India Needs To Build A Military-Industrial Complex With Caution

The sustenance of a military-industrial complex is under intense public scrutiny in parts of the world where the great powers flourish. We shall look into why this thesis is not applicable in a emerging power like India. India has a 7,500-km long coastline and a slightly larger land border. Our land border is host to some of the most volatile areas in the world. Our coastline spans the Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean, all hotbed of intense marine activity—both militarily and in civil terms. Nearly 20 per cent of the Indian landmass in the grip of heavily armed internal insurgencies. Contrary to a deceptive peaceful nature which most Indians profess they have, Indians are one of the most violent communities in the world. We need complex military machinery and small- to light-firearms to maintain internal and external equilibrium. Remember, in America, widespread arms licensing is prevalent not to arm citizens against bandits and petty thieves, but the US Constitution guarantees this right to protect law-abiding citizens against a tyrannical state. Phew!!!

In the light of this, India’s defense minister very rightly said recently that the public and private sector would have a much bigger role to play in the production of defense equipment in the near future for the country to emerge as a strong defense manufacturing base. A country like India cannot indefinitely depend on foreign defense equipment manufacturers alone and needs self-reliance in this critical area. While underlining the growing importance of the private sector in the area of defense equipment production, Mr. Antony said this would not mean the weakening of the public sector. He said it had to be realised that the public sector could not shoulder the responsibility of manufacturing defense equipment on its own. The minister emphasised the need to make India an important weapons and defence equipment-producing base and said the country should also be able to supply defense equipment to other friendly countries. In other word, Mr Antony was referring to the need for a military-industrial complex (MIC).

Military-industrial complex (MIC) is a concept commonly used to refer to policy relationships between governments, national armed forces, and the industrial sector that supports them. These relationships include political approval for research, development, production, use, and support for military training, weapons, equipment, and facilities within the national defense and security policy. It is a type of iron triangle. The term is most often played in reference to the military of the United States, where it gained popularity after its use in the farewell address speech of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, though the term is applicable to any country with a similarly developed infrastructure. It is sometimes used more broadly to include the entire network of contracts and flows of money and resources among individuals as well as institutions of the defense contractors, The Pentagon, and the Congress and executive branch. This sector is intrinsically prone to principal-agent problem, moral hazard, and rent seeking. Cases of political corruption have also surfaced with regularity.

The first modern MICs arose in Britain, France and Germany in the 1880s and 1890s as part of the need to defend their respective empires either on the ground or at sea. The naval rivalry between Britain and Germany and France and their revenge sentiment against German Empire that followed the Franco-Prussian war was of utmost significance in the inception, growth and development of these MICs. Conversely, the existence of these three nations' respective MICs may have been the source of these military tensions. Officers like Admiral Jackie Fisher influenced the shift toward faster technological integration (which meant closer relationships with private, innovative companies). Similar MICs soon followed in nations like Japan and the United States. Industrialists who played a part in the arms industry of this era included Alfred Krupp, Samuel Colt, William G. Armstrong, Alfred Nobel, and Joseph Whitworth.

Furthermore, the length of time necessary to build weapons systems of high complexity and massive integration required pre-planning and construction even during times of peace; thus a portion of the economies of the great powers (and, later, the superpowers), was dedicated and maintained solely for the purpose of defense (and war). This trend of coupling some industries towards military activity gave rise to the concept of a "partnership" between the military and private enterprise. The term is often used to refer to the "complex" in the context of the United States, where the term came into wide use by the public, following its introduction by President Dwight Eisenhower in his "Farewell Address"; the US has a complex which, on an annual basis, accounts for 47 per cent of the world's total arms expenditures. This also may be due to the historical pattern of the previous ~70 years of military expenditures by the US; prior to World War I, the US maintained a small military (in comparison to its peers) in times of peace and instead relied on militia or, in later years, reserves, in the event of war.

Though the US never completely demobilized following World War I, and standing forces were maintained to a greater extent in the years that followed it, World War II was the driving force that utterly changed this historical pattern of general neglect of the military. During the Second World War, the US underwent total mobilization of all available national resources to fight and win, alongside her allies, a total war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, a mobilization of resources far greater than that which took place during the entire previous history of the US. At the end of the war, East Asia was gravely damaged, and Europe was devastated; several European states abandoned their colonial empires, faced by a loss of moral legitimacy, national will, and military strength; and the US and the Soviet Union stood as the two remaining great powers left in the world, from that point, known as superpowers.

The US and the Soviet Union grew suspicious and hostile to one another; faced with a threat immediately following the Second World War, the US only partially demobilized, and left in place a sizable apparatus of military production and large naval, air, and land forces. This period, called the Cold War, represented a 45-year period of low-intensity, unconventional conflict between the superpowers, with the ongoing potential to metastasize into a nuclear conflict that could happen with only minutes of notice, could possibly destroy both superpowers, cause a new Dark Age, and might even result in the extinction of the human species. And in this time overshadowed by acronyms like MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) and NUTS (Nuclear Utilization Target Selection), the military-industrial complex rose to great prominence, and power, in the US.

It is difficult to estimate the degree of dependence of the US economy on its military and defense spending, but it is clearly enormous, and legislators fiercely resist defense cuts that affect their districts. In Washington State, an economist estimated in 2002 that in Western Washington 166,000 jobs, or about 15 per cent of the workforce, depended directly or indirectly on military installations alone, not counting defense industries. In Washington State overall in FY2001, about $7.06 billion arrived in US Department of Defense payroll, pensions, and procurement contracts—and Washington State was only seventh among the fifty states in this regard. Overall, US spending on defense acquisitions and research is equal to 1.2 per cent of the GDP. In 1977, after the Vietnam war and the Watergate crisis, President Jimmy Carter began his presidency with what historian Michael Sherry has called "a determination to break from America's militarized past" However, increased defense spending in the era of President Ronald Reagan is seen by some to have brought the military-industrial complex back into prominence.

Total world spending on military expenses in 2006 was $1.158 trillion US dollars. Nearly half of this total, 528.7 billion US dollars, was spent by the US. The privatization of the production and invention of military technology also leads to a complicated relationship with significant research and development of many technologies. The Military budget of the US for the 2009 fiscal year was $515.4 billion. Adding emergency discretionary spending and supplemental spending brings the sum to $651.2 billion. This does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget. Overall the US government is spending about $1 trillion annually on defense-related purposes. The Bob Dylan song "Masters of War" was written about the military-industrial complex.