The Military Industrial Complex ...50 Years Later

January 18, 2011  On the 50th anniversary of Dwight D. ("Ike") Eisenhower's farewell address as America's 34th president, Watson Institute Professor James Der Derian writes this week in Berliner Zeitung that "Eisenhower's warning, of  'the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex, ' is, regrettably, even more timely."

He goes further to say that, in fact, "Ike was lucky:  he did not live to see the birth of a new hyphenated monster, the military-industrial-media-entertainment network."

Der Derian, currently a Bosch Public Policy Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, is author of Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment-Network, whose second edition was published in 2009 by Routledge.