Deep State

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

"I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination."

- Julian Assange

Some notable figures in the United States have for decades expressed concerns about the existence of a "deep state" or state within a state, which they suspect exerts influence and control over public and foreign policy, regardless of which political party controls the country's democratic institutions.

According to Philip Giraldi, the nexus of power is centered on the military–industrial complex, intelligence community, and Wall Street, while Bill Moyers points to plutocrats andoligarchs. Professor Peter Dale Scottalso mentions "big oil" and the media as key players, while David Talbot focuses on national security officials, especially Allen Dulles. Mike Lofgren, an ex-Washington staffer who has written a book on the issue, includesSilicon Valley, along with "key elements of government" and Wall Street, but emphasizes the non-conspiratorial nature of the "state".

Political scientist Michael J. Glennon believes that this trend is the result of policy being made by government bureaucracies instead of by elected officials.

Throughout history, state systems with outsized pretensions to power have reacted to their environments in two ways. The first strategy, reflecting the ossification of its ruling elites, consists of repeating that nothing is wrong, that the status quo reflects the nation’s unique good fortune in being favored by God and that those calling for change are merely subversive troublemakers.

When members of the military-intelligence establishment continually disobey civilian leaders (leak information, subvert elections, ignore official policy directives, etc.), civil-military relations break down. The democratic state is put at risk of becoming a so-called banana republic, subject to military coups, or a deep-state controlled autocratic state, similar to Turkey and Egypt, wherein former military and intelligence officers pressure a weak government to carry out their agenda. 

The threat is that when the policy preferences of unelected administrators in the military-intelligence bureaucracy diverge from those of elected leaders, the bureaucrats can choose not to carry out the orders of its civilian bosses. (For those who are still skeptical, Shields notes that “the armed forces sidestepped Clinton’s campaign promise to fully integrate gays into the military with virtually no consequence.”)

"Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."

George Orwell, 1984