"HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?"

HOST:

Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll (USN, Ret.)

Deputy Director, Center for Defense Information

INTERVIEWER & NARRATOR:

Sanford Gottlieb, Senior Producer

MARKETING & OPERATIONS:

Mark Sugg

PRODUCERS:

Matthew Hansen

Nick Moore

Daniel Sagalyn

PRINCIPAL ANALYST & SCRIPTWRITER:

Marcus Corbin

PROGRAM PRODUCER:

Daniel Sagalyn

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER/MARKETING:

Lori McRea

ORIGINATION:

Washington, D.C.

PROGRAM NO.:

527

INITIAL BROADCAST:

22 March 1992

CONDITION OF USE: Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR"

Center for Defense Information

Videotapes also available.

"HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?"

Features commentary from:

DICK CHENEY

U.S. Secretary of Defense

Admiral STANLEY FINE (USN, Ret.)

Former Navy Budget Director

PETER McCLOSKEY

President, Electronics Industries Association

General COLIN POWELL

Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

HOBART ROWEN

The Washington Post

JOHN STEINBRUNER

The Brookings Institution

"HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?"

NARRATOR: What are these people doing? Still building fighter planes, tanks, missiles and bullets. But, after the disappearance of the Soviet Union, instead of making bullets, they could be making bullet trains.

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

Admiral EUGENE CARROLL: As Americans we share a common understanding that we need a sound national defense program. We also understand that it may be possible to spend too much money on forces and weapons and weaken our economy which, in turn, hurts our security.

Today, we're going to listen to some experts describe how much is enough. What are the factors we should consider in how much goes into our military forces and how much we're going to need to strengthen our economy. They're very interesting, well informed people. You might listen carefully and see who seems to make the most sense for you.

NARRATOR: Despite the end of the cold war, the Pentagon has not changed its plans for war. It still wants to keep hundreds of thousands of troops stationed around the world and to act as global policemen.

The Secretary of Defense even puts the fate of the world on US shoulders.

Defense Secretary DICK CHENEY (Senate Armed Services Committee hearing): "It's important for us to remember that future peace and stability in the world will continue to depend, in large measure, upon our willingness to deploy forces overseas in Europe, Southwest Asia and the Pacific, and to retain high quality forces here at home."

NARRATOR: Admiral Stanley Fine capped a career aboard ship and in military planning as Budget Director for the Navy.

Admiral STANLEY FINE (USN, Ret.): I think the Pentagon is spending so much money on a force or forces looking for a mission, and I'm being somewhat harsh when I say that. Ultimately, the forces that we have and that we're projecting for the future are not much different from the forces that we had during the cold war. Nor is our thinking much different from what it was during the cold war. We're still talking about keeping Marines aboard ship in farflung parts of the Earth to fight against uncertain countries, to fight uncertain wars, to fight uncertain battles.

NARRATOR: If you care to wade through the 1700 pages in this document, President Bush's budget request to Congress for next year, you'll find that the administration wants to increase military spending from $281 billion in 1993 to $291 billion in 1997. Although it may not keep pace with inflation, military spending in this plan will remain at high cold war levels and swallow up any peace dividend.

In this election year, our attention has turned from the cost of war to the cost of peace. Politicians have focused on the jobs that will be lost in the short run if less is spent on the military. The economic costs and tax burdens of continued cold war spending are getting less attention.

But this is to turn the situation on its head. The end of the cold war actually provides a rare opportunity to free millions of people and billions of dollars from unproductive military work.

Hobart Rowen perceptively covers economic issues at The Washington Post. Before that, he wrote for Newsweek. Today his widely read columns are syndicated nationally and internationally.

INTERVIEWER: In the long run, can cuts in military spending spur economic growth?

HOBART ROWEN: Yes, they can, because cuts in military spending will enable us to divert resources to those productive things, like investment, that will get the economy moving ahead at a faster pace. Now there's going to be a transition. You can't overnight slash any kind of spending and not expect that there won't be a negative reaction. But over the long run, certainly, cuts in military spending can lead us into a better and healthier economy.

NARRATOR: So how much military spending is enough?

The Congress has not settled on an answer, but many members feel the administration plan would spend more than enough. Senator Jim Sasser, chairman of the Budget Committee, has proposed spending $120- to $140 billion less than President Bush over five years. Senator John McCain, an influential Republican on the Armed Services Committee, has proposed spending about $250 billion in 1997, $40 billion less than the administration in that year.

Large savings could come as early as next year.

Admiral FINE: I would dare say that if we really wanted to and were willing to do the restructuring that other nations are going through, if we really were serious about it and not looking to the defense budget as much as an industrial policy to keep people employed, but really zeroed-in on what the need was and came to grips with what our national objectives should be, we probably could take another $20-30 billion out of the defense budget without really weakening our real military needs.

NARRATOR: If you're not a military expert, you can use a simple but sensible method to figure out how much is enough.

Mr. ROWEN: I'm just applying sort of a common sense rule. If we needed $300 billion a year when the Soviet Union was our major threat and 40, 50, or 60 percent of that was directed toward the Soviet Union and if the Soviet Union isn't a threat now, then I should think we'd be able to reduce the total by something like that percentage. So, I don't see why we couldn't point toward getting down to a number that's approximately half that in a reasonably short number of years.

NARRATOR: Another revealing rule of thumb for military spending is to look at what other rich industrial countries that have no powerful enemies spend. Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Japan all spend $30- to $40 billion on their militaries, at most one-seventh of what the United States is now spending.

Researchers at the Brookings Institution have suggested to Congress building a really new world order that would make the world safe enough to allow even less spending.

JOHN STEINBRUNER, The Brookings Institution (Senate Budget Committee hearing):

"We suggest the possibility of saving $250 billion over a five-year period. This is in the 050 National Defense Account. $725 billion over a ten-year period, and 93 billion a year thereafter. Those obviously are very impressive savings indeed, but the more important point is that we would be better off."

NARRATOR: A study by retired senior military officers at the Center for Defense Information has found that the United States could spend about $200 billion in 1995 and still perform all the Pentagon's military missions. That sum would put armed forces in the field capable of defeating any plausible enemies without help from allies.

Roughly $90 billion of the $200 billion would be spent on a force to defend the United States, including nuclear weapons. Another $60 billion would maintain the capability to assist allies. And $50 billion would permit intervention around the world.

This alternative military would still include one million active duty soldiers and another million in the reserves. It would maintain more than two times as many soldiers in the active component alone than took part in the war with Iraq.

Secretary Cheney fears that such spending would leave us unprepared for a new cold war.

Secretary CHENEY (Senate Armed Services Committee hearing):"Eventually the threats will not be remote, they will not be vague, and we will not have the alliances and the capabilities needed to deal with them. We will wish then that we had made the much smaller investment that we ask for today to preserve the depth in our strategic position that we have so dearly won."

NARRATOR: But in 1948, the last time we faced no powerful enemies, we spent the equivalent of only $80 billion today. Still we were able to build up very quickly to fight the Korean War and the cold war.

We could spend even less than $200 billion later if we let our rich and powerful allies take full responsibility for defending themselves and give the United Nations the lead in preventing and resolving conflicts.

When there is a military threat to the United States, the high economic costs of large military forces must be borne. But is there a threat out there?

Even the Pentagon can find few threats around the world.

Secretary CHENEY (Senate Armed Services Committee hearing):"Today, we have no global challenger, except with respect to strategic nuclear forces. No country is our match in conventional military technology or the ability to apply it. There are no significant alliances hostile to our interests. To the contrary, the strongest and most capable countries in the world are our friends. No region of the world critical to our interest in under hostile, non-democratic domination."

NARRATOR: This has led the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, to go to the extraordinary lengths of arguing that the US military no longer needs threats to justify the forces it wants.

General COLIN POWELL (Senate Armed Services Committee hearing): "The real threat, the real threat is the unknown, the uncertain. In a very real sense, the primary threat to our security is instability and being unprepared to handle a crisis or a war that no one expected or predicted. And to hedge against this uncertainty, we must structure our forces based on the capabilities of other military forces in regions where we retain vital interests, whether or not there is a specific, well-defined military threat."

NARRATOR: But to request spending billions of dollars to deal with threats that cannot be identified is to ask for a blank check.

Admiral FINE: Now we really have to change our world outlook. If we can change our world outlook and recognize that the immediate threat, conventional threat to the United States and the Western Hemisphere and its allies is practically negligible, and that we don't want to take on the role of being the world's policeman for every little spat that goes on anywhere in the world, then clearly a number related to what our real national defense needs are, taking into account what our allies and we can contribute together to international security, would be at a significantly lower number than it is now.

NARRATOR: As president of the Electronics Industries Association, Peter McCloskey has been promoting electronic technology and vigorously representing the $270 billion electronics industry for the past 15 years. He sees trouble spots around the world requiring continued US military involvement.

PETER McCLOSKEY: We still have quite a bit of unrest as it relates to other areas of the world. And so, I don't see any end to the regional type of conflicts, the civil wars that will go on. We have the instability that exists in the former Soviet Union and the various members of that common market.

NARRATOR: Even if the countries with the world's largest militaries were hostile to the United States, and most of them are not, they don't come close to the military strength the Soviet Union once had.

The Soviet Union once had a four million-man military; Syria, for example, has only a 400,000-man military. The Soviet Union had 61,000 tanks; North Korea has 3000. The Soviets once had 51,000 artillery pieces; Libya has 1700. The Soviets had 4300 combat aircraft; Iran has 213.

These countries don't even match Iraq's former military strength and the United States needed only 17 percent of its military personnel and about a third of its combat units to quickly defeat Iraq.

If military action is required around the world, the United States no longer has to try to do it all by itself. The forces of our close friends, including European allies, Canada, Japan, Australia and South Korea, include over four million active personnel, over 12 million additional reserve personnel, 25,000 tanks, 7000 combat aircraft and 500 major surface warships.

What are some of the missions that we can safely spend less on than we did during the cold war?

Defending Europe. Price tag: well over $100 billion a year.

Defending Japan and Korea. Price tag: another $40 billion.

Fighting nuclear war. Cost: over $50 billion yearly.

The Pentagon is now using missions other than fighting the Soviet Union, such as war for oil, to justify some of its spending. Defending the Persian Gulf costs another $60 billion, four times the cost of the oil imported from the Persian Gulf each year. Yet positive alternatives to war for Persian Gulf oil, such as stockpiling, conservation and development of other promising energy sources, have not yet been vigorously pursued. Furthermore, the United States imports only about 5 percent of its total energy from the Persian Gulf. Even the transportation system, which is relatively oil-dependent, gets only about 11 percent of its energy from the Persian Gulf.

What cold war weapons that are no longer needed are still being built?

The B-2 Bomber. The Pentagon wants five more at a cost of $4 billion for 1993.

Admiral FINE: And to buy five more is more a drill in rounding out a force rather than doing a cost-effective analysis of what those extra five would do for the force. To spend the billions needed for an extra five just to make it a nice round number doesn't make economic sense or sense in any other way.

NARRATOR: New nuclear missiles for submarines. Price tag in 1993: $1.1 billion.

The F-22 fighter. Cost: $2.2 billion in 1993 alone.

New destroyers. The bill for one year: $3.5 billion.

Transport aircraft. 1993 charge: $2.9 billion.

New and old versions of the F/A-18 Navy fighter bomber. $3 billion.

Star Wars. For 1993, nearly a one-third increase in funding, from $4.2 billion to $5.4 billion.

Some see Star Wars expenditures justified by the possibility of nuclear weapons spreading to additional countries.

Mr. McCLOSKEY: We have major problems with the spread of nuclear technology, and where that technology can go, and how it can be delivered, and the subject of blackmail. That's why the Strategic Defense Initiative has gotten such strong support in the Congress right now. We want to try to prevent the opportunities for terrorist blackmail.

NARRATOR: Star Wars remains unproven technology, however, and the director of the CIA sees no new capability to attack the United States for at least ten years.

Peter McCloskey also argues that it's too soon to slow the development and purchase of new equipment.

Mr. McCLOSKEY: Well, certainly if I was in a foxhole, I'd want to make sure that there were certain things, like target identification, that my close air support wasn't getting me, but it was getting the people on the other side of the line, if you will. So, there are a lot of technology things that need to be done, particularly in the electronics area and particularly in the area of counter-measures. We're in an era now of great technology advance. Electronics can be used very aggressively to ensure that we have the capability.

NARRATOR: Yet most of the weapons now under development were designed to defeat future Soviet weapons that are very unlikely to be built.

Military reasons for keeping spending at cold war levels have vanished. What are some of the other reasons?

Admiral FINE: Part of it, I would guess, is inertia. It's what's been done over the last 40 or 45 years, let's keep doing what we've been doing.

Part of it is what I call the drive for institutional survival. The other day there was an article in the paper about the commandant of the Marine Corps, saying that if the Marines are cut back to 145,000, they'll not be able to perform the missions that have been outlined for them. Well, most of the missions that he discussed are basically cold war missions or, worse yet, missions for intervention in the Third World.

Mr. ROWEN: Everybody I think recognizes that the threat from the Soviet empire is gone. I think everybody understands that military spending is being maintained at a high level because congressmen don't want to cut that particular base in their own district and they're afraid of the employment consequences in those districts.

NARRATOR: If there were military threats, we would spend whatever was necessary to defend ourselves. But in the absence of powerful enemies, the costs of high military spending cannot be justified.

It's hard to grasp just how costly the administration's $281 billion request for 1993 military spending really is. This might help. If you printed 100 one dollar bills every second, it would take until the year 2081 to print the $281 billion.

The military is now spending about $6 billion every week, or $9400 every second.

How much do you spend on the military? $3000 every year for the average American household. Over five years, that's the down payment on a $150,000 house.

Some point out that military spending is taking a smaller share of the economy than in the past.

Mr. McCLOSKEY: We have gone from, as I mentioned, 4 1/2 percent of GNP today and we're going to go down to 3.4. That would be the lowest level of defense support since prior to the Second World War. We always go through these cyclical kinds of activity. What's important is to make sure that we don't emasculate our capability.

NARRATOR: Although military spending represents a modest part of the overall economy, it takes a huge chunk of government funds. It amounts to more than the entire combined total of spending by the Departments of Agriculture, Labor, Transportation, Education, Housing and Urban Development, Energy, Treasury, Justice, Interior, State and Commerce, plus the federal courts.

But that's not the whole story. The government's definition of military spending under-counts the actual size of military spending. The figure is more like $420 billion every year than 281 billion when you include military-related costs, such as:

Over $80 billion for interest on the national debt that can be attributed to military spending.

Over $30 billion for veterans.

And $2.5 billion for the military share of NASA and the Coast Guard.

$420 billion every year works out to $4400 for the average family.

High military spending has inflicted a cost on the economy, as well to our individual pocketbooks. A large portion of our federal spending deficits and the $3 trillion net national debt is due to military spending. Now we're dealing in trillions. To print $3 trillion at a 100 one dollar bills a second would take 950 years. The debt amounts to $32,000 per family.

Massive government borrowing to pay for the debt has starved US businesses of funds needed for investment. Almost a fifth of this money is borrowed from foreigners, particularly Europeans and Japanese. Ironically, this money helps pay for the US troops in those countries defending them against unidentifiable enemies.

Interest costs on the national debt are now $200 billion a year and are the fastest growing item of federal spending.

During the cold war, the military spent the equivalent of over $12 trillion. Four decades of this spending has diverted much needed research talent and resources away from civilian industries. For every dollar of federal government research, the military gets 60 cents. Energy gets four cents. Transportation gets two. Health, 14. The environment, two.

Mr. ROWEN: And while we were pursuing our military aims, as logical and as necessary as they were, it gave Japan and Germany and other countries who were with us in the need to ward off any external threat, it gave them the opportunity to pursue civilian things. So, naturally, our concentration on the military put us at a great disadvantage as against those countries who were able to benefit from our security umbrella and went ahead with their own civilian programs. So, that's been a big factor in limiting our ability to penetrate the civilian export markets of the world.

NARRATOR: Another example of the hidden costs of maintaining a big cold war military is environmental destruction. It's estimated that it will cost a shocking $300- to $400 billion over at least 30 years to clean up the mess at military bases and nuclear bomb factories.

But how quickly can we go from spending at cold war levels to only spending what we need militarily?

Mr. McCLOSKEY: We're talking about very serious cuts in the defense budget. We're talking about a million jobs in the defense industry itself during the period involved. We're talking about a half-a-million uniformed soldiers. We're talking about a quarter-of-a-million Civil Service people. Some of that will be by attrition, but others, a large amount of it, will not.

NARRATOR: In the past, the nation has made faster and deeper transitions from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy.

For example, after World War II, the number of soldiers plummeted from 12.1 million to 1.6 million in two years, from 1945 to 1947. An astonishing 22.5 million people left employment in the war effort. Military spending dropped from 35 percent of the gross national product to 6 percent.

After the Korean War, military spending dropped by the equivalent of $115 billion in three years. After the Vietnam War, it dropped by the equivalent of $131 billion in six years.

Mr. ROWEN: And I think we have to do a courageous thing. I think we have to say we don't need these military expenditures at these levels, we must cut them, it's good for the economy. And we've had the experience after World War II in how to begin to approach a reconversion problem.

Now I will quickly concede that the problems now and the problems at the end of World War II are different.

NARRATOR: After World War II, the economy was growing rather than in a recession. But today, the money no longer spent on the military will be free to deal with a broad array of domestic problems, including unemployment.

Mr. ROWEN: It takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of money. It takes a lot of patience and it takes time, but it can be done. What we have to do is to make a national commitment. If our military needs are no longer that high, we shouldn't continue to spend the money for that purpose, we've got to divert it to some other purpose.

Admiral CARROLL: You have heard from some very impressive people talking about our national defense requirements. We had officials of the Department of Defense saying that we need to spend more, that we face uncertainty and instability and we must be prepared for wars we cannot foresee.

On the other hand, you've heard from critics who say, no, we're spending too much, that we don't need B-2 bombers, we don't need Star Wars, and that we have national needs that we must address with the money we could save on military spending.

Who's right? How much is enough?

Thanks heavens, we live in a democracy and the answer to that question rests with you, the citizens of the United States. We would like to hear from you here at the Center for Defense Information, hear your answer to how much is enough to defend the United States of America.

[End of broadcast.]

CONDITION OF USE Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR"

Center for Defense Information