Nick Turse Quotes

... a caricature of Mr. Military Industrial Complex.

The Military Industrial Complex. President Eisenhower had it wrong. It’s the Military Industrial Congressional Complex.

We have been compelled to create an armaments industry of vast proportions.

Like all wars, conflicts bring on great opportunities for business.

I am not being facetious when I say that the real enemies in this country are the Pentagon and its pals in big business.

The military budget is simply an enormous pork barrel of special privilege, the privileges taking the form of windfall profits, of no-risk profits and, most importantly, of enormous outlays of capital supplied by the Pentagon to arms contractors.

The 'defense' budget is three quarters of a trillion dollars. Profits went up last year well over 25%. I guarantee you: when war becomes that profitable, we're going to see more of it.

We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex and the damage it could do to society.

Of the top 10 companies who got contracts from the Iraq war, all of them had contributed to the Republicans and almost all had ex Pentagon admirals and generals on their staffs.

There has been no war in US history where we ever knew who was getting the contracts during the war.

The defense budget is more than a piggy bank for people who want to get busy beating swords into pork barrels.

War is a racket.... The only way to stop it is by conscription of capital before conscription of the nation's manhood.... Let the officers and directors of our armament factories, our gun builders and munitions makers and shipbuilders all be conscripted—to get $30 a month, the same wage paid to our lads in the trenches. Give capital 30 days to think it over and you will learn by that time there will be no war. That will stop the racket—that, and nothing else.

The military market is based on human folly, not normal market precepts. Human folly goes up and down, but it always exists. It's depths have never been plumbed.

The merchants of death have provided jobs for centuries, but that's no reason to continue it.

The wonder of this month's military procurement scandal is that it can still scandalize us. The practices that are being exposed—the revolving door between government and industry, the mutual backscratching between the military and the companies that build the weapons—aren't abuses of the system. They are the system.

1971 … was the year when, for the very first time, the United States bailed out an industrial firm whose own financial management had driven it to the brink of extinction. The company was Lockheed Aircraft Corporation and the bailout was in the form of a loan guarantee worth $250 million.

Peace is costly to the profits of the military/security complex. Washington's gigantic military and security interests are far more powerful than the peace lobby.

To most of America, war has become not only tolerable but profitable, and so there is no longer any great incentive to end it.

In the end the privatisation of war is not acceptable. We shouldn't be issuing these sub-contracts to these contracting companies because the people who run them are making millions. There should be no relationship between ex-politicians and them, like John Reid and Malcolm Rifkind, who are now associated with contracting companies having been ministers of defence. That's unacceptable.

Somebodys paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are rebuilding it. Theyre getting paid by the American taxpayer in both cases. So we pay them to destroy the country, and then we pay them to rebuild it. Those are gifts from U.S. taxpayer to U.S. corporations.

I think that one of the things that we all ask ourselves, whoever we are, is: who stands to make a lot of money out of this [wars]? And, certainly, it comes back to people like armaments makers, and so on and so forth.

War provides jobs, profits, political payoffs, research funds, and forms of political and economic power that reach into every aspect of society.

Beware the influence of the military-industrial complex.