NARRATOR: In 1993 alone the military costs each American household over $3000, but that's not all we're paying. Along with direct military outlays of $291 billion for 1993, the military establishment imposes other burdens on the country that are largely overlooked:

...Paying for necessary care to veterans who fought the past wars.

...Vast amounts of land given over to military use.

...Extensive environmental damage.

...And, an economic toll that hurts American competi-tiveness and costs American jobs.

["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]

Admiral GENE LaROCQUE: Welcome once again to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR."

Many Americans are fully aware that we are still spending at cold war levels to maintain our military establish-ment. In other words, about $6 billion a week. But most Americans are totally unaware of the vast hidden costs which must be borne by Americans as we prepare for war and fight in war. Our program is on that subject today and I think you'll find some surprising and interesting information in the program.

PAYING FOR PAST WARS

NARRATOR: Americans are more than willing to spend what is needed for defense. But they shouldn't have to spend more than is really necessary and they need to know the full scope of the costs the military entails.

President DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER:

"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."

NARRATOR: Forty years ago when President Eisenhower spoke those words, he expressed concern for the tradeoff between mili-tary spending and civilian needs. In today's belt-tightening times, more than ever Americans are debating how best to spend scarce government dollars.

INTERVIEWER: Where would you give your priority for federal spending?

MAN-on-the-Street: Well, right now I think health care, if it's spent wisely, although right now a lot of health care money is spent inefficiently. Education is another priority and I think reducing the deficit is important, too, for future generations.

MAN-on-the-Street: Well, you can just look around here on the streets of Washington, D.C. You don't have to look very far to see all kinds of -- all the problems we have in this society.

WOMAN-on-the-Street: I would put priority for federal spending back at home. I think the social services structure in this country needs a lot of work. Health care is a major problem, access to health care, particularly for people of color, children, women, the elderly and disabled. That's where I would put the money, back in health care and social services.

LES ASPIN, Secretary of Defense: (at confirmation hearing):

"With our cold war foe gone, what kind of a defense do we need? We know for certain that the end of the cold war does not mean the end of defense."

NARRATOR: Even as we deliberate the future of the military, we are paying for its past. The military fought our wars, although civilian officials made the decisions to go to war.

When a soldier enters the service, the nation may be making a lifetime commitment of financial support. Today, there are 27 million living veterans, or more than one out of every ten Americans. The Veterans Affairs Department now commands $38 billion a year for the care and support of former members of the armed forces. With the spiraling cost of health care and the "graying" of the population, that figure is sure to go up.

The retirement benefits for career military personnel constitute another hidden cost. Twenty-seven billion dollars goes to support one-and-a-half million military retirees in the form of retirement benefits.

While the size of the national debt has become an issue of great concern, there has been little examination of the mili-tary's contribution to it. Over the course of the cold war, we spent a staggering $12 trillion on the military. Just during the 1980s, military spending more than doubled. At the same time, tax cuts reduced the amount of money the government had to spend.

GREG BISCHAK: Roughly one-half of the national deficit is attributable to military spending.

NARRATOR: Greg Bischak is the executive director of the National Commission on Economic Conversion and Disarmament, a private research group. He's a leading advocate of retooling military production to civilian uses.

Mr. BISCHAK: Under President Reagan, we pursued a policy of cutting taxes, which led to a shortfall in revenue, and we increased military spending. The net result was that we had to borrow more to make up the difference between the shortfall in our revenues and the increase in our total federal spending. Military spending accounts for the lion's share of the increase in federal spending during the 1980s.

HIDDEN COSTS: A WEAKENED ECONOMY

NARRATOR: When Americans think of the effects of military spending, they may think of World War II. Huge assembly lines churning out weapons like hot dogs, millions of jobs created. The end of the Depression.

But the cold war changed the way we prepared for war, and with it the way we made weapons. Whereas the size of armies and the numbers of weapons were the keys to previous wars, the technology itself has become the core of the nation's war-making ability. Long range bombers, ballistic missiles, electronically-guided munitions, complex, costly weapons systems.

Mr. BISCHAK: In the early 60s, we saw a dramatic change in the economic effects of military spending and military spending began to be more of a drag on economic performance, essentially pulling in too many resources and not creating enough in return for the economy and the civilian sector and the public sector for civilian needs. By and large, I would estimate that from 1964 onward, military spending became a net economic loss to this country.

NARRATOR: The weapons design and production process came to rely more heavily on white collar scientists and engineers and less on blue collar assembly line workers. The weapons they pro-duced, often designed to deliver nuclear warheads, were measured by their increasing speed, range and accuracy.

Typically, each weapon has cost more than twice as much as the one it replaces. Today the Air Force wants to build the

F-22 fighter plane at an estimated cost of $150 million each. That's about 150 times the cost of the F-86F fighter of the 1950s. If automobile prices had increased at the same rate as weapons over that period, your next car would run you $400,000.

Specialized corporations evolved that focussed almost exclusively on producing weapons for their sole client, the Pentagon. Cost was secondary to capability. The cozy relationship that developed between these companies and Pentagon bureaucrats became known as "the military-industrial complex."

Now this runs directly counter to the traditional way that American commercial companies have long competed. That is, making low cost products in large numbers for mass consumption. The cost-is-no-object doctrine afforded to military contractors created a divide between military and civilian industries, resulting in two separate business cultures.

JOEL YUDKEN: Military businesses have very different kinds of engineering practices, management practices, marketing prac-tices than the civilian sector, in large part because they have one single customer, and that's the Department of Defense.

NARRATOR: Joel Yudken once worked as an aerospace engineer for Lockheed and is the co-author of Dismantling the Cold War Economy.

Mr. YUDKEN: And they do not have to compete in a competi- tive market and, increasingly, they don't have to compete in now what is becoming a global market. So, their whole style, their whole culture, the whole way of operation is very different from that of what you need to do to survive in the civilian market.

NARRATOR: Companies that produced for both military and civilian markets would deliberately keep the two processes apart, creating a wall of separation between then so as not to taint the civilian side with the baroque and cost-ineffective practices of the military side.

Increasingly, the rigorous, high-performance demands of modern weaponry involve research that is so specialized and slow in reaching completion that it offers little in the way of spin-offs to the commercial sector. But we're still pumping about 60 percent of federal research and development funding into the military despite widespread acknowledgement that it has become a drain on the US economy.

Mr. BISCHAK: Our capital goods producing sector in this country was really hammered during the 1980s while we were busy investing in military goods, which, in fact, have little to do with the productivity-enhancing investments that are required to keep us as a world class economy.

NARRATOR: Now the Pentagon has come up with a new catch phrase, "dual use."

Mr. BISCHAK: The grip of the military-industrial complex is still quite tight on our science and technology policy. And today it's being resurrected in the name of what some experts call "dual use," the idea that somehow one can invest in certain tech-nologies that have both military and civilian applications.

NARRATOR: Some economists are skeptical whether "dual use" is all it's cracked up to be.

Mr. BISCHAK: Well, in principle, it sounds fine. But, in fact, the Army will have a lot of different requirements than the police department will have, and you'll ultimately be developing two different products.

NARRATOR: Americans have always seen their economy as driven by free enterprise, without an explicit industrial policy by the government. The reality is different.

Mr. BISCHAK: We do, in fact, have an industrial policy and have had one for roughly 45 years. The military budget constitu- ted an industrial policy in this country. We've invested billions and billions of dollars in researching and developing new types of technologies, new products, and then we would buy these products, create a market, in essence.

INTERVIEWER: And the product was weapons.

Mr. BISCHAK: Exactly. Weapons and technological superiority in all military fields.

NARRATOR: For four decades, military contractors have enjoyed a close relationship with the government. Contractors were frequently awarded "cost-plus" contracts, in which they were guaranteed a profit no matter how much they overran their original bid.

Mr. YUDKEN: You knew as a contractor that you didn't have to worry about keeping costs down. You could just add-on more gold plating, more -- meaning more very sophisticated, expensive kind of additions, and know that you're going to be paid for it by the government and make profit off of it.

NARRATOR: The special treatment afforded to military contractors and the heavy federal investment in the military are today reflected in our civilian economy's struggle to regain competitiveness in the global market.

Mr. BISCHAK: The Japanese, the Germans, our other competi-tors spend relatively more money on basic science investment and pursuit of industrial productivity investments, the advance of human knowledge. And the returns are clear. They're beating us and eating our lunch in every major high-technology market in the world today.

HIDDEN COSTS: FEWER JOBS

NARRATOR: Some argue that military spending is beneficial because it creates jobs.

MAN-on-the-Street: When the cold war was on, it did bring some -- a lot of money to people that made the airplanes and the weapons, the ammunition and stuff.

MAN-on-the-Street: Well, it produces a lot of jobs, produces a lot of high-paying jobs.

NARRATOR: But again, the changes since World War II in how weapons are built have made this a questionable proposition. Relatively low numbers of employees produce customized weapons, working in a craft shop atmosphere. Today, military spending is not a very efficient way to create jobs.

MAN-on-the-Street: There are a lot of towns I think which rely on the bases in their areas. A lot of the commerce and the stores and businesses rely on the spending of military personnel and their families. But, to the rest of the country and people that aren't directly affected by military installations and operations, I think it hurts because that's money that could be going and spread -- be spread out to their areas that's getting spent on manuevers and equipment and personnel that we don't need anymore.

Dr. BARBARA BERGMANN: Even if you were to take government money and pay people to dig holes and fill them back up again, that would stimulate the economy and provide jobs. The point is though that we have much better programs than digging holes and filling them back up.

NARRATOR: Dr. Barbara Bergmann is a respected economics professor at American University.

Dr. BERGMANN: Now when people speak of the military budget as a way of stimulating the economy or when they speak of the military budget as something that can't be cut because it would cause a loss of jobs, what they're really saying is the military budget is something like these holes in the ground, and that's a ridiculous policy.

NARRATOR: Congressman John Conyers is the independent-minded chairman of the House Committee on Government Operations. He commissioned a recent study by the Congressional Research Service on the relationship of military spending to jobs.

Rep. JOHN CONYERS (D-MI): There are more jobs to be found in the public and private sector for the same amount of money than there is to be found in the military.

NARRATOR: In fact, the study concluded that for every billion dollars transferred from the military budget to state and local governments, 6200 additional jobs would be created over and above the number of jobs the money would have created in the military.

Rep. CONYERS: Even as we downsize the military, the corre-lative increase of jobs that will result will be a benefit to our society. That in the long term, more jobs are created by trans-ferring our federal emphasis and support to non-military expendi-tures and programs.

NARRATOR: Such a transfer would create new jobs in much needed areas such as teaching, law enforcement and rebuilding the country's ailing infrastructure.

Dr. BERGMANN: The tax-paying capacity of the people depends to some extent on their perception of what they're getting for the taxes. And people these days don't feel they're getting a lot from the federal government. And one reason is that such huge revenues are being poured into military purposes which people no longer feel directly benefit them.

MAN-on-the-Street: We could use a lot of that money they were spending on the cold war efforts to deter communism or what-ever, terrorism, right here at home on education, more jobs, job training.

WOMAN-on-the-Street: There's really not the communist threat and we're not at war now and why not put it back into the country?

HIDDEN COSTS: An ENVIRONMENTAL NIGHTMARE

NARRATOR: We know that war fighting is damaging to the environment, but preparing for war also takes a heavy toll on the air, land and water. The US military is the biggest single polluter in the world.

The military controls 43,000 square miles of land in the United States, land that might otherwise be used for con-structive civilian purposes. That's an area larger than Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and Maryland combined.

The increasingly high-tech nature of warfare, with faster weapons that have a greater range, translates into the Pentagon's ever-expanding need for land on which to test these weapons.

MICHAEL RENNER: The average fighter plane now needs about 20 times the amount of air space than it did back in 1945.

NARRATOR: As a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Insti-tute, Michael Renner tracks military-environmental issues for the prominent State of the World report.

Mr. RENNER: A similar development has happened with regards to land forces. The average US infantry battalion now needs about seven to eight times more space to manuever as it did back in World War II.

NARRATOR: Years of military manuevers have destroyed thou-sands of acres of valuable farmland. Low-level flights over populated areas disrupt everyday life with a barrage of deafening noise. Military exercises often leave long-lasting marks on the earth.

Mr. RENNER: If you look, for example, at the Mojave Desert in California, we can still see the tracks of General Patton's tank armies that were exercising in the early 40s in preparation for World War II.

NARRATOR: Four decades of preparing for war with the former Soviet Union have taken a terrible toll on the environment. But only recently has the military found it a reason for concern.

For years it operated behind a veil of secrecy, produ-cing and testing weapons of mass destruction without regard for the side effects on the environment or the impact on public health. Over that period, the Department of Energy produced nearly 70,000 nuclear warheads in facilities spread out over 13 states.

Every step of the bomb production process subjected the environment to nuclear contamination. At one plant alone, the Hanford Nuclear Weapons Reservation in Washington state, enough radioactive waste has leaked into the soil and water to produce over 50 Nagasaki-sized bombs.

Mr. RENNER: With regard to nuclear wastes, with regard to radioactive wastes, a lot of these materials are very long-lived. We have very little idea what to do with these materials.

NARRATOR: In addition to making bombs, the United States has been testing them, above ground until 1963 and underground in the Nevada desert ever since. To date, the United States has conducted 965 nuclear test explosions. While the dangers of fallout from above-ground tests is well known, even underground tests damage the environment. Studies have shown that radioactive materials leach into the soil and ground water, as well as into the air through a process known as "venting."

Six-hundred thousand people have been employed in the nuclear weapons complex. Half of them -- fully 300,000 workers --are believed to have been affected by exposure to radiation.

With a half-life of 24,000 years for plutonium, the toxic legacy of the nuclear arms race may well be our most lasting reminder to future generations.

Mr. RENNER: A number of communities are very clearly and very severely impacted, so much so that local water sources cannot be tapped for drinking purposes, that water has to be brought in from other places. There are, of course, anecdotal stories, anecdotal stories abound of people, children, elderly people, people from all walks of life having all kinds of health effects. Cancer, of course, is prominent.

NARRATOR: There are those who boast of having "won" the cold war. But at what cost? Try $160 billion for starters. That's what the General Accounting Office, the government's own watchdog agency, estimates it will cost to clean up the nuclear mess. One-hundred and sixty billion dollars: That's enough to buy new homes for over 1 1/2 million American families.

While the pollution at nuclear weapons facilities is the most dramatic example, it is only part of the problem. The Pentagon has so far identified thousands of non-nuclear contami-nated sites on hundreds of military installations across the country.

At the Rocky Mountain Arsenal just outside Denver, it's easy to see how it happened. For 40 years the Army produced deadly chemical and nerve gases there, often disposing of them in a cavalier fashion. It contains what has been dubbed "the most polluted square mile on earth," featuring the infamous Basin F, an unshielded cauldron where hundreds of toxic chemicals now leach into the soil and ground water.

Ironically, the land at Rocky Mountain Arsenal has long served as a habitat for a vast assortment of wild animals, which continue to populate the area despite the contamination. The Army has now turned it into a wildlife preserve.

While nuclear and chemical weapons production are obvious culprits, the military's everyday activities have unwittingly added to the problem.

Mr. RENNER: We have the legacy of toxic waste at virtually every military base in the country.

NARRATOR: Fueling and servicing aircraft. Manufacturing with ozone-depleting chemicals. Testing munitions. These are among the Pentagon's continuing dirty habits.

Some estimates put the price tag for the cleanup at Pentagon sites at $200 billion on top of the $160 billion to clean-up nuclear hot spots.

Mr. RENNER: And I think we also have to realize that the financial cost is only part of the picture. In some areas, it may not be possible to really clean up a base or an adjacent area. It may be much better to just clean it up to the extent possible, then fence it off and, basically, to declare it as a "national sacrifice zone," as some people have proposed.

NARRATOR: The hidden costs of the military clearly affect almost every facet of our society. If President Clinton were to scale back military spending to reflect today's economic and international realities, he would also reduce these hidden costs. Our long-time adversary, the Soviet Union, has broken up, crushed beneath the weight of its own excessive military spending. Yet America continues to fund the Pentagon at cold war levels.

Rep. CONYERS: Unfortunately, the cuts proposed by this administration aren't nearly deep enough; $88 billion over five years is, as we say in Washington, peanuts. This budget can be cut in half.

Senator JIM SASSER (D-TN) (from speech on Senate floor):

"Are we going to continue to raise the deficit, continue to borrow money to build fighter planes, and tanks, and aircraft carriers that produce nothing in themselves? Are we going to continue to pay vast sums of money to pay and employ large military formations that simply are not needed?

"It appears to me that that is the ultimate in waste. And whether you are borrowing money to build a school or whether you are borrowing money to buy an Abrams M1A1 tank, you're still raising the deficit. The difference is that that school will produce citizens who are educated and who will be productive and will produce additional wealth and economic growth for the country."

Admiral LaROCQUE: Well, I hope you found the program as interesting as I did. When we old sea dogs get together and reminisce about our active duty experience, we realize that we did not pay enough attention to the possible damage to the envir-onment and to the adverse impact on our economy that our military spending might cause. I think now, as we look back on it, we should have paid more attention to that.

But there's great hope because this new crop of admirals and generals, and privates and corporals are really paying a lot of attention to the environment. They want to clean up the mess that has been made and they want to do their best to prevent any destruction of the environment in the future. They're also much more concerned now about the amount of spending that is called for in the military and the possible adverse affect it might have on our economy.

Until next time, for "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I'm Gene LaRocque.

[End of broadcast.]