Military-industrial complex

The term military-industrial complex (MIC) usually refers to the combination of the U.S. armed forces, arms industry and associated political and commercial interests, which grew rapidly in scale and influence in the wake of World War II. The term may also be used for militarism, in reference to any such business partnership between industry and military.

As pejorative terms, the "MIC" or the "Iron Triangle" refer to an institutionalised collusion among defense contractors (industry), The Pentagon (military), and the United States Congress (government), as being against the public interest, and driven by profiteering.

Use of the term

The term was first used publicly by President of the United States (and former General of the Army) Dwight D. Eisenhower 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.

In the penultimate draft of the address, Eisenhower initially used the term military-industrial-congressional complex, indicating the essential role that U.S. Congress plays in propagating the military industry. But, it is said, that the president chose to strike the word congressional in order to avoid offending members of the legislative branch of the federal government. The author of the term was Eisenhower's speech-writer Malcolm Moos.

Vietnam War-era activists referred frequently to the concept. In the late 1990s James Kurth asserted that "[b]y the mid-1980s . . . the term had largely fallen out of public discussion," and opined that "[w]hatever the power of arguments about the influence of the military-industrial complex on weapons procurement during the Cold War, they are much less relevant to the current era."

Contemporary students and critics of American militarism continue to refer to and employ the term, however. For example, historian Chalmers Johnson uses words from the second, third, and fourth paragraphs quoted above from Eisenhower's address as an epigraph to Chapter Two ("The Roots of American Militarism") of a recent volume on this subject (The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic [New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004], p. 39).

The expressions permanent war economy and war corporatism are related concepts that have also been used in association with this term.

Although the term was originally coined to describe U.S. circumstances, it has been applied, by extension, to the corresponding situations in other countries. It was not unusual to see it used to describe the arms production industries and political structures of the Soviet Union, and it has also been used for other countries with an arms-producing economy, such as Wilhelminian Germany, Britain, France and post-Soviet Russia. The expression is also sometimes applied to the European Union.

Background of the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States

World War II & Korean War

(Note this is the period Eisenhower was referring to)

Vietnam War

Brown & Root

KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown and Root) is an American engineering and construction company, a private military contractor and a subsidiary of Halliburton. After Halliburton acquired Dresser Industries in 1998, Dresser's engineering subsidiary, M.W. Kellogg, an engineering contractor begun as a pipe fabrication business by Morris W. Kellogg in 1900 and acquired by Dresser in 1988, was merged with Halliburton's construction subsidiary, Brown and Root, to form Kellogg, Brown, and Root. The legacy of Brown and Root is many contracts with the U.S. military during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as well as during World War II and the Vietnam War.

KBR is the largest non-union construction company in the United States.

On April 15, 2006, Halliburton filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell up to 20 percent of its KBR stock on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the proposed ticker symbol "KBR". Halliburton will still own at least 80 percent of KBR should the statement be approved. Halliburton has stated in its SEC filings its intent to eventually dispose of its KBR holdings, believing the two companies would best be served by being separate from the other.

History

Brown and Root was founded in Texas in 1919 by two brothers, George R. Brown and Herman Brown with money from their brother-in-law, Dan Root. The company began its operations by supervising the building of warships for the United States Navy.

One of its first large-scale projects, according to the book Cadillac Desert, was to build a dam on the Texas Colorado River near Austin during the Depression years. For assistance in federal payments, the company turned to the local congressman, Lyndon B. Johnson.

During World War II, Brown & Root built the Naval Air Station Corpus Christi and a series of warships for the U.S. Government.

In 1947, Brown & Root built one of the world's first offshore platforms.

Following the death of Herman Brown, Halliburton acquired Brown & Root in December 1962. According to Dan Briody, who wrote a book on the subject, the company became part of a consortium of four companies that built about eighty-five per cent of the infrastructure needed by the Army during the Vietnam War. At the height of the war resistance movement of the 1960s, Brown & Root was derided as "Burn & Loot" by protesters and soldiers.

In September 2005, under a competitive bid contract it won in July 2005 to provide debris removal and other emergency work associated with natural disasters, KBR started assessment of the cleanup and reconstruction of Gulf Coast Marine and Navy facilities damaged in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The facilities include: Naval Station Pascagoula, Naval Station Gulfport, the John C. Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, two smaller U.S. Navy facilities in New Orleans, Louisiana and others in the Gulf Coast region. KBR has had similar contracts for more than 15 years.

Political connections

Brown and Root had a well-documented relationship with U.S. President Lyndon Johnson which began when he used his position as a Texas congressman to assist them in landing a lucrative dam contract. In return they gave him the funds to "steal" the 1948 Senate race from the popular Coke R. Stevenson. The relationship continued for years, with Johnson funneling dozens of military construction contracts to B&R.

U.S. Vice President Richard B. Cheney was chairman and chief executive officer of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000. He has been accused by political opponents of supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq and providing work to KBR under contingency contracts to financially benefit himself and his business associates. The contract that KBR won from the US Army in a competitive bid process is referred to as LOGCAP (Logistical Civilian Augmentation Program) and is managed by the US Army. (KBR won the first LOGCAP contract, Dyncorp the second, and KBR the current one, dubbed "LOGCAP III".) It is a contingency based contract which is invoked at the convenience of the US Army; the orders under the contract are not competitively bid (as the overall contract was) and thus the reason for the confusion. When the contract was invoked during the Balkans crisis there was no controversy and very litte scrutiny of the contract. KBR performed under this agreement in the Balkans for over 10 years and still maintains a LOGCAP presence there to this day. It was only after the OIF invasion that the LOGCAP contract became a political issue.^{[citation needed]}

Activities in Afghanistan

KBR was awarded a $100 million contract in 2002 to build a new U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, from the State Department.

KBR has also been awarded 15 LOGCAP task orders worth more than $216 million for work under Operation Enduring Freedom, the military name for operations in Afghanistan. These include establishing base camps at Kandahar and Bagram Air Base and training foreign troops from the Republic of Georgia.

The War on Terror

The United States army hired Kellogg, Brown and Root to provide housing for approximately 100,000 soldiers in Iraq in a contract worth $200 million, based on a long-term contract signed in December 2001 under the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP). Other LOGCAP orders have included a pre-invasion order to repair oil facilities in Iraq; $28.2 million to build prisoner-of-war camps; and $40.8 million to accommodate the Iraqi Survey Group, which was deployed after the war to find hidden weapons of mass destruction.

In the competition for the current LOGCAP contract, the Army Corps of Engineers asked competitors to develop a contingency plan for extinguishing oil well fires in Iraq. The Army chose KBR's plan in November 2001, though it remains classified.

On March 24, 2003, the Army announced publicly that KBR had been awarded five task orders in Iraq potentially worth $7 billion to implement the plan. One of the task orders, obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, required KBR to "procure, import and deliver" fuels to Iraq. In fact, the contract was awarded more than two weeks earlier, without submission for public bids or congressional notification. In their response to Congressional inquiries, Army officials said they determined that extinguishing oil fires fell under the range of services provided under LOGCAP, meaning that KBR could deploy quickly and without additional security clearances. They also said that the contract's classified status prevented open bidding.

The Army's actions came under fire from Congressman Henry Waxman, who, along with John Dingell, asked the General Accounting Office - the investigative arm of Congress to investigate whether the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Pentagon were circumventing government contracting procedures and favoring companies with ties to the Bush administration. They also accused KBR of inflating prices for importing gasoline into Iraq.^{[citation needed]} In June 2003, the Army announced that it would replace KBR's oil-infrastructure contract with two public-bid contracts worth a maximum total of $1 billion to be awarded in October. However, the Army announced in October it would expand the contract ceiling to $2 billion and the solicitation period to December. As of October 16 2003, KBR had performed nearly $1.6 billion worth of work. In the meantime, KBR has subcontracted with two companies to work on the project: Boots & Coots, an oil field emergency-response firm that Halliburton works in partnership with (CEO Jerry L. Winchester was a former Halliburton manager) and Wild Well Control, both of Texas.^{[citation needed]}

Changes to conditions of employment imposed on UK staff

Late in 2004, KBR announced that due to $1billion in losses over the past four years, it needed to make annual savings to its cost base of $80-100m. Despite repeated assurances that the pain would be shared world-wide, changes to staff terms and conditions (primarily longer hours for no extra pay) were imposed mainly on its UK offices, primarily in Leatherhead and Aberdeen. Staff who refused to sign the new terms and conditions were fired with effect from 31 March, 2005. Although some concessions were made very late in the process when the level of discontent became clear, the strategy backfired as many key staff members left as a result, leaving some departments with severe staff shortages.^{[citation needed]}

Many former staff remain in legal dispute with the company relating to the manner in which the process was carried out.

Legacy in Houston

Houston's convention center was named after company founder and namesake George R. Brown.

Cultural references

Cult television show The X-Files displayed a nameless conspiracy of the American government, dominated by the Military-industrial complex's sinister machinations. This conspiracy included everything from tobacco lobbyists to extraterrestrials. Not surprisingly, some conspiracy theorists felt the show was created to disenfranchise their distrust and hide the real conspiracy. In the third season episode of the series "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'" series lead David Duchovny satirizes this by accusing a writer's search for the truth regarding a bizarre alien abuduction as an effort made for "the military-industrial-entertainment complex."

See also

• War is a Racket (book by Smedley Butler)
• Why We Fight (documentary by Eugene Jarecki)
• Corporatism
• Militarism
• Prison-industrial complex

External links

• Company website

Sources

• Eisenhower, Dwight D. Public Papers of the Presidents, 1035-40. 1960.
• ________. "Farewell Address." In The Annals of America. Vol. 18. 1961-1968: The Burdens of World Power, 1-5. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1968.
• ________. President Eisenhower's Farewell Address, Wikisource.
• Hartung, William D. "Eisenhower's Warning: The Military-Industrial Complex Forty Years Later." World Policy Journal 18, no. 1 (Spring 2001).
• Johnson, Chalmers The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004
• Kurth, James. "Military-Industrial Complex." In The Oxford Companion to American Military History, ed. John Whiteclay Chambers II, 440-42. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Nelson, Lars-Erik. "Military-Industrial Man." In New York Review of Books 47, no. 20 (Dec. 21, 2000): 6.
• Nieburg, H. L. In the Name of Science, Quadrangle Books, 1970

External links

• Schema-root.org: military industry 38 military industry topics, each with a current news feed
• Open Secrets: Top Defense Contributors to Federal Candidates and Parties database
• War Resisters: Piechart and info on defense spending
• Military-industrial complex on SourceWatch
• National priorities project chart showing how your federal income tax is spent
• Quotes on Money and Banking and Militarism
• Flows of Money and Patronage from Washington Truth in Recruiting
• Why We Fight : A Film by Eugene Jarecki exploring the effects of the Military Industrial Complex

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