The statement itself has created a problem of its own.
The key word term, from which the unanticipated problem from the phrase has arisen is “unwarranted influence”.
A totally objective sense of that term is nearly impossible in the political arena.
Thus, almost any national security expenditures that go to the “military industrial complex” are seen by some as always representative of “unwarranted influence”.
And, others have such an extreme concern about THAT over-reaction that they will not open themselves to the basic concern that Eisenhower had; that WE SHOULD be buying ALL THAT WE NEED, but all that we need may not in fact be as much as the “military industrial complex” wishes we would spend.
It has been hard, politically, to get a happy medium, and at the same time an equal, and bi-partisan, problem has begun to dominate Congressional action on military equipment expenditures - the equally corrupt, and equally “unwarranted influence” of pushing military expenditures as jobs programs in Congressional districts, and not solely on true national security needs. Frankly, I think this Congressional horse-trading over where the expenditures will land, and the lobbying that goes along with it, has been worse than any direct “unwarranted influence” from the military suppliers themselves.
Not the Moos who bit my sister.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953)
Whoops, remembered it, but found it here:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/23920.Dwight_D_Eisenhower