Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
James Ledbetter is a financial journalist, an author with several books to his credit, and currently the editor-in-charge of Reuters.com. His new book, Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex, recalls the president's farewell address, in which he cautioned against the rising influence of the defense establishment and its industrial partners. In his own words, the author aims not to defend or discredit the notion of the military-industrial complex, or MIC, but to describe the origins of the idea and to show how it has evolved since the famous speech. As such, the book is an intellectual history, the anatomy of a sound bite. The author tries to place Eisenhower's remarks within the context of a larger concept and, to some extent, credit the president with calling attention to a growing threat.
The initial sections are successful, as the author does an admirable job of tracing the evolution of the concept from the emergence of a modern US Navy and the steel industry that helped to create it through America's current involvement in an extended conflict in the Middle East. His arguments concerning the growth of wasteful military spending and the outsized role for the military in American society attributed to the MIC are convincing in the light of the massive deficits...