In 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his famous farewell address as president, warned of the "acquisition of unwarranted influence" by what he called the "military-industrial complex" in the United States. Today, however, the "large arms industry" of Eisenhower's day is only part of a complex equation. Civilian firms such as PepsiCo and IBM form the backbone of what more accurately can be described as a "military-corporate complex." These businesses allow the Pentagon to function, to make war and to carry out foreign occupations.

For example, in 2006 (the last year for which official figures are available), PepsiCo and IBM ranked among the Pentagon's top 100 contractors, taking in $286,696,943 and $291,825,309, respectively. This was no aberration. The previous year, they received $233,053,993 and $382,408,117 each, according to Department of Defense documents. In fact, both companies have been defense contractors every year since at least 2000. And there isn't anything special or odd about PepsiCo or IBM, when it comes to the Pentagon.

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These are, in fact, today's "typical defense contractors." They are the companies that regularly take in tax-funded payouts from the Pentagon for services and goods (chiefly for the more than 1.3 million active members of the armed services). Few realize the actual look and shape of the new "militarized" U.S. economy. It's not just the classic "permanent armaments industry" -- it's civilian and it's widespread.

In reality, whether we like it or not, whether we care or not, we're all participating in it. When we buy Crest toothpaste (Procter & Gamble) or Oscar Mayer hot dogs (Kraft) or a PlayStation 3 (Sony), the fact is we are supporting an increasingly civilian-oriented military economy and an increasingly militarized civilian economy. As such, ever more U.S. companies are going to war, and, even if ever fewer Americans are interested in volunteering for military service, it's increasingly true that, by the flow of our dollars, ever more of us are going to war with them.

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The real point is that the military-corporate complex is inescapable, and it's hidden in plain sight, if only we'd care to look.

It's high time we at least recognize that PepsiCo, IBM, Microsoft, and Johnson & Johnson and just about every other corporate giant (and thousands upon thousands of flyweights of the business world) are benefiting not only from our purchases of cola, computers, software and bandages but from our tax dollars, via the Pentagon. We all know what the Pentagon's doing abroad, and what that's meant for Iraqis.

The CIA's primary mission became fighting Communism. The first 3/4 of the book lay out how it attempted to accomplish this. The CIA's typical strategy involved identifying a country with the potential to elect a communist government, funding right-wing revolutionaries to overthrow said government, and helping a new government come into power.

In most cases, the new government would be headed by a violent fascist with no respect for law or liberty.

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LBJ got us into Vietnam because of poor intelligence. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was later revealed to be friendly-fire between two US warships, not an attack by the Communists. The error was discovered the same day LBJ ordered retaliatory strikes on Vietnam, but never reported to the legislature or the executive. The mistake was declassified in 2005.

Nixon had a bad habit of ignoring what the CIA told him when it contradicted his policies, even though the CIA was often right and Nixon was often wrong. Sound familiar? Nixon wanted to fight Communism everywhere and wanted the CIA to do it. One of his strongest legacies is the arms race for the cold war. He pressured the CIA for estimates of the Soviet's nuclear arsenal in line with his beliefs, and they delivered, overstating the true numbers until the end of the Cold War.

Carter decided to involve the US in the Soviet-Afghani war, ordering the CIA to funnel arms to the Afghan fighters resisting the Soviet invasion. The shipments went through Pakistani intelligence, which distributed them to the most effective fighters after keeping a fair share of the arms for themselves. The most effective fighters turned out to be the radical Muslims. Some of these fighters later formed the Taliban, of which you may have heard. They took power in Afghanistan in the mid-90's.

Reagan continued Nixon's legacy, using these overstated numbers to bolster the military-industrial complex and further the arms race with the Soviet Union. He approved of the shady arms dealing with Iran and the funding of rebels in Nicaragua and other parts of Central America.

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Bush had little use for the CIA before 9/11, ignoring their warnings that a major terrorist attack on American soil was looming. We all know how that turned out. He had great use for the agency after 9/11, convincing the higher-ups to find intelligence supporting the existence of WMD's in Iraq. We all know how that turned out, too.

It seems like the government wasn't screwing things up enough, so they needed to create a special department for to spend billions to come up with truely spectacular failures, then classify the worst of them.

All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming conquest as an article of faith. It is to be achieved either by gradually acquiring more and more territory and so building up an overwhelming preponderance of power, or by the discovery of some new and unanswerable weapon. The search for new weapons continues unceasingly, and is one of the very few remaining activities in which the inventive or speculative type of mind can find any outlet. In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance--meaning, in effect, war and police espionage--the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life. In the vast laboratories of the Ministry of Peace, and in the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands of the Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably at work. Some are concerned simply with planning the logistics of future wars; others devise larger and larger rocket bombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more and more impenetrable armour-plating; others search for new and deadlier gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease germs immunized against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce a vehicle that shall bore its way under the soil like a submarine under the water, or an aeroplane as independent of its base as a sailing-ship; others explore even remoter possibilities such as focusing the sun's rays through lenses suspended thousands of kilometres away in space, or producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at the earth's centre.