In the 1961 farewell speech where President Eisenhower made the "military-industrial complex" famous, Ike was going to add "Congressional" and struck it out minutes before he spoke, according to his military aide, Brig Gen Andrew Goodpaster. Goodpaster, who died in 2005, made the observation in a 1993 interview, according to a new report by Barry Watts and Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, "Sustaining Critical Sectors of the US Defense Industrial Base".
Watts and Harrison's main conclusion concerns strategy, and is as follows: It would be nice to have one. The problem, they argue, is that since the birth of the US defense industry after World War 2, the US has been disposed to regard the defense business as a free-market institution, and they quote recent leaders to show how those views survive.