The Material-Industrial Complex

Future-Facing Foreign Policy

On January 17, 1961 President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his farewell address to the nation, introduced a new colloquialism, "The Military Industrial Complex." In his address President Eisenhower stated:

We can no longer risk emergency improvisations of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. . . . 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 State House, every office of the Federal Government. We recognize the imperative need for the 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.

Whether you are of the opinion that such a thing does not exist, or that this quasi-institution has an insidiously controlling grip at virtually all levels of our society, matters not within the context of what is being discussed here. But to define what it is, is necessary for my broader argument. David Mooney defines it as”

a group of national resources– public and private, military and civilian, political and academic– combined together for the common defense, in support of a national strategy of deterrence through preparedness.

Whether your position on the problems arising from this nested state run the full gamut from emotional to statistical; from arguments that such a relationship exists between the military and the industrial sectors of our society; or that it is wasteful, promotes profiteering, and exerts too strong an influence on the nation’s resources, the most succinct definition of the military-industrial complex points to the very crux of what I wish to discuss– the creation and strengthening of relationships across the whole material stack such that the primary objective function towards which nation states direct resources, changes from deterrence through preparedness (or perhaps, preventing and creating technological surprise) to extreme ownership and stewardship of the material basis of civilization.

How does a nation accomplish the critical task of arming itself? And how can we learn lessons from America’s bicentennial endeavor? A bit of Revolutionary War history here will do us good in drawing parallels.

Twenty-seven arms makers, nineteen of whom were New Englanders signed contracts with the Treasury Department for the delivery of 40,200 muskets during the spring and summer of 1798. None of the parties involved were required to produce evidence of their ability of gunmakers, nor were they asked to produce bonds guaranteeing delivery within an allotted period of time. In addition to paying $13.40 per musket, the Treasury also agreed to help ease the financial burdens of production by making outright monetary advances to certain contractors. Only three of the original 27 met their agreements. Among those who didn’t was Eli Whitney (of cotton gin fame), who offered to produce 10,000 within two years– it took him 11 years to execute this agreement but in doing so, he laid the foundation of not only the war industry, but also the modern industrial system as a whole because of his ideas of interchangeable parts for mass production. But I digress.

The pattern that exists, as outlined by Lieutenant Colonel Neil Meoni is this;

1. Arsenals cannot meet the crisis needs of a nation

2. Private industry ultimately provides the weaponry

3. Pork barreling starts to occur, consistent with the power base in Congress

4. There are time delays before the contractor produces

5. The Treasury Department advances money to the firms to alleviate their financial burdens

With American manufacturing (dependent on raw materials sourcing), I like to believe there is a somewhat similar pattern:

1. Our current design space of materials cannot meet the crisis needs of the world

2. Private industry steps in to provide tooling and alternative modes of manufacturing

3. Consistent with the industrial base, the same old companies are brought in to solve problems

4. They seem to be stuck in local minima, when there are newer ways of doing things that need to be valorized

5. Congress advances money (as well as tax credits and subsidies) to established firms to maintain their pole position

The realities of geopolitics, the experiences of resource constraints, and the effects of resource curses, have forever changed the concept of defense. Defense has historically included the maintenance of stocks of specialized plant equipment and machine tools, the evolution of strategy, the stockpiling of raw materials, and the honing of intelligence (which has morphed into global command and control). In addition, the timeline of war has been dramatically shortened, and the spectrum of conflict has widened to economic and material modes of warfare.

It could be said that the responsibilities of the defense establishment of America have morphed such that for instance, the line between civilian and warfighter has changed (see dual-use). As such, and once more, our shy friends close to the hill need to realign with industry and repurpose the command and control apparatus towards exploring a different kind of terra incognita to maintain technological advantage and to prevent surprise. The virtuous cycle, and the revolving door, that materializes as the Iron Triangle, needs to have a different long-term objective function– one that takes into account, the quickly changing landscape of technology. Harold Laski states that:

“…the engineering factory is a unit of the Army and the worker may be in uniform without being aware of it”

Just as in the past, America’s oceanic buffers became irrelevant in the face of the changing landscape of warfare, complacency concerning the intellectual buffers of America, will keep us blind to the shifting sands on which the economies of nations rest– goods are an asset, money is a debt.

Just as there evolved on the American scene, a relationship of necessity between the military and the defense contractor, the world has a special demand for new materials. The nature of the demand, its importance to the survival of civilization, will steer nations to those who are in the best position to satisfy this demand, resulting in the rise of organizations and collectives who will tailor themselves to operate across this full stack, to suit the special needs of economies. Those who criticize such a relationship, criticize a basic law of supply and demand– if there is a demand for a material that conducts electricity to support our clean energy transition, mines supply copper to alleviate that need. Taken to its logical conclusion, what happens when all the copper in the world, regardless of quality (in the thermodynamic sense), is not enough? Substitutes must then be conjured and valorized to fill in the gap. I believe this paradigm, with an ever-tightening feedback loop, will define this century.

Are there any alternatives to this material-industrial complex? To paraphrase an unidentified DOD authority:

“ I see no satisfactory alternative to a system under which private industry supplies the materials and the manufacturing nodes our nation and its allies need. There are only two other possibilities. One is to forget about trying to prosper the US, to stop all advanced materials production and to put our trust in the peaceful intentions of the environmentalists, the antinatalists, the degrowthers, and any other potential aggressors with Malthusian dispositions. That I don't believe we are prepared to do. The second possibility is to let the economies of old produce all the technological solutions states need, in legacy plants and resurrections of archaic designs. That would turn the clock back a century or more, to a system that couldn't cope with todays' demands.”

I strongly believe no other system is compatible with the current political, economic, and social systems of our country. There are some characteristics (features, not bugs) of the military-industrial complex that are worth mentioning here because they echo through collective institutional behaviors far removed from national security:

1. Secrecy: unavailability of information impedes judgment as to the gravity and uncertainty of threats/crises– in the case of materials, the lack of metadata leads to asymmetry in one’s ability to leverage (experimental) materials. It also obscures the inefficiencies of material allocation– is this the right material for the right job? And lastly, pricing mechanisms, the way markets communicate the encoded information of value, are the wrong kind of leading indicators of material value

2. Complexity: The complexity of materials systems makes it difficult to judge whether a system is being produced or employed efficiently, or whether the proposed system is needed at all (see Elon’s algorithm of questioning requirements, deleting parts and/or processes where necessary, and eventual automation). Standardization seems to be a double-edged sword, providing access to global markets, but also restricting industry to old design paradigms, which new materials would quickly rearrange.

To accelerate the process by which new ideas, products, and systems enter the world, the success of the military-industrial complex in aligning objectives towards safeguarding national security, serves as a harbinger for the ability of governments to resolve (or at least, hold) internal tensions for the purposes of a singular goal. According to Melissa Flagg, government policymakers have a variety of levers through which they can effect change and rebalance the tensions among different strategic goals. These levers, when pulled may impact individual or multiple goals, within the context of the specific structure and type of policy instruments that are used.

These levers and their variants are legion, and like every complex system, do not always have the intended effect– the ability of a government to self-regulate, to adapt to feedback, and to maintain stability for the purpose of achieving goals in dynamic environments leaves much to be desired (not on the individual level, but on the emergent n-th order level).

My personal biases point to the creation of technological product as the ultimate lever, since this changes individual, societal, institutional, and governmental behavior, from the bottom up.

I have some nascent ideas about what the ultimate technology stack for the material-industrial complex should look like– end-to-end systems from resource extraction to recycling, but if there is anything to be learned from this exposition, it is that the material basis of civilization needs to be actively stewarded in the direction of doing more with less.