Pentagon Budget: The Return of Reagan
enrique
The Progressive magazine, March 1999
Here we are, more than seven years after the fall of the Soviet Union,
and the United States is spending more
money on the Pentagon than it was two decades ago. The Pentagon has a
budget that exceeds that of the next ten
biggest militaries combined. And still the Joint Chiefs demand more, and
still Bill Clinton gives it to them. This
money is a waste-just more candy for the kids at the Pentagon, more cake
and ice cream for the contractors.
This bloated Pentagon budget doesn't make us any safer. In fact, some of
it-like the renewed Star Wars
program-places us in more jeopardy.
When Clinton announced at the beginning of the year that he was boosting
Pentagon spending by $110 billion over
the next six years, he obliterated one more distinction between
Democrats and Republicans. His proposal, the
largest increase since the days of Reagan, sounded an all-out retreat.
"He finally caved," says William Hartung of the World Policy Institute.
"It's an abdication of his responsibility as
commander in chief. He's afraid to put them on a budget. It's the worst
time to have someone like that in charge."
Hartung believes Clinton surrendered to the Joint Chiefs "partly because
he was never confident running the
place, and partly because he's looking to give Gore some political
cover."
The camouflage for this increase in Pentagon spending is to raise the
pay of the men and women in the armed
services. But that's misleading. "Overall, it's being sold as a way to
give more money to the troops and for
readiness, but one of the main goals is to spend more on unneeded,
gold-plated Cold War relics," says Christopher
Hellman of the Center for Defense Information. "It calls for spending
more than $6 billion for replacing fighter
aircraft that already are the best in the world." Other procurement
items are equally unnecessary, he says. There
is money for a new and improved nuclear aircraft carrier and for
maintaining the fleet of eighteen Trident nuclear
submarines, even though the Navy said it could get by with ten back in
the Bush Administration.
The strategic rationale for this gargantuan Pentagon is still the
two-war theory: that the United States should be
prepared to fight two wars overseas at the same time. Pentagon
strategists under Colin Powell, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs in the Bush Administration, 'more or less worked backward,"
says Hartung. "They said, 'If we want a
force of this size, what threat would we need?"'
Lawrence Korb, Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan
Administration, takes issue with the two-war
strategy. "It's very unrealistic," he says. "The assumption behind it is
that while the United States is fighting one
enemy the other enemy would take advantage of us. But no one took
advantage of us during Korea, or Vietnam, or
the Persian Gulf. And the reason is, you don't start a conflict against
the major superpower just because you might
have some short-term advantage since, in the long term, we'll come back
and clean your clock."
Other conservatives have come out against this level of spending. "It's
totally unnecessary," says Ivan Eland,
director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute. He has harsh
words for the Pentagon officials who insist
they are so strapped for funds that they can't pay their personnel.
"It's like you're buying a mansion and then
complaining you don't have enough money to mow the lawn." He agrees with
the Center for Defense Information
that upgrading weapons systems is silly. "We don't need new attack
submarines. We already have the best
submarines in the world."
So if increasing Pentagon spending is unjustified, why is Clinton
proposing it? "Clinton wants to nullify the military
issue," Eland says. "The Democrats have to guard against being perceived
as weak on national security. And the
Republicans don't seem to understand that Pentagon spending is
government spending. And, let's face it, there are
a lot of vested interests here."
Eland adds that Clinton is "weak vis-a-vis the military. He has problems
with his service record, so they have more
leverage over him."
With Clinton offering so much to the Pentagon right off the bat, it may
end up getting even more. "The bidding war
is just beginning, and no one is going to be bidding any lower," Hellman
warns.
A day after his State of the Union address, Clinton also gave ground on
Star Wars. Defense Secretary William
Cohen announced that the Administration would spend $6.6 billion over
the next five years on a national missile
defense system to guard against intercontinental ballistic missiles
(ICBMs).
A fantasy of Republicans since Ronald Reagan first proposed it, a
national missile defense system may sound good
at first-who could be against protecting the United States from nuclear
attack?-but it makes no sense upon close
examination.
First, the technological hurdles are extremely high. The Pentagon has
already spent more than $50 billion on a
missile defense system "that has yet to deploy or successfully test a
single reliable device," Hartung wrote
recently in World Policy Journal. "In fact, the most impressive products
to come out of our $55 billion, fifteen-year
investments in missile defenses to date are the flashy 'artist's
conceptions' of how mature systems might work,
which the military services and defense contractors duly trot out
whenever Congress threatens to cut back the Star
Wars budget."
John Pike, the director of space programs at the Federation of American
Scientists, takes an equally chary view.
"It won't work," he says. "They've had fifteen tests of what they're
trying to deploy and only two have hit
anything. It's not a workable technology. And now they are going to test
it a grand total of three more times before
they decide whether to deploy it or not. Ask yourself: Would you fly on
an airplane that has crashed thirteen out of
fifteen times and is only going to be tested three more? It's buggier
than Microsoft software."
And even if the technology were miraculously to work during tests, it
would be easy for an enemy to elude or
confound the missile defense system once it was set up. "We could deploy
a system against ICBMs that, like
friendly puppies, beg to be destroyed," wrote Richard Garwin, a Senior
Fellow for Science and
Technology at the Council on Foreign Relations, in a letter to Inside
Missile Defense in January. "But in the real
world, any nation that fields ICBMs against the United States" would
take "simple countermeasures."
It would be easy to send a missile with biological bomblets that "would
be immune from intercept by any of the
techniques considered" by the Pentagon, said Garwin, who designed
nuclear weapons at Los Alamos. And if the
missile carried nuclear weapons, it most likely would be coming with a
"simple countermeasure that would certainly
be effective against the planned deployment."
The history of the arms race is littered with innovations that were
supposed to secure one nation's safety or
superiority but proved ephemeral at best and destabilizing at worst.
Missile defense is just the latest. And the irony
is, it doesn't even address the most likely threat against the United
States. That threat is not from North Korea
lobbing a nuclear missile at us. Such an action would be suicidal. "If
they did fire it, we would blow them up," Pike
says. "Kim Jong Il is not stupid. He didn't wait this long to inherit
the family business only to throw it all away."
As many analysts point out, a missile is the least likely threat against
the United States, since the Pentagon would
know right away who launched it.
"If I were a nation that sponsored terrorism, I wouldn't want to attack
the United States with a missile that said
quite clearly where it came from," says Daryl Kimball of the Coalition
to Reduce Nuclear Dangers. "I would rather
come into the United States and plant a bomb here." Kimball calls
missile defense the Maginot Line of the
nineties.
Garwin agrees. "If these countries really wanted to hurt us, they would
use shorter-range missiles from ships,
nuclear weapons blowing up in harbors, purchased cruise missiles if they
like, small airplanes that could fly out of
shipping containers on a ship. And that's a much easier job," he said on
the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer on January
28. "We shouldn't feel protected against malign intent from these
countries."
Going ahead with the missile defense system could actually make the
United States more vulnerable, since it would
exacerbate tensions between the United States and Russia, as well as the
United States and China.
"It's another poke at the Russians on the heels of NATO expansion," says
Hartung. "To have a strategy of
provoking the Russians is insane." When Defense Secretary Cohen
announced that the United States may
renegotiate or pull out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty
so as to go forward with missile defense, the
Russians immediately denounced the effort.
"Sooner or later, someone in Russia's going to say, 'The bear needs to
wake back up again and be threatening
again.' Someone's going to say, 'Look, we tried to be nice and what did
it get us?' It is further confirmation, as if
more were needed, that the only way Russia gets respect is to go back to
the old way of doing business," says
Pike. "Missile defense provides the Russians with the sovereign excuse
not to go along with START II and
START III," which would greatly reduce their arsenal.
"If, in the course of creating a limited missile defense, the United
States leads Russia to hesitate to make further
reductions in weapons, we are increasing the real threat that exists
today," says Kimball. "There are 5,000
Russian missiles on hair-trigger alert. This is a far greater risk to
the United States and global security than a
missile attack from North Korea."
Then there's China. "I'm a little less worried about the Russians than
the Chinese," says Pike. "China has thirteen
missiles that could reach the United States, and China is introducing a
new generation of solid-fueled missiles.
When we did that, we went from having many dozens of missiles to having
many thousands of missiles. If China
sees us deploying missile defense, it is very easy to imagine that the
Chinese will engage in a significant build-up."
Antagonizing Russia and China while building a shield against a
prospective North Korean missile makes no sense
to John Rhinelander, who helped negotiate the ABM treaty. "I don't think
the threat from North Korea is as
important by any means as the problem with the Russians and the
Chinese," Rhinelander said when he appeared
with Garwin on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. "The Russians have
thousands of weapons now which could
destroy us. And China has maybe ten to twenty.... We ought to be
focusing on them.... What we are doing is
counterproductive."
Meanwhile, missile defense is great news for Pentagon contractors
Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon. "The
big three are deep into this," says Hartung of the World Policy
Institute. "It's basically a free lunch. We gave them
$55 billion, and nothing works and still they get more money. If this
wasn't for the military, you'd have to peel the
Republicans off the roof, but because Ronald Reagan blessed it, it's
OK."
How small could the Pentagon budget be without jeopardizing our
security? "That depends on how you define what
are the vital interests of the United States," says Eland of the Cato
Institute. "No one's discussed that. They've
kept all the assumptions from the Cold War." Eland says the Pentagon
budget should be about $175 billion. "I'd
whack $100 billion off the budget," he says.
Former Pentagon official Korb takes a similar view. He has proposed
cutting around $40 billion off the budget right
away and much more down the road. "Rather than adding in excess of $100
billion to the defense budget over the
next six years as proposed by President Clinton, I believe we should be
reducing the defense budget by at least
$100 billion over the same time period," he said in testimony prepared
for the Senate Budget Committee.
On the left, the proposals range from the modest to the ambitious. "We
can safely cut between $40 or $50 billion
over the next couple of years without hurting security a bit," says
Hellman of the Center for Defense Information.
"You could probably cut $80 billion pretty lickety split," says Scott
Nathanson, the deputy director of
Demilitarization for Democracy, a group based in Washington, D.C.
"You could easily cut $40 to $50 billion by abandoning the two-war
strategy, stopping big-ticket purchases, and
eliminating pork and waste," says Hartung. "And with a more creative
defense strategy, one where you're not
pushing arms all over the world, you could cut $100 billion."
The most far-reaching proposal, though, comes from Randall Forsberg,
executive director of the Institute for
Defense and Disarmament Studies, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A
longtime peace activist, she has been
putting together a rock-bottom budget of $80 billion. Her proposal has
three components.
First, she would spend $20 billion strictly on defending U.S. territory.
This includes funding NORAD (the North
American Air Defense command), transforming the National Guard into the
army, and maintaining a small naval
force.
Second, she would spend $30 billion on maintaining a strategic deterrent
force and for satellite-based intelligence
and communications. Yes, that means keeping nuclear weapons, but only
about 200 single-warhead missiles based
on submarines. "I'd like to see the process of disarmament not be
unilateral," she says. "If the United States
advocated cutting its nuclear arsenal to the minimum deterrence levels,
we could get everyone to come with us.
And then we could move jointly to eliminate nuclear weapons."
And third, she would spend $30 billion for multilateral peacekeeping
forces and to prevent genocide. "I'm very
much an internationalist," she says.
Whether you favor Forsberg's $80 billion Pentagon budget, or Cato's $175
billion, or the $220 billion that the
Center for Defense Information and others are talking about, they all
are a fraction of Clinton's proposal, which
stands at $267 billion for the year 2000 and will soar into the $300
billions a few years later.
"Clinton has become so busy co-opting Republican issues, he's becoming
Reagan," says Hartung.
And it's not just Clinton. The Democrats as a whole are muffling their
traditional criticism of runaway Pentagon
spending. Gone from Congress are such Pentagon watchdogs as Ronald
Dellums, Democrat of California, who as
chairman of the Armed Services Committee was not afraid to admonish the
Joint Chiefs and offer a saner, more
stripped-down alternative budget.
"We don't have any strong champions on Capitol Hill," laments Hartung.
The tragedy is that the conditions for world peace are greater now than
they have been at almost any time since
World War II. The horror of nuclear weapons has seared itself into the
global consciousness. The threat of global
nuclear conflagration has receded in the wake of the Soviet Union's
collapse. The futility of the arms race is now
obvious. The international treaty to rid the globe of anti-personnel
land mines shows that cooperation is possible,
even though the United States still refuses to go along.
To be sure, the dangers of chemical and biological warfare are with us,
and we need to defend against them. But we
don't need a Pentagon budget approaching $300 billion for that.
"There is a historic opportunity today," says Pike of the Federation of
American Scientists. "War should be
substantially less relevant in the twenty-first century than it was in
the twentieth. We have a real opportunity to
expand the zone of peace."
Unfortunately, President Clinton seems dead-set on squandering that
opportunity.
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