It's all just a government subsidy to continue funding otherwise uncompetitive businesses in order to maximize military capability. If we didn't have any threat of armed conflict, we wouldn't need to spend it, and these companies could try their shake in the free market.

Unfortunately, what Eisenhower didn't bother to acknowledge about the military-industrial complex is that it is also driven by external factors (namely, ones that don't mind killing us) and, more than anything, the American belief that we should never suffer under any circumstances from any war. We have never been attacked, and we have never rebuilt our lives. Americans, even the Greatest Generation, cannot fathom a 9/11 a day. If we want to break free of that (the way Europe has, in part by cutting budgeting and in part by contracting through Americans), we are going to have to prove we don't have a glass jaw, because we will certainly be tested.