Eisenhower

The year is 1961. Eisenhower is giving his farewell address. He warns about the "military industrial complex."

In trying to locate the actual size of the military budget in 1961, I found the following quote.

"The Kennedy administration placed particular emphasis on improving ability to counter Communist "wars of national liberation," in which the enemy avoided head-on military confrontation and resorted to political subversion and guerrilla tactics. As McNamara (The Secretary of Defense under Kennedy.) said in his 1962 annual report, "The military tactics are those of the sniper, the ambush, and the raid. The political tactics are terror, extortion, and assassination." In practical terms, this meant training and equipping U.S. military personnel, as well as such allies as South Vietnam, for counterinsurgency operations."

Source

Interesting and scary in its prescience.

Turns out the military budget in 1961 was approximately $40 billion. Now it exceeds $500 billion and everything that Eisenhower warned us about has come to fruition.