"Standing armies in times of peace are inconsistent

with the principles of republican government, dangerous

to the liberties of free people and generally converted

into destructive engines for establishing despotism."

NARRATOR: So said the Continental Congress in 1784 as it debated the relationship of the military to democracy in America. While the 1990s are not the 1780s, does American society risk permanently compromising or even losing its funda-mental values by sustaining large military forces during peacetime?

Why have we so changed our views about the wisdom of permanently maintaining large forces?

This week, "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" traces the course of the changing relationship between American society and its military establishment.

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

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

For the past 50 years, the influence of our military has been felt throughout the entire American society and that influence is actually increasing. The military has influenced our way of speaking, our way of thinking, our way of acting and the way we go about solving problems. Our program's on that subject and I think you'll find a lot of surprising information in the program.

NARRATOR: A 1993 Harris Poll of American adults found public confidence in the military at a 27-year high. Fifty-seven percent of those interviewed held positive opinions about the military, a figure more than double that of the second most popular institution, the Supreme Court. Americans, through their elected representatives, give concrete support to this attitude. In Fiscal Year 1993, the last Bush administration budget, we spent $291 billion on the military. The Clinton administration's budget for 1994 proposes a modest drop to $277 billion. Military manpower, although declining, is projected to stabilize at about 1.4 million active duty men and women in 1997.

On the surface, these facts seem to contradict the judgments of our Founding Fathers. They firmly believed that the best way to safeguard democratic values and institutions was to keep the pursuits of war -- and the instruments of war -- distinct from the pursuits of peace.

Today, the United States enjoys a level of peace not experienced for more than two generations. Yet, as a society, we still seem willing to support and pay for a large military structure capable of enforcing America's power around the world.

Military and democratic values seem to be in conflict. Dr. Larry Korb, and assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, is now an influential senior fellow at The Brookings Institution.

Dr. LARRY KORB: The military is charged with a very serious obligation; that is, using violence when all other measures have failed to protect the national interests. And in doing that, they need unquestioned loyalty, and discipline, and unit cohesion. On the other hand, they exist to protect a democracy, which has just the opposite values.

NARRATOR: Dr. Gregory Foster has almost daily contact with the next generation of America's military leaders as the

J. Carlton Ward Distinguished Professor at the National Defense University. He identified the values most prized by military institutions.

Dr. GREGORY FOSTER: Hierarchy, in terms of organizational relationships, a preference for order, decisiveness, commitment and dedication, a "can-do" spirit, a sense of obligation or duty, certainly professional competence.

NARRATOR: But these are not the values of the immigrants and settlers who came to America and they are not our values today. We want freedom to pursue social and economic opportunity, to engage in debate and to dissent, to walk away from or to meet challenges head-on.

Dr. FOSTER: In society, we tend to prize the notion of individuality and individualism. That certainly is a characteris-tic distinction between civil society and the military institu-tion, which prizes the notion of a chain of command, teamwork, unity of action and direction, those sorts of things.

NARRATOR: For over a century, the young United States, protected by geography, comfortably lived with this difference. We didn't need a large standing military force. After Andrew Jackson beat the British at New Orleans in 1815, the two basics of national defense -- secure borders and freedom from invasion -- could almost be taken for granted. And even the occasional battles and campaigns could be fought by calling out the citizen soldiers to augment the small regular force. Blessed with such a benign atmosphere, the principles of the founders took root.

Dr. FOSTER: I think it's very clear is that the military subscribes to a sense of obedience to higher authority. I think the military fully buy into and are socialized to accept the notion of civilian supremacy, or at least civilian control.

NARRATOR: In other nations, the military frequently were either handed power or intervened to restore order and privilege after the failure, incompetence or greed of civilian rulers. These countries developed the undemocratic tradition that the military were the final arbiter of power, the kingmakers, even the oppressors.

Not that the United States remained immune from the sometimes violent swings between the martial spirit and total demilitarization, which even the Founding Fathers knew to be folly.

Dr. KORB: We temporarily in this country sort of go too far in one direction or the other, but then the reaction sets in. I would say after World War I and particularly in the 30s, we really didn't pay enough attention to military power and we turned a blind eye to the military machines that the Japanese and the Germans were building.

NARRATOR: But as Larry Korb relates, we went the other way in the 1940s.

Dr. KORB: After World War II, we sort of went in the other direction. We tended to emphasize the military too much and over-reacted to everything that the Soviet Union was doing and we got carried away particularly in Vietnam, but then a reaction sets in. So, I really don't see us having any of the problems that other countries -- say like a Greece, or a Turkey, or an Argentina -- has had, where the military has been forced to sort of step-in and take control of society.

NARRATOR: But World War I had punched the first significant hole in the psychological and institutional barriers between war and peace erected by our nation's founders. Government, whose power before World War I was still relatively unfocussed, adopted some basic aspects of military culture during that war. Military language, forms of centralized organization and decisionmaking processes, modes of thought and information control were used to bring what previously had been diverse civilian activities under central control.

The direction of industrial production was centralized under the War Industries Board. Communities were encouraged to contribute food and show home front solidarity with the "Doughboys" by skipping meals or not eating meat. Information management and -- let's face it -- outright propaganda were run from the highest levels. Only the relative brevity of our involvement in the "War to End All Wars" deflected this rush toward more centralized government powers.

The greater and longer effort of World War II erased any lingering distinction between civil and military pursuits. The ensuing cold war then institutionalized the change. Of the measures implemented for the war, the key lever of change was the military draft, which brought into uniform for an extended period of time a huge cross-section of American society.

Before World War II ended, some 12 million Americans had become thoroughly familiar with military organizations, values, and methods of control and activity. Another 13 million Americans, although not as closely regimented, churned out weapons and war materiel from the centrally controlled and regulated military industries. These 25 million were almost one-fourth of the entire American population over 14 years of age.

The rigors of war and war industries were the defining experiences for a whole generation, experiences that breached the historic divide between civilian and military life and values.

Although such unity of purpose was necessary for war-time victory, it was carried into the ensuing cold war struggle that has dominated American institutions and psychology for 40 years. In the process, as our society became hostage to the lifestyle and thought patterns of unending war in peace, we subordinated our democracy to the apparent military necessities of the moment.

Larry Korb discusses the reasons Americans generally accepted and tolerated this change.

Dr. KORB: Well, I think a lot of it had to do with not just the cold war, but with World War II, because a lot of people went into the military and they learned military briefings and the military staff work and they went back to companies and they began to use that framework for decisions. And because of our success in World War II militarily, we thought that we could impose a military solution on just about every problem that faced us. And too often we looked at that first before exploring other options.

NARRATOR: At the beginning of the cold war, there appeared to be good reasons to keep military-style approaches to our problems. Externally, America's rapid demobilization from 12 million troops to under two million threatened to undo all the sacrifices of World War II. The government's way to hold the line while our military rebuilt was to threaten the Soviets with the atomic bomb, whose use was controlled by the president as commander-in-chief.

But this more aggressive approach, together with the creation of a system of alliances surrounding the Soviet state, over-emphasized military-type solutions. We became intent not on managing and coping, as in the past, but on "winning" what Bernard Baruch first called the "cold war" by militarizing our foreign policy.

From 1966 to '69, Townsend Hoopes was a senior Pentagon official and under-secretary of the Air Force. The author of Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal, the first secretary of defense, Secretary Hoopes comments on this militari-zation.

TOWNSEND HOOPES: Oh, I think the military, the militariza-tion, the military build-up became excessive and I think I would point to the Eisenhower administration. I think the Eisenhower administration institutionalized the cold war. It did so by creating a series of regional alliances around the world, by instituting military assistance programs to 42 countries, by having military advisory groups in 42 countries.

NARRATOR: Dr. Korb agrees.

Dr. KORB: Political leaders too often turn to a military solution before exploring all of the diplomatic initiatives.

NARRATOR: To those who governed at the time, this reliance on military power and organization seemed quite appropriate and necessary. But such reliance also suggested that society as a whole might benefit from continuing the wartime "virtues" of conformity and discipline.

In the 1960s, part of the young post-World War II generation rebelled against this easy conformity and produced a clash of values that found a major outlet in the Vietnam war protests. In 1968, the Army, in the form of the National Guard, was called on to Chicago streets to help quell demonstrations outside the Democratic National Convention.

Here modern America saw firsthand the clash of values, the divisions created by uncritical acceptance of policy based on military solutions and the freewheeling and even rebellious energy of a significant segment of civil society. The two cultures simply didn't fit easily with each other.

But Secretary Hoopes, for one, doesn't see such a sharply drawn distinction.

Mr. HOOPES: I don't think the military values are the polar opposite of the civilian values. And, indeed, I think order and discipline are gravely needed in our civilian society today.

NARRATOR: Order and discipline, built into the U.S. Consti-tution, are certainly necessary for the fabric of a democratic society. But our Founding Fathers also knew that social order and discipline are often the excuse tyrants use to justify secrecy and government intrusion into the lives of citizens.

The potential for such intrusion -- a potential that, to some extent, became fact with government spying on dissenters and war protestors -- sprang from the National Security Act of 1947 and subsequent related laws. The highly centralized and increasingly secretive national security establishment that resulted was supported by a growing and seemingly permanent military-industrial complex. Together these formed the un-elected power center that President Eisenhower warned against when he left office.

The initial government elements of this power center were the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, and the Department of Defense. But what was most impor- tant about this whole war-oriented structure was its centraliza-tion under the president as the commander-in-chief, a role to which Congress deferred more and more.

Mr. HOOPES: Thrust into the cold war, to a kind of global bipolar confrontation with the Soviet Union and the other attributes of the communist system that we probably would have gone -- we would have reverted -- not to something like the 1920s, but we would not have maintained that centralization and that tension and that singleness of purpose that really were the requirements of the cold war.

NARRATOR: The long struggle against the Soviets created an unfortunate mindset in both political leaders and the general public. The success of the military approach in two world wars suggested to civilian leaders the usefulness of applying similar methods, policies, and even language to domestic problems.

Dr. FOSTER: To speak in these terms was a way of artifi-cially galvanizing the American people, it was thought, in common cause to deal with important problems that did not take the form of some kind of external military threat.

NARRATOR: This was not a premeditated plot, but the all too human trait of applying solutions from one area to another, of going from seemingly intractable international problems to equally hard domestic ones.

Dr. KORB: Well, it crept not only into the domestic agenda but in the way in which businesses acted. I mean, they became wars between companies, trade wars between the United States and other countries, as well as using the military metaphor to deal with domestic problems. And the idea was that if we could prevail against the world like we did in World War II, certainly if we declared war on drugs, or poverty, or Japanese companies, we should be able to win also.

NARRATOR: Secretary Hoopes is not convinced that it made a difference.

Mr. HOOPES: We call now all major efforts "wars on" some- thing and we don't win them very often, so I accept your point. But I don't know quite --

INTERVIEWER: Do we mean it?

Mr. HOOPES: Do we mean it?

INTERVIEWER: When we say it. Is it just rhetoric or does it really suggest that we're really trying to mobilize?

Mr. HOOPES: Well, we certainly haven't produced a war on gun control, for example. There are more guns in the country now than there ever were and there's even just as much poverty. So, I'd be inclined to think that if we meant it, we didn't mean it in the sense that we meant winning World War II.

NARRATOR: But how we speak does affect how we think and we don't have to look too hard to find examples where military rhetoric was used by our civilian leaders to rally support for domestic programs. The vast network of interstate highways was created under legislation called the National Defense Highway Act. The shock of the Soviet Sputnik in 1958 justified overdue education reform, but we called it the National Education Defense Act.

We launched the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on crime, trade wars. America became used to military-style language, highly centralized government and massive government spending.

Dr. KORB: It was a mindset that was the idea that somehow, with overwhelming force or money, that just about every problem could be solved, rather than realizing that many problems are so complex they need to be managed rather than solved. The real danger was that the idea of unconditional surrender or total victory that occurred in World War II could be applied to trade problems or domestic problems.

NARRATOR: Although the cold war is over, the general effects of this mindset still permeate our society. High schools run Junior ROTC programs that give academic credit to students who study in military history or participate in map reading, target practice, and marching drills.

Law enforcement agencies have SWAT teams that use military tactics and equipment, including standard military armored vehicles. Even the criminal justice system now employs measures for some first-time offenders that are modeled on mili-tary boot camps. All the camps follow military models of basic training.

Clearly, the American military as an institution does not today threaten our constitutional processes. But its popular-ity and its 50-year success in defending the nation from external military dangers has lulled politicians and citizens into a con-tinuing easy acceptance of military values and methods.

Dr. KORB: Any type of behavior can become a virtue or vice if it's overdone. Certainly, the military, with its loyalty and conformity, shows what can be done when you have a group of people working toward a common goal. On the other hand, I don't think you'd ever want the government giving orders to people to do this or that. I think a certain amount of skepticism is very healthy in a democracy.

NARRATOR: The exercise of individual judgment rather than easy conformity needs to take root again throughout society. Basic to recapturing the spirit of our nation's founders is de-militarizing the concept of patriotism.

Patriotism is not just military strength or the martial spirit. It's not "my country, right or wrong." Patriotism includes and is rooted in the give and take of debate and dissent, even at times dissent in the form of civil disobedience, the ultimate hallmark of democratic societies, but a concept alien to the military.

Everyday voices after the cold war and the Gulf War ended do give a sense that some Americans are recapturing our nation's earlier vision, but the voices are not unanimous.

INTERVIEWER: How do you define patriotism?

MAN-on-the-Street: That's a tough one. Patriotism runs many gamuts to me, as far as the love of country, but it's more than that. Patriotism is the type of people that give their time to Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, retarded citizens groups, things like that, the people that give to the country and don't just take from it.

MAN-on-the-Street: I'm an ROTC student and I plan to serve for some period of time, and I think that's a great way.

INTERVIEWER: Patriotism is equated with the military, do you feel?

Same MAN-on-the-Street: I do, yes.

MAN-on-the-Street: But I would wonder how many people actually know what the constitution stands for in any country and they see patriotism as little by little being eroded into what-ever the administration represents as being the will of the country, not necessarily the will of the people or the will of the people who set-up the country.

NARRATOR: Gregory Foster, of the National Defense Univer-sity, believes that lifting the veils of secrecy and getting the public reinvolved in all aspects of decisionmaking are funda-mental to the effective operation of democratic societies.

Dr. FOSTER: We have to open up the decisionmaking processes that go into dealing with this world, so that the American people become a part of that, feel that they are a part of that and feel, moreover, that government cares about what they think.

NARRATOR: Dr. Foster is not alone in this view.

MAN-on-the-Street: How can the public make decisions if we don't know what's going on? And if there's too many things that are deferred to the military as top secret, then the civilians get left out and cannot make a decision based on facts and information.

NARRATOR: The end of the cold war offers the opportunity to redefine how we think about and organize our society, to move back from an era in which the easy inclination has been to adopt military responses to both foreign and domestic problems.

The military establishment and its industrial allies can now be disengaged from their central role in government, in our economy, and in the psychology of the body politic. As part of this process, Congress needs to reassert and reclaim its constitutional responsibilities to oversee and regulate the military. Secrecy surrounding weapons programs like the B-2 stealth bomber can be lifted earlier, allowing Congress and the public a real say before one-fourth of the budget for a weapon is already spent.

Concerned Americans can communicate to their elected representatives the importance of non-military concern and values to national strength: social and economic opportunity, a healthy environment, a government open to political consensus and compromise rather than one controlled by special interests.

Make no mistake, in a world such as ours, the military as an institution remains important, but its functions and demands cannot override the nation's needs or democratic values.

Dr. KORB: I'm sure if left to their own devices, the mili-tary would like to have people from all of the same race, gender, sex, and they probably wouldn't want married people either. But society says you don't exist just to defend a piece of geography, you exist to defend a way of life.

NARRATOR: Solutions to domestic problems -- jobs, health care, housing, education, nutrition, care of the very young and the very old -- can no longer be delayed if the nation is to retain its vigor. This means shifting priorities, resources and talent even as we continue to lead the rest of the world.

For our country and our democratic experiment, we stand at a crossroad as momentous as were the 1780s, the 1860s, the 1940s. For the first time in over 50 years, perhaps we can safely step back from military habits, language and principles in dealing with national concerns. We may, in fact, achieve more by seeking consensus and managing our problems rather than looking for unconditional victory over them.

This approach may be slower and more frustrating than winning, but it is a better way to guarantee the preservation of our democratic values and, ultimately, of our democracy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson summarized it well: "This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it."

Admiral LaROCQUE: About 200 years ago, during the Revolutionary War, there was a famous preacher, an American patriot, who said, "There's a time to pray and a time to fight." We've had a time to fight in the last 50 years. Now we have other problems in our society today, problems that need to be solved by non-military means. And the question we have to ask ourselves is can we kick this military habit that we've developed over the past 50 years and move on to new and inventive solutions to the many problems that plague our society.

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

[End of broadcast.]