LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Military-Industrial Complex: Soviet Union
built 291 days ago
The undue influence of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned against does not merely take the form of powerful lobbying on behalf of a sector of the business community and its government patrons. For one thing, the complex is now a military-industrial-academic-and-union complex. For some universities, the payoff is a munificent source of research support at a cost of keeping the results secret. Trade unions not only trade off ideological support for the arms race by certain union leaders but ... accept considerable government direction of business, as long as it brings jobs--never mind other consequences. However, substantial opposition is growing in universities and among and within unions, as it is also within the business community. Many groups have suffered from the economic dislocation and have begun to allocate the responsibility for the conditions.
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By the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the military-industrial complex receded from popular consciousness. By 1999, in the absence of the Soviet threat, American defense expenditures shrank to 3 percent of the GDP. But with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and two successive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, defense spending rose beyond $400 billion in the 2004 budget. The headlong pursuit of homeland security renewed concerns that the influence of a reinvigorated military-industrial-national security complex would be an enduring facet of American life well into the twenty-first century.
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President Eisenhower’s warning about the "acquisition of unwarranted influence" by the military-industrial complex is as relevant today as it was in 1961. Despite the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the breakup of the Soviet Union, the U.S. military budget is higher today than it was when Eisenhower gave his military-industrial complex speech in 1961. At more than $270 billion per year, the U.S. military budget (in constant dollars) remains near the peacetime cold war average that prevailed during the prime period of U.S.-Soviet rivalry, from roughly 1950 to 1989. This is astonishing considering that Russia has slashed its weapons procurement budget by 77% since 1991, and that Russian forces could barely prevail over a rebel army in Chechnya (inside its own borders), much less project force against neighboring countries.2
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The military-industrial complex (MIC) was always the most technologically advanced branch of Soviet industry; it manufactured products that were not merely competitive on foreign markets but were often superior to their Western counterparts. It appeared that the collapse of the Soviet Union would bring the MIC enormous profits, since the Soviet Union had delivered about $20 billion worth of weapons abroad annually, but had received payments of only $3-5 million in currency; the rest was a donation to ideologically friendly regimes. In reality, everything turned out differently. Yearly exports of Russian weapons fluctuate from $1.7-4 billion. This is less than 4% of the total volume of Russian exports and allows Russia to hold fast to a not very honorable fourth place among major arms-exporting countries. The annual average of $2.8 billion is the main income of 1600 MIC enterprises.
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Open sources readily show to anyone who cares to look that this war is about oil, but media and government do not mention these facts as it would be inconvenient to the military industrial intelligence media complex. (The major neworks and print organs are largely owned my military contractors and/or the intelligence community.) The problem is that the ONLY logical pipeline routes to serve SE Asia and China all run through Afghanistan or along its borders, largely so close as to be visible from the border. A US-Soviet backed pipeline is considered critical, competing with a proposed Chinese backed oil pipeline project serving the same oil fields in the Caspian Sea region, which includes Iran and several former Soviet provinces. The Chinese began negotiating that project in 1997, causing a great deal of consternation for the Clinton administration and major US oil companies who stood to gain little in the project.
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In May, the government signed a decree on the union of the MiG Aviation Scientific-Industrial Complex (ASIC) and the Moscow Aircraft Production Association (MAPA). This was the first step in the formation of a concern on the basis of manufacturers and developers of MiG airplanes. MAPA MiG, headed by Vladimir Kuz'min, received the right to carry out independent foreign economic activity.
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