The Military Industrial Complex was born after World War II from, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower explained, the “conjunction of an immense military establishment” — the Pentagon, the armed forces, intelligence agencies, and others — “and a large arms industry.”

Those two forces, the military and the industrial, united with Congress to form an unholy “Iron Triangle” or what some scholars believe Eisenhower initially and more accurately called the military-industrial–congressional complex. To this day those three have remained the heart of the MIC, locked in a self-perpetuating cycle of legalized corruption (that also features all too many illegalities).

The basic system works like this:

1) Congress takes exorbitant sums of money from us taxpayers every year and gives it to the Pentagon.

2) The Pentagon, directed by Congress, turns huge chunks of that money over to weapons makers and other corporations via all too lucrative contracts, gifting contractors tens of billions of dollars in profits.

3) Contractors use a portion of their profits to lobby Congress—with the help of lobbyists and campaign donations—for yet more Pentagon contracts, which Congress is usually thrilled to provide, perpetuating a seemingly endless cycle.

-Derived from “The Military Industrial Complex Is Killing Us All,” published by The Nation magazine and TomDispatch.com, and written by members of the Network to Dismantle the Military Industrial Complex.