Aaron B. O’Connell -
NOTE: NNOMY does not endorse the assumptions about the impact of militarization on the U.S. economy outlined in this article but chooses to repost it to highlight concerns for the desensitization of his students towards war expressed by a professor of history in a military university.
IN 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office warning of the growing power of the military-industrial complex in American life. Most people know the term the president popularized, but few remember his argument.
In his farewell address, Eisenhower called for a better equilibrium between military and domestic affairs in our economy, politics and culture. He worried that the defense industry’s search for profits would warp foreign policy and, conversely, that too much state control of the private sector would cause economic stagnation. He warned that unending preparations for war were incongruous with the nation’s history. He cautioned that war and warmaking took up too large a proportion of national life, with grave ramifications for our spiritual health.
War is a touchy subject, especially given the near-palpable tension of the upcoming presidential election. If you’re against war, you’re a hippy at best, anti-military and unpatriotic at worst. If you’re for it, you’re pro-violence, anti-peace, an extreme conservative… Basically, you’re either too fat or too skinny, and the middle ground is essentially a wasteland. I’m not anti-military as we now know it, although there are certainly myriad issues. I do think increasing military spending when the military isn’t even asking for it, while cutting all sorts of important and necessary social programs, is absolutely ridiculous. But that’s neither here nor there.
If protection rackets represent organised crime at its smoothest, then war risking and state making – quintessential protection rackets with the advantage of legitimacy – qualify as our largest examples of organised crime. Without branding all generals and statesmen as murderers or thieves, I want to urge the value of that analogy. At least for the European experience of the past few centuries, a portrait of war makers and state makers as coercive and self-seeking entrepreneurs bears a far greater resemblance to the facts than do its chief alternatives: the idea of a social contract, the idea of an open market in which operators of armies and states offer services to willing consumers, the idea of a society whose shared norms and expectations call forth a certain kind of government. 
