“Forever Wars” and the Military-Industrial Complex
How temporary wars became enduring commitments
Summary
In 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower—a five-star general and former Supreme Allied Commander—warned Americans about the growing influence of what he called the “military-industrial complex”: the permanent combination of a huge military establishment and a large private arms industry. Eisenhower believed a strong military was necessary, but warned that this combination could acquire excessive influence over national policy.
Four decades later, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 began another transformation. Congress authorized military force against those responsible for the attacks. That authority subsequently supported military operations against terrorist organizations outside Afghanistan as well, including operations in Yemen and Somalia.
The resulting conflicts became known collectively as America’s “forever wars.” The war in Afghanistan lasted almost 20 years. The Iraq War began in 2003, and American military operations subsequently extended into Syria and other countries. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that post-9/11 wars and related national-security activities have produced approximately $8 trillion in expenditures and future obligations, including an estimated minimum $2.2 trillion in future care for veterans.
Meanwhile, military spending and the industry supplying the military have become permanent features of the American economy. The Defense Department’s FY2026 budget documents put total requested national-defense resources at just over $1 trillion when anticipated reconciliation funding is included.
This does not prove that defense contractors cause wars. The United States faces genuine security threats, and maintaining armed forces requires an industrial base capable of supplying them. But Eisenhower’s warning raises a question that remains important:
When an enormous permanent military establishment, private industry, jobs, congressional districts and national-security policy become economically dependent upon one another, does the system develop its own momentum toward continued military spending and intervention?
“Forever Wars” and the Military-Industrial Complex
Eisenhower’s warning
Few critics of excessive military influence had stronger military credentials than Dwight D. Eisenhower.
He commanded Allied forces in Europe during World War II and later served two terms as president.
On January 17, 1961, three days before leaving office, Eisenhower delivered one of the most remarkable presidential farewell addresses in American history.
He acknowledged that the Cold War required the United States to maintain powerful armed forces and something America previously had not possessed in peacetime: a permanent armaments industry of enormous size.
But he saw a danger in the arrangement.
He warned Americans to guard against the acquisition of “unwarranted influence” by the military-industrial complex. He specifically emphasized that its economic and political influence reached communities, state governments and the federal government.
Eisenhower was not arguing for unilateral disarmament.
He was warning about incentives and power.
Once a country builds an enormous permanent system around military preparedness, the institutions inside that system naturally acquire an interest in maintaining it.
More than six decades later, the system is vastly larger.
September 11 and a war without a conventional ending
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 produced an understandable demand to find and defeat the people responsible.
Congress responded with the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF.
Unlike a traditional declaration of war against another country, the authorization targeted people and organizations connected to the attacks. As terrorist networks changed, successive administrations interpreted the authority to cover military actions beyond Afghanistan.
A Congressional Research Service report documented its use for operations involving terrorist organizations in countries including Yemen and Somalia, while other counterterrorism operations occurred in Pakistan and Libya.
That created a fundamentally different kind of war.
Germany surrendered in 1945.
Japan surrendered in 1945.
There was no equivalent moment at which global terrorism could surrender.
Terrorist organizations could splinter, change names, relocate, form affiliates or be replaced by new organizations.
A war defined geographically can end when the fighting in that country ends.
A war against a method of violence or changing network of organizations has no equally obvious endpoint.
That helps explain the expression “forever war.”
Afghanistan: nearly twenty years
American forces entered Afghanistan in 2001.
The original objective was closely connected to al-Qaeda and the Taliban government that sheltered it.
But the mission evolved.
The United States eventually became involved not merely in counterterrorism but in building Afghan security forces and supporting an Afghan government capable of surviving after American forces departed.
The United States finally withdrew its military forces in 2021.
The war had lasted almost 20 years.
Iraq followed a different path. The United States invaded in 2003 and withdrew most troops in 2011, but American forces returned after the rise of ISIS. Operations also expanded into Syria.
GAO reported as early as 2017 that American forces were simultaneously engaged in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
The pattern had changed.
America was no longer necessarily at war in the traditional sense of mobilizing the country against another nation.
Instead, military operations could continue at relatively low intensity for years while much of American civilian life proceeded almost untouched.
That may be one of the most important characteristics of the forever-war era:
War became easier for most Americans not to notice.
The financial cost
The numbers are difficult to comprehend.
Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates approximately $5.8 trillion in appropriations and other expenditures associated with America’s response to 9/11 through FY2022. When estimated future obligations for veterans’ medical care and disability benefits are included, the total reaches approximately $8 trillion.
That figure is broader than the direct cost of combat. It includes categories such as homeland-security expenditures, additions to the Pentagon’s base budget, interest attributable to war borrowing and veterans’ obligations.
For comparison, GAO calculated in 2019 that the Defense Department alone had received more than $1.8 trillion specifically for war-related activities since 2001.
These distinctions matter. There is no single objectively correct number called “the cost of the wars.” Different totals answer different questions.
But every serious accounting reaches the same general conclusion:
The financial commitment has been enormous.
And some of the largest bills arrive after soldiers come home.
Medical treatment and disability compensation for veterans continue for decades after a war ends.
The human cost
Money is the easiest cost to count.
It is not necessarily the most important one.
Brown’s Costs of War project estimates that at least 940,000 people have died directly from violence in major post-9/11 war zones. Its researchers estimate millions more indirect deaths caused by consequences such as damaged infrastructure, disease, hunger and disrupted access to essential services.
Those estimates encompass many countries, combatants and causes; they should not be interpreted as people directly killed by U.S. forces.
The project also estimates that approximately 38 million people have been displaced in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines in connection with the post-9/11 wars examined by its researchers.
American service members and their families have borne another portion of the cost.
And veterans’ medical and disability costs will continue long after the wars themselves have disappeared from newspaper headlines.
Enter the military-industrial complex
None of this demonstrates that defense companies wanted these wars to begin.
That distinction is essential.
The United States needs weapons. Soldiers need aircraft, vehicles, ammunition, communications equipment and protection. Modern weapons are extraordinarily complicated, and designing and manufacturing them requires specialized companies, skilled employees and long-term investment.
There is therefore a legitimate reason for a defense industry to exist.
The problem Eisenhower identified was subtler.
What happens when the system becomes permanent?
Defense contractors depend upon government contracts.
Military installations provide employment and economic activity in communities across the country.
Members of Congress understandably want to protect jobs in their states and districts.
The armed services compete for budgets and programs.
Weapons programs can employ thousands of workers and involve elaborate supply chains.
Closing a program therefore isn’t merely a military decision. It can become an economic and political decision as well.
That is the structure Eisenhower was asking Americans to watch.
An industry increasingly concentrated
Another development makes the question more important.
The defense industry consolidated dramatically after the Cold War.
GAO reported that between 1990 and the late 1990s, the number of prime contractors declined in 10 of 12 defense markets the Pentagon considered important to national security. In tactical missiles, for example, the number fell from 13 contractors to three. Some major defense markets were reduced to only two competitors.
Consolidation can have advantages. Larger companies may eliminate redundant facilities and achieve efficiencies.
It can also reduce competition.
And because highly specialized military systems often cannot simply be purchased from an ordinary commercial supplier, the government may become dependent on a small number of companies.
GAO continues to identify defense acquisition as a high-risk area and has documented delays and technological and production problems in major weapons programs. It has also warned that some components have only a single supplier.
Thus the relationship is reciprocal:
The defense industry depends upon the government, and the government depends upon the defense industry.
That is almost exactly the structural relationship Eisenhower was describing.
Does the military-industrial complex cause war?
That question requires care.
There is ample evidence that defense contractors benefit financially when governments purchase more weapons.
That does not establish that contractors caused the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere.
Governments go to war for many reasons: genuine security threats, ideology, intelligence assessments, domestic politics, alliances, strategic calculations and sometimes serious errors of judgment.
The Iraq War, for example, cannot responsibly be reduced to a single economic explanation.
But Eisenhower’s warning did not require a conspiracy.
He specifically warned about influence “whether sought or unsought.”
His insight was that institutions create incentives.
A nation that maintains an enormous military establishment will develop companies, careers, communities, congressional interests and bureaucracies connected to military spending.
Those interests do not have to meet secretly and decide to start a war.
They merely have to make continued military expenditure easier to sustain politically and economically than it otherwise would be.
That is a much more plausible—and more important—version of the military-industrial-complex argument.
War without taxes
There is another unusual feature of the post-9/11 wars.
Americans were not asked to finance them through a dedicated wartime tax.
Brown’s Costs of War project estimates that more than $1 trillion in interest costs had already resulted from borrowing associated with the wars in its accounting through FY2022.
Borrowing separates the political decision to wage war from its immediate financial consequences.
Citizens can receive government services without simultaneously seeing a large war surcharge on their tax bills.
Future taxpayers inherit part of the bill.
That changes the political economics of warfare.
A war financed immediately by visible taxation asks today’s voters:
Is this worth paying for?
A war financed substantially through borrowing allows much of that question to be postponed.
Congress and the disappearing declaration of war
The Constitution divides war powers between Congress and the president.
Yet America’s modern wars have rarely begun with the formal declarations of war familiar from World War II.
The 2001 AUMF proved remarkably durable. Its language continued to provide legal authority for military operations many years after the attacks that produced it, including operations against organizations that did not exist on September 11, 2001.
This raises a democratic question independent of whether any particular military operation is justified:
How often should elected representatives be required to reconsider an ongoing authorization for war?
A new vote forces Congress to debate the threat, objective, cost and conditions for ending military action.
An authorization without an expiration date can make continued operations the default.
Instead of government having to decide repeatedly to continue a war, Congress must affirmatively act to stop one.
That is a profound difference.
The trillion-dollar military
The post-9/11 wars did not create America’s military establishment, and ending those wars did not dismantle it.
For FY2026, Defense Department budget documents showed a national-defense total of approximately $1.012 trillion when the administration’s anticipated reconciliation resources were included.
That money is not simply “war spending.”
It finances nuclear deterrence, personnel, bases, research, ships, aircraft, cybersecurity, missile defense and many other capabilities intended partly to prevent wars.
That distinction is important.
A powerful military can deter an adversary from attacking in the first place.
The legitimate question is therefore not:
Military spending or no military spending?
No serious national-security policy can be reduced to that choice.
The question is:
How much military power does the United States need, for what purposes, under whose authority, and at what opportunity cost?
Every dollar committed to defense is a dollar unavailable for another public or private purpose.
That does not make defense spending wasteful.
It makes the decision consequential.
Eisenhower’s warning was about democracy
Eisenhower’s speech is sometimes remembered as an attack on weapons manufacturers.
It was more interesting than that.
He accepted the necessity of a powerful military and a permanent defense industry.
What frightened him was the possibility that a system created to protect American democracy might eventually acquire enough political and economic weight to distort democratic choices.
His proposed safeguard was not eliminating the military.
It was an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry.”
That remains a useful standard.
Before another military intervention begins—or an existing one continues—citizens and Congress can ask some surprisingly simple questions:
- What precisely are we trying to accomplish?
- Who is the enemy?
- What constitutes success?
- What would cause us to leave?
- How much will it cost?
- Who will pay?
- What nonmilitary alternatives were considered?
- Does Congress still authorize the mission?
- Who benefits economically from continuing it?
- And, most important, when does it end?
A country sometimes has to fight.
But a democracy should never reach the point where war continues simply because continuing has become easier than stopping.
That may be the enduring meaning of both the “forever wars” and Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex.
Printable References
Eisenhower, Dwight D. “Farewell Address.” January 17, 1961. National Archives and Records Administration. Primary source for Eisenhower’s warning concerning the military-industrial complex, permanent armaments industry and democratic oversight.
Congressional Research Service. 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force: Issues Concerning Its Continued Application. Discusses the legal authority used for post-9/11 military operations and its extension beyond Afghanistan to terrorist organizations and operations in other countries.
Crawford, Neta C. The U.S. Budgetary Costs of the Post-9/11 Wars. Costs of War Project, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, September 1, 2021. Detailed accounting of approximately $5.8 trillion in expenditures through FY2022 and approximately $8 trillion when estimated future veterans’ obligations are included.
Costs of War Project, Brown University. “U.S. Federal Budget.” Provides breakdowns of post-9/11 war expenditures, including military operations, homeland security, Pentagon base-budget increases, interest and veterans’ costs.
Costs of War Project, Brown University. “Findings.” Research summaries concerning direct and indirect deaths, displacement, veterans and the geographic extent of post-9/11 counterterrorism operations.
U.S. Government Accountability Office. Overseas Contingency Operations: Alternatives Identified to the Approach to Fund War-Related Activities. GAO-19-211, January 28, 2019. Reports that DOD had received more than $1.8 trillion for war-related activities since 2001 and examines alternative methods for budgeting those costs.
U.S. Government Accountability Office. Defense Industry Consolidation: Competitive Effects of Mergers and Acquisitions. 1998. Documents the sharp decline in the number of prime contractors in major defense markets during the post-Cold War consolidation of the defense industry.
U.S. Government Accountability Office. Weapon Systems Annual Assessment: Challenges to Fielding Capabilities Faster Persist. GAO-22-105230, June 8, 2022. Reviews major Defense Department weapons programs, acquisition difficulties and risks associated with the defense industrial base.
U.S. Department of Defense, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller). FY2026 Budget Request. Official Defense Department budget document showing approximately $1.012 trillion in total national-defense resources when anticipated reconciliation funding is included.