Explain how the military industrial complex has us in a proverbial vicious cycle?

Question

and how this keepings ungodly sums of tax payer money coming into their pockets and away from things that benefit american taxpayers, such as education, health care, roads, bridges, border patrol etc...

Answer 1

From a defense perspective, among the basic necessities of a successful country are a somewhat intelligent population and security. Without these factors you will not have stability, which is necessary for economic growth. Our government realizes this, and has invested heavily in defense and the defense industry.
As a result of this investment, and the arms race in the mid to late 20th century, we have run a surplus of defense equipment, and we discovered that exporting this surplus to our allies (and others) leads to increased revenues and fosters goodwill among other nations. However, this has not come without consequences.
Although we were not officially involved in the Russo-Afghan war in the 80s, we did supply the mujahideen with weapons, which have since found their way to targeting us and our allies. The same phenomenon has occoured in latin America, where the cartels posess a sizable quantity of U.S. made equipment. And just last week, 2 U.S. Air Force pilots were approached at an Eastern European Air Show by a Russian man, who asked them how much it would cost for him to purchase their B-52 Aircraft.
You would think that the spread of these weapons into the hands of those who would potentially do us harm would encourage us to cease our defense investments, however, now we must pay analysts and intelligence experts to track the spread of these and other weapons to the best of their abilities. To this end, the Department of Defense has invested heavily in technologies that make countering weapons and weapons-systems easier to manage. This investment has also shaped and benefitted our civilian society, hence, the creation of the internet, GPS, PC mouse, etc... via DARPA.
Is this cycle vicious enough for you?

Answer 2

The military industrial complex (first reference I'm aware of being in Eisenhower's last speech as President) refers to the revolving door dynamic between the military and industry. One could make the argument that this revolving door has expanded to include both education and government.

What happens effectively is that the same people get recycled through these different sectors and that inevitably there are conflicts of interest. The most obvious is between industry and the military. When industry (specifically defense contractors is meant by this) hires former military people, many who still are have contacts within the government there can be a blurring or perhaps a conflation of interest. It is not in the government's interest to go to war, nor is it in the military's (since they are the ones actually fighting -there is a reason why so called chicken hawks are chickens, as in haven't fought) but, and this is a big one, it is the interest of the industry. Why is it in the interest of the industry you ask? Because it is an enormous business, one that you can really make a killing in. Pardon the, oh so apt, pun. It makes people, who are aware of this little revolving door, very nervous when the three groups of people who: make money off of war, actually go to war, and are supposed to keep us out of war are often the same people; merely working for each branch of the complex at different times.

Education can be added to this complex. For all those who think that Cal Berkeley is such a liberal, pot-smoking institution, consider: every single nuclear war head the US has ever built (and most likely ever will- since the contract was just renewed) has been designed there at the Lawrence Livermore Labs, and they were built in Los Alamos, which I think just got partially bought out by Halliburton. In fact the entire University of California system receives a ton of DoD money for the hard sciences, and pretty much all of that research and development goes towards weapons manufacturing. Personally I think it is horrible that in order to get funded you have to be involved with weapons building.

But yeah that's the short end of it.

Answer 3

"Military industrial complex" is some kind of mumbo-jumbo code word. You just have to grok its existance, as there are no facts or evidence or proof that any such thing actually exists, except as a bogeyman for the paranoid.

Yes, it sounds like a fearsome and forbidding menace, but in the end, I've not seen anybody being able to explain just exactly what it is supposed to be.

But we need to be wary of the "Professional Sport - Refreshment Drink Industry Complex!" Gatorade will git ya'!LOL!

Answer 4

Well, there is the infamous 'death spiral.'

The military has a mandate to obtain the best weapons available, and the industries that serve it compete to provide them so as to be proffitable. The result has been weapon systems that have been more advanced, more complex, and more /expensive/ with each generation. The spiraling cost has led the military to shrink in size, even as it grows in budget. Smaller and smaller numbers of increasingly 'superior' weapon systems. The end result of the Death Spiral would be the entire military budget devoted to a single instance of a single weapon system. Long before that, of course, the military would cease to be an effective fighting force.

Answer 5

To break it down would take years to explain

Think of it like trying to translate all the U.S. tax code into one easy to read booklet

It is impossible

Answer 6

make love not war.