[honzabe]

Military analyst Ryan McBeth argues the military industrial complex is nowadays a lot smaller and less influential than people think - he even uses a mental shortcut "military industrial complex does not exist" [1] - make of it what you will. His arguments seem pretty convincing to me.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2gIId1dpDs

[roenxi]

In the big picture I'd probably mildly agree with his view that the defence industry proper isn't the US's biggest problem right now and railing against Military-Industrial complex is using the wrong term. But his arguments are a bit weird.

He classifies the Tech companies as not part of the military industrial complex, which seems like a mistake. The US tech industry is integrated with the US intelligence establishment and is effectively part of their military presence. Musk, for example, was making a very visible contribution to the Ukranian war effort with Starlink. Google & Facebook are a bigger threat than the US military when it comes to governments being taken out in my opinion and the US military is probably more of the same mind than they let on.

He's also very focused on earnings which is a headscratcher. He has revenues right next to that, and revenues are what matter. Earnings just say the US weapons producers are an inefficient industry which isn't a matter of controversy because it doesn't matter much. He seems to be confused about what figures to look at.

[nxobject]

Yes and no – I do believe that the MIC, explicitly stated, doesn't exist now as it has before: he illustrates it by noting the fact that the top five legacy arms and defense manufacturers don't earn as much, or have the same market cap, as the top five in other companies (say, tech.)

But arguably a lot more companies that aren't on the face of it defense and arms manufacturers are getting a larger and larger piece of the pie. Tech companies rely on defense – and "national security" – spending as key revenue streams, and they've built the connections with the government to match. (I think both SpaceX and Oracle are very much obvious examples now.)

So, perhaps the definiton of the MIC has to be updated for the 21st century to include "national security" spending and other significant technical suppliers.

[Jetrel]

Well, there's actually a HUGE historical downsizing that happened; this is actually something that really caught people off guard with Russia's invasion of Ukraine - the US MIC is a tiny fraction of the size that it used to be, and honestly isn't prepared to supply a "peer conflict" where two industrial powers are in a stalemate that they can't seem to break, so they're throwing as much ordinance as they can produce at the enemy to try to break through.

Thank god, this also hit the Russians incredibly bad, but yeah; people's perceptions of the production capacity of both countries is wildly, wildly overestimated.

The MIC basically had its budget slashed by ~80% or so after the cold war. Thousands of factories were permanently shuttered, hundreds of companies more or less ceased to exist - sometimes some of their engineers were aqui-hired by other firms, but by and large they just stopped working for the MIC in general.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqjvTKFufuk

This is what they called the "Peace Dividend"; when the Soviets collapsed, we no longer felt we needed a military that could repel a conventional assault from the Soviet Union (with all 700m citizens, and the heartland of industrial Europe (i.e. Germany, Poland, Czechia) backing them). We just, worst-case, needed to stop Russia and their 140m citizens.

They called it that because it unlocked a huge chunk of the budget that previously went to the MIC. A literal dividend of money.