US Military Rot: New Dimensions and New Dangers
David Kerans
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed…. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people…. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. –President Dwight Eisenhower
Eisenhower’s warnings regarding the insidious influence of the military are some of the best known of all reflections on American society, owing to their prescience. Diligent observers have kept a close watch on the manner in which the swelling military-industrial complex has been shaping the country’s economy and affecting its foreign policy, such that a significant portion of the public is at least somewhat aware of the relevant issues. Much less well known, however, are the ways in which the long hegemony of the military-industrial complex has allowed it both to expand its influence and to rot. As we shall see, the last decade of military adventurism has revealed alarming new processes at work, raising problems which not even Eisenhower anticipated.