Presented at International Society for Systems Sciences, ISSS 2025 PDF Presentation
There is a line in Orwell’s 1984: “The war is not meant to be won, the war is meant to be continuous.”
We see a major difference between classical territorial conflicts and modern warfare with the predominance of the military-industrial complex (MIC), or using Ray McGovern’s term MICIMATT (Military Industrial Congressional, Intelligence, Media, Academic, Think Tank). The MIC has overtaken its purpose of ensuring industrial readiness for war materiel and has become a goal-seeking system. We can observe the functional purpose for continuous and escalating wars in the US has been to generate capital for the investors of the MIC, in the largest public-private partnership on earth.
To recognize the additionally reinforcement of the business model involving Wall Street as a flywheel to the MIC, we should add “Investors” to the term now, making this “MICIMMAT-IC.”
We face moral hazard when realizing that, as citizens or investors, we are subject to ethical precarity as participants in this complex. A egregious systemic hazard of structural coercion is found when people cannot opt out or democratically change the system. We are structurally indicted as members of NATO countries, and implicated in the acceptance of a sociopolitical culture that sustains an “offensive” industry ostensibly for national security. Because of the pervasiveness of this system, the only personal escape may be to leave the country (to reduce tax liability) and to carefully vet one’s investment options.
The methodology is based on a Warfield problematique mapping informed by literature review, and structural analysis of socioeconomic factors, with a functional assessment using Flourishing Enterprise Modeling tools.
This position paper is introduced in the tradition of Kenneth Boulding’s vision of economic change for peace. His ideas were foundational, but the MIC in his era was much less entangled than today. As the Western economic system has become wholly dependent on the revenues from public funding of the defense economy, we are implicated in significant moral hazard. President Trump’s proposal for a $1 trillion DoD budget only highlights the audacious capital expended every year on sustaining this economy. The NATO budget is also at a similar level. As a comparison, we can observe NATO publicly-funded system is roughly the same size as the global pharmaceutical industry.
We can map the structure of the MICIMATTIC problematique, that might entail 50-60 functional contributions to the problem of a sustained militarized economy. The purpose of that mapping is to identify the most influential sources of leverage to dislocate financial commitments and reposition economic flows in an abrupt shift away from public-funded business model of war.
Here we start by mapping the business model of the US/NATO war economy, as a consistent business model on which the industry is dependent. This will show the types of capital flows that reinforce the MICIMATTIC system and such a model, based on the Flourishing Enterprise Ontology, will suggest ways of intervening and displacing the financial flows that sustain the war economy.
