Qu’est-il advenu du complexe militaro-industriel ?

Résumé En

While military force has long been regarded in the American tradition as a threat to liberty, democracy and peace, the notion of a military-industrial complex (MIC) appeared on the scene as late as 1961. It owed much to the power elite thesis offered a few years earlier by C.W. Mills. In the 1970s, however, the much weakened consensus on defense and foreign policy, changes in the international context and the substitution of neoclassical for keynesian paradigms combined to limit the legitimacy and influence of a MIC in which fault lines became apparent. At the time of the Reagan defense build-up, a military reform movement led frontal attacks on 'waste, fraud and mismanagement'. In the last five years, the two components of the MIC have become increasingly dissociated in analyses of the issues involved. The recent period has shown that influence can be derived from a position of relative weakness as well as from one of strength, which certainly bears out the notion that civil-military relations are best approached in institutional rather than in quantitative terms.