Rear Admiral Gene LaRocque (USN, Ret.)
Director, Center for Defense Information
HOST:
Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll, Jr. (USN, Ret.),
Director, Center for Defense Information
DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH:
David T. Johnson
DIRECTOR of TELEVISION:
Mark Sugg
SENIOR PRODUCER & NARRATOR:
Ira Shorr
PRODUCERS:
Marguerite Arnold
Glenn Baker
Abraham Dubb
Daniel Sagalyn
Stephen Sapienza
PRINCIPAL ANALYST & SCRIPTWRITER:
Glenn Baker
SEGMENT PRODUCER:
Glenn Baker
VIDEO GRAPHICS:
Adam Luther
ORIGINATION:
Washington, D.C.
PROGRAM NO.:
732
INITIAL BROADCAST:
24 April 1994
CONDITION OF USE:
Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" (Center for Defense Information).
National Commission for Economic Conversion and Disarmament
Rep. ELIZABETH FURSE (D-OR)
House Armed Services Committee
Senator TOM HARKIN (D-IA)
Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense
MICHAEL KLARE
Hampshire College
ANN MARKUSEN
Rutgers University
Rep. IKE SKELTON (D-MO)
House Military Forces & Personnel Subcommittee Chairman
Rep. JOHN SPRATT (D-SC)
House Armed Services Committee
Rep. HENRY HYDE (R-IL): "Let's give..."
CONGRESSMAN: "...that they don't have just as much of an interest in their grandchildren and their children living as we do. That's the real thing that's driving this."
Rep. HYDE: "The gentleman belongs to the trusting school of arms control and, I'm sorry, I
don't."
NARRATOR: The debate over our nation's security has long been fertile ground for the raising of myths. During the Cold War, we were told there was a "bomber gap," a "missile gap," and then, "a window of vulnerability." All three were used to pump up military spending. We were even told it was possible to win a nuclear war. All these myths help perpetuate a costly arms race.
Today, the debate over security is guided by a new set of myths, which, unchallenged, may prove just as costly.
["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]
Admiral EUGENE CARROLL: Welcome once again to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR."
Many people today are saying the world is a more violent, a more dangerous place than it was even at the height of the Cold War. Is this a realistic appraisal? Is this true that we are facing tremendous threats and we must arm ourselves?
Today, we're going to look at the reality of threat in the world today and determine whether our
military programs are based upon myth or reality.
President BILL CLINTON (State of the Union Message, 1994):
"The budget I send to Congress draws the line against further defense cuts. We must not cut defense further."
General SHALIKASHVILI, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff (congressional testimony):
"Could we cut deeper? My answer is no."
NARRATOR: Has the military budget been cut as far as it can be? There are many in Congress who think it's been cut too far.
Rep. IKE SKELTON (D-MO): So many areas have been cut too far.
NARRATOR: Nine-term Representative Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Military Forces and Personnel Subcommittee, was one of several members of Congress who went to the president to warn against further cuts.
Rep. SKELTON: If there's anything that is true about inter-national relations and military conflicts, it's expect the unexpected. Those who are prepared do well.
Rep. JOHN SPRATT (D-SC): We're about as low as we want to go. We could obviously go lower, but we would do so at our peril.
NARRATOR: Representative John Spratt, now in his sixth term in the House, is a key player on the Armed Services Committee.
Rep. SPRATT: We are cutting things to the bone and we're running the risk that we will hollow the force out a bit.
NARRATOR: The mass media, echoing the conventional wisdom in Washington, has reported as a matter of fact that military spending has been cut drastically. But spending has come down only in comparison with the massive military budgets of the mid-80s.
Senator TOM HARKIN (D-IA): There's just a popular miscon-ception out there, and that is that we're cutting the military to the bone, that we can't afford to cut it any longer.
NARRATOR: Senator Tom Harkin, member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, has served in Congress for two decades.
Senator HARKIN: What we've done so far is we have basically stopped the worst abuses of the Reagan era. But that's just taking the huge growth that Reagan put in and saying, no, we're not going to have that huge growth any longer.
NARRATOR: Under President Reagan, military spending grew by 50 percent in real terms, unprecedented growth in a peacetime period. Compared to its peak in 1989, military spending has come down. But we are still spending more on the military today than we spent on average throughout the Cold War, when we confronted the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. Even including the effects of infla-tion, next year's proposed $271 billion in military spending is 13 percent higher than what we spent in 1980, a year of great Cold War tension following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Rep. ELIZABETH FURSE (D-OR): I think there's a great deal of work we can do cutting military spending even further. I think we can very easily get down in four or five years to 150 billion.
NARRATOR: Representative Elizabeth Furse is a freshman member of the House Armed Services Committee.
Rep. FURSE: If you have big district that depends on military spending, you get up on the House floor and you say -- you don't say, "Gee, I want more money for my district." You say, "Hollow force," you know, "We're going to weaken America's..." But, in fact, we are weakening America by draining the money out of our economy that should be spent on things that make us secure.
NARRATOR: In the past, military spending was justified on the basis of the perceived strength of the Soviet Union and its allies. But now...
LES ASPIN, then-Secretary of Defense (27 March '93):
"The Warsaw Pact is gone. No way that Humpty-Dumpty's going to be put back together again. The former Soviet Union has broken into lots of republics. There's no way that's going to be pulled back together again."
NARRATOR: Yet today, five years after the end of the Cold War, the United States still spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined. And the nations with the largest military budgets -- France, Germany, Japan, Britain and Russia -- are all either our allies or want to be.
GREG BISCHAK: I think the United States could easily cut $100 billion out of the US defense budget and still maintain its valid security requirements.
NARRATOR: Greg Bischak is executive director of the National Commission for Economic Conversion and Disarmament and a widely published defense economist.
Mr. BISCHAK: This is clearly an occasion when we have to
begin examining what the real threats to the United States are and how we can maintain our security in a way that doesn't depend on more and more US military capabilities.
NARRATOR: WIth the end of the Cold War, there was much talk of a "peace dividend," meaning savings from reductions in military spending that would be returned to other sectors of the economy.
INTERVIEWER: What happened to the peace dividend?
Rep. SKELTON: Oh, we got a peace dividend. We didn't have to fight the Soviet Union.
Mr. BISCHAK: The peace dividend's been gobbled up by the huge debt that America incurred during the Cold War. The citizenry of America must remember that half of that debt is attributable to the military spending incurred during the Cold War.
Rep. SPRATT: In our particular case, we bought most of what we've got on our national credit card. We charged it up to the deficit between 1981 and 1988, when the budget finally flattened out. We didn't really levy the taxes to pay for those defense increases. Nevertheless, we actually cut taxes during that period. So, consequently, there is no dividend.
NARRATOR: Another piece of current conventional wisdom holds that we must continue to produce complex weapons systems in order to preserve our ability to build them should the need for them arise in the future.
Rep. SKELTON: The industrial base is not something that you can pick back up. For instance, a B-2 bomber, which is complex, which is very difficult to make; should that line be shut down and become cold? To need it again, you have to start all over again, and not just retool, but find subcontractors and contrac-tors, very difficult to do. That's why we have to keep our industrial base as best we can through the next several years.
INTERVIEWER: And, in essence, at times build weapons we don't need.
Rep. SKELTON: You don't need today, don't need tomorrow, but that's the purpose of a military. It's an insurance policy.
NARRATOR: But does it really make sense to continue to build enormously expensive weapons, such as the Seawolf attack submarine, when the threat they were designed to counter no longer exists?
The Pentagon was supposed to re-evaluate its needs in the much heralded Bottom-Up Review. Yet the current budget is chock full of questionable expenditures like the Seawolf. For example, yet another nuclear aircraft carrier is planned at a cost of $4.5 billion, primarily to maintain the capacity to build more of them, rather than to counter any immediate threat.
Mr. BISCHAK: Producing more aircraft carriers or Seawolf submarines, which after all were oriented toward meeting the Soviet threat, seems a tremendous waste give the budget constraints the nation faces. We're talking about spending several billion dollars this year on a Seawolf submarine and an aircraft carrier combined. It's illusionary that we're going to save jobs and an industrial base by pursuing this policy.
In fact, if we want to retain our shipbuilding industry, we have to get serious about capturing our market share in the commercial shipbuilding market to keep these people employed.
NARRATOR: Other big ticket items originally designed to fight the Soviet Union still crowd the military budget: the F-22 fighter, the B-2 bomber, and the Milstar satellite system. These weapons are dinosaurs of a bygone era, devised for yesterday's war scenarios. In the most likely conflicts of the near future -- ethnic uprisings and regional clashes -- these costly Cold War relics will be of little utility.
Rep. FURSE: We are trying to design a defense establishment from ten years ago's needs. What we have to do is we have to stop, sit down. Not the Bottom-Up Review, but a real look at what is America's military to look like. How can we design a military that really meets our needs? I think we should spend every penny we need to spend on a strong military, but not one penny more.
President GEORGE BUSH (28 Jan. '92, State of the Union Message):
"By the grace of God, America won the Cold War."
Secretary ASPIN (congressional testimony):
"The Cold War started on their watch. It ended on ours, on our terms. We won."
NARRATOR: In 1989 the Berlin Wall came down. Shortly there-after, the Soviet Union crumpled. The Cold War was over and the United States was quickly declared the winner. No one disputes that the Soviets lost, but did we really win the Cold War?
ANN MARKUSEN: I think both the US and the Soviet Union lost the Cold War.
NARRATOR: Professor Ann Markusen teaches at Rutgers Univer-sity and co-authored Dismantling the Cold War Economy.
Prof. MARKUSEN: That Cold War arms race redirected resources in both societies that would have gone for other things. And it seems clear to us to see the way in which that crippled the Soviet economy. I would argue that that also has crippled the American economy and that's one reason we're in such great trouble today, compared to Germany or Japan, for instance.
Mr. BISCHAK: Perhaps the only winners of the Cold War were the military contractors who garnered excess profits in the party.
Rep. SPRATT: I take nothing away from what we achieved in maintaining the peace throughout the Cold War years by having superior strength, but I don't think that's what ultimately brought down the Soviet Union. I think it failed from within rather due to the threat from without.
NARRATOR: Throughout the half-century of the Cold War, security was defined entirely in terms of military strength: more and better nuclear weapons, ships, tanks, missiles and warplanes. The prevailing myth was that more weapons meant more security.
Today, it is easy to see the shortcomings of that belief. We poured the equivalent of $12 trillion into the military -- that's a 12 followed by 12 zeros -- over the course of the Cold War, much of it money that otherwise might have gone to more productive uses in our society.
Mr. BISCHAK: To give people an idea the size and magnitude of that, that exceeds the value of all the fixed assets that are human-made on the face of the United States, less the military equipment that we bought.
NARRATOR: Signs of our national insecurity are ever-present. We see widespread poverty in our cities, an economy that has grown so dependent on military spending that it is struggling to adjust now that our enemy has disappeared, a massive federal debt, and pollution from bomb factories and careless military practices that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to clean up, leaving permanent environmental scars in many communities.
Today, we are beginning to realize that security is measured in ways other than the size of our military.
Rep. FURSE: Real national security, right now for everyday people, means healthy streets, children who go to school well-fed and are well-educated so they can meet our future's need. We need to have community policing, so that instead of playing top cop around the world, we have well-trained cops on our own streets. That's what national security is about.
WARREN CHRISTOPHER, Secretary of State (congressional testimony):
"The world has changed and we face a paradox. The collapse of the Soviet Union enables us to reduce our Cold War military forces, but it also leaves American forces as the main ballast in an unstable and dangerous world."
Secretary ASPIN (Pentagon press briefing):
"What we really have now is a wholly different scale, but in a lot of ways a more difficult challenge, a more unpre-dictable challenge."
WILLIAM PERRY, Secretary of Defense (congressional testimony):
"This is a very dangerous world."
NARRATOR: To listen to many policymakers, the end of the Cold War leaves the United States facing an even more dangerous and hostile world. But is the world really a more dangerous place today than it was during the Cold War? During that period, the specter of nuclear Armageddon hung over us every day.
Rep. SKELTON: The Soviet Union, of course, was a massive superpower than could have engaged us in World War III, which would have, as you know, been a horror, at best. The world is different. We have threats, of course, with North Korea, which is a very real threat today. Downstream, you have Iran, Iraq, other countries that are even off the screen today; you just don't know.
Rep. FURSE: We are saying, oh, it's a more dangerous world. But, in fact, during the Cold War, there were all these ethnic conflicts going on; we just didn't focus on them. They weren't important to us. We already had our good guys and bad guys.
NARRATOR: Today, 44,000 nuclear weapons still exist and new nations are striving to join the nuclear club. But the threat of global nuclear annihilation has greatly receded since the end of the Cold War and regional confrontations around the world have taken center stage.
Rep. SPRATT: I think we'll learn from bitter experience about which of these engagements we want to undertake and which we don't want to undertake. The world will be a more complicated place, but it's not one that we want to withdraw from.
NARRATOR: It may provide small comfort, but ten years ago, there were about 40 conflicts taking place around the world; whereas, today there are about 25. But in any case, not one of these conflicts represents a military danger to the United States. We now have a priceless opportunity to adjust our military structure to this new reality.
Consider this stark fact: Less than one-fifth of our military spending goes toward defense of the United States. The rest goes toward protecting foreign countries. Many Americans now feel that our allies in Europe and Asia are capable of paying for their own defense.
And slowly, we are coming to realize that instability around the world is not going to be resolved or prevented by military force.
Rep. FURSE: You can't keep the world secure by just hovering over it with weaponry. You only keep the world secure by establishing secure institutions and secure people. What we need to do is get our thinking around to saying how do we prevent wars from happening. We're not doing that yet.
NARRATOR: To that end, the United States can reduce its military role around the world by helping the United Nations build its peacekeeping abilities. The United States can also contribute to making the world a more stable place by stemming the flow of modern weaponry into developing countries.
Prof. MARKUSEN: A great deal of our contemporary security problems are associated with arms exports and the proliferation of arms in the world, which the United States is the single dominant supplier and perpetrator of that arms race.
NARRATOR: Many of the policymakers who are calling the world a more dangerous place ignore the fact that the United States is the world's biggest arms salesman. By selling weapons around the globe, often to authoritarian governments, the US is contributing to the potential for future conflicts, conflicts that could well involve the United States.
General COLIN POWELL, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1989-1993 (Pentagon press briefing):
"This is a fundamental underlying principle of Presi-dent Clinton and Secretary Aspin, of the Joint Chiefs of Staff strategy statement for the Bottom-Up Review, being able to deal with two major regional contingencies or conflicts near simultaneously."
General SHALIKASHVILI, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff (congressional testimony):
"We need to maintain the ability to respond to two nearly simultaneous major regional contingencies."
NARRATOR: Do we really need, as the Pentagon claims, the capability to fight and win two major regional wars nearly simultaneously without the help of allies?
Rep. SPRATT: I think it's wise to say we want a force that is keyed to being able to fight two regional conflicts. One basic reason is that if we have a major regional contingency to which we have to respond -- the Persian Gulf, Korea, wherever it might be -- then some other bully, like a Saddam Hussein or Kim Il Sung, while we are otherwise engaged in another region, unless we have the capacity to take him on at that time, then he might see this as his opportunity to become assertive.
NARRATOR: However, at no time in the past 50 years was the United States confronted with having two fight two wars at the same time, despite our preoccupation with the enormous military capability of the Soviet Union.
MICHAEL KLARE: My view is if you look at the scenario closely, there's no reality to it whatsoever.
NARRATOR: Professor Michael Klare directs the Peace and World Security Studies program at Hampshire College and is a noted authority on Third World conflict.
Prof. KLARE: It has several tests. One is that our adversary will be a major regional power with a large military. They give a figure of half-a-million to three-quarters of a million troops, with large numbers of tanks and aircraft and other modern weapons. And secondly, that they will be involved in a conflict against a small, weak power allied to the United States that will need our assistance. That there will be two of those. But if you look around the world, you can't find one case where that's so.
There are one or two countries, Syria and North Korea, perhaps, that pass the first test; they have a large military and a lot of equipment. But their most likely adversaries -- Israel, in one case; South Korea, in the other case -- are not Kuwait. These are very powerful, potent states that probably have enough military to defeat the hypothetical aggressor without American help.
Rep. SPRATT: We do have to factor in our allies and I don't think we've adequately accounted for the collective security apparatus in this post-Cold War world. That's something we've got to work on.
NARRATOR: The war with Iraq in 1991, which at the time had the world's fourth largest army, involved large scale deployment of heavy armor and high-tech weaponry. In the Defense Depart-ment's Bottom-Up Review, the Iraq war thus became a convenient model for planning future wars. Many defense analysts feel, however, that future conflicts are unlikely to resemble the Gulf War.
Prof. KLARE: I think it's very doubtful that we're going to find enemies that fit that model anywhere in the world. I think it's much more likely that we'll see something more like Bosnia, where it drags on, and drags on.
NARRATOR: A potential war on the Korean Peninsula is the other regional conflict on which the Pentagon bases its planning. North Korea has recently been elevated to the status of top international bad guy because of its suspected nuclear weapons program and its resistance to nuclear inspections.
Prof. KLARE: They might have enough nuclear material possibly for one weapon, conceivably for two, but that's highly unlikely for technical reasons. Nobody is certain that they have a deliverable weapon, however. They may have plutonium; it's not clear that they've developed a nuclear weapon. And if they did, it would be one weapon, and I can't imagine them using it for anything except deterrence, to prevent nuclear strikes against them. It wouldn't do them any good to use one weapon in war.
NARRATOR: Should a conflict break out in the Korean Peninsula, South Korea, with twice the population and twelve times the economic strength of the North, has the capability to take care of itself. In addition, North Korea's neighbors possess more than enough military power to deal with any threat they might perceive from North Korea.
Prof. KLARE: The two-war scenario is the answer to the Pentagon's problem at the end of the Cold War. At the end of the Cold War, the only enemy that we've had for 40 years, the Soviet Union, ceased to exist, for all practical purposes, and we had built a very special kind of military. We had built a capital-intensive, high-tech, very sophisticated military and a very large military intended to fight mid-intensity and high-intensity wars on a global basis.
NARRATOR: The kinds of conflicts that are most likely in the post-Cold War era -- ethnic conflicts, insurgencies, and peacekeeping operations -- don't require the kind of military that the United States built to fight the Soviet Union.
Rep. FURSE: We have just asked for a report on the 15 new weapons systems the Pentagon wants to build. And what we asked was -- we asked the report to focus on Bosnia. Would those 15 new weapons, which we're going to build -- would those 15 new weapons have worked in Bosnia? And we find that only four of those 15 weapons systems would be useful at all and they are the four least expensive ones.
NARRATOR: One effect of our strategy to fight two wars without allies is that it will perpetuate other nations' depen-dence on the so-called "American defense umbrella."
General POWELL, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1 April '93, congressional testimony):
"The world looks to us for our leadership, looks to us for our military strength. We must provide that strength. We must have it available. We can do that, we will do it."
NARRATOR: As long as the United States continues to dispense military welfare around the world, other countries will have no incentive to take responsibility for their own security. And there is another danger in the two-war strategy:
Prof. KLARE: I believe that the thinking behind the Bottom-Up Review, that we need to be prepared forever, indefinitely into the future to fight rising Third World powers like Iraq, and Iran, and Libya and Syria, is a very dangerous policy because I think it will militarize our response to these countries. And instead of seeking a diplomatic modus operandi with them, we're going to be more inclined to seize on what appear to be provoca-tions and jump to a military response. I'm very worried that that's going to happen, particularly in the Korean Peninsula, but also in the Persian Gulf, and that we could find ourselves again and again trapped in very dangerous and costly wars.
NARRATOR: As we have seen, much of the conventional wisdom on military issues is based on questionable assumptions. So, who makes these assumptions and how do they take hold in Washington?
Rep. FURSE: If you run an advertising agency and you had unlimited money and 20 years to play this theme -- "The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming. Oh, we're in danger. Oh, we have to more weapons" -- If you had had that opportunity, you could sell anyone anything.
Rep. SPRATT: The problem you find in Congress is that we don't always have the confidence or expertise to say definitely, decisively, until it gets really bad and there's not much debate left over the issue, that this or that system won't do and, therefore, you have to buy something else.
NARRATOR: By its very nature, a bureaucracy will do every-thing it can to maintain its power and resources. The Pentagon is the largest bureaucracy in the world. They have a vested interest in getting across their point of view. They're also backed up by defense contractors, who stand to make a lot of money with military weaponry, and by congressional representatives who have jobs in their districts that are dependent on military contracts. That's a lot of power pushing a point of view and, very often, the president and the media are swept up in that power.
Senator HARKIN: It gains a lot of momentum when the presi-dent of the United States stands before Congress in his State of the Union and says we won't cut the military any further. Well, that sends a popular misconception out there that we're really cutting a lot of military.
Prof. MARKUSEN: One of the casualties of the Cold War was the notion of a broader based citizenry that would be educated about and have representatives who participated in decisionmaking about what the Pentagon ought to do. There's no belief that the average citizen, for instance, might have a view of what security is and might be able to be represented in that process.
NARRATOR: As a nation of taxpayers, a myth accepted is a bill paid. As citizens of the world's
greatest democracy, the American people owe it to themselves to challenge the conven-tional
wisdom of the military establishment and let their elected officials know where their true security
lies.
Admiral CARROLL: We've heard from some very well informed people today about America's true security requirements. In this transition period following the Cold War, some want to go on spending at Cold War levels in order to prepare the United States to fight two wars anyplace in the world at the same time. Others think that our security requirements at home should be the focus, that we should be taking care of our communities and our own needs.
This is a very important public issue and requires a thoughtful debate and that debate must be based upon facts, not myths.
Until the next time, for "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I'm Admiral Eugene Carroll.
[Over credits, Cold War-era film clips]
NARRATOR: "In the background was the growing struggle between two great powers to shape the postwar world. Soviet Russia was expansively stabbing westward, knifing into nations left empty by war. On orders from the Kremlin, Russia had launched one of history's most drastic political, moral and economic wars, a Cold War. The United States was obliged to help Europe safeguard its traditional freedoms and the independence of its nation."
NARRATOR: "...stop the imperialism as a threat to the peace of the world."
NARRATOR: "If the communist bloc does attack, our radar sites and observers will sound the
alert."
[End of broadcast.]
(C) Copyright 1994. Center for Defense Information. All Rights Reserved.