connotations in Russian
The connotations of military–industrial complex are different in English and in Russian. The English term implies a coalition of industrial and military interests. The Russian term refers to the military industries taken together as a group, or what is known as a defense industrial base in English.
While there are many references to a Russian or Soviet military–industrial complex, this is partly the result of word-for-word translation that fails to account for the nuances of Russian and English grammar. Voenno-promyshlennyi kompleks is the Russian term commonly translated into English as military–industrial complex. However, the adjectival voenno- (military) modifies promyshlennyi (industrial) rather than the complex. In other words, it refers to a complex of the interests of military industries; not to the collective interests of military and industry.
Similar terms
A related term is "defense industrial base" – the network of organizations, facilities, and resources that supplies governments with defense-related goods and services. Another related term is the "iron triangle" in the U.S. – the three-sided relationship between Congress, the executive branch bureaucracy, and interest groups.
A thesis similar to the military–industrial complex was originally expressed by Daniel Guérin, in his 1936 book Fascism and Big Business, about the fascist governments' ties to heavy industry. It would be defined as "an informal and changing coalition of groups with vested psychological, moral, and material interests in the continuous development and maintenance of high levels of weaponry, in preservation of colonial markets and in military-strategic conceptions of internal affairs." An exhibit of the trend was made in Franz Leopold Neumann's book Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism in 1942, a study of how Nazism came into a position of power in a democratic state.
In The Global Industrial Complex, edited by American philosopher and activist Steven Best, the "power complex" first analyzed by sociologist Charles Wright Mills 1956 work The Power Elite, is shown to have evolved into a global array of "corporate-state" structures, an interdependent and overlapping systems of domination.
Matthew Brummer, associate professor at Tokyo's National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, has pointed out in 2016 Japan's "Manga Military" to denote the effort undertaken by the country's Ministry of Defense, using film, anime, theater, literature, fashion, and other, along with moe, to reshape domestic and international perceptions of the Japanese military–industrial complex.
James Der Derian's book Military–Industrial–Media–Entertainment Network relates the convergence of cyborg technologies, video games, media spectacles, war movies, and "do-good ideologies" into what generates a mirage, as he claims, of high-tech, and low-risk "virtuous wars." American political activist and former Central Intelligence Agency officer Ray McGovern denounces the fact that, as he claims, American citizens are vulnerable to anti-Russian propaganda since few of them know the Soviet Union's major role in World War II victory, and blames for this the "corporate-controlled mainstream media." He goes on to label the culprits as the Military–Industrial–Congressional–Intelligence–Media–Academia–Think-Tank complex.
In the decades of the term's inception, other industrial complexes appeared in the literature:
- Animal–industrial complex;
- Prison–industrial complex;
- Pharmaceutical–industrial complex;
- Entertainment–industrial complex;
- Medical–industrial complex;
- Corporate consumption complex.
Tech–industrial complex
In his 2025 farewell address, outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden warned of a "tech–industrial complex," stating that "Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power."
The statement was made following Elon Musk's appointment in the second Donald Trump administration and the public overtures towards Trump by technology industry leaders, including Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos, as well as the dismantling of Facebook's fact-checking program.
Military–entertainment complex
The scope of the military–industrial complex has broadened to include cultural and media sectors, giving rise to what modern scholarship has dubbed the military–entertainment complex. This term refers to forms of cooperation between military institutions and entertainment industries, in which the military may provide equipment, personnel, technical expertise, or other forms of support to filmmakers, video game developers, and related media producers. In the United States in particular, such collaborations have contributed to films, games, and other media that depict military themes and operations. In some cases, media production has been developed with direct military involvement, such as America's Army, a video game created by the U.S. Army for recruitment and public outreach purposes. Through these interactions, entertainment media can play a role in shaping public understanding of military activities and warfare, extending the influence of military institutions beyond traditional domains such as production and procurement, into areas of cultural and media production.
Academic debate
The value of military-industrial complex for academic analysis was questioned by numerous scholars within a few years of the idea's introduction. However, Steve J. Rosen said in 1973 that C. Wright Mills's theory of the military-industrial complex is "a most useful analytical construct".
The notion of military‐industrial complexes, or MICs, has, however, become so politically and conceptually loaded as to make it almost meaningless as an analytical concept, especially when studying the years prior to 1939.
— Miller, Turnbull, and Jari Ojala
