America Needs a Strong Military Industrial Complex Essay -- War Army D

America Needs a Strong Military Industrial Complex By mid-1942, World War II was looking bleak for the Allied powers. The German Wehrmacht was blitzing through Soviet Russia, the Luftwaffe had laid waste to much of London, Rommel was about to take Africa, and the Japanese nearly had control of the Pacific. Fortunately, as the Axis started running low on materiel, America was increasing the Allied supply dramatically. This enormous production capacity displayed by the U.S. was the product of their new military-industrial complex, as plants across the country geared up production of weapons and combat vehicles and the government began pumping resources into the creation of new military-oriented production facilities. The American industrial surge turned out to be not only the deciding factor in World War II, but also the greatest protection against the Soviet threat during the Cold War that followed.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In the wake of his defeat at El Alamein, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel declared, â€Å"The bravest men can do nothing without guns, the guns nothing without plenty of ammunition, and neither guns nor ammunition are of much use in mobile warfare unless there are vehicles with sufficient petrol to haul them around†. While Germany and Japan struggled to reproduce materiel at the speed at which it was being lost—leading to shortages for the Afrika Korps in the African desert and the Wehrmacht during Operation Barbarossa—the U.S. began producing it almost as quickly as it could be shipped out. There was virtually no military-industrial complex to speak of before 1940, and America went woefully under prepared into conflict after its losses at Pearl Harbor. However, by 1944 America was turning out 8 aircraft carriers a month, 50 merchant ships a day, one fighter plane every five minutes, and 150 tons of steel every sixty seconds (Walton 540).   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  While other factors certainly aided in the momentum switch that occurred in late 1942 and 1943 and accelerated to the cessation of hostilities, historian Francis Walton writes that, For the reduction in bloodshed much credit must go to the miraculous tools of war, most of which, in the hands of the victors, were ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ It is the considered judgment of the military experts that in World War II ‘our victories were the product of massed materiel rather than the highest military skill’(4). Walton i... ... the United States is the undisputed military, economic, cultural, and political leader of the world, a title it earned for the most part with relatively little bloodshed. The military-industrial complex formed in the early stages of World War II can be thanked for this, as its extraordinary capacity for churning out weapons almost single-handedly preserved the Allied cause, and its ability to do so without exorbitant burden on the U.S. economy eventually won it the Cold War. Those who today consistently advocate cutting the defense budget in accordance with a policy of isolationism and pacifism and decry the profits made by military contractors would do well to remember the roots of America’s current superiority before making too rash a decision. Bibliography Walton, Francis. Miracle of World War II: How American Industry Made Victory Possible. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1956. Hickman, Martin B. The Military and American Society. Beverly Hills: Glencoe Press, 1971. Koistinen, Paul A.C. The Military-Industrial Complex: A Historical Perspective. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1980. Strachey, John. On The Prevention of War. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1962.