By Thibaud Boncourt, Mathias Delori, Christophe Wasinski and Marielle Debos
In his farewell speech on 17 January 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned his compatriots about the development of a “military-industrial complex”(MIC) in the United States, i.e. a growing integration of the military establishment and the weapon industries. Eisenhower feared that this alliance would encourage the production of some biased expertise whose main function would be to justify new wars and weapons programmes. This trend was already obvious in the studies produced by the Rand corporation and some other think tanks of the MIC. Therefore, Eisenhower’s main concern was that the militarization of knowledge would encroach on a traditionally more independent field: academia. The American president believed that if such a “military-industrial academic complex” (MIAC) were to be formed, there would no longer be any counter-power and “public policies would become prisoners of a techno-scientific elite”.
Published:
openDemocracy.net, 2019
Online available:
www.opendemocracy.net