John A. Alic

This paper makes two primary claims. First, the so-called military-industrial complex originated, in the United States, during World War I, not, as some analysts have proposed, in the latter part of the 19th century. Second, despite the shift in responsibility for design, development, and production from government to industry since World War I, a shift that accelerated following World War II, the armed forces remain the dominant actor by reason of control over the technical requirements that determine conceptual design and overall weapons system “architecture.”

As American military planners looked ahead to possible entry into World War I, the Army, lacking alternatives, had no choice but to turn to private firms for design and manufacture of aircraft. In earlier decades, Army and Navy employees had normally been responsible for both conceptual and detail design even though government might later contract with private firms for production — of steel, of small arms, of warships. Such a policy could not be maintained for aircraft because government was almost entirely lacking in the necessary expertise, which could be found only in the few small firms comprising the infant U.S. aircraft industry. From these beginnings, the shift of design and production from the public to the private sector gained momentum after 1945 as government sold off plant and equipment built up during World War II. While privatization enabled Washington to contrast its “free enterprise” system with the command economy of the Soviet Union, transfer of design responsibilities, as opposed to production, was more nearly a response to technological than to geopolitical forces. Although Navy personnel continued to design warships into the 1970s, and even today the Army designs and fabricates some ordnance equipment, the military’s service and supply bureaus, still sclerotic after 1945 though with greater technical depth and breadth than before the war, could not have kept pace with new and emerging technologies in aerospace and electronics even if decision-makers had elected to rely on them.

Following near-disaster in Korea in 1950, policymakers concluded that technologically superior weapons were the necessary counterweight to numerical disadvantages vis-à-vis the Soviet Union (and China, at the time generally considered subservient to the Kremlin). Attritional strategies rooted in the world’s largest manufacturing economy might have sufficed during World War II, when American troops often did not have the best weapons but received them in unmatched numbers. The Korean War demonstrated that the nation’s armed forces needed superiority in weapons. Since the military could not develop the needed innovations itself, they would have to come from the rapidly expanding defense industry. As in the past, the military services retained authority over acquisition, only lightly checked by civilian officials. Contractors too had to abide by service wishes, which were negotiable chiefly at the margins. The resulting asymmetry has meant that, no matter the efforts of defense firms to lobby the leaders of the armed forces, Congress, and the administration, they remain junior partners in the “military-industrial complex.”