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:
Ira Shorr
SEGMENT PRODUCER:
Stephen Sapienza
VIDEO GRAPHICS:
Adam Luther
ORIGINATION:
Washington, D.C.
PROGRAM NO.:
743
INITIAL BROADCAST:
17 July 1994
CONDITION OF USE:
Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" (Center for Defense Information).
Today, "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" brings you "A Conversation with Ron Dellums."
["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]
Admiral EUGENE CARROLL, Jr.: Welcome once again to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR."
Today you will enjoy a rare opportunity to see America's defense programs and policies through the eyes of an insider, a consummate insider. Our guest today is a veteran of 21 years' service on the House Armed Services Committee and today, from his vantage point as chairman of that powerful group, he will share with us insights that can come from only one man, Congressman Ron Dellums.
IRA SHORR: For almost a quarter of a century, Ron Dellums has served his country in the halls of Congress. Elected to the House of Representatives in 1970 to representative a largely working class district in Oakland, California, Dellums has been a consistent advocate for arms reductions, peaceful resolution to international conflicts, and investments in domestic programs to enhance the quality of life of America's less fortunate.
Congressman Dellums entered Congress on the winds of protest that swirled around the Vietnam War. Moving from protest to policy, in 1973, he became the first African American to be appointed to the House Armed Services Committee. Congressman Dellums' tenure on Armed Services often saw him as a lonely voice of opposition to the strongly pro-defense members who tradition-ally dominated the work of that committee.
In December of 1992, Ron Dellums was elected to the powerful position of chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, a new responsibility that years ago could not have been imaged.
We recently sat down with Congressman Dellums to get his assessment of how well the military was adapting to the post-Cold War world and to find out more about this singular American statesman.
Mr. SHORR: I wanted to start off and have you talk a little bit about the early experiences that helped shape your life. I understand that your uncle was a leader in the Sleeping Car Porters Union and you had a close relationship with him.
Rep. RON DELLUMS: Yes.
Mr. SHORR: What impact did he have on your political evolution, your political thinking, your career, your relation-ship with him?
Rep. DELLUMS: Well, you know, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was the first effort to organize the black worker in America. It became the first black trade union movement in the United States , which literally changed the perception of the black worker in America. And oftentimes, businesses would exploit the oppression of blacks coming from the South to use them for the purposes of breaking strikes. And suddenly, here this marvelous group of courageous young men and women who chose to organize a union and set against all odds.
Well, C.L. was one of them.
Mr. SHORR: He was your uncle.
Rep. DELLUMS: My uncle. My father's older brother. C.L. was a larger than life person in my world. I grew up with courageous trade union stories, civil rights efforts. His message to me was to further my education. Anything I needed to make sure that I stayed in school, he made sure that that was there.
His one piece of advice to me was never go into public life to be the elected official, be the voice of influence behind the scenes. So, much later in life, before he died, he said to me "that piece of advice I'm happy you didn't take, because I'm proud of you as a public servant."
What shaped my politics regarding war and peace was Martin Luther King, the most extraordinary person that I ever heard. And when he began to talk about the issues of war and peace with such eloquence and such passion, I was drawn to that like a magnet. I remember he came to the University of California in the aftermath of having given what we now know was a historic speech at the Riverside Church in New York.
Mr. SHORR: Against the Vietnam War.
Rep. DELLUMS: Incredible speech, where he took that stance. And at the end of that speech, if you recall, he was attacked by leaders, both black and white. Whites attacked him; you know, the audacity of a black man to challenge the foreign policy calculations of this country. Blacks attacked him because they thought his advocacy of peace would, in some way, detract from the civil rights movement. And his response was, "I have no way of segregating my moral concerns."
Well, at any rate, he came to the University of California in the aftermath of that speech, and I was just one person way in the back of about 25-, 30,000 people, Sproul Hall, University of California, Berkeley, people waiting with rapt attention to hear this man answer his critics. And he went to the podium and gave this most incredible speech. And people were thunderous in their applause. And I remember just tears came streaming down because I felt this tremendous sense of pride that this brother was able to command the respect of all these people, and did it with such courage and such dignity that I knew that what he was about was something that I also needed to be about.
Mr. SHORR: And, indeed, when you ran for Congress in 1970, much of the motivation of for you at that time was opposition to the Vietnam War?
Rep. DELLUMS: Exactly. And I took the Vietnam War on very strongly. And a number of people said to me, well, you know, the black community's not interested in the Vietnam War. And my response was that black people in America, historically, carried the burden of racial and economic oppression, they do not have to carry the burden of ignorance. And to be in public life, you have to be part of the educative process and my job is to go out there and help people understand the connection between waging war and spending billions of dollars on military apparati that detracted from the priorities of this country.
Mr. SHORR: Now when you were elected in 1970, I think I remember reading Spiro Agnew at that time refer you to as a radical extremist.
Rep. DELLUMS: Right.
Mr. SHORR: Do you remember your feelings the first time you stepped into the halls of Congress? Here you were, an outsider who had somehow wound up on the inside. What kind of feelings did that bring out for you at that time?
Rep. DELLUMS: When I was elected, if you recall, the phrase that went around the country was "Afro-topped, bell-bottomed, radical black man from Berkeley wins election." So, when I walked in the door, that mantle was placed upon my shoulders and, for years, I had to carry that mantle of being the radical black dude from Berkeley.
Mr. SHORR: Even though that's not who you were, in the sense of how they were seeing you.
Rep. DELLUMS: They saw me as a caricature. And they saw Berkeley as "Bizerkeley," so whoever represented that area had to at best be flaky. They saw the Bay area as this hotbed of left wing communist thought. Therefore, Ron Dellums, at a bare minimum, had to be a "commie pinko extremist." And when I walked into these chambers, in the context of the Vietnam War, against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, I was talking about something very different.
So, here comes this black guy from the Bay area talking about peace, feminism, challenging racism, challenging the priorities of the country and talking about preserving the fragile nature of our ecological system, people looked at me as if I was a freak. And in looking back, I think the only crime that we committed was that we were 20 years ahead of everybody else.
Mr. SHORR: Moving on from those years, another war that you fought against was the Cold War for many years. You have been quoted as saying that the Cold War "was driven by madness on both sides." What did you mean by that?
Rep. DELLUMS: As we began to escalate as a result of our preoccupation with seeing the Soviet threat and the communist menace, they also began to respond. And one could argue whether that was a defensive response or a reaction, or whatever; at any rate, in real terms, they responded. Which then required us to say, 'see what they're doing, we need to go another step.'
So, we continued to escalate over the years, to the point where we ended up spending in excess of $300 billion per year, at a time when the social problems of this country were multiplying and the social fabric of this country coming apart. We had homelessness, and hopelessness, and lack of opportunity, lack of housing, poverty, hunger, disease. We paid a very heavy price in this country for that because we neglected the issues, we neglected the problems, and we've built an incredible machine and we brought forward weapons that, to this day, pose a major
threat to the survival of human life on this planet with nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction. So, I saw that as madness.
Mr. SHORR: We move now into the post-Cold War era. The military was asked to articulate a vision of the post-Cold War. They came out with a document, their attempt to articulate that vision. They called it a Bottom-up Review. How would you define what the Bottom-up Review is for a public that may be totally unfamiliar with that document or its purpose? What is the Bottom-up Review to you?
Rep. DELLUMS: First of all, the Bottom-up Review was an effort on the part of the military to look at the post-Cold War world and to determine to the best of their ability what they perceived as the threats in the immediate and in the long term future and develop -- shape a force, a weapons procurement strategy that would meet those needs.
A lot of work went into that and I don't diminish that effort. But I perceive the Bottom-up Review to be less a vision of where we're headed into the 21st Century than it was a cautious first step away from the Cold War. Because it was a cautious first step, I think going in the direction of down-sizing, appropriate, downsizing of force, downsizing of infra-structure, etc., all those are very good things. But again, they ended up saying the threat in the future is such that we need to be able to fight two major regional contingencies virtually simultaneously. That means that we could, from their thinking, potentially fight a war in the Persian Gulf, fight a war on the Korean Peninsula almost simultaneously.
Mr. SHORR: And without the help of allies.
Rep. DELLUMS: Without the help of allies, which is a very important point. Two responses to that:
Number one, this was a requirement more stringent that the Bush administration, who said that we should be able to fight one major regional contingency and perhaps effectively defend ourselves someplace else. So, this was an even more stringent requirement, developing an even larger force.
Secondly, in a world that clearly, to the most casual observer, is becoming much more multinational, with greater cooperation in and among the family of nations, to talk about going it alone without any allies is counter-intuitive and it also runs counter to what I believe to be the public opinion of the American people. Which is, if we're going to go out there, for whatever purpose, let's go on a multinational basis.
Mr. SHORR: Tom Harkin was on the floor of the Senate recently and noted that it's ironic, from his perspective, that the military is requesting in 1995 $4 billion more than the military budget was in 1980, when the Soviet Union was intact, when the Warsaw Pact was intact, when the Cold War was raging. And he asked how can we justify a military budget in 1995
$4 billion more than the military budget in 1980?
Rep. DELLUMS: I don't think that you can justify it. Put it another way. We are at this very moment, in the context of the post-Cold War, spending more money on our military budget than all of our potential allies lumped together. That's extra- ordinary. When you consider at the height of the Cold War, when we were spending roughly $300 billion a year, we were contemplat-ing fighting a war with the Soviet Union or fighting a protracted land war in Europe with the Warsaw Pact. Between 50 and 70 percent of our annual allocation was designed to prepare for those two scenarios. Simple arithmetic will show you that in a $300 billion military budget, we were spending between $150- and $210 billion -- billion dollars -- per year to fight two enemies that magically disappeared.
And I'm saying that the Bottom-up Review justifies and rationalizes a force that is much too large, that at some point down the road we cannot afford. It doesn't address the realities of the world that I think we're going to be dealing with.
Mr. SHORR: As far as the threats that are out there and other problems?
Rep. DELLUMS: Yes. Yes. Because I see the scenarios of the future, the Bosnias, the Somalias, the Haitis, and the Rwandas of the world. I think peacekeeping and peacemaking and peace enforcement are the new realities. As Colin Powell said, he wanted to be the biggest bully on the block. Well, we are. We're the last peg standing. We are the superpower.
I believe that as the only standing superpower, we have two responsibilities to the rest of the world:
Number one, to walk gently in the world. Because when you have such awesome capacity to destroy, you need to walk with great caution and great care. I think that means diplomacy, political solutions, dialogue.
And secondly, to show the world that there are alterna-tive ways to engage in conflict resolution. If the threats out there are ethnic conflicts, tribal conflicts, and clan conflicts, border disputes, hunger, and poverty and disease, the question then is do you solve those problems by creating a huge military force capability or do you solve those problems by realizing that, on an increasing basis, the problems of the world don't lend themselves to a military solution. Peacekeeping, peace-making, peace enforcement are important factors, but waging war doesn't make sense.
Mr. SHORR: What kind of programs do you put your resources into that you say could resolve conflicts more ably than the use of guns and weapons?
Rep. DELLUMS: We learn more about what is involved in peacekeeping, what's involved in peacemaking, what's involved in peace enforcement. These are new words, part of our -- a new part of our lexicons, and we've got to define these terms. I would suggest to you that these are not ingrained ideas in the American national psyche at this point, but they need to be.
Mr. SHORR: And one concrete sign of support for those new directions might be building up the UN capacity for peacekeeping, for example, which there does seem to be some opposition to in Congress in this transition time. There's some hesitancy on the part of many in Congress to say the United States will spend tax dollars to build up the UN's peacekeeping abilities; we have to keep our tax dollars with our own military.
Rep. DELLUMS: Right. Because the extent to which you build up multinational institutions like the UN, you decrease the need for unilateral buildup and unilateral expenditures, which takes pressure off. The extent to which you continue to be critical of multinational involvement, the United Nations, other multi-national institutions is the extent to which you rationalize going it alone, unilateral effort. So, you have to build bigger forces, buy more weapons.
The extent to which you view the world in multinational terms, you begin to see the UN as a place where you can come together as allies to try to solve problems, you diminish the need for the United States to feel the need, as they do now in the Bottom-up Review, to go it alone into regional conflicts. And the extent to which we embrace multilateralism, multi-nationalism is the extent to which we diminish the pressure for the need for us to have such a large unilateral capability in the world, the police officer of the world, as it were.
Mr. SHORR: I think I saw a figure that said for every billion dollars in UN peacekeeping spending, we spend trillion dollars -- the world spends a trillion dollars on military spending. The proportion is so much more on the side of national military budgets than it is on the side of multinational peace-keeping efforts.
Rep. DELLUMS: That's powerful imagery. And then if you take the next step, if that's in fact the case, look at the extraordinary resources that get freed to engage in conversion, as I see. I see conversion at two levels. First, the fiscal conversion, as you move away from heavy reliance on military expenditures to prop up your economy to non-military expendi-tures, so that you move away from the technology that endangers life to the technology that enhances the quality of life.
And I believe that a society that commits itself to solve social problems simultaneously generates employment, as well. So that first big conversion is converting from big military expenditures to big non-military expenditures.
Mr. SHORR: So, you create jobs with those kind of federal investments.
Rep. DELLUMS: You address the mass transit problem in this country, so that you move away from pollution and what have you. Someone has to build it, someone has to develop the technology, someone has to manufacture, someone has to maintain, someone has to operate.
You show me a social problem that our society is committed to solve and I'll show you that we cannot only solve that problem, but we generate employment, as well. Every study that I've seen shows that for every dollar spent on the non-military side of the budget ledger in this country, you generate more employment than you do on the military side of the ledger.
The faster that our fiscal policies embrace the notion of conversion and the faster that our conversion programs begin to come to fruition, then it seems to me the faster that we will be able to move away from weapons systems that serve no useful purpose except to continue to employ people.
Mr. SHORR: You were quoted I think in The Los Angeles Times as we saying, "We don't know how to do conversion, we don't know how to take a base and turn that into an area for a healthy civilian economy."
Rep. DELLUMS: Right.
Mr. SHORR: Do you still think we don't know?
Rep. DELLUMS: Well, I think we're learning, and that's why I'm saying that this moment provides us with the challenge of conversion, but also the opportunity to actually do it. Now we've got to take the progressive perspective into a post-Cold War world and become advocates for fresh new ideas and fresh new approaches.
The extent to which I'm sitting there as chair, my job will be to challenge my colleagues, and I try to do that on a daily basis. Think fresh, think new, think different. There are no experts. Let's put down the baggage of the Cold War and let's step into the new realities with creative thought and a different set of ideas, with a different mindset.
Mr. SHORR: How can you use that leadership position to articulate this kind of vision that you're talking about and to speak for this kind of change?
Rep. DELLUMS: Part of my job has to be to mount the podium, as in this opportunity that you've given me, to talk about new ways of seeing our role in the world that can have impact on downsizing the military budget, freeing resources to deal with other significant issues that have to be addressed in our society.
Mr. SHORR: If you could put yourself a number of years ahead, when you are ready to step down as chair of the House Armed Services Committee, what kind of a legacy would you like to leave for US military policy?
Rep. DELLUMS: First of all, I would like to see multi-nationalism as a cornerstone of our national security strategy, number one.
Number two, that in that context, we became a significant player in the UN. We paid our dues. We put up. We help strengthen the United Nations to truly become the family of nations. That we were truly committed to a multinational arrangements and relationships in the world. That would be very powerful and very important.
That peacekeeping, peacemaking became a very signifi-cant part of our national security strategy. We're presently at 300 million in a $260-plus billion military budget.
Mr. SHORR: Three hundred million for support of interna-tional peacekeeping out of --
Rep. DELLUMS: Out of a budget of $260-some billion. A number of my colleagues presently think that that's a raid on the military budget. I would argue that it is an integral part of our national security strategy, therefore, an integral part of our budget. So, I don't know if I can put a dollar figure, but I would like to see our peacekeeping budget move into the billions, as opposed to the $300 million.
I would like to see an end to the development of any more nuclear weapons, an end to weapons of mass destruction. I would like to see an end of our role as seller of arms in the world.
Mr. SHORR: Which we are number one at.
Rep. DELLUMS: Yes. So that the whole question of proliferation was an issue that we took substantively and took seriously. I would like to see our conversion effort reach into the billions of dollars.
Mr. SHORR: It's approximately 3 billion a year, something like that right now.
Rep. DELLUMS: Yes. When I walked away, I would like to see it somewhere around $10 billion. Those are the things that I would like to see. Because I think at the end of the day, what I'm saying is I would like to see a more secure world. I would like to see a more peaceful world. I would like to see a more just world. I would like to see the United States an integral partner in the family of nations that no longer felt the need for such tremendous unilateral capacity and unilateral capability, that we work in and among the family of nations.
And that we redirected the priorities of this country so that we did not have to trip over people sleeping in the streets and put a quarter in a cup because a person doesn't have a job, or in a society where babies are having babies and people are not receiving the kinds of education they need, that people did receive the health care they needed because the priorities of this country were radically changed. Then I would feel that I had led a very useful and productive life.
I think the Armed Services Committee is integral to that because the extent to which people view their sense of threat out there and respond to it is the extent to which you apply resources. And our national security apparatus has always dominated this process. We now have a chance to unravel that and go in a very different way.
Mr. SHORR: Congressman Dellums, I thank you for the time and the opportunity to talk with you.
Rep. DELLUMS: Thank you.
Admiral CARROLL: We've been privileged today to gain fresh insights into America's defense programs through the conversation with Congressman Ron Dellums. It's been particularly helpful to hear his positive words about the potential of the United Nations to pick up some of the load as the world's peacemaker and peace-keeper and let up on America's fleets and armies deployed around the world.
We thank Congressman Dellums for his vision and leadership in his efforts to make this a safer and more peaceful world.
[End of broadcast.]
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