The Military Industrial Complex: A Perfect Budget Predator

By Steve Hynd

Something in the Adam Elkus piece I linked yesterday got me thinking late last night. He wrote:

Critics of American foreign policy often undermine their own case with conspiracy theorizing about the �military-industrial complex.� The real problem, however, is not James Bond villain-style secret plans and hidden agendas but basic human frailty. A largely homogenous group of people is not going to have all the answers to questions of war and peace because they are necessarily limited by their experience, specialization, and biases.

And he's doubtless correct - it isn't a deliberate conspiracy, as such. As Heinlein noted, no man is a "villain in his own eyes" but then again, the natural consequence of a clique is to further the general aims of that clique even if there's no intention to do so, or as Adam Smith put it: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public." That's because people of the same trade always share many of the same ideas and beliefs, and those memes, in the sense Richard Dawkins originally proposed for the word, act like genetic code in several important respects. Particularly at the level of austistic corporate or governmental "entities" - and few are more autistic than the Pentagon, with its insistence on manuals for everything which set down the only acceptable interpretations and implementations of theory - it is as if memes themselves respond to pressure to maximise their own replication and survival.

It's possible to construct an evolutionary model of the Military-Industrial Complex (henceforce, the M.I.C.) which shows it as a perfect predator, constantly gobbling up resources and competitors in a way which makes it look exactly like a conspiracy while never actually being one. Such a creature lives in an environment where the food source is money, mostly federal budget money, and the competition consists of other government departments as well as other industries. It cannot reproduce in the accepted sense but it can make new parts of itself and it can feed, grow, mutate, compete with other similiar entities just like , say, a jellyfish, which is composed of many individual creatures living and acting together as a colony. In such an account, the M.I.C. can be seen to be as perfectly adapted to its environment as a Box Jellyfish is to its own, and to have adapted its environment just as humans have theirs in order to better succeed at feeding, growing and eliminating competition. After all, it now swallows the bulk of the federal budget every year and has created a new set of justifications: the War On Terror and Counterinsurgency Doctrine - for swallowing an ever growing share.

The individuals who make up the beast - the generals, lobbyists, lawmakers and industrialists with their revolving doors between their various roles - act purely as memetic information carriers. Ideological sperm or internal viruses, they carry memes like COIN from one part of the beast to the other, often find a rationale for creating new parts to the creature (new agencies, departments and commands) and even venture out to infect other entities and co-opt them into the M.I.C. entity as has been done in the COIN-driven co-opting of many of the pratical tools of US aid under military control. None of those individuals are part of a conspiracy in any sense of actively conspiring - they are simply doing what they believe is right according to their own network of beliefs and knowledge. But they add up to an entity that acts like a conspiracy just as surely as the individual chromosomes and cells of your body add up to an entity that acts like a human being.

And because the M.I.C. is so perfectly adapted to its environment, and is so capable at altering its environment to suit itself, it will be especially difficult to create a set of evolutionary pressures which will mutate it into a less threatening and pernicious beast. Cutting the food source - money - alone won't work. An apex predator, it will simply gobble up its own food and leave the lesser amount left to be shared between its less-able competitors. If the M.I.C. is to be reduced in size or altered into a creature that no longer seeks new conflicts and new excuses to gather in ever more resources, then we'll have to practise memetic engineering - introduce new memes that don't automatically involve reaching for interventionism and encourage them to spead, against resistance, throughout its body - or enhance the competitiveness of its peers by making them more memetically capable of success in the environment all such entities co-inhabit.