The Sellout

President Eisenhower in his 1961 Presidential farewell speech to the nation warned about what he called the defense industrial complex. In the years since this address and throughout the Cold War era corporations solely dedicated to the production of weapons of war flourished. Gone were the days, such as those during WWII, where companies devoted to the production of consumer goods could be shifted to a wartime footing. The Cold War, on both sided of the Atlantic, spawned entire industries whose only purpose was and still is to produce weapons of war. But how do these companies sustain themselves in this new post-Cold War reality? The answer is the Middle East with a seemingly endless appetite for war and weapons.