Arming America through the Centuries: War, Business, and Building a National Security State - Legacies of War

While many associate the concept referred to as the ‘military-industrial complex’ with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the roots of it existed two hundred years earlier. This concept, as Benjamin Franklin Cooling writes, was ‘part of historical lore’ as the American nation discovered the inextricable relationship between arms and the State.