TERRI BELL, "America's Defense Monitor": Do you believe this budget is more than it needs to be, about right, or not enough?

STACEY and AKUNDE TIBBS, Chantilly VA: It's more than it needs to be. It's more than it needs to be, definitely.

DENNIS FINN, Santa Fe, NM: I think it's slightly more than it needs to be.

SHARON CARR, Philadelphia, PA: I think what the Pentagon asks for may be legitimate.

NATALIA ZVORSKY, Elkton, MD: I think it's definitely more than it needs to be.

NARRATOR: It's your military. How much do you think America should be spending?

"Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it's the voice of God." Mark Twain

NARRATOR: Americans, no matter where they turn today, find themselves assaulted by public opinion polls. Polling and surveying have become massive industries, taking the public's pulse on everything from voting intentions to Elvis sightings and UFOs.

MARK MELLMAN: The process of conducting a poll really starts with two things.

NARRATOR: Mark Mellman is president of The Mellman Group, a Democratic polling and consulting firm.

Mr. MELLMAN: It's first developing the sample, who it is you want to talk to. And the key to accurate polling is making sure that you have a random sample of the population. Not that everybody gets called, but that everybody has an equal probability of being called. So, we have some techniques that we use to set up that random sample.

The other part that starts right at the beginning is developing the questionnaire. A poll's only as good as the questions that are asked. And the way those questions are designed, the order in which the questions are asked. All can have an influence on the outcome.

NARRATOR: In addition to measuring the public stance on specific issues, polls can also serve as a barometer of the nation's mood.

Mr. MELLMAN: I think the public today is, in many ways, frustrated. They're concerned about an economic crisis. They believe that they are being squeezed between prices that are rising and incomes that are stagnant. They see a cultural crisis. They see values in decline all around us and they see the proximate cause of many of our problems as being related to that decline in values. And third, there's a political crisis that they feel. They -- People no longer trust our institutions of government. They think that those institutions are absolutely run by special interests, not by "we, the people."

"I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts." --Will Rogers

NARRATOR: Recent polls show public trust in government at a record low. In a survey conducted by the Americans Talk Issues Foundation, 76 percent of those questioned said that they rarely or never trust "government to do what is right." This negative response far surpasses previous polls that showed dramatic discontent in times of political crisis:

...61 percent distrustful of government in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal

...69 percent in 1980 during the Iran hostage crisis.

...and 62 percent in 1990 after the Iran-Contra affair

Mr. MELLMAN: The sad fact is that trust in government has never been lower, and when you think about what that means, it's pretty shocking. It means that fewer people trust the government today than trusted the government when we were about to impeach the president of the United States for high crimes.

"AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" on-the-street interviews:

ADM's TERRI BELL: How would you characterize your feelings towards the federal government?

STACEY and AKUNDE TIBBS: They're taking our tax dollars and wasting our money.

CARY WEDDINGTON: I'd go less in government involvement and just cut down basically all government intervention.

Dr. MARTHA KELLEY, Wynnewood, PA: And I think there's a great deal of dissatisfaction because people believe that their voice is not heard.

DON PLUMMER, Waldorf, MD: My feelings for the federal government are pretty positive, since I work for the federal government. But as far as Americans that have an anti-government feeling right now, I think it's because there's the perception that government isn't accomplishing a whole lot, that we're at a standstill regardless of whether we have a Democratic president or a Republican president.

NARRATOR: But while many Americans today distrust government as a whole, the same cannot be said for one of its institutions. In a 1996 Harris Poll, 47 percent of those questioned said they have "a great deal of confidence" in the military. No other major institution or profession comes close. Trust in the military exceeds by a wide margin trust in the Supreme Court, major educational institutions, major corporations, the White House, the media and Congress.

"AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" on-the-street interviews:

Ms. BELL: What are your feelings towards the United States military?

JOHN MANKINS, Ashburn, VA: In general, quite positive. I think it's very difficult to argue with a century of success.

LOLITA TURNER, Fort Washington, MD: I think the military is pretty good. I mean, they're doing the best that they can.

DON PLUMMER: I served in the US military, it's also very favorable, and during the Vietnam War. I don't think Americans have a negative perception of the military. I think it's actually very positive at this point. And since the end of the Vietnam War, the perception of most American citizens is that it's a great institution.

In fact, we probably have a more favorable perception of the military now than we ever have since the end of the Second World War, and it's certainly a more positive perception than we have of the civilian side of the government.

STEVEN KULL: Overall, Americans have a positive attitude about the men and women in the military. When we ask them on a scale of one to ten, with ten being very positive and one being very negative, how they felt, the median score was eight.

NARRATOR: Dr. Steven Kull is director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes and a professor at the University of Maryland. He was the principal investigator in a November 1995 survey of American public attitudes toward US defense spending.

Among this survey's findings: While Americans insist on a strong national defense, a majority of people believe that defense costs are excessive and should be reduced.

Dr. KULL: It seems that they don't really feel that the US needs to have as robust a military as it presently has. Overall, when you ask them how they feel about defense spending, they lean in the direction of wanting it to be less. The average American wants to cut defense spending about 10 percent.

FOCUS GROUP in Atlanta:

PARTICIPANT: You can cut 10 percent easily of anything.

PARTICIPANT: Ten sounds good, at least, to start with.

PARTICIPANT: Ten to 15.

NARRATOR: Citizens are inclined to support still deeper cuts in military spending, Dr. Kull discovered, when attention is drawn to ways in which the savings from military cuts might be directed.

Dr. KULL: One question that we wanted to know is, well, how would the public respond if the president and Congress did decide to cut -- make really deep cuts in defense. So, we asked, "Well, how would you feel if the president and Congress decided to cut by 20 percent?" And a modest majority, I think 56 percent said that they would favor that.

Well, with another part of the sample we said, "Well, suppose the president and Congress decided to cut defense spending 20 percent and instead redirected those funds to education, fighting crime, and cutting the deficit?" And in that case, over 70 percent said that they supported a deep cut of 20 percent.

NARRATOR: In addition, 63 percent of those surveyed said that US military spending "has weakened the US economy and given some allies an economic edge." Sixty-nine percent felt that the Pentagon, in trying to improve US military technology, "often goes overboard, building expensive capabilities that are not really necessary." And 89 percent agreed that "countries that receive protection from US military capabilities...rely too much on the US."

Dr. KULL: One of the strongest sources of support for cutting defense is the feeling that the United States is playing the role of world policeman more than it should be. There's a feeling that if our allies and others who benefit from US military capabilities would carry more of their share, then the US could cut substantially.

NARRATOR: Polls for years have indicated that Americans believe the United States is being taken advantage of by our major trading partners, that Japan and Europe are winning the economic competition while our government spends a sizable portion of our national wealth year helping to defend them.

"AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" on-the-street:

NATALIA ZVORSKY: Well, I think they should work on here, on home issues. That's where the money needs to be, that's who gave the money. And the other countries, they need to protect themselves.

Mr. MELLMAN: It's one thing to spend a lot of money to defend the United States, it's another thing to spend tens of billions of dollars defending the Europeans and the Japanese and other Asian countries against a nonexistent Soviet threat. People don't think that's a good way to spend American tax dollars.

Rep. PETER DeFAZIO (D-OR): Well, my constituents, I think, are like that of many of my colleagues.

NARRATOR: Congressman Peter DeFazio of Oregon can think of at least two additional reasons why a majority of citizens in his district would support cutting military spending.

Rep. DeFAZIO: They want a military that has a budget and capabilities appropriate to real threats that confront the United States. And they're asking me what happened to the peace dividend? We won the Cold War, the Soviet Union has collapsed, and yet we are spending are Cold War levels to defend our country. Not only that, we're still spending wastefully. We're still spending a hundred dollars to buy a bolt that can be bought for five dollars. We're still buying weapons that we don't need that don't work, gold-plated weapons, like the B-2 bomber, and still wasting billions on things like "Star Wars."

NARRATOR: Recent polls show that Americans believe that about 50 percent of every government dollar and 40 percent of every Pentagon dollar is wasted.

Mr. MELLMAN: People do believe that the Pentagon is riddled with waste and inefficiency and bureaucracy, and they see a tremendous amount of waste. People still talk about the $600 toilet seats and the $500 hammers and all the kinds of examples of Pentagon waste that we've been treated to over the years still very much etched in people's minds.

FOCUS GROUP in Atlanta:

PARTICIPANT: That's what I was talking about.

PARTICIPANT: Yeah, it gets really nerve-wracking when you hear this, that they're spending all this money and they're getting crap for it.

PARTICIPANT: I think, like we were saying earlier before, they were saying, more should be spent on the actual people who are in the military and not on equipment.

Rep. DeFAZIO: I think that people have a high opinion of our men and women who serve in uniform. They appreciate the service, they appreciate the defense of the nation. They appreciate the sacrifice present, ongoing and past made by many of these young men and women. And they also believe that our young men and women in uniform are not well-served by waste, by generals and admirals at the Pentagon flying around in special jets with their cats for $500,000 a trip from Rome to Colorado Springs.

"Nations are quite capable of starving every other side of life -- education, housing, public health, anything that contributes to life, physical, intellectual, moral and spiritual -- in order to maintain their armaments." --G. L. Dickinson

NARRATOR: Polls indicate that Americans would prefer that military spending be on the table in efforts to balance the federal budget.

Mr. MELLMAN: What's striking about the efforts to balance the federal budget is that, in fact, the politicians have not sought to cut any money in defense. They've been willing to cut money in Medicare, they've been willing to cut education, but they've been unwilling to touch defense. That's not at all where the public is. The public says cutting Medicare or cutting education are unacceptable ways to balance the budget. Most people think that cutting defense somewhat is an acceptable way to balance the budget.

Rep. DeFAZIO: Americans finally realize over the last few years the depth and the seriousness of the financial state of our country and they want to see the budget balanced. And they don't think that any part of the government is so efficient or effective that it can be exempt, and certainly not the Pentagon with all of the documented waste, fraud and abuse.

"AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" on-the-street interviews:

Ms. BELL: In an effort to balance the federal budget, Congress is cutting education, Medicare and other federal programs. Do you think that military spending should also be considered for cutbacks?

STACEY TIBBS: Yes, definitely.

AKUNDE TIBBS: Yes, I think it definitely should be cut back because education is more important to the kids.

NATALIA ZVORSKY: Military spending should definitely be considered for cutbacks. Education should not be cut at all. I am a teacher. I work in a school system where there hardly is any paper or pencils. What's the future of the military is we don't have students who are capable of learning or have the supplies to learn?

JOHN MANKINS: I think that they have to take their turn in the barrel in terms of bottoms-up evaluation of what money is being spent for, in terms of policy goals, certainly.

"Government, in the last analysis, is organized opinion. Where there is little or no public opinion, there is likely to be bad government." --W.L. Mackenzie King

Senator STROM THURMOMD (R-SC) (Senate debate, 4 August '95): "I am concerned about defense spending levels. I have argued for years that defense was underfunded."

Senator SAM NUNN (D-GA) (Senate floor debate): "There are many members of this body in the House and the Senate who feel that defense spending should be higher and are willing to take it out of domestic."

NARRATOR: Although a majority of the American public may find a reduction in military spending desirable, a majority of their elected representatives in Washington feels differently. Last year, Congress tacked on $7 billion to the military budget, on top of what the Pentagon asked for. Polls show the public, by a strong majority, disapproves of this action.

Dr. KULL: Well, this is something they were very firm about. Seventy-seven percent said that they were opposed to the $7 billion addition. And when we asked them why do you think Congress added this $7 billion, only a small percentage thought that it was really driven by concerns about security issues. The largest number, the majority felt that it was driven by Congress' desire to maintain jobs in their districts.

LAWRENCE KORB: To try and cut military spending right now is hard for a number of reasons.

NARRATOR: Dr. Lawrence Korb is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration.

Dr. KORB: First of all, you have a lot of people who work in defense industry and you have a lot of people who work on military bases. And in order to cut spending, you're going to have to get rid of some weapons systems, close some bases. And a lot of the politicians don't want to bear the short-term cost of laying those people off.

NARRATOR: But while Americans, like many of their elected officials in Congress, often view military spending in terms of jobs, they believe job concerns alone should not spare the military budget from cuts.

Dr. KULL: We assumed that actually a majority would feel that it's important to maintain defense spending so as to preserve jobs. But, in fact, that didn't turn out to the case. We asked it in two different ways. In one case, we said "Should the US preserve defense spending so as to maintain jobs?" And only 43 percent supported that position.

When it was posed as an argument between the idea that the US should not maintain defense spending so as to preserve jobs, but should instead emphasize job training and so on, that argument was preferred by a two-to-one margin.

NARRATOR: According to Steven Kull, three-fourths of Americans believe that the military budget is inflated by three factors:

...Members of Congress promoting defense-related jobs in their districts

...Duplications of functions among the military branches

...And defense contractors influencing members of Congress through campaign contributions.

Rep. DeFAZIO: I'm the only member of the United States Congress, House or Senate, willing to sign a pledge not to take money from military contractors for reelection. Now there's a lot of great peace advocates here, but the influence of defense contractors and their subsidiaries is so pervasive that they won't even sign that pledge. So, their pervasiveness when it comes to generosity at election time, in terms of campaign contributions, is a big factor.

NARRATOR: For example, Northrup Grumman and five major subcontractors that build the Air Force's controversial B-2 bomber gave over $2 million to congressional candidates in campaign contributions prior to the 1994 elections.

Another way weapons-makers assure the continued support of Congress for expensive weapons programs is by subcontracting work to industries in as many states and districts as possible. The B-2 bomber has subcontracts sprinkled in 383 congressional districts in nearly every state in the Union. In 1995, Congress added $493 million to the B-2 program that the Pentagon did not request.

Rep. DeFAZIO: The fact that much of the military industrial complex is in key states cripples the capability of either party to deal effectively with them and with that kind of waste. You know, President Clinton and Bob Dole are trying to out-bid each other on building more B-2 bombers that even the Pentagon doesn't want, that don't work, that aren't needed, that are going to fight a war that'll never happen, in a mission that isn't achievable.

Dr. KORB: Many members of Congress these days don't have any military experience. They don't want to stand up to the military. They don't want to be seen as soft on defense. They don't want to pay the economic dislocation cost. And they don't want to sit down and apply a common sense test to this area that they apply to a lots of other areas.

"Public opinion is stronger than the legislature and nearly as strong as the Ten Commandments." --Charles Warner

Mr. MELLMAN: There's only an extraordinarily small minority of the American public that wants to increase defense spending. So, when politicians increase defense spending, they're clearly acting against the will of the majority. Now we elect them not just to follow public opinion, we elect them to follow the dictates of their conscience and the information, the analysis and the judgments that they make are obviously different than the judgments that the public arrives at. But there's no question that the public does not want to increase defense spending at all.

BAKER SPRING: I think that the public has been misled, and that's one of the reasons why I think the polls are showing the American people favoring further cuts in defense.

NARRATOR: Baker Spring is the senior defense analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

Mr. SPRING: First, they don't understand how much defense has come down since Cold War levels: Roughly by about a third. The second thing they have not been told about is the implications of further defense cuts. That is, that we could end up not being able to meet our commitments to states in Europe, or to Asia, or to the Persian Gulf, commitments that I think the United States made in good conscience and that the American people would support us continuing to uphold.

Dr. KORB: People who are argue that the military budget has been cut too much are basically arguing to keep a level of spending not to deal with our enemies or the future, but the past. People say, for example, that defense spending in real terms has been cut every year since 1985, and that's correct. But the fact of the matter is that 1985 was an artificially high year. That was the peak of the Reagan build-up, which was based not on military necessity, but to bankrupt the Soviet Union.

Dr. KULL: Americans want a strong defense. They're very clear about that. They do feel that the US has global interests and they don't want to withdraw American commitments to protect other countries.

Mostly though, they want to move in the direction of having other countries, other allies carrying more of the burden, put more emphasis on multilateral institutions, more emphasis on the UN, more emphasis on the collective security system within which the United States is not the world policeman, but has a shared role with other countries.

NARRATOR: How much should the United States spend to defend itself each year? Steven Kull asked people for their answer to this question, taking into consideration spending by six potential enemies: Russia, China, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea.

Dr. KULL: Forty-eight percent said that the United States should spend a bit more than the strongest potential enemy. Twenty-nine percent said that we should spend as much as all of them combined. Only 7 percent said that we should spend twice as much as all of them combined. Well, in fact, the United States does spend about twice as much as all of them combined.

Now you couple that with the fact that the average American only wants to cut defense spending a bit, it becomes clear that Americans are very much underestimating how much the United States is spending.

FOCUS GROUP in Atlanta:

PARTICIPANT: I have a question.

MODERATOR: Carla?

PARTICIPANT: No, I have a question. I've been out of school awhile. Define "defense spending" for me.

MODERATOR: Well...

NARRATOR: The fact is, most Americans have no idea how much is spent on their military each year.

"AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" on-the-street:

STACEY TIBBS: About $5 million.

AKUNDE TIBBS: I think about between $10 million and $12 million.

NATALIA ZVORSKY: I don't know. I'd say at least a couple of -- I don't know, 15 billion? Is that about right? I have no idea.

CARY WEDDINGTON: I don't have any idea. I have no idea. Quite a bit, I imagine.

Dr. MARTHA KELLEY: In terms of money? Probably $20 billion.

LOLITA TURNER: Oh, a few billion dollars per year. I mean, you've got a lot of equipment, you've got a lot of things that they need, the necessities. Oh, it's a lot of money.

NARRATOR: US military spending in 1996 is $265 billion.

"In the modern world, the intelligence of public opinion is the one indispensable condition of social progress." --Charles William Eliot

Mr. MELLMAN: One of the basic facts, features of American public opinion these days is the public is not interested in foreign policy and defense issues. Indeed, not only are they not interested, they really resist being interested in foreign policy and defense issues.

NARRATOR: In 1980, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, 60 percent of Americans believed US defense spending should be increased. Today, opinion polls indicate that only a fraction of Americans rank defense among the leading concerns confronting the nation. Public sentiment for increased federal spending on jobs programs, health care and other non-military needs far outweighs support for military spending.

Mr. MELLMAN: Americans feel that they've spent a long time worrying about national security, when they felt there was a threat from the then-Soviet Union. They were concerned about nuclear war. They were concerned about the possibility of armed conflict, and they've seen that possibility largely dissipate, and people feel liberated to not worry about what's going on overseas, to not worry about what's going on with the defense establishment and to focus here at home.

NATALIA ZVORSKY (on-the-street interview): I think the money needs to be more brought back to home, to education, to the homeless, single-family parents and stuff that don't even have places to live, or can't hold a job, or can't afford child care, that's what -- We need to work on America.

NARRATOR: As America increasingly focuses inward, many feel they can afford to ignore military issues. But the average American household pays about $2600 every year in taxes to support the military, an expense that's hard to ignore.

Meanwhile, Congress and the president, in their efforts to balance the budget, are making tradeoffs and cuts in programs such as education, housing and environmental protection without cutting defense.

Should Americans take a greater interest in defense matters? Can they afford not to?

[During this 30-minute program, Americans spent more than $15 million on their military.]

ADM JOHN SHANAHAN (USN, Ret.): President Dwight Eisenhower once said, "I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of their way and let them have it." While Americans may not believe quite so strongly about cutting military spending, opinion polls do suggest that a majority would like to see it lowered.

In view of the responsibilities assigned to them by the Constitution to represent the people, perhaps the Congress and the president should listen more closely to what the people are saying. Our political leaders may choose to follow public opinion or they may choose to lead it, but the one thing they must not do is ignore it.

For "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I am Jack Shanahan.

[End of broadcast.]

Produced by the Center for Defense Information