The War Machine

a washington analyst takes a pragmatic view of the awesome pentagon juggernaut as the lamentable keystone of our economic well-being

About ten hours after Robert Kennedy was shot, the 700 graduating cadets of West Point were given a lecture by General Harold K. Johnson, then Army Chief of Staff, who made no mention of the dangers faced by those who participate in civilian politics but, instead, came straight to the top of military priorities and warned his young colleagues of certain dangers they faced in their own careers. He admonished the Army's freshest officers to beware of "the perils of pacificism." But he did comfort them with the observation that "the sharp demarcation which tended to separate the military from the civilian element of our society [when he graduated from West Point in 1933] has all but disappeared."

The speech was largely ignored by the press; the points he made, though sound enough, were old ones. It is a truism that, in an economy long attuned to military budgets, a sharp turn to (continued on page 214)The War Machine(continued from page 134) pacifism can be perilous. As for General Johnson's comparison with the Thirties, anyone who lived through that period will, indeed, remember how the Army and Navy were looked upon as hideaways for people of limited ability (in Service towns such as San Antonio and San Diego, the fine old families even looked upon the military as bums), which is hardly the kind of reputation that we will permit today in a nation of 27,500,000 veterans and 3,500,000 active Servicemen, and where more than ten percent of the work force can thank the military for their jobs.

These two characteristics--fear of a return to pacifism and the increasing difficulty of distinguishing where the military side of our life leaves off and the civilian begins--are taken by observers such as John Kenneth Galbraith to prove that we are caught in the middle of that complexity first identified by name in President Eisenhower's farewell speech of 1961: "the military-industrial complex." They are quite right in their conclusion, of course; but if they think anything can be done about it, they are quite wrong. Eisenhower, who was a practical as well as a crafty man, understood that very well.

Everyone must know by now that Ike did nothing but read the speech. It was written by his young aide Malcolm Moos (now president of the University of Minnesota), in whose mind this farewell address had been building for two years. As ritual demands, let us now review the four vital paragraphs:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.

The total influence--economic, political, even spiritual--is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal Government.

We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.

As warnings go, this wasn't much, and few people at the time paid attention. After all, when one declares that there is an "imperative need" for an activity, it is somewhat difficult to make people look upon it as a great threat. Nonetheless, to give Eisenhower credit, he probably believed some of what he said. A couple of years earlier, when it was discovered that the Capitol's corridors were crawling with former military officers working as lobbyists, the President had commented with wry matter-of-factness that the forces shaping the defense budget were "obviously political and financial considerations" rather than "strict military needs," and he warned that if that sort of thing kept up without restraint, "everybody with any sense knows that we are finally going to a garrison state."

The crush of military lobbying offended Eisenhower's Kansas sense of moderation. He was simply against abusing defense expenditures for political and economic considerations; he wasn't against it in principle, as he demonstrated in 1960, when, at Nixon's request, he authorized an extra $190,000,000 to be spent on the worthless B-70 project in California and thereby, in Joseph Al-sop's opinion, "quite certainly helped carry California for Nixon by the narrow margin of about 30,000 votes." The late C. Wright Mills, author of The Power Elite, once observed that when Eisenhower saw unemployment rise to the disturbingly high level of 4,500,000 in January 1958, he pulled what has become the standard ploy: "The President proclaimed that war-contract awards will rise from the 35.6 billion dollars of 1957 to the 47.2 billion dollars of 1958." In 1950, the defense budget was 13 billion dollars; but from 1953 to the day Ike left office, annual spending by the Pentagon never fell below 40 billion dollars, and the two billion dollars for researching new weapons in 1952 had grown, by the end of Ike's tenure, to nine billion dollars annually. To see Eisenhower's position accurately, one should bear in mind that when he wrote a letter in 1966 to his former press aide, James Hagerty, listing what he looked upon as his greatest achievements, Eisenhower did not list the military-industrial-complex warning of his farewell speech but did list his having supervised the "preservation for the first time in American history of adequate military establishment after cessation of war."

In short, Eisenhower's attitude toward the military-industrial complex--to which he seemed oblivious until almost the day before he left office--was really no different from the attitude of John Kennedy, who increased the defense budget more swiftly than any President in history, or of Lyndon Johnson, whose home state of Texas ranked seventh in defense contracts when he became President and ranked second when he left office. Johnson on one occasion ordered the Lockheed-Georgia Company to establish subassembly plants for the world's largest military airplane in the home districts of three key House committee chairmen whose good will he needed; and (according to L. B. J.'s brother, Sam) looked upon this kind of horse trading as so practical a matter that he would sometimes burst out in conversation with some such observation as, "Well, goddamn, I fixed him up with two defense plants last year and now he's giving me trouble." To be sure, L. B. J. wasn't as candid as Senator William Fulbright about one of the reasons for the Vietnam build-up, which Fulbright said some businessmen and some Congressmen view as "a nice little war, not too much killing but still a big help to the economy." Johnson was constantly boasting of economic boom conditions. In the first two years of the Johnson escalation, the defense industries accounted for 23 percent of the increase in employment, adding 4,000,000 jobs to the rolls, and no less an economic authority than the financial editor of The Washington Post, Hobart Rowen, observed, "If there were not the war going on in full bloom, we might be in the throes of a full-fledged recession."

With this attitude prevailing in the White House for the past two decades, supported by a Congress that even now cannot muster more than two dozen votes out of 535 in opposition to any defense budget, a Congress that has never failed to fund a single major weapons system, a Congress in which 70-billion-dollar defense budgets have been passed with only ten minutes of debate--with these men in control of the Government, it is as futile in the year 1970 to talk of turning back the military-industrial complex as it would have been in the year 1910 to talk of reversing the industrial revolution. We have irreversibly become a militaristic nation. Even when Eisenhower first used the phrase, it was outdated. Military-industrial-union-political-university complex would have been more accurate; more accurate yet would be a recent observation of Dr. Arthur Burns, chairman of Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisors from 1953 to 1956 and now chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, "The military-industrial complex has acquired a constituency including factory workers, clerks, secretaries, even grocers and barbers."

This broad constituency has created an atmosphere in which it is natural to find a Wall Street Journal columnist observing, "Certainly, military spending is far from a totally negative factor in the world's economies. The production of a $6,800,000 F-111 adds to the G. N. P. just as much as does the equivalent dollar volume of new commercial airliners; it also supports employment in Fort Worth, Texas." (He could even have gone as far as to say that a $6,800,000 mistake--as proved by the 15 F-111s that have crashed--is not to be disdained, either.) Ralph Lapp, in The Weapons Culture, quotes two Utah State University economists in this defense of defense: "The defense industry, as a whole, has proved itself to be one of the state's most stable industries. At least defense employment has not been sensitive to the 'business cycle,' which was true of those major industries of past years."

Partially in pursuit of economic stability, our Government since World War Two has spent one trillion dollars for defense. This is 1,000,000 times $1,000,000. Moreover, the total cost of the military side of our Government is never found solely in that portion of the budget marked national defense. Aside from the 16-billion-dollar interest stuck into the budget, which is mostly for money borrowed to support the military establishment in the past, there are 8.6 billion dollars for veterans' benefits, including 1.7 billion dollars for medical care of veterans, 1.08 billion dollars for veterans' education. The 2.4 billion dollars channeled to the Atomic Energy Commission must also be considered military outlay, as is much of the 1.2 billion dollars spent by the Army Corps of Engineers and as, also, is much of the 1.6 billion dollars for foreign aid. And while it may be stretching the notion of militarization a bit, it is just as well to point out that the interstate-highway system was started as a defense idea--sold to Congress with the argument that should another war come, we would need a better road system to move troops and supplies--and that is costing us four billion dollars this year. But leaving the highway system out of our calculations and leaving out the salaries of the 170,000 employees of the Veterans Administration and such items as the impacted school subsidies, and adding up only the known military dollars in the rest of the budget, the total comes to more than 100 billion dollars; Senator George McGovern places all military spending at 107 billion dollars, which isn't a wild estimate. So the militarization of the nation, as measured by the popular support of these commitments, is 25 percent higher than the Government's official estimate.

It would not be accurate to say that this is altogether calculated duplicity. Some of it is ignorance and some is stupidity. Spending that much money is such a difficult and complex problem that the highest officials in the Government can't keep track of it. If President Nixon wanted to find out right now how much money is being spent on what weapons, he'd be out of luck. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird couldn't tell him, because he doesn't know. Nobody knows. Any reader in his right mind will be skeptical of that statement. But we have it on no less an authority than Robert F. Keller, Assistant Comptroller General of the United States. Testifying before a Senate subcommittee not long ago, Keller said: "The Department of Defense's inventory includes some 130 [weapons] systems, having an estimated total cost through completion of about 140 billion dollars.... But as far as we know, information is not available centrally as to the total number of systems being acquired or their costs."

The Senators couldn't believe it. Did Keller actually mean, could he possibly mean, that the information "is not even available to the Secretary of Defense or the President of the United States?" Yes, said Keller, that was exactly what he meant: There is no one source of information on defense spending to which the President can go. However, he was optimistic; if the President wanted to scratch around long enough in a number of different places, he said, "I think he can find out." That's how generously we're spreading it around in this era when a Navy rescue submarine that was budgeted to cost $3,000,000 winds up costing $125,000,000 per craft, and the price of 38 major weapons systems--while apparently nobody is watching--jumps nearly 50 percent.

Today, we are spending on defense at a rate of $2834 per taxpayer each year. The money we are pouring into defense, which is two thirds of all Federal tax receipts, is greater than the net profits of all American private enterprise put together. The Pentagon is the nation's largest home builder, and even its PX service--with annual sales of 3.7 billion dollars--ranks right up there with J. C. Penney and F. W. Woolworth. In the employ of the Pentagon are 22,000 prime contractors and 100,000 subcontractors. Seventy-six industries are classed as defense-oriented. There are 5300 U.S. cities and towns that have at least one defense plant or company under contract to the military.

Ten years ago, Congressman Ken Hechler complained, "I am firmly against the kind of logrolling that would subject our defense program to narrowly sectional or selfish pulling and hauling. But I am getting pretty hot under the collar about the way my state of West Virginia is shortchanged in Army, Navy and Air Force installations." Until West Virginia got its fair cut, Hechler threatened to "stand up on my hind legs and roar." Within four years, West Virginia's military contracts had quadrupled. Hechler's reasoned complaint--no pork barrel or logrolling; just give us our fair share--is the normal political approach to the military budget today and tomorrow and probably forevermore.

One may wish and work for it to be otherwise, and the impact of this wishing and working will be a healthy one; commercial militarism should be balanced by idealism, just as city dwellers are better off if they can get into the country occasionally. But one should not hope to change basic things. Early in March of 1969, a bipartisan group of Senators and Representatives--a respectable number, 50 in the House, 27 in the Senate--introduced a bill to establish a National Economic Conversion Commission, an outfit to figure out ways to divert some of the defense budget to peaceful efforts once the Vietnam war is over. When Congress went home for the holidays ten months later, the bill hadn't budged out of committee. That was no surprise. It had been flopping around Congress for six years. Senator McGovern introduced it in 1963. Chairman of the committee is Abe Ribicoff of Connecticut, and it may or may not be to the point that Connecticut gets more defense dollars per capita than any other state. Even if such a commission were eventually established, it would get nowhere. Similar commissions have sprung up periodically ever since World War Two with the objective of "converting" the defense budget, and they have even made some proposals--none of which can be recalled by anyone in Washington today. A special Presidential study group was assigned to the same over-all problem in 1964; it brought in its report in 1965, which was not exactly a good year for optimism, because it saw the beginning of our build-up in Vietnam. The study was buried.

One might reasonably assume that the best way to divert the defense budget to peaceful pursuits would be to partially disarm, and one might suppose that the best chance for disarming would come from the work of the U. S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. If one supposes all that, then the ACDA can be seen as symptomatic of what the reversalists are up against; some of its better-known members are John J. McCloy, partner in the eminent Wall Street law firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy; Roger Blough, chairman of the board of U.S. Steel; John Cowles, president of The Minneapolis Star and Minneapolis Morning Tribune; General Alfred Gruenther (retired); Dean Anderson McGee, president of Kerr-McGee Oil Industries; George Meany, president of the A. F. L.-C. I. O., et al. Perhaps their advice is quite appropriate, since disarmament, if it came, would come only with the consent of those who had also contributed to armaments. They have made several vague and very orthodox passes at the problem; in fact, they have let 30 contracts to experts to study the best way to convert a war economy to a peace economy, and 25 of these studies are now in. The results, totally disregarded, add up to zero.

And that is just as well. Hope is the worst thing such studies could offer. Hope made sense perhaps as recently as, say, 1946 to 1949. But not since. Certainly not now. Even the most optimistic estimates of the speed with which a significant member of military-industrial industries could shift over to civilian production are made in terms of five or six years; and since not even the basic maneuvers for conversion have been agreed upon, a shift from military to civilian production could not be anticipated sooner than a decade from the end of the war, even with the best of will. And little good will is in evidence. Bernard Nossiter of The Washington Post roamed the country, interviewing major military industrialists, to see what plans for conversion were being made; he found virtually none. The Pentagon is quite candid about being prepared to use all "surplus" money, when the war is over, in the production of 13 new weapons systems that have already been proposed.

And in this, the planners of future arsenals are being led by Southerners, which is appropriate, inasmuch as the South benefits more by ratio than any other region from the military budget. The advisors to the President and to Congress on military matters are General William Westmoreland of South Carolina, Army Chief of Staff; Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chief of Naval Operations, from Alabama; General John McConnell of Arkansas, Air Force Chief of Staff; General Leonard F. Chapman, Jr., of Florida, Commandant of the Marine Corps; and General Earle Wheeles, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who came up through the Washington National Guard back in the days when the national capital was, as in many ways it still is, a Southern town.

The South will team up with the West to push militarism even more deeply into the politics of the future if, as Kevin Phillips predicts in The Emerging Republican Majority (the Bible of the Nixon era): "In 1970, California, Arizona, Florida and Texas, almost alone among the 50 states, will gain ten new Congressmen and electoral votes, principally at the expense of the urban Northeast and Great Lakes. In another generation, the four Sun Belt states will outvote all 11 Northeastern states, if present trends continue. Few Northeasterners realize the new prominence of the South and West or appreciate that a new political era is in the making." One is not likely to overlook the fact that three of the Sun Belt states Phillips mentions are among the consistent front runners in military appropriations, and all four consistently send to Washington some of its most hawkish legislators.

Almost never is the power of the South referred to in debate over the military budget, perhaps because it is so embarrassingly evident, what with John Stennis of Mississippi sitting on military authorizations and Richard Russell of Georgia sitting on military appropriations in the Senate; and George Mahon of Texas running both the main appropriations committee and the defense subcommittee on appropriations (with Robert Sikes of Florida, a general in the reserves, number two on the subcommittee), the legendary Mendel Rivers of South Carolina chairing the House Armed Services Committee and Sikes chairing the military-construction appropriation subcommittee. The only time the Southerners ever quibble about defense expenditures is when one tries to interfere with another's booty. Thus, when Senator Stennis talked about investigating the obvious plundering of the budget by the Georgia builders of the C-5A, Senator Russell retorted that funds might be withheld from the fleet of logistic deployment ships that would be built in Mississippi shipyards. When new members are added to the Armed Services committee, they are drawn heavily from the South; of the nine new men added to the House in 1968, one (a retired lieutenant colonel) was from New Jersey, one was a former Congressman from Texas now living in New Mexico and others were from Virginia, West Virginia, Georgia, Alabama and Texas.

The Southern suzerainty over military affairs is so total that the principals feel free to joke about it. At a testimonial dinner for Senator Stennis in Jackson, Mississippi, attended by 1200 of the most powerful industrialists and Congressional war lords, Rivers made a speech in which he quipped, "I don't believe the Yankees will pick a fight with us again, because when we get through, there'll be precious few installations left north of the Mason-Dixon line."

In the fiscal year that runs from July 1, 1969, to June 30, 1970, New York will have received $3,500,000 for military construction. Rivers' home state, South Carolina, will have received nearly nine times that much--$30,800,000. Texas will have gotten $47,000,000, Virginia $31,400,000, Florida $21,700,000. In fact, every state in the old Confederacy got more construction money than New York, except for Dixie's two poorest and least populated waifs, Mississippi and Arkansas, which, even so, got only a little less than New York.

The South has everything tied up light at committee level, and when the military bills hit the floor, teamwork with the conservative wing of the G. O. P., plus a few references to the threat of communism rolls the money through. But if, by chance, the conservatives need an extra push in the House, Speaker John McCormack will supply it. McCormack is convinced that the nation has been saved by Mendel Rivers more than once, and when it looks like Rivers needs some help, McCormack will come down out of his chair and tell the House, "I always defer to the experts, which is why I always defer to Congressman Rivers in military matters." By saying that, McCormack can add another 20 or 30 votes--which is about the size of the McCormack claque--to Rivers' legislative juggernaut.

Of course, one can always hope that mortality will ease this situation sooner or later, but mortality is too slight a shovel to pit against this mountain. Efforts to decrease the flow from the Pentagon cornucopia are no more successful from the inside than from the outside. Not all Congressmen are endlessly greedy; among the ones who aren't are Robert Leggett of California (in whose district military payrolls amount to $600,000,000 annually) and Otis Pike of New York, in whose district the military-aircraft industry is the largest employer. They can speak quite matter-of-factly of militarism as commerce and industry. "My state receives about nine billion dollars in military and space salaries," says Leggett. "That's why we have four Californians on the House Armed Services Committee. California has ten percent of the nation's population and, therefore, California should have ten percent of the committee, and we do have." This is typical pie-slicing talk from Congressmen involved in military spending. Nevertheless, in the past couple of years, Leggett and Pike and three other Congressmen on Rivers' committee have become disturbed by the unrestrained spending on militarism and have banded together to see if they can't modify the policy. Because this makes them seem rather foolhardy in the eyes of their colleagues, they have been named the Fearless Five. They are also the banished five; they have had absolutely no impact on the operation of Rivers' committee, and Rivers has retaliated by taking away their important subcommittee assignments, giving them less preference than the freshmen members of the committee. Other committee members, observing the punishment, have hurried to assure chairman Rivers of their own deep loyalty to him and to military spending.

But don't dismiss the Fearless Five as a cranky, quaint clique. They went about their efforts in a very sensible way. With Charles Whalen, Jr., of Dayton, a former economics professor, serving as the "administrator" of the movement, they met weekly between June and October, 1969, carefully put together the arguments they would use against various sections of the military budget, made working alliances with the large semi-liberal Democratic Study Group in the House and with the Members of Congress for Peace Through Law, which, despite its odd title, actually has some standing and, under the new leadership of Brad Morse of Massachusetts, even a little clout. Whalen served as liaison among the three groups. On the day of the showdown voting, the Fearless Five even put into operation a whip arrangement by which they tried to get sympathetic members to show up on the floor for a vote.

Bear that in mind: An intelligent, manly effort was brought to focus on the military budget when it appeared in the House. The Fearless Five and their allies hit the bill with 14 amendments. They passed part of one. And that amendment was so shredded and patched that they don't even consider it their biggest victory. The biggest victory of this group, the thing that Whalen describes as "our high-water mark," came when they were able to muster 141 votes against a recommittal motion that, if their side had had its way, would have permitted Whalen to offer a substitute motion. After months of work, the biggest victory of the Fearless Five was in making a decent showing--not winning, just making a decent showing--in an obscure parliamentary maneuver.

If the mood of the country ever was right for slashing the Pentagon budget, it was in 1969. In Congress, as The Wall Street Journal noted, "Never before had the nation seen the strategic arms race debated in such breadth and detail." Widespread demonstrations were held against the R. O. T. C., and some professors joined the students in protesting the use of campus laboratories for defense research. Even House appropriations czar Mahon was stirred to the amazing remark, "The military has made so many mistakes, it has generated a lack of confidence." So much criticism rolled through Washington that President Nixon appointed a committee to "study" Pentagon affairs. This demonstrated comparatively great turbulence in the normally placid Administration. And yet, when the storm of 1969 had passed, nothing really had changed. The military budget had been chipped away less than five percent (columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak claim that even this was a clever bit of sleight-of-hand on the part of Defense Secretary Laird, who left the Pentagon's requests unrealistically high, so that Congress could "feel good" by cutting the budget back to where Laird knew all along it would have to go). Only three percent of the college R. O. T. C. units were put under attack in 1969, and the Pentagon could boast that by 1972, it would have 250,000 cadets at the high school level--a new generation. And campus research for the Pentagon was still increasing. In the most promising anti-militarist year since World War Two, anti-militarism had accomplished almost nothing.

Some feel that the military's grasp on the economy is the result of a devious plot. Others, without finding virtue in the complex, will deny that it is evil. Adam Yarmolinsky, who was a special assistant to former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, says, "Surely, the military-industrial-Congressional complex is not a conspiracy." However, he acknowledges, "There are coincidences of interest among the military project officer who is looking for a star, the civilian contractor who is running out of work, the union business agents who can see layoffs coming and the Congressman who is concerned about campaign contributions from business and labor, as well as about the prosperity of his district." To call it a coincidence of interest rather than a conspiracy is probably a matter of personal preference. And, in any event, a case for the not-so-coincidental convergence of interest that would add up to true conspiracy can be made.

During World War Two, the Army was quite open in its efforts to take over the nation's production power, including the fiscal fuel that provides that power. Donald Nelson, who was head of the War Production Board during that War, wrote later, "From 1942 onward, the Army people, in order to get control of our national economy, did their best to make an errand boy of the WPB," and his appraisal of these efforts was substantiated by a Bureau of the Budget report issued in 1946, which acknowledged that during the War, the Army attempted to seize "total control of the nation, its manpower, its facilities, its economy."

With the end of World War Two, the defense industries were faced with a crisis of influence, since never in American history had a war been settled without an accompanying diminution of the arms industry and of the military establishment. To counteract this anticipated slump, a movement was launched to integrate the military with big business. When the end of the War was in sight in January of 1944, Charles E. Wilson, then president of General Electric, told the Army Ordnance Association, "The revulsion against war not too long hence will be an almost insuperable obstacle for us to overcome in establishing a preparedness program and, for that reason, I am convinced that we must begin now to set the machinery in motion." The goal, he said, must be "a permanent war economy," which could be best begun if every key defense industry named a special liaison official, with the commission of a reserve colonel, to serve with the Armed Forces. In the same year, Navy Secretary James Forrestal helped organize the National Security Industrial Association, to assure a clublike approach to industry's dealings with the military. Other associations included the Aerospace Industries Association. Every arm of the military had its own special tunnel into industry.

This meshing of contrivances would never have succeeded, however, without an accompanying program of fright. Despite the frequent alarms sounded by prominent military leaders immediately after the War that another conflict was imminent, the nation was tired of fighting and did not immediately respond. Colonel William H. Neblett, a former national president of the Reserve Officers' Association, who was in the Pentagon during this period, recalls: "Generals and admirals, colonels and captains spoke throughout the land at every meeting to which they could wangle an invitation. Reams of statements of generals and admirals for press and radio were ground out for them by the civilian publicity experts, employed at the Pentagon.... The Pentagon line was that we were living in a state of undeclared emergency, that war with Russia was just around the corner."

But it didn't work. The defense budget was cut and Congress refused to pass the universal-military-training bill, which would have ensured a permanent peacetime conscription to support the brass pyramid left over from the War. So a series of false alarms was prepared--and used with effective results. The Chicago Tribune of June 19, 1948, tells how: "In March, apparently in desperation, the Army handed President Truman a false intelligence report which 'pictured the Soviet Army as on the move,' when 'actually the Soviets were redistributing their troops to spring training stations.'" So, on March 17, Truman called a joint emergency session of Congress, out of which came peacetime conscription and the first building blocks for constructing the western European military alliance that helped perpetuate the Cold War. Happily for the military, other episodes followed that could also be used. On September 23, 1949, President Truman announced that "within recent weeks" the Russians had achieved an atomic explosion, and the reaction to that announcement was described in Atomics magazine's September issue as "a minor panic; many radio commentators have the country practically at war with Russia." Newspapers contributed their share to the hysterics and Charles E. Wilson, who had been recruited by Truman for Civil and Defense Mobilization Director, quite honestly praised the American Newspaper Publishers Association at its 1951 dinner in words that hardly attempted to disguise his project: "If the people were not convinced that the free world is in mortal danger, it would be impossible for Congress to vote the vast sums now being spent to avert that danger.... With the support of public opinion as marshaled by the press, we are off to a good start."

In the 20 years since then, the assets of the military have continued to multiply. There has been no moment of retrenchment, no momentary hesitation on the part of Congress to spend whatever the Pentagon requested, and more. Defense expenditures today are so dominant that the total economy can no longer function normally without taking its direction from the Pentagon. Insignificant adjustments in the defense budget have the power to create or wipe out small towns and to make even large towns respond in boom or bust ways. When the Army Ordnance Depot (530 workers) was shut down in Igloo, South Dakota (population 1700), a few years ago, the community simply went out of existence. Other small towns have disappeared like this as the result of a scratch through some line in a military-appropriations bill. When the Martin Company laid off 6800 workers in Denver in 1963, the expansion of the Denver economy came to an abrupt halt, Colorado's economic expansion slowed significantly and it was nearly two years before the economy began to move upward again. Throughout the nation, one out of ten employed persons is dependent on the military-industrial complex for his pay check (3,500,000 in Service, 1,300,000 employees of the Defense Department, 4,000,000 industrial workers). If most of this employment were suddenly cut off, it would pitch the nation into a depression fully equal to the worst of the 1930s. In 14 states (Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Texas, Utah and Virginia), more than ten percent of the personal income comes from the Pentagon's coffers; and in three states (Alaska, Connecticut and Idaho), plus the District of Columbia, more than 20 percent of the personal income is from defense payrolls.

T. Coleman Andrews, former commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, told a group of businessmen in 1960, "If the Soviets should present a sincere and reliable proposal for peace, it would throw us into an industrial tail spin the like of which we have never dreamed." Since then, the military budget has more than, doubled. If the defense industry were to shut down tomorrow, 38 percent of all physicists, 18 percent of all engineers and 61 percent of all aeronautical engineers would be out of work. Obviously, broad elements of the labor force are at the mercy of the military budget. Even if a quick sufficiency of civilian employment could be drummed up for the conversion period, we have crippled with specialization so many of our supposedly skilled defense workers that it is doubtful that they could make the switch-over without retraining. William G. Torpey, a manpower specialist in the Office of Emergency Planning, made this embarrassing admission a few months ago, when he warned that the Government should look carefully at the problem of manpower displacement before canceling any defense contracts, because the specialization of defense engineers is so limited that it would be hard to match them with job opportunities in civilian industry (italics mine).

It is partly this forced dependency to which Dr. George Wald referred in his now-famous speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "I don't think we can live with the present military establishment and its 80-to-100-billion-dollar-a-year budget and keep America anything like we have known it in the past. It is corrupting the life of the whole country. It is buying up everything in sight: industries, banks, investors, universities, and lately it seems also to have bought up the labor unions."

The military establishment's purchase of the universities is best seen in the number of faculty engineers and scientists (25,000) who earn all or part of their income from the Pentagon. Seventy-five percent of all university research is supported by the Federal Government, and most of this support comes from the Department of Defense. Some of the younger scientists have attempted to break away, but the influence is so deep that the latest Pentagon figures show its contracts with universities still increasing, and MIT, where Dr. Wald voiced his criticism, is still leading the pack, with $119,000,000 of its $218,000,000 operating budget coming from the Pentagon.

The Pentagon also purchases state governments and communities, in a manner of speaking. When 6000 sheep were killed by Army nerve gas in Utah, state officials voiced no great protest, because the state earns $35 from defense activities for every dollar earned in sheep ranching. One of every three manufacturing employees in Utah looks to the Pentagon for his pay check. Seventeen members of the NAACP, including Louisiana Field Director Harvey Britton, were arrested and held 24 hours without bond by city officials in Leesville, Louisiana, which depends on Fort Polk trade, for no crime except that, in the words of Leesville mayor R. J. Fertitta, "Anyone who is not welcome at Fort Polk is not welcome at Leesville." The NAACP delegation had merely gone to the military base to investigate reports of racial discrimination.

Increasingly, the civilian authorities at all levels of government have come to tolerate and sometimes even welcome the military in setting the moral tone of the community and nation. Taking advantage of this, the Pentagon has assumed the right to enforce laws normally left to civilian courts (military tribunals have prosecuted Servicemen for income-tax evasion) and has also tried to pre-empt surveillance normally left to the FBI and state and local police. The U. S. Army Intelligence Command, headquartered at Fort Holabird, Maryland, keeps a close watch on nonconformists in civilian life. Christopher H. Pyle, who spent two years as a captain in Army Intelligence, disclosed recently that the Army has about 1000 plainclothes investigators deployed in 300 offices around the country, spying on civil rights leaders and political activists in and out of the anti-war movement. The system is tied together by teletype, ready for quick alert at all major bases.

Former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford was right: "Not too many years ago, the War and Navy departments were concerned almost exclusively with men and simple machines. Defense industries were regarded as mere munitions makers. How remote that era seems!" Today, the arms manufacturers and the military constitute an elite, and they have taken advantage of their new status by intruding into every important element of civilian life. The success of their strategists can be measured by the fact that one is now forced to complain that if there is a great threat that confronts us from the military today, it is not in its cruel aspects (after all, it is safe to assume that cruelty will repel most Americans) but in its benevolent ones. The military is now in a position to argue very persuasively that it does not take half the national budget to do evil but to do good. It can show that without the Pentagon's continuing ambitions, the nation would be thrown into a deep depression. It can cast itself in a father image, pointing out that the Veterans Administration is the legal guardian of 746,000 citizens, including 640,000 minors, and that it is the comforting mainstay to 4,800,000 veterans and survivors, who receive more than five and a half billion dollars a year in pensions and the compensations.

The military can give head counts to prove that a hitch in the Service has sent more people to college or given them on-the-job training than all the civilian school-aid programs ever invented (8,420,000 World War Two vets, 2,377,000 Korean vets and 1,633,000 post-Korean vets), and it can even argue that the reason it permits 100,000 illiterates in the Armed Forces today is not to use them for battle but simply to educate them. It can point to the fact that the military alumni system has built the largest hospital chain in the world, which treats 900,000 veterans each year in bed and receives 8,000,000 outpatient visits. It can also justify the military system by saying that if it had not been for a hitch in the Armed Services, the 7,000,000 veterans who have bought homes since World War Two on GI loans would have had to borrow money at higher interest rates elsewhere and might not have qualified. Indeed, so successful has the Pentagon been in altering its image that it is sometimes looked to as the model for running civilian social-reform programs. Thus, when Sargent Shriver was director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, he obtained many of his top people from the Pentagon and set out to copy what he considered the Pentagon's efficiency methods.

As extensive as the military's reach into foreign relations and domestic welfare is, perhaps the most damaging result of the ascendancy of the military-industrial complex is that we have, by not admitting the take-over, been forced into a series of national shams and into a distortion of our traditional concepts of honesty. At the least harmful level, the sham takes the form of describing our belligerent efforts as peaceful efforts. Defense Secretary Laird touted the ABM as "a building block to peace." In his first Armed Forces Day address. President Nixon defended the military-industrial machinery as "the apparatus for peace." But this is such an old gambit that it is almost forgivable; it follows a precedent set by such venerable patriots as Andrew Carnegie, who contributed some of his war profits to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which, in turn, was used to lobby for treaties that benefited his railroad. American politicians and capitalists have always had a hard time distinguishing between peacemaking and warmaking.

On a very dangerous level, however, are the false alarms that are supposed to excuse military-industrial activities. Those who desire to increase the budget apparently feel obliged to supply a new peril. Every Presidential campaign and every new Administration since Eisenhower's has been marked by its version of the same budget-induced bogey. The "bomber gap" of the Eisenhower years was followed by the "missile gap" of the Kennedy years, which was followed by the "megatonnage gap" of the Goldwater campaign, which was displaced by the "security gap" of Nixon's 1968 campaign. And Secretary Laird wasn't in office two months before he noticed what his predecessor had failed to notice--that we are confronted by a new missile gap.

In the Eisenhower years, 30 billion dollars was spent on bombers that gave only ragged protection. Since World War Two, as Ohio Senator Stephen Young has pointed out, "The United States has spent almost 19 billion dollars on missile systems that either were never finished or were out of service when completed, because of obsolescence." Little that we did, little that we got in return for all that money, would have been capable of offsetting the great perils spoken of at the time of the spending, if, in fact, they existed. From another perspective. Senator William Proxmire has observed: "Of 13 major aircraft and missile programs with sophisticated electronic systems built for the Air Force and the Navy since 1955 at a cost of 40 billion dollars, only four costing five billion dollars could be relied upon to reach a performance level of 75 percent or above of their specifications." And yet we survived, perhaps because there was no peril, after all.

Out of this froth emerges the first positive thought: While we can do nothing to restrict the military-industrial part of our Government, perhaps we can at least negotiate with the masters of that sector to accept a budget with no questions asked, to do with as they choose--short of waging war--to build missiles that can't be aimed and airplanes that won't fly, if that is their desire, as long as they do not accompany their budget requests with some at-least-partially bogus new specter. If we must submit to their budgetary demands, at least we may be able to negotiate them into accepting a saner and calmer blackmail.

"So help me, God," Congressman Rivers once swore to his colleagues in the House, "we are going to have a follow-on bomber. If I live, I am determined to get my nation a bomber. We have too many eggs in the missile basket. This could be our end." Under the rules of the proposed system of blackmail decorum, we would be spared these theatrics, which is a consideration that certainly must be worth several billion. Nor would we ever again have to hear Rivers demand the immediate deployment of some new weapons system with the gloomy fakery, "I just hope it isn't too late." Knowing his budget was in the bag by prior agreement, presumably he would keep quiet.

Everyone knows that to wipe us out, the Soviet Union would have to expend at least 20,000 megatons of nuclear power, which would release enough strontium 90 to kill off everybody in the world via atomic poisoning; and everyone knows that we already have more than ten times as many missiles as would be necessary to obliterate Russia if that nation should attack us--so it would have been much nicer if we had not been subjected first by Robert McNamara to the specter of a missile attack from China (which as yet has no operative intercontinental missiles) and then by Melvin Laird to the specter of a missile attack from Russia ("Make no mistake. They're going for the missiles. No doubt about it."). How much more civilized it would have been if each Secretary of Defense had stuck to the facts and told us that the billions to be spent on the anti-ballistic-missiles system would employ hundreds of thousands of people in 5000 firms subcontracting to the corporations standing to benefit the most--Bell Telephone Labs, McDonnell Douglas, Martin-Marietta, General Electric, Sperry Rand, Raytheon, AVCO, Hughes Aircraft, Radio Corporation of America, et al. We would let Laird know that we understand what he is up to and encourage him, with an uncontested appropriation, to put an honest face on it.

The second possible improvement on the present situation would come from a national acceptance of the military-industrial complex as a special form of socialism that is not bound by the normal code of business ethics. A major form of socialism it certainly is, being a controlled economy that is larger than the economies of entire nations, such as France and the United Kingdom. Probably the sharpest observer of the military-industrial complex is Murray L. Weidenbaum, former professor of economics at Washington University in St. Louis, who now serves as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. On this point, he has observed: "The close, continuing relationship between the military establishment and the major companies serving the military market is having some long-term impacts on both the nature of the public sector of the American economy and a large branch of American industry. To a substantial degree, the Government is taking on the traditional role of the private entrepreneur, while the companies are becoming less like other American corporations and acquiring many of the characteristics of a Government agency or arsenal. In a sense, the close, continuing relationship between the Department of Defense and its major suppliers is resulting in a convergence of the two. This is blurring or reducing much of the distinction between public and private activities in an important branch of the American economy."

He was speaking of such companies as Lockheed Aircraft and Thiokol Chemical, which exist almost entirely on defense contracts, and of companies such as North American Rockwell, General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas, more than three quarters of whose income is from defense. This socialism was inevitable. In the first place, the Government created from scratch much of the industry with which it now deals. For example, it made available more than a billion dollars' worth of capital facilities to the five leading World War Two aircraft manufacturers (the companies themselves invested only about $150,000,000 in capital equipment). The Government also contributed most of the working capital. Having brought these companies into existence--at least into existence as giants--the Air Force assured their staying alive after the War by issuing, in 1946, a secret order to the effect that "Whenever practicable, contracts are parceled out among the old established manufacturers on an equitable basis, so that they may be assured enough business to perpetuate their existence." (This letter from the Air Matériel Command to the Commanding General, Army Air Force, was declassified 14 years later, in 1960.) This kept out new competitors and pushed the industrial concentration. Favoritism shown in the distribution of research and development funds further increased this concentration. The results were inevitable. Today, except for Curtiss-Wright, which dropped out of contention, the seven top plane manufacturers of World War Two are still among the very top defense contractors. It would be strange, indeed, if these creations of the Pentagon's bounty were not indistinguishable from their creator.

A similar history can be found in most of the other Government-supported defense industries. The concentration is impressive. The ten top companies receive 30 percent of the Federal research money. The eight top defense companies virtually monopolize the manufacture of 22 out of the 27 most important military products. Their control of the Pentagon market is 98 percent or better for such items as helicopters and fighter aircraft, missile-guidance systems, fire-control systems and surveillance satellites; they control 91 percent of the combat-vehicles market, 81 percent of surface-radar sales, 93 percent of data-processing systems, etc. These are the big-money items. Only for such items as ammunition, services, textiles, clothing and subsistence do the smaller companies really have a whack at the money--and these are the markets that will slump first with a halt in hostilities.

The 24 top companies hold nearly 50 percent of the prime contracts; but they have bought this eminence at the cost of their independence. They have become what The New York Times recently called "the defense WPA." It matters not at all to them that much of the work they do is worthless. Gordon W. Rule, a Government procurement officer, told a House subcommittee, "Industry today is smug and perhaps rightly so. No matter how poor the quality, how late the product and how high the cost, they know nothing will happen to them." Cost escalations and stock manipulations and budget padding that, if done in ordinary business, would get immediate attention from a grand jury or the Securities and Exchange Commission, go on with scarcely a notice in the defense industry.

Journalist Julius Duscha has pointed out that between 1954 and 1964, "Five billion dollars was spent on the development of weapons [this was just the development of the weapons to prototype stage, not the manufacture of them en masse] that proved to be unworkable or unnecessary. This is more than the entire Federal budget before World War Two." Duscha's estimate was very low; and, anyway, since his accounting in 1964, the junk development has increased. More recently, we have seen the unveiling of the new Sheridan tank, which cost more than a billion dollars and is so poorly designed that it will never see battle. In his defense of it, General Austin Betts, head of Army Research and Development, said everything: "There is nothing about this tank that we dislike but the cost and demonstrated reliability." And we must not forget the B-70, for which we paid one and a half billion dollars, and saw only two planes actually constructed; one crashed after a mid-air collision and the other's only significant trip was to a museum, where it remains.

But such slip-ups scarcely dent the pride of companies that long ago decided pride can't be banked and that permit the Government to pay even for the retooling of their factories, which is exactly what was done not long ago (at a starting cost of $14,000,000) for Northrop, the chosen manufacturer of the F-5 "Freedom Fighter." When Congressman Durward G. Hall of Missouri asked Mendel Rivers why Northrop didn't pay for its own retooling, Rivers replied quite frankly: "It just doesn't happen in the industry. Nobody [pays his own way]." Unions supported by defense contracts are just as willing as management to trade pride for income and to continue turning out worthless armaments. When former Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania proposed, early in 1968, that the Pentagon stop manufacturing a particularly unneeded helicopter, top A. F. L.-C. I. O. leaders said they would not support him for reelection (the helicopters were manufactured at a Pennsylvania plant). This was no doubt one reason he was not re-elected to the Senate. A disregard for craftsmanship and engineering runs through the industry and occasionally shows up in slapstick ways, as when a new atomic submarine was launched from a California shipyard and immediately sank to the bottom, where it will remain until salvagers spend an estimated $35,000,000 to raise it. As for the aircraft section of the defense industry, it takes in the most dollars and produces the least per dollar. It keeps cranking out the same old planes. As Senator Stuart Symington pointed out, "Even though this nation is now spending over eight billion dollars a year on military research alone, it is a fact that since 1954, not a single new superior fighter plane--Army or Navy--has been produced in this country."

But the lesson to be learned from all these failures is that we must not judge the defense industry by them. The reason for the industry's existence is not to produce efficient weapons, thank goodness, but to produce jobs; and when the day arrives that this is the accepted criterion for its activities, then we can stop bruising our sanity and our ethics against an abnormal situation. On that happier day, we will understand that when John R. Blandford, chief counsel for the House Armed Services Committee, rallies members, as he did not long ago, with the reminder that "we are going to have to keep [Northrop] in business," he means only that and nothing more. We should give the industry its 70 billion dollars or 80 billion dollars, or whatever is agreed upon as necessary for employment at a given time, with the instructions: "Spend it however you want to. Let Lockheed pad its bills and let General Dynamics lose its blueprints and let every company's engineers come up with redesigned Spads and Fokkers--we don't care. Just keep the folks working!"

If we were now protected by that attitude, we would not be dismayed to learn that the proposed F-14 fighter plane for the Navy is nothing but a warmed-over version of the F-111B, which was finally junked by the Navy when it was discovered to be unflyable and riddled with 253 defects of design and construction. We would not give it a second thought that Pentagon officials covered up Lockheed's two-billion-dollar bungle on the C-5A in order to protect the company on the stock market. We would understand why the official who revealed the bungle to the public was fired by the Pentagon because he wasn't a team player. And we would pass no judgment on learning that although the Autonetics Division of North American Rockwell had produced faulty "brains" for the Minuteman II missile, it received contracts to make $400,000,000 worth more of the devices. In the context of make-work, we would think it quite sensible that the Pentagon has 5500 people involved in military procurement alone, that the Pentagon hires an average of one lobbyist for every two Congressmen and that the Pentagon pays $31,000,000 yearly in salaries to publicity and public-relations men whose job is to let the public know how important it is that we go on building obsolete missiles and earth-bound planes.

Richard Kaufman, economist counsel for the Senate Joint Economic Committee, has suggested that the military industrialists might more safely be paid for not building weapons; it would be a kind of "military land bank," by which industrialists would be paid so much for every weapons machine they took out of production. Or, as a modification of this plan, Kaufman proposes that if military-industrial workers prefer to stay active rather than stand by idle machines, they should be put to work making models of guns and airplanes as a way to retain their manual dexterity.

By placing the world of the Pentagon beyond all normal judgments except those based on employment, we would also be more tolerant of the "two-and-a-half-war" base on which the Pentagon has built its budget for at least the past decade. As it sounds, this means the Pentagon feels that it should be equipped at all times and ready to simultaneously fight a war in Europe, a war in Asia, plus a small war in, say, Latin America. Since we have not yet had that many wars to fight, and since unused weapons do not always wear out as fast as it would like, the Pentagon sometimes has a hard time spending its money, and it is sometimes embarrassed by the press's discovery that it has let contracts for strange studies--such as its recent grant of $600,000 to the University of Mississippi to see if doves, crows, ravens, pigeons, parrots, chickens, vultures and other birds can be taught to participate in war by steering missiles, detecting mines and in other ways filling in for human warriors [see the lead item in Playboy After Hours, March]. The Pentagon also has admitted spending many millions on such studies as "Cold Adaptation of Korean Women Divers," "Upper Limits of Safety for Primaquine in Sensitive Italians" and "An Experimental Study of the Development of Consensus." These things may give employment to more veterinarians and professors than we realize, and that should be our only criterion. Otherwise, we will go mad.

By giving the Pentagon carte blanche within its budget, we could also do without such antiquities as the Renegotiation Board. Renegotiating with profiteers had some effectiveness in World War Two and during the Korean War, but the board is now only a shadow agency that conducts ineffectual investigations. Lawrence E. Hartwig, chairman of the Renegotiation Board, told Congress that he had come upon one company that, on $3,500,000 in sales, had made a profit margin of 17.8 percent and a 517 percent return on its net worth, but, he added, "I am not saying that this particular company is making excessive profits." He cited similar cases, none of which he had looked upon as excessive profiteering, and Congress considered him such a good sport that it gave his board the budget money it asked for.

The Pentagon has so intimidated those who would, or should, probe its books that the General Accounting Office, popularly supposed to be "the watchdog of Congress," refused to act on Senator Proxmire's demands that it study defense profits. The job, said the GAO, was too difficult. It had timidly tried to be a policeman on another occasion, with embarrassing results. It had sought information from 111 selected defense contractors, only to be told by 46 of these firms that they didn't know what profits they were making--and the GAO let them get by with that explanation. The House Banking and Currency Committee learned in 1968 that it is quite customary for defense contractors to lie to the Government about their profits; a company that said it earned only 4.5 percent profits had actually earned 10 percent; another reported 12.5 percent profits but actually had earned 19.5 percent, and another reported a 2 percent loss when it had earned a 15 percent profit. No penalties are levied for this kind of misinformation.

Since 1965, when the big build-up began in Vietnam, the United States has spent 150 billion dollars on prime contracts, but Pentagon officials insist--when queried by investigating committees of Congress--that they have not kept a record of who made what profits. When asked for answers, they reply vaguely that somewhere within the bowels of the massive Pentagon building, scattered here and there, are the figures that could supply the answer, but nobody has compiled them. It is an answer quite effective in keeping away investigators.

Someday, the efficacy of hiding and disguising defense profits will be easily and simply conceded, for, as Bert Cochran has written in The War System:

The war economy has a diabolical comfortableness about it that slowly submerges almost every part of the population in a euphoric stupor. Where the strong brews of patriotism and national honor keep the man in the street reconciled to high taxes and enormous financial outlays for military spending, he would resist, with all the righteous indignation bred of years of mass-media conditioning, comparable Government spending for "bleeding heart causes" and "egghead welfare boon-doggling." Missiles, planes and bombs mean jobs; schoolhouses, scholarships and hospitals mean only more taxes and bureaucracy.... The beauty of the military system is that it is the kind of sheer waste which dovetails perfectly with the rest of the economy; the hardware and gadgets that come out of the laboratories and plants compete with no civilian products, do not interfere with the private corporation's patent rights and do not accumulate the kind of inventories that retard continued production. When the munitions do not get used in war, they quickly become obsolete and are junked or sold at knockdown prices or given away to our clients. There are no surpluses, and the demand is inexhaustible.

Probably for some time to come, the puritanical side of our national character will not permit us to concede that the idea of reforming the military-industrial complex is hopeless. But eventually we will admit it, and then we can move into the era of more equitable perversion for which America has probably always been destined.