rabel22 wrote:Because he thought that people could read between the lines. Wars cost money. It dosent take a genius to realize that. The industrial military is tied too the military who prosecute the wars.
People who are busy reading between the lines generally miss the original point entirely - as appears to be your case.
The speech you are referring to was his farwell address which is traditionally treated by outgoing Presidents as a way to summarize their tems(s) in office.
Eisenhower presided over a fairly substantial military modernization program during his time in office. There is no indication that he had reservations about military spending in general (though he did concern himself with balancing military spending with social programs and keeping the overall budget in check, both of which he also addressed in his speech.).
Defense budgets increased enormously early in his first term. In 1950 military spending was 5.0% of the GDP. In 1953 (Eisenhower's first full year in office) it was 14.2% and in 1954 it was 13.1% of the GDP. It remained above 10% for the remainder of his time in office. Defense spending hasn't been that high since Eisenhower left office and even under the Regean build-up/modernization it only reached 6% of GDP. Eisenhower spent more money on the military (as a % of GDP) than any President has since the end of WWII.
If, as you claim, his concern was money, he certinaly didn't act that way. He had no problem spending money on aircrcaft carriers, aircraft and armored vehicles. The entire U-2 program was developed during his terms and the entire Army III Corps (armored) was kept active for no reason other than to test his new tanks. That spending supported the Eisenhower Doctrine - a stated willingness of the U.S. to deploy military forces anywhere in the world to assist countries in defending themselves if requested. He specifically addressed the fact that the military-industrial compex was largely created during his time in office within that very speech.
"Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations."
He did specifically address a few concerns he did have while he was in office however. One was his concern with international appearacnces and the perception of colonialism. On numerous occassions he expressed concerns that military interventionism should be avoided unless we were specifically asked to intervene and his meeting with JFK in regard to Laos when they were transitioning after JFK's election is a fairly clear indication that he was a firm supporter of working with international allies should military force be deemed necessary.
The 2nd was his Colonels and 1 and 2 star Generals working directly with defense industries to influence individual members of the Congress on which moderization programs got funding and which one's didn't and bypassing the more senior military officers and the Secretary of Defense. During his moderization program there was a lot of infighting between the services for which programs got funded and who got the newest toys to play with and the number of lobbiests grew significantly. The difference there is that they stopped lobbying the Dept. of Defense to get funding for their programs and instead went straight to the Congress which resulted in undesired programs getting funded while desired programs were often killed. (And "lobbying" at the time had little to do with campaign contributions and a whole lot to do with delivering actual votes.)
So I find it hard to believe that he gave a speech sumarizing his terms in office and in that speech he used some "coded" language hoping people would pick up on it in an attempt to address some imaginary concern with military spending that would reflect the exact opposite direction of his own administrations while using words that directly confronted actual problems that
did exist and that he had expressed concerns about.
Perhaps if spent more time reading what was actually said and less "between the lines" you'd actually comprehend the importance of his speech.
