EXECUTIVE PRODUCER:
Rear Admiral Gene LaRocque (USN, Ret.)
Director, Center for Defense Information
INTERVIEWER & NARRATOR:
Sanford Gottlieb, Senior Producer, "America's Defense Monitor"
DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH:
David T. Johnson
MARKETING & OPERATIONS:
Mark Sugg
PRODUCERS:
Marguerite Arnold
Glenn Baker
Daniel Sagalyn
PRINCIPAL ANALYST & SCRIPTWRITER:
Daniel Sagalyn
SEGMENT PRODUCER:
Daniel Sagalyn
ORIGINATION:
Washington, D.C.
PROGRAM NO.:
638
INITIAL BROADCAST:
6 June 1993
CONDITION OF USE:
Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" (Center for Defense Information).
NARRATOR: How much is a billion dollars? If you earned $1000 a day, you would take 2,740
years to earn one billion dollars. President Clinton and the Pentagon want $277 billion for just one
year of military spending.
The cold was is over, so why does the military still demand so much money? Has anything changed in President Clinton's new military budget?
["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]
Admiral GENE LaROCQUE: Welcome once again to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR."
We Americans have always been able to prepare for war very efficiently and very effectively. One of the things we've not done so well at is to cut back our military forces once the war is over. In our program today, we're going to explain in very simple terms why it is that we are unable to reduce our military forces and cut our military spending now that the cold war is over.
NARRATOR: This year marked the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Pentagon building outside Washington.
LES ASPIN, Secretary of Defense (12 May '93, Pentagon):
"The Pentagon and its mission have been at the center of American and world history for those 50 years."
NARRATOR: This symbol of the American military establish-ment was built in a 16-month rush at the beginning of World
War II. It's the world's largest office building, with over
17 1/2 miles of corridors and three times the office space of the Empire State Building in New York, a fitting home base for the world's busiest, most powerful and widely deployed military force.
The building's style has been described as "early ugly." When it first opened, the Pentagon's cafeteria lines were segregated by race and there were separate bathrooms for blacks and whites.
Thank heavens some things have changed since 1943. But the prominence of the military in the life of our nation has carried over from the climactic years of World War II through the decades of intense US-Soviet military competition to the present period of post-cold war changes.
The Pentagon is of particular importance to the more than eight million Americans who are still part of the military establishment of the United States: The 2.8 million active duty and reserve military personnel, the one million civilians employed by the military, the nearly three million industry workers, and the 1 1/2 million retired military people.
Bill Clinton was born after the Pentagon was built. He did not campaign for president as a critic of the military, but he did promise to try to focus the country's energies on rebuild-ing at home. To help free up more resources for the country's domestic needs, he promised a modest reduction in military spending of $60 billion spread over five years. That's only a tiny bite out of the $1,400,000,000,000 in military spending planned by President Bush from 1993 through 1997.
A campaign promise has now been converted into specific Clinton administration proposals for military spending. The new secretary of defense is Les Aspin, former chairman of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee. He is the architect of the Clinton administration's military policies. Secretary Aspin has acknowledged the centrality of Bill Clinton's $60 billion promise.
Secretary ASPIN (27 March '93, Department of Defense budget briefing):
"Sixty billion was a campaign pledge, so we've got that as a benchmark."
NARRATOR: President Clinton's first military budget calls for $277 billion for military spending in fiscal year 1994, which begins in October 1993. That's only a 5 percent reduction from 1993 spending of $291 billion.
Projected military spending over the five years 1993 through 1997 would total $1,300,000,000,000 under the new president's proposals. Some cost savings beyond $60 billion are anticipated as a result of lowered estimates of future inflation and interest rates and government-wide pay restraints.
In announcing the new military budget, Defense Secretary Aspin pointed to the similarities between the Clinton and Bush military programs.
Secretary ASPIN (1 April '93, before Senate Armed Services Committee):
"We inherited a defense budget -- As all previous administrations do, they inherited a defense budget that we can adjust only really at the margins, and most of the work has been done on it."
NARRATOR: Secretary Aspin also acknowledges that the budget is treading water, with basic changes postponed to a later time.
Secretary ASPIN (27 March '93, DoD budget briefing):
"What we're doing is kind of treading water on two of the big ones, the R&D and the procurement account. Nothing very adventuresome there, pending the outcome of the bottom-up review."
NARRATOR: Because important decisions have been delayed, the new military spending proposal contains money for all of the old weapons programs. There has been some criticism in the Congress of the failure to cancel any weapons.
Senator JAMES EXON (D-NE) (1 April '93, Senate Armed Services Committee):
"Right or wrong, you have decided to tread some water, if you will, on making any decisions on weapons systems. That only makes it tougher.
"I would simply say that, if we're not going to do any-thing about any or all of those programs, it's going to make our task almost impossible as far as the future is concerned."
NARRATOR: Criticism has focussed particularly on the hugely expensive array of new tactical aircraft.
Senator SAM NUNN (D-GA), Chairman, Senate Armed Services Committee (1 April '93, committee hearing):
"I think that one thing that almost everyone that's looked at the budget realizes, and that is we cannot afford to spend the billions of dollars requested this year as a down payment on four tactical fighter programs."
NARRATOR: There is at least $16 billion in the new $277 billion military budget for weapons programs that were initially developed for war with the now-defunct Soviet Union. These cold war weapons include:
...B-2 bomber, $1.7 billion requested for 1994
...C-17 transport plane, $2.6 billion
...Trident II missile, $1.2 billion
...A/F-X Navy attack plane, $399 million
...Centurion submarine, $449 million
...F/A-18 Navy attack plane, $1.4 billion
...F-22 Air Force fighter, $2.3 billion
Secretary Aspin is conducting what he calls a bottom-up review of US defense needs.
Secretary ASPIN (1 April '93, Senate Armed Services Committee):
"The bottom-up review will look at the size and character of the post-cold war forces, services roles and mission, infrastructure, consolidation, defense acquisition process, defense industrial base. Not a small or trivial list of issues, but those, in addition -- we will be looking at in addition to the exact programs."
NARRATOR: The basic reason for a bottom to top review of the US military is that the Soviet Union is gone.
Secretary ASPIN (27 March '93, DoD budget briefing):
"It is almost impossible to over-emphasize the impor-tance of the Soviet Union in defense planning that consumed all of our attention for four, almost five decades. They were at the heart of everything we did."
NARRATOR: Defense Secretary Aspin doesn't think the old Russian danger will come back.
Secretary ASPIN (same briefing):
"There are certain things that have changed that are irreversible here. The Warsaw Pact is gone. There's no way that Humpty-Dumpty's going to be put back together again. The former Soviet Union is broken into lots of republics. There's no way that's going to be pulled back together again. The communist party has lost its ideology. The Russian military is going through some really very, very hard times."
NARRATOR: Senator Sam Nunn, the long-time chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, notes huge cuts in the Russian military, far beyond what is going on with the US military.
Senator NUNN (7 January '93, Senate Armed Services Committee):
"I do think we have to watch very closely what the Russians are doing in their development, but they have cut some-thing like 80 percent of all their military procurement, if you can imagine the scope and magnitude of that."
NARRATOR: The bottom-up review is currently being conducted within the Pentagon with most of its results not expected to show up until next year. Secretary Aspin, however, already seems to have made up his mind about the big conclusion. The big peril that has replaced the Soviet Union is the so-called regional danger.
Secretary ASPIN (27 March '93, DoD budget briefing):
"The thing that really drives the defense budget now is the regional threats. We still have people like Saddam Hussein. We still have bad guys which have military capability. And we need to have the capability in the United States military to be able to deal with those people. There's about a half a dozen of them. You all can think of the same people: Libya, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, etc."
NARRATOR: But the new problems are nowhere near as dangerous to the United States as the old problems. There is no country or set of countries in the Third World which come even close to having the military capability of the former Soviet Union. No Third World country is even as strong as Iraq, so easily defeated by the United States in 1991.
Secretary ASPIN (1 April '93, before Senate Armed Services Committee):
"If you look at the bad guys out there, there is no bad guy, with the possible exception of what happens in Russia, but the most extreme case of the bad guys out there is another Desert Storm. And there isn't anybody out there that is the kind of threat that Iraq was before Desert Storm."
NARRATOR: It seems implausible that Third World countries can be used to justify the continuation of cold war levels of military spending. However, emotional appeals and hyped threats can help persuade Americans that there is a dangerous world out there filled with so-called new dangers for which the American military has the answers.
A genuine bottom-up review is certainly needed, but any review done entirely within the Defense Department will almost certainly end up justifying the great bulk of cold war spending.
The Pentagon is looking as hard as it can to find new excuses to justify keeping spending as high as possible. The change of presidents from Bush to Clinton has not changed this pattern.
President Bush's secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, also worked hard to pump up the alleged regional dangers.
Perhaps it's not surprising that military planners take this route. Americans have become accustomed to fighting wars and preparing to fight wars. We've always fought somewhere else and thus found war relatively painless. Our economy is too dependent on preparing for war. The Congress is accustomed to it. The lobbyists from the military industries like this situation.
Many of the 27 million living veterans are inclined to support a big military. And when presidents go to war they usually find a big boost in popularity, at least initially. Today, with the cold war over, the US military find themselves as busy as ever. Perhaps even busier.
General COLIN POWELL, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1 April '93, before Senate Armed Services Committee):
"There are more entries on my dance card this year than there were last year when I appeared before this committee. Somalia, over 24,000 American troops have been involved there over the last several months. A possibility of action in Bosnia. Our Marines have been stretched rather incredibly with respect to Somalia, Provide Comfort, Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Operation Guantanamo, Southern Florida hurricane relief, Los Angeles' problems, some of the light divisions in the Army have had similar experiences. In the 3 1/2 years I've been chairman, we have dealt with some 21 to 22 different operations."
NARRATOR: Why this explosion of activity around the globe? Secretary Aspin and General Powell attribute it in part to the enormous prestige of the American military.
General POWELL (1 April '93, same hearing):
"The United States armed forces are the most well recognized, most respected and most trusted forces in the world. This is a position not to be abandoned. The world looks to us. The world looks to us for our leadership, looks to us for our military strength."
Secretary ASPIN (1 April '93, same hearing):
"Everytime you turn around somebody's got something in mind about where we're going to use the US forces."
NARRATOR: The US military is busy with so-called humani-tarian interventions and nation-building.
Secretary ASPIN (1 April '93, same hearing):
"You look around now and what they want the United States military to do is to go in there and build a government. We have the United States military in Somalia because there is no government there at all. If we get dragged into Haiti, it's going to be the same thing. There is no government, functioning govern-ment in Haiti. There is no functioning government in Bosnia at the moment. There may not be an functioning government in Russia.
"I mean, what we're talking about here -- And yet the story is that whenever all of these things happen, the first thing that people want to reach to is the United States military."
NARRATOR: But are these appropriate roles for the US military? Should the US military be everywhere around the world, trying to solve all sorts of non-military problems? Some don't think so.
Senator LAUCH FAIRCLOTH (R-NC) 1 April '93, Senate Armed Service Committee hearing):
"In the last 30 years, unless there's something I've missed, we've been a total failure at rebuilding governments with the military and I hope we would get out of that business and stay out of it."
Senator BOB GRAHAM (D-FL) (1 April '93, Senate Armed Services Committee hearing):
"I'm concerned that the situation in which we currently find ourselves that the United States is almost singularly capable of responding to conflicts around the world. In a sense, we should take pride in the fact that we have that capability, but I do not think it's a condition with which we want to live permanently."
NARRATOR: With the United States having no significant military opponents and increased military involvement in many non-military missions, the US military budget is more than ever a jobs bill, with the preservation of weapons programs and military bases the top priority for many members of Congress.
Secretary ASPIN (7 January '93, before Senate Armed Services Committee):
"The current situation in Congress right now is not a split between hawks and doves, between liberals and conserva-tives, between Democrats and Republicans, it's between those people that have military bases and facilities and things in their districts and those that don't."
NARRATOR: The newest catch-word for trying to support military spending is the "defense industrial base." When it's hard find concrete military opponents to justify buying weapons, efforts are made to keep weapons factories open because, someday, a real need may arise again for new weapons. One prominent example is the push to continue building expensive submarines when there is no longer a Soviet enemy.
Senator JOHN McCAIN (R-AZ) (1 April '93, Senate Armed Services Committee hearing):
"I appreciate, by the way, very much your concern about the submarine industrial base and, obviously, it's been a subject that you've been questioned about several times. I hope you'll keep the same concern, and I know you will, for the carrier industrial base, for the mine warfare industrial base, for the tank warfare industrial base, the tactical air industrial base and all of the other industrial bases that are so important to maintain a well rounded military establishment.
"And I'm even impressed by your dedication to a $2.7 billion piece of equipment that, in my view, is useless in order to continue to preserve that submarine industrial base."
NARRATOR: Another reason military spending remains so high is that some people, especially politicians, think that the mili-tary sector should receive preferential treatment. After many years of easy access to dollars, high-paying jobs and big profits in military industry, additional billions of dollars are being spent to provide help to military personnel leaving active duty, military industries which are cutting back, defense workers losing their jobs and communities with base closings.
The extraordinary measures being taken, however well-intentioned, were not extended to past victims of the ebb and flow of economic life. For example, the US oil industry lost 450,000 jobs, 50 percent of the total, in the last decade. Hundreds of thousands of automobile industry workers also lost their jobs.
While reductions in military programs are having signi-ficant impact in some locations, such as California, Connecticut and Virginia, the fact is that cuts in military spending are not that severe. The official Defense Conversion Commission conducted the most comprehensive study of the subject and concluded in December 1992 that, "The present defense reduction is the mildest and most gradual of the past half-century." Defense cutbacks after World War II, Korea and Vietnam were much more severe.
Economic pressures to sell arms to foreign countries, even potential future adversaries, remain high. By spreading arms around the world, we help fuel the regional violence that the Pentagon points at to sell big military budgets.
Another reason that military spending will likely remain higher than necessary is that President Clinton already faces a powerful political offensive against even the modest cuts he has proposed. He may have a hard time implementing his campaign promise to cut military spending from $1.4 trillion to $1.3 trillion over five years. Opponents have been quick to charge the new president with being weak on defense.
According to Senator Bob Dole, Republican leader in the Senate, "The Democrats, under the leadership of President Clinton, want to gut defense."
Senator STROM THURMOND (R-SC) (1 April '93, Senate Armed Services Committee hearing):
"I believe the reductions proposed by the president could cripple our military forces and leave us ill-equipped to cope with likely future crises."
NARRATOR: In large part, to try to avoid being accused of weakening the American military, the Clinton military budget actually increases funding for operations and maintenance, O & M, to keep levels of training and readiness at a cold war pitch. Even though today's military dangers do not require this, political dangers seem to.
Every Democratic president dreads being accused of presiding over a so-called "hollow military." This was the charge that Ronald Reagan used successfully against Jimmy Carter in 1980, even though Carter sharply increased military spending in his last two years in office. Opponents of Bill Clinton seem eager to try to resurrect this technique. The response of Defense Secretary Aspin and President Clinton will likely be to keep money flowing to the military to appease the critics.
President Clinton's relations with the military have not been good. He is clearly on the defensive. Divisive issues, including gays and women in the military, have raised emotions.
Senator McCAIN (1 April '93, Senate Armed Services Committee hearing):
"I'm hearing, frankly, from all over the country from people I served with, from people I haven't that they're very, very disturbed and upset. And I don't think that you should underestimate the impact that this could, in the long term, have on the quality men and women that we're able to recruit and retain in the military. Do not underestimate that."
NARRATOR: Secretary Aspin is already talking about adding $5 billion to military spending. He admits that the bottom-up review could end up raising President Clinton's goal of an active military force of 1.4 million troops.
Senator JOHN GLENN (D-OH) (1 April '93, Senate Armed Services Committee hearing):
"And so is your bottoms-up review -- That's the first question. Is the bottoms-up review going to reconsider the 1.4? Is that not carved in stone?"
Secretary ASPIN (same hearing): "No, no. We're looking at what it means and if it doesn't work, the thing that goes is the 1.4."
Senator GLENN: "Okay. So, we might come out with a higher figure then."
Secretary ASPIN: "Indeed."
NARRATOR: American taxpayers will be footing the bill for a huge, busy military establishment for many years, unless alterna-tives are developed, alternatives like United Nations and other multinational peacekeeping activities.
Senator CARL LEVIN (D-MI) (7 January '93, Senate Armed Services Committee hearing):
"You and I have spoken about multinational enforcement. The United States can't be the policeman of the world, but the world needs a policeman."
NARRATOR: United Nations military operations around the world have expanded in recent years. The US Defense Department is starting to pay more attention to the UN.
Secretary ASPIN (7 January '93, same hearing):
"Now we're going to have to rethink the UN. We have to rethink the use of force and the UN's role in the force, and how do we get military forces to the UN. How do we get money to the UN? All of this needs to be worked out and I think it's going to be a fascinating thing to work on."
General JOHN SHALIKASHVILI, Commander-in-Chief, US European Command (20 April '93, before Senate Armed Services Committee:
"And I am looking to the day when we can do -- start out with seminars and lead to actually training on such poli- tically insensitive things as peacekeeping, for instance."
NARRATOR: Another positive change would be a restoration of the constitutional role of the Congress in exercising its war powers. The relatively easy resort to the use of the armed forces by the president is one of the reasons the US military is so active around the world.
Senator NUNN (20 April '93, Senate Armed Services Committee hearing):
"We're in an era where the United Nations is increas-ingly involved. We're in an era where we have more lead time than we may have had in the cold war, although sometimes that lead time is compacted. And I think the Congress of the United States, pursuant to our constitutional obligations that are clearly spelled out in the declaration of war authority, are going to have to be involved in making these decisions."
NARRATOR: Real change will only come about if the American people become informed and get involved. Some hope that the Pentagon's bottom-up review will ask the American people for their views.
Senator TED KENNEDY (D-MA) (1 April '93, Senate Armed Services Committee hearing):
"And I want to just say, comment just on your latter description about alternatives and giving the responsibility to the Congress, to the American people, as well as to the military, about what they really want to defend and how much they really want to spend. For such a long time, since I've been on the com-mittee, what we've always been told is: 'We need everything. And if you cut back on any single aspect, you're really threatening our national security.'
"And I think what is enormously constructive is to have you and General Powell lay out and say, 'Okay,' to the American people and to the Congress, 'this is what you can do for this,' and then to let the decision be made by the Congress and the American people, and that's really a very fundamental and different attitude."
NARRATOR: The United States stands for much more than man-kind's number one military power.
General POWELL (12 May '93, Pentagon 50th Anniversary):
"...a symbol of the breathtaking scope of America's vision for the future."
NARRATOR: Is this the image we want to present to the rest of the world? Where do we want
our country and our world to be 50 years from now?
Admiral LaROCQUE: Well, in the past 50 years, the life of the Pentagon, the United States has been forced to build a huge military establishment at great cost to the nation. We've become accustomed in the past 50 years to being at war, to building weapons. We've been accustomed to denying ourselves many of the things that we need in this country in order to buy the weapons which we felt we needed.
Now, however, we're reaching a new point in the American story. We no longer need to continue to build weapons because we no longer have an enemy as we had in the past 50 years. But we seem unwilling, and perhaps incapable of stopping the production of weapons. We seem unwilling, or perhaps incapable of reducing our military forces to suit the situation that is now before us. We can have a very bright future for this nation. But if we are going to have that future, it's going to take a fundamental change.
We today are spending money we don't have to buy weapons we don't need, to fight a foe we cannot even identify. If we're going to make a bright and wonderful future for the United States and move out of this morass of the cold war, it's going to take a strong, firm resolve on the part of Americans to bring about a change, a change which the new administration promised, but so far has not yet fulfilled.
Until next time, for "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I'm Gene LaRocque.
[End of broadcast.]
(C) Copyright 1993, Center for Defense Information. All Rights Reserved.