Turse and the Military Industrial Complex

Nick Turse raises some very important questions regarding the military industrial complex in today's society. He argues that any firms and corporations that receive funds from the Department of Defense or provide any type of service to the military constitute examples of the MIC in action. This covers an enormous array of businesses that provide an enormous array of services not only to the military but to all facets of our society, as Turse makes clear in his article. Accepting this view, we must admit that the MIC has penetrated our lives so deeply that it has become virtually impossible to avoid partaking in it. We cannot hope to avoid contributing to the militarization of our society without essentially giving up on basic needs that we have come to rely on, and without paying our taxes--less the focus of Turse's article but nonetheless an obviously critical aspect of the complex as he describes it.

If we are to conclude that the MIC has become a problem, we then have to ask ourselves how that problem might be solved, and unfortunately an easy or clear solution does not come to mind, nor does Turse propose one. We cannot realisticly be expected to stop buying products made by companies that recieve military funding or provide services to the military. There are simply too many. The MIC has become so deeply rooted that it seems nearly impossible to weed out without fundamentally altering the way business and government works. Perhaps providing less of our federal budget to the military would be a good start, but that seems highly improbable given our current political reality. We would have to stop using our military before anyone would suggest we stop funding it, and even if we did that, people would then have to be convinced that the likelyhood of needing to use it were small, which also seems unlikely in today's world.

Perhaps I'm being too cynical, but I think that our society will need to undergo a number of significant changes before the military industrial comples can be diminished and eventually erradicated. Most people do not even recognize it as a problem, and I don't doubt that many would defend it. Afterall, we have seen many material benefits as a result of the MIC. I would agree with President Eisenhower that the MIC represents a very real danger to supposed American values and to our future, but unfortunately it is a hole that it will take us a very long time to dig ourselves out of, if we are able to at all.