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The Defense Department spends al most $4,000,000 a year on congressional liaison, employing about 340 people for the task. One of their functions is to keep in close touch with members of Congress, providing such information as announcements of new contracts or construction in a particular member's bailiwick. Representatives of the big firms, sometimes called MICs (for military-industrial complex), are often corporate vice presidents with six-figure salaries and generous expense accounts. They are usually not registered lobbyists, and they tend to be discreet in their operations, keeping their names out of the newspapers and avoiding lavish soirees. At private clubs in town, on country-club golf courses, sometimes on a farm in Maryland or Virginia, occasionally on a yacht, they entertain—and gather intelligence. To compete successfully, their companies have to know what the military is likely to want, what project is popular on Capitol Hill, who is really the best man to deal with.
The big contractors find the military an excellent source for such experts. Senator William Proxmire, one of the Pentagon's most persistent and effective critics, notes that 2,072 retired, highranking military officers are now on the payrolls of the 100 top defense contractors, a threefold increase in the past ten years. While Proxmire does not charge any overt impropriety, he and others wonder whether an officer dealing with a particular company is going to drive a very hard bargain if he may go to work for it soon.
What is the overall effect of the M-I complex? That depends on the viewpoint. Dwight Eisenhower warned of its "grave implications," while acknowledging the nation's "imperative need" for a vigorous defense industry. V. J. Adduci, vice president of the Aerospace Industries Association, says that it is not diabolical or secretive but exemplifies the "open, dynamic, fail-safe relationship between two viable segments of our society." Economist Arthur F. Burns, now a senior White House aide, has argued that the complex "has been affecting profoundly the character of our society as well as the thrust and contours of economic activity." The effects, according to Burns, have been mostly negative: promoting excess government spending, stoking inflation, diverting resources from civilian needs, warping college curriculums, luring professors from teaching into research and breeding a class of civilian managers and scientists whose sole orientation is toward the government. The M-I complex is not really a complex; it is certainly no demon, no Mafia. But in view of the manifold problems it manages to create, without necessarily meaning to, it clearly bears close and constant surveillance.