SORRY, Ike. You warned us 50 years ago but your warning was not heard, or if heard not heeded.
President Dwight Eisenhower in his last speech as president warned the world about the growth of the military-industrial complex. This week, and previously, Wikileaks illustrated he was right.
Eisenhower said, “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 city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. . . .
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence . . . by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
And this week, Wikileaks tells us of the spread of this power. A cable from a US diplomat in Canberra commented on Australia’s seeming incapacity to fund its ambitious plans for military spending.
But “if Defence can find the political will to reform inefficient budgeting and programming, particularly by procuring from the US rather than domestically, it will be able to achieve the needed savings to pursue its ambitious plans”.
Let’s leave aside for the moment the obvious hypocrisy of the statement given the appalling inefficiency of US defence spending. Rather note the failure of the diplomat to ask the question why wouldn’t Australia have its own baby military-industrial complex? It copies America in everything else.
Of course local defence industries are going to persuade military bureaucrats to buy their products. Of course, they will point out to politicians the importance of having defence industries in their bailiwicks. Just as they do in the US.
The lumbering, unworkable, inefficient Collins class submarine is a case in point. Why buy off the shelf from the US, or, woe be on us, from Europe, when we can build a far more expensive item from the ground up in Australia to create jobs in far-flung places to save political necks? What on earth has efficiency or good sense got to do with military spending?
Indeed, the exemption of Defence from the Federal Government’s successive efficiency dividends rather proves the point. Efficiency in Defence seems a lost cause. Far from having to cut for efficiency, it is to get a 3 per cent spending increase from its present $22 billion for the next seven years. Much of it will be wasted.
How is it that politicians imagine that voters really want a 3 per cent increase in military spending while education and health departments are required to deliver efficiency dividends year after year and be cut?
Eisenhower knew the answer before it happened – “a disastrous rise of misplaced power”. Who convinces political parties from both sides that they can get away with quarantining military spending from cuts? Indeed, who convinces them that they cannot get away with NOT quarantining? In the US, certainly, the answer is: a powerful military-industrial complex. In Australia, maybe the answer is the same.
In the US the arms industry peddles its influence everywhere – in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal Government, to quote Eisenhower. It seems the same is happening in Australia.
The military-industrial complex in the US is insidious and influential enough, it seems, that it has shaped the thinking of a US diplomat in Canberra to put as the obvious answer to Australia’s quest to spend more on military toys that Uncle Sam should flog it off to us.
A small sample. On a larger scale, the US has engaged in wars that have engorged the coffers of the corporations which supply the military — like the politically well-connected Haliburton.
What is the antidote. Again, let’s turn to Eisenhower — a Republican and a former general, mind you. He saw the need for a robust media.
“We must never let the weight of this [military-industrial] combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes,” he said “We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Maybe, given the rise in power of the military-industrial complex, he might have been a little more sanguine about Wikileaks than his Republican successors.
Wikileaks, and more importantly the people who leaked to it, has done the world a service. A lot of people have said it has not told us anything “we” did not already know – that former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was a control freak; that the Afghan war unwinnable and so on. Maybe.
But it has told ordinary voters a lot. Opinion polls on, say, whether Australia should remain in Afghanistan showed a significant portion of people accepted the delusionally optimistic public platitudes of political leaders and that those platitudes were enough to put yet another portion into the category of doubtful. In short, before Wikileaks the Afghan folly was pursuable. You could get away with it politically. After Wikileaks, the masses won’t cop it. “I read Wikileaks and I vote.”
It may be that the politically savvy and the reasonably well-informed have known for a long time that the public face on Afghanistan and half a dozen other matters was a mendacious façade. But the façade could continue. After Wikileaks, it cannot. The previously duped will be more wary – because the doubt about the policies and the politicians who are pushing them is not coming from just a few well connected members of the commentariat. It is coming from the horse’s mouth – diplomatic cables, fellow politicians and son on — so that the citizenry is more “alert and knowledgeable”.
What now? Perhaps the biggest change that the Wikileaks saga will bring is in the public’s view of war, particularly the lead up to war. In most past wars, the political leaders could almost always rely on a jingoistic, nationalist, populist drumbeat of enthusiasm for whatever military adventure is going: “Home before Christmas”, “Enduring Freedom” and so on.
As the Wikileaks get more frequent, more timely and more pervasive the presence of a more alert and more knowledgeable citizenry will make it more difficult for the military-industrial to persuade our political leaders to lurch into war.
Republican though he be, I like Ike.
CRISPIN HULL
This article was first published in The Canberra Times on 15 December 2010.