Tag: Dwight D. Eisenhower

Jul 22 2008

The Bonus Expeditionary Force

It must have had a dreamlike quality to it: a summer’s day in Washington, the tanks and troops on the street accompanied by officers like George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower, led by none other than General Douglas MacArthur.  America’s Caesar was wearing a full salad bowl of ribbons and medals, magnificent astride a great horse; to the impoverished veterans he was riding to meet, he must have looked like a mighty warrior of a bygone era.  Then, to their horror, the Chief of Staff of the US Army ordered his infantry to fix bayonets, his cavalry to draw sabers, and his tanks to move forward.

Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, we’re tonight’s historiorant finds Depression-hit vets of the First World War encamped in a Hooverville in Washington during the summer of 1932.  I’m not saying it contains lessons to be learned about the interrelationships of Republican presidents, veterans, economic depression, and violent authoritarianism, but as St. Colbert once said, “I can’t help it if the facts have a liberal bias.”

Jan 13 2008

The Military Industrial Complex and the Power Elite

Wikipedia tells us that the concept of a “permanent war economy” originated in 1944. Such a war economy, it was predicted, would be one in which there would be a post-WWII arms race. It was argued at the time that:

the USA would retain the character of a war economy; even in peacetime, American military expenditures would remain large, reducing the percentage of unemployed compared to the 1930s.

The concept was also used by U.S. businessman and Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson to refer to an institutionalized war economy, a semi-command-type economy which is directed by corporation executives, based on military industry, and funded by state social spending…whereby the collusion between militarism and war profiteering are manifest as a permanently subsidized industry.

Wilson warned at the close of the war that the U.S. must not return to a civilian economy, but must keep to a “permanent war economy.” Wilson was made Secretary of Defense under Dwight D. Eisenhower, and was largely instrumental in reforming the Pentagon as an instrument for facilitating a closer relationship between the military and industry.

The military, originally conceived as a small order fed by state militia, has now become an empire, the largest and most expensive feature of our government.