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
Daniel Sagalyn
Stephen Sapienza
PRINCIPAL ANALYST & SCRIPTWRITER:
Marcus Corbin
SEGMENT PRODUCER:
Stephen Sapienza
VIDEO GRAPHICS:
Adam Luther
ORIGINATION:
Washington, D.C.
PROGRAM NO.:
807
INITIAL BROADCAST:
30 October 1994
CONDITION OF USE: Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR"
(Center for Defense Information).
(C) Copyright 1994, Center for Defense Information. All Rights Reserved.
Videotapes also available.
ROBERT BOROSAGE
Director, Campaign for New Priorities
SUSAN ECKERLY
Deputy Director, Economic Policy Studies, The Heritage Foundation
JAMES FALLOWS
Author, "Looking at the Sun"
Dr. FRED IKLE
Distinguished Scholar, Center for Strategic and International Studies
Under-Secretary of Defense, 1981-1988
WHO's NUMBER ONE?
NARRATOR: Americans expect to win in everything from sports to moon races to wars. And, in fact, the United States has been first in so many things that this century has been called "The American Century."
But now America's story includes this:
(Video images of America's problems at home.)
["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]
Admiral EUGENE CARROLL (USN, Ret.): Our program today gives you two very different views about spending for military forces. Some experts argue security requires a high levels of spending. Others contend we can reduce the spending to strengthen the United States economy and improve the quality of life in America. It seems we cannot be number one in everything. We must choose: Helicopters or health, troops or teachers. Now that the Cold War is over, we do have more choice. What do you choose?
NARRATOR: Americans are feeling increasingly less secure. Crime and poverty is worse here than among our allies in the industrial countries of Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Americans also feel a lack of access to the things that make for a high quality of life: Well-paid jobs, affordable health care, and quality education.
But while we may be falling behind other countries in these measures, the United States is still number one, by far, in military might.
The question arises, does the United States need to keep military spending at Cold War levels or can we now afford to shift resources into reducing our federal budget deficit and addressing domestic problems? Some feel there are new threats after the Cold War that will demand high levels of military spending.
Dr. Fred Ikle has had a distinguished career in government and academia. He was Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy from 1981 to 1988 and directed the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under Presidents Nixon and Ford.
Dr. FRED IKLE: There are, however, new threats and some are very hard to get a grip on. One is the surviving arsenals in Russia and other former Soviet republics. And there we worry most about the danger of accident, theft, unauthorized use of nuclear weapons, which could be totally devastating and for which we have no answer.
Then in the more distant future, 20 years down the road maybe, we don't know what will happen in China. China is going through a massive transition, their military is building up. Their gross national product will be comparable to ours 30 years, 25 years hence, so we don't know what will happen there. And some people are worried also that Russia might reconstitute itself into a military threatening power. I think that is less likely, but who knows?
NARRATOR: Noted author and analyst Robert Borosage has directed the Center for National Security Studies, the Institute for Policy Studies, and now the Campaign for New Priorities. He's more hopeful that the United States can further reduce military spending.
Dr. ROBERT BOROSAGE: We can have the most powerful military. We can be able to dominate any country in the world. We have no industrialized country that is anything but our friend. Right? If you compare our budget and the budgets of our allies on the military with those of potential adversaries, everybody the Pentagon thinks might be a bad guy -- Iraq, North Korea, Iran, China, Cuba, etc. -- we're out-spending those countries by a factor of about twenty to one, thirty to one. It's totally out of proportion. We can make dramatic reductions without even thinking about safety, without even thinking about being number two in the military, without even thinking about being in line with the rest of the world.
NARRATOR: Is there a connection between high levels of military spending and a nation's
ability to meet domestic needs? Let's take a look at how the United States compares to its
industrial allies in military strength and quality of life.
"HELICOPTERS and HEALTH"
NARRATOR: This is the view through the Army's Apache helicopter targeting system. That moving box is the computer identifying targets all by itself. If you were one of those targets, you wouldn't even know what's attacking you, because it's nighttime outside this cockpit. All the crew has to do is point to the target and a laser guided missile homes-in, with devastating effect.
Although this helicopter has had reliability problems, at $17 million each, it is king of the armored battlefield.
The United States can build the most powerful helicopters in the world, but how able are we to keep all our citizens healthy? Many say ours is the best health care system in the world. But if it is, why do citizens in so many other industrial countries live longer on average than US citizens?
Even the people of Cuba, an isolated island racked by poverty, have an average lifespan that matches ours. At the other end of the economic scale, an average Japanese person enjoys a full three more years of life than we do.
Embarrassingly, the United States is tied for last place among the industrial countries with its high rate of infant deaths.
Many of these problems are caused by a lack of access to quality health care. Indeed, the United States is the only industrial country without universal health care coverage. Compared to the United States, Japan's government invests twice as much of its budget on health care for all of its citizens.
American journalist James Fallows has lived in Japan and, most recently, has written "Looking at the Sun," which examines the economic philosophies behind Japan's rise. He has also written on US military issues.
JAMES FALLOWS: The health care situation in allied countries is like many other aspects of their life compared to American life, in that its upper reaches are not as high up as are those in America, but its bottom level is much, much higher than the bottom in the United States.
It's still -- it's significant that people come from around the world to the US for heart transplants and for exotic surgery, because the most expensive machines and the most expensive doctors are found here. But for the average person, the average working person, the average retired person, the average person needing preventive care, the systems are much better set up in Germany, in particular, also in France, to a degree in Japan than they are in the US and at a much lower level of expenditure, about half as much of the GNP as we spend here.
NARRATOR: Some analysts believe that broader government health care, as enjoyed in Europe, has costs for an economy.
SUSAN ECKERLY: While they do have social, you know, net programs, for instance, in Europe that are, people would say, more generous than the ones here, for instance, national health insurance.
NARRATOR: Susan Eckerly is Deputy Director of Economic Policy at The Heritage Foundation and has worked on a wide range of domestic issues as a congressional staff member and Department of Labor official.
MS. ECKERLY: It's always a tradeoff. Their standard of living generally is probably less than
ours in this country because of the high taxation rates. And granted, they do have maybe health
care, the quality isn't as good as ours in this country. And, at the same time, they have lower
earning power than we have.
"FIGHTERS and FINANCES"
NARRATOR: The US is the number one air power in the world, and not just because we have more aircraft, more capable aircraft and better trained pilots. The United States is the only country that has so many different types of aircraft, which support each other in many ways to multiply our overall combat strength.
These planes, F-14s and F-15s, protect RF-4s...which find targets for the F-16s and F-18s
...which get by enemy radar and defenses with the help of F-4Gs...and are refueled by KC-135s and KC-10s...which are guided by E-3As and E-2Cs...which have supplies brought by C-5s, C-141s, and C-130s. You get the picture.
US fighters can climb straight up. Unfortunately, our national debt is going up almost as fast. It's expected to reach four and a half trillion dollars in 1994.
To cover the debt, the US Government borrows billions of dollars each week, much of it from foreign countries. This borrowing gobbles up our savings, leaving too little capital for industry to invest in factories and jobs.
Ms. ECKERLY: High deficits, and we are going to be facing them around the year 2000, very high budget deficits if we keep on the current trends, are very much threatening our economic well-being. And defense spending can contribute, it has contributed, actually. If you look at the past few years, the only cuts being made in spending right now are basically mainly on the defense side of the ledger.
NARRATOR: The Congressional Budget Office projects that the US budget deficits will start their steady rise again as early as 1996.
Mr. FALLOWS: It's not even necessary to look back over the eons or back to the history of the Roman Empire to infer that there's some connection between underlying economic strength and military strength, that both dimensions of national security, both are important. But in the long run, economic strength is fundamental.
We need only look again to the last decade and what happened to the Soviet Union. Of course,
their economy was in far more ruinous shape than ours will ever become. That is a nation that
could never be overcome through military means, but was undermined through economic means.
"CARRIERS and CRIME"
NARRATOR: The United States is the only country in the world that has nuclear-powered "supercarriers" this big.
Dr. IKLE: Our ability to get almost anywhere in the globe, to something like the Gulf War, to transport forces there, that is unique. It's only the United States that has this capability. Russia has a large nuclear arsenal left over, but they don't have this global reach that we have for conventional forces. And that is very important and give us a great measure of extra strength.
NARRATOR: This unique ability to intervene all over the globe doesn't come cheap, of course. The new US nuclear-powered carrier now under construction will cost well over $4 billion. The total cost to buy the carrier, the aircraft that will go on it and the ships to protect and supply it comes to $20 billion. And it will cost an additional one billion dollars a year to operate the aircraft carrier and its supporting ships.
While no foreign countries dare to take on the US Navy or threaten US citizens at home, Americans increasingly feel threats to their security on their very own streets. It's no secret to us that we have a big crime problem. But you may not know that crime is nowhere near as bad in allied countries. The United States puts more people in jail on a per capita basis than France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands put together. Revealingly, Russia and the United States, the Cold War rivals, lead the world in rates of imprisonment.
A US child is fifteen times as likely to be killed by gunfire as a child in strife-torn Northern Ireland. Fifty thousand children in the United States were killed by guns between 1979 and 1991, more than the number of soldiers who died in combat during the Vietnam War.
Japan, on the other hand, has extremely low violent crime rates. And there are those who see a connection between low crime rates and government investments in quality of life.
Mr. FALLOWS: Even though creature comforts in Japan are often modest -- the housing is small, not as many Japanese people have cars -- there's a kind of thoroughgoing social success, social quality of life the people there take a great pride in. The educational system is, of course, famous for success. The crime prevention system is quite impressive. And so, rather than putting their money into military accomplishments, the Japanese have put it into, number one, industry and, number two, the infrastructure of life in Japan.
NARRATOR: Some people are not sure the federal government can do much about these problems.
MS. ECKERLY: And so, of course, government can play a role there, but I think we need to beware of too much of it being centralized in the federal government and give state and local law enforcement officials the tools they need to do their job.
Dr. BOROSAGE: America's public institutions are starved and they're not working very well. You know, our streets are not safe; the European streets are safe. Our health care system, people have to scramble for their own health care; in Europe, the government takes care of health care. Our day care is a disaster for working mothers, all privatized, all a scramble, if you can afford it at all. In Europe, there are huge benefits for that.
So that their public institutions -- You know, there are controversies there, too. There's a fight
about spending, etc. But public institutions work better, in large part, because they're funded
better and they have a longer period of working. Here we starve them, and then we complain that
they don't work very well.
"TROOPS and TEACHERS"
NARRATOR: To fight the Cold War, the United States built up a global network of military bases and sent its troops all over the world. Despite the breakup of the Soviet Union, this unmatched network lives on. In 1994, there were US forces in 138 of the world's countries.
The Clinton administration plans to keep at least 100,000 troops in Europe and another 100,000 in East Asia, indefinitely. US taxpayers will spend more on these forces than this year's entire federal investment in education: $26 billion.
At the end of World War II, our future US allies looked like this: (Video of war-devastated Europe and Japan.)
Now they look like this: (Video of skyscrapers, "urban bustle.")
But US troops are still there helping to defend them.
Dr. BOROSAGE: There's no question that over the last 25, 30 years of the Cold War, the Europeans have used the American umbrella, the security umbrella, and our commitment of troops there to be able to have significantly lower resources going to their defense and to their military and use those resources for domestic investment.
We spend about as much to defend Japan and Korea as the Japanese and Koreans spend together to defend themselves. It doesn't make any sense.
NARRATOR: While the US leads in troops abroad, interna-tional comparisons have shown that US students lag behind other nations in science and math skills, key ingredients for our future economic competitiveness. In one large study, US high school students ranked eighth in math, seventh in chemistry, and fifth in physics. Japanese students, on the other hand, ranked first, second, and second, respectively.
Mr. FALLOWS: In Korea, also in Japan, also in Taiwan in different ways, the structure of scholarships, the pay for teachers, the kinds of pay given to working people all have been tailored to give people incentive to stay in school, to say that this is an important component of our long term strength, and so we will set signals that make it attractive for people to do this, since it's in our collective welfare in the long run.
Thirteen percent of US students leave school without minimal reading skills, leaving the United States behind the six other industrial countries examined in one study. Only one percent of Japanese students leave school unable to read well.
As for devoting resources to education, the United States is seventh in average salaries paid to teachers.
Dr. BOROSAGE: We're the only industrial country without a systematic apprenticeship program for the 75 percent of kids that don't graduate from college. That means that young workers going into the workforce get less training and are less prepared and are paid less, as a result, and have less security.
We spend much less on displaced workers when companies downsize and throw workers out of work. Our unemployment benefits are worse. Our retraining programs are worse than any other industrialized country. The last figures were, the United States spends about less than one-tenth of one percent of its gross national product on employment and retraining programs. The Japanese spend about three times that much; the Germans, about three times that much. It's a huge difference.
NARRATOR: Other observers worry that more government funding may not be able to produce results.
MS. ECKERLY: The problem again is we're not seeing the improvement in terms of whether
it's testing scores, or kids graduating from high school knowing how to read and write. So, we
need to look at what are we doing wrong. Money's not always the answer. I mean, here in the
District of Columbia, here where I'm located in Washington, we are spending on average $9000
per pupil and these kids aren't graduating from high school with the skills they need. Nine
thousand dollars per pupil in a public school; President Clinton sends his daughter to a private
school for $10,000 a year. So, something's wrong.
"PENTAGON POCKETBOOKS and POVERTY"
NARRATOR: The year the United States will spend $280 billion on its military, far more than any other nation. In fact, we spend almost as much on our military as the rest of the world combined. We're clearly in a league of our own when it comes to military spending.
Over the next five years, each family in this country will be asked to pay an average of $13,000 for military spending. That's enough for a down payment on a house.
Why is US military spending still so high, despite all the talk of defense reductions?
Dr. BOROSAGE: What people don't understand is the military budget's come down from its height in the mid-80s. But in the early 80s, we doubled the budget in peacetime, the largest military buildup in the annals of history. And so, basically, what we've done with all these cuts is we've brought it down primarily to a -- basically to a normal Cold War level.
NARRATOR: Some point out that military spending takes a smaller share of our economy now.
Dr. IKLE: Defense spending as a percent of the federal budget and defense spending as a percent of the gross national product is now at its lowest since the early years at the end of World War II, before the Cold War really started. And then during the Korean War, when there was a big war going on, and also during the Vietnam War, it wasn't much higher. It was up to 9 percent, if I remember correctly, of the gross national product. And during the Reagan years, it was at times I think around 6 percent at the high levels, and now it's, if I remember correctly, below 4 percent.
NARRATOR: Despite a growing economy, poverty in this country is getting worse, not better. An astounding 39 million US citizens now live in poverty. And the gap between rich and poor is growing faster here than in ten European countries.
Mr. FALLOWS: Three's a way to illustrate the differences in wealth between the US and Western Europe and Japan that Americans don't often notice, because it has to do with what part of the society is best off. If you're at the top of society, it's clearly best to be in the US. The US has the most luxuries, the biggest houses, the nicest lives, the greatest resorts. If you're going to be in the middle or the bottom of society, it's often better to be somewhere else. I would much rather be the worst off person in Japan or the worst off person in Germany than the worst off person in the United States.
NARRATOR: One in every four young children in the US lives in poverty. But the United States is last among nine industrial countries in the share of children it raises out of poverty with government assistance.
Some doubt such programs will work here.
MS. ECKERLY: We have spent well over a trillion dollars on the war on poverty since the beginning of the 1960s. And if you look at the results of all that spending, we have more children born out of wedlock, more divorced families. We have the greater social breakdown, a greater crime rate. So, I don't think you can say that more federal spending will improve the quality of life in the United States in terms of poverty.
NARRATOR: For comparison, the "War on Poverty" cost one trillion dollars. But the four decades of the Cold War cost more than $12 trillion.
Dr. BOROSAGE: The Europeans are much more accustomed to a higher level of government
spending. During the 40 years of the Cold War, they built social democracy. They provide day
care for children, and health care for every adult and for every citizen, and cradle to grave
education, and paid family leave when you have a child, and a mandated by law four weeks paid
vacation, and a whole range of social benefits that they've built up with the industrial prosperity
of the Cold War. We ran the Cold War. We spent hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars,
trillions of dollars manning the barricades across the world.
"ARMS TRADE and AUTO TRADE"
NARRATOR: The United States is the world's number one arms dealer. It sells far more weapons than all of the other industrial countries combined. In 1993, the US Government agreed to sell $32 billion in military hardware. US corporations were licensed to sell another $26 billion worth.
While the United States exports more weapons than anyone else, it lags in exporting civilian products, like automobiles. In 1992, the United States imported $130 billion more goods than it exported, giving it the world's largest trade deficit. Japan, on the other hand, had an export surplus of $109 billion.
US weapons are hot sellers because we invested so much money to give them the most advanced military capabilities. But other countries have invested more in civilian products, transportation needs, like roads and railways, and communication networks. Germany's parliament, for example, recently approved $3.5 billion for a 280-mile per hour train. Meanwhile, people in our nation's capital ride in subway trains manufactured in Italy.
Mr. FALLOWS: In the United States many of the things that we care about and take pride in most as Americans were influenced by government investment, government spending. The interstate highway system was, of course, a direct federal creation. The health care system in the US has been driven for a long time by government guidance, by government research contracts. And so, we have shown in this country that we have an ability to do things that are in the public interest and we shouldn't be embarrassed or ashamed of that, but should try to do it based on the lessons of our own success.
NARRATOR: The United States spends 57 percent of its federal research and development funding on weapons. That's ten times as much as its industrial trading partners. Japan spends just 6 percent of its research dollars on the military.
The $40 billion the United States Government spends on military research each year is money not available for developing new technologies in advanced transportation, clean energy sources, or environmental protection, all things that would benefit our economy and our health.
Others argue that our military power gives the United States economic clout with other countries and helps increase exports.
Dr. IKLE: Now the Japanese government and Germany's people know that we provide the ultimate protection for their security, so they kind of understand that we lean in there and try to negotiate better access, more evenhanded access for our products. France, Germany, they can't do that.
NARRATOR: Is it time for the United States to shift priorities from the military to other kinds of security, economic and social?
Dr. BOROSAGE: We are safer now than we've been probably in anytime in the 20th Century. We live in a very safe neighbor- hood. Mexico doesn't threaten us. Canada doesn't threaten us. Two oceans on either side and no industrial power that opposes us. They're all our friends or what to be our friends.
And yet, even though our neighborhood's safe in the world, our streets aren't safe in our own cities. And when you have 20 percent of the children born into and raised in poverty, you have the crime we're suffering, you have the educational problems we have in terms of competitiveness, you have lowering real wages, people working harder and getting less, you've got a real domestic crisis at home and that's where we ought to be focusing our attention and our resources.
Admiral CARROLL: Clearly, the answer to the question who is number one in the world depends on what you're measuring. If it's military power, America is number one by a wide margin. But considering such factors as education, health care, crime rates, economic power, then the comparisons are not nearly as favorable and, in some cases, we're actually losing ground, not gaining. Certainly, we must provide adequate defenses in a violent, over-armed world, but excessive spending on America's defense weakens our security and quality of life in many, many ways. We hope this program has highlighted the benefits of making wise choices about America's security.
Until the next time, for "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I'm Eugene Carroll.
[End of broadcast.]
CONDITION OF USE: Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR"
(Center for Defense Information).
(C) Copyright 1994. Center for Defense Information. All Rights Reserved.
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