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Applicant is a management-oriented person with extensive administrative and engineering experience. His ability to initiate, organize, plan and administer management policies and engineering programs has been fully developed. Applicant is thoroughly familiar with the most up-to-date engineering techniques, as well as the most effective means of communicating to ensure that programs are completed with success. He is highly regarded by his associates and would be a valuable asset to an employer seeking a man with his qualifications."

George Florea, the unemployed 49-year-old aerospace engineer who wrote that self-description for his job resume, holds two college degrees and was a ten-year employee at the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company plant in Sunnyvale, California, when he was laid off in February 1970. At Christmas of that year, he worked as a department-store Santa Claus for $2.50 an hour; it was his first job in nine months. Florea is a family man with three children; he's a political conservative, a loyal, dedicated citizen and a good neighbor, who for 14 years has lived in the same house on Stephen Road in San Mateo, California. He is understandably baffled that he can't find a job that would utilize his obviously needed skills, training and talent.

There are about 85,000 George Floreas around the nation at present. Most of them are concentrated where the high-technology aerospace and (continued on page 106)Aerospaced Out(continued from page 99) defense industries are located--in California, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, Missouri, Washington and Florida. Cutbacks in space and defense contracts and a drop in Vietnam expenditures from 28 billion dollars to around ten billion dollars annually, grossly exacerbated by a general economic slowdown, brought the mass layoffs. There were 235,000 scientists and engineers employed in aerospace in 1968. Today there are around 150,000. Total employment in aerospace is down nearly 518,000 from 1968, the peak year of employment, when 1,400,000 were on the industry payrolls.

Since the end of World War Two, the aerospace and defense industries have roller-coastered through their own depression-prosperity cycles, generated by alternate waves of war scares, defense-technology "breakthroughs" and big-spending space programs. And now the roller coaster is down again, deep in the trough of NASA budget cuts and a slowdown in defense spending--an estimated 18 billion dollars in defense procurement for 1972, compared with 24 billion dollars in 1968--due in no small part to Congressional resistance to unwarrantedly large defense budgets.

So George Florea got the ax. And he and other engineers and scientists, worried industrialists and perplexed politicians are asking: What happened to conversion? The men and the companies that built the enormously complex Apollo rockets, spaceships and communications systems surely have something to contribute to meeting our critical civilian needs.

Electronically operated transportation systems, complex computer networks for programmed education and health services, air-and water-pollution-control systems, airport-traffic-control systems, ocean and atmospheric monitoring, assembly-line mass-produced housing, plus hundreds of other ideas for solving the nation's economic, social and environmental problems have been offered. But what has resulted?

Conversion may have been talked to death--if, indeed, it ever was alive. Hundreds of studies, millions of written words, thousands of speeches and desks full of editorials have warned, charged, proposed, exhorted, complained and explained the need for the nation to prepare for peace and begin the task of converting our giant aerospace and defense technology from arms production to the production of civilian goods and services.

Congress for years has wrestled with the question of conversion. Scores of hearings have been held, legislation introduced, surveys made, economists and business experts heard. But for all those hearings and studies, surveys and reports, America continues to waste the 85,000 engineering and scientific brains that helped design our intricate space and defense systems and to waste billions of dallars' worth of plants and equipment that now lie rusting.

Six years ago, the state of California commissioned four systems-analysis studies by the aerospace industry. The idea was to apply the aerospace-systems approach to dealing with crime, transportation and waste disposal. The studies drew national attention as forerunners of how space and missile engineering and management techniques could be used to solve more earthly problems. Today, under a different state administration, the four studies are gathering dust on the "conversion shelf" in the California State Library--four more monuments to America's naïve faith that a problem will be solved if only enough people keep talking and writing about it.

Few people doubt that these experts could design civilian systems to help solve social and governmental problems if they were given the chance. That's not the problem. The hang-up lies in the failure of government to plan adequately for the redeployment of men and facilities far enough in advance of the layoffs and cutbacks. The arms race triggered by Cold War fears after World War Two, the space race triggered by the Soviet success with Sputnik in 1957, and the Korean and Vietnam wars kept the high-technology aerospace and defense industries busy. Unemployment was only an occasional thing. An engineer was never out of work; he was only "between jobs," like a Hollywood actor. He waited out an occasional layoff beside his swimming pool, where he leisurely selected the best of several attractive offers.

But now the historic Apollo program is almost finished and the NASA budget has been severely cut. Total industry sales have dropped from nearly 30 billion dollars in 1968 to around 23.3 billion dollars in 1971. Yet no coordinated plan has been put forth to move men and materials out of armaments and space exploration and into jobs to improve our society and the lives of our people. The "peace dividend" that private and Governmental economists avidly anticipated, the money that was to be left over for more productive purposes when costly cold and hot wars were would down, has yet to appear in the national budget. It has been eaten up by inflation, the incessant drive for new weapons and the futile, unending race to outpace military obsolescence.

It's simply not possible to speak of guns and butter when we spend more on military matters than on anything else. Our Government seems unable to conceive of anything with a higher priority than arms and arms races. In consequence, domestic problems such as education, health, housing and transportation have been sacrificed. Sacrificed, too have been the jobs these pursuits could have created and the men who could have filled them.

One California engineer commits suicide holding a handful of rejection letters telling him there are no openings; another operates an ice-cream stand; George Florea becomes Santa Claus; and thousands of others head for the welfare offices and unemployment-benefit lines. There is growing bitterness on those lines. Thomas O. was an aerospace engineer-manager near San Jose, California, with six kids and a $300-a-month home. He owned a boat and was making payments on two cars. Now he's on welfare, using food stamps to feed the kids. He's articulate and angry:

"You know, we aerospace people thought we were a special breed and we still try to keep our elitist position even in the unemployment lines. We talk about The Wall Street Journal. We dress up in our suits as though we were going to lunch with an important executive. Most of all, we look straight ahead as we stand in line, trying not to see the other unemployed workers around us. Well, I'm tired of that 'motherhood, sunshine and 1972-will be better' bull. Engineers are expected not to rock the boat, but if being unemployed has taught me anything, it has opened my eyes to the great big lie I've been fed about being an elitist."

Melvin S. of Los Angeles sardonically suggests that aerospace engineers be listed as an endangered species and proposes the establishment of an Aerospace Preserve and Environmental Sanctuary (APES). A newly formed organization called the American Engineers and Scientists Association is attempting to organize a national campaign to discourage students from entering engineering and scientific programs of study.

Even when an engineering job does open up, the help-wanted ad will often read, "No aerospace, please." Why no aerospace? "They're too old.... They've been overpaid.... They're overspecialized.... They haven't kept up to date in their fields.... Young graduates are smarter, know computers, come cheaper and are more eager...." So the answers go.

How about retraining? Why not turn the aerospace engineer into, say, an environmental engineer? Twenty-four men who would rather switch than continue a losing fight have undergone that kind of retraining at the University of California at Irvine. Others are enrolled in special summer programs at USC. But will there be jobs for them when they (continued on page 162)Aerospaced Out(continued from page 106) are finished? The answer is uncertain. For one thing, the money for massive pollution-control systems isn't being made available either by Government or by industry.

For another, these men will be competing with younger, freshly turned out environmental engineers. Many prospective employers consider the 50-year-old engineer no match even for the under-graduate engineering student of 1972. "Our freshmen start right in on computers," says a department head of a university engineering school. "They deal with advanced concepts and are taught to think conceptually. The man who graduated 25 or 30 years ago doesn't know computers and if he hasn't been going back to school regularly, he no longer even knows the field in which he was trained."

Better job-information systems are being devised. The Department of Labor has created a national registry for engineers and other skilled workers, and there presently are job banks in more than 100 major cities, linked by teletype and computers, to list and match jobs and applicants. A few men are being placed. But with further cutbacks and phase-outs scheduled, unemployment in aerospace is mounting faster than jobs are opening up in other fields.

Some aerospace companies foresaw trouble coming and began diversifying years ago. A few companies merged. They and others acquired satellite firms. Some set up new companies to convert from space technology to the production of civilian goods. A number of these businesses began experimenting with programmed education, communications networks based on computers and new systems for environmental controls. They have had some success--though, clearly, a $250,000 contract for designing a sewage-disposal system for a small town in Ohio is hardly in the same league with a billion-dollar contract for a Saturn booster.

Nevertheless, some aerospace companies have proved that where a real need exists and money is available, either conversion or diversification can be effected.

Litton Industries is completing an experimental smog-monitoring system for the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District. Litton's environmental-systems division in Camarillo, California, which has been involved in pollution-monitoring systems since 1967, is building 12 automated, remote monitoring stations to keep constant tabs on the area's temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, and concentrations of sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, oxides of nitrogen and other contaminants. Linked by telephone lines to a central computer, the stations serve as an instant-warning system for broadcasting smog alerts and will track new sources of pollution. Litton predicts a $250,000,000 market for pollution-monitoring systems in the United States alone. Judging by prospects and needs, Litton may be thinking small.

Another California aerospace company, the Electro Dynamics division of General Dynamics in san Diego, is working on the prototype of an ocean-monitoring system to provide basic data on the marine biosphere, which many scientists agree, is seriously threatened by pollution and poisoning. Electro Dynamics is building six automated electronic ocean buoys for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency at a cost of about $3,000,000. If the pilot project is successful, Electro Dynamics foresees a system of up to 500 buoys, costing perhaps $500,000,000, in the next ten years.

The oceans are basic to man's life on this planet. They are the source of 70 percent of our oxygen and ten percent of the animal protein we consume each year. We could get much more life-sustaining protein out of the oceans if we tried. Two billion tons of fish are hatched each year, yet we catch just three percent--60,000,000 tons--by means of present techniques. Those two billion tons of fish, if caught, would quadruple the amount of fish protein now available. And if we were to distribute the catch more equitably throughout the world, it could provide the basic protein needs of a world population ten times the present 3.6 billion.

This is not to suggest that we ever could--or would want to--catch and consume that much fish. We probably couldn't change world dietary habits that radically and, in any case, we would want to be wary lest we upset the ecological balance of the seas. But we have a long way to go if we want to convert the oceans into the "breadbasket of the future." "And there are many technological advances that could be made if we had a mind (and were willing to spend the money) to make them.

The oceans are also a vast source of mineral wealth. Massive concentrations of minerals lie on the ocean floors and huge oil deposits are under the continental shelves. Yet we have all but neglected oceanic exploration. The scientists and engineers who conquered space are only now moving into the deep waters of the ancient mysteries of the sea. North American-Rockwell's ocean-systems division developed a small research submarine that could become part of a futuristic underwater oil-development system. North American and Mobil Oil jointly produced a $5,200,000 prototype underwater oil-pumping station that can be serviced from a submarine. The underwater oil-pumping system, built under a cylindrical structure, will permit oil operations in the waters of the continental shelf. Had such a system been available in 1969, the blowout disaster in the Santa Barbara Channel might have been prevented.

I contend, and I have introduced legislation in the Senate to back up my contention, that all oil drilling in Federal waters in the channel should be halted until we have perfected the technique of sea-bottom oil completions. We already have much of the know-how. We have the scientists and engineers. We lack only the incentive and the determination. By forbidding further oil exploitation of the outer continental shelf until it can be accomplished pollution-free, my bill would supply both the incentive (albeit a negative incentive of the loss of industrial profits and Governmental revenues) and the determination (to regain both profits and revenues).

Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, which got into occeanwork through its Polaris submarine and other underwater defense systems, has also been doing much marine experimentation. Its Deep Quest submarine has been conducting research and rescue operations. It salvaged, for example, the flight-log tape recorder from a commercial-airline jet that crashed in the deep ocean water off Los Angeles in January 1969, enabling investigators to determine the cause of the accident. Lockheed has also developed an ocean oil-pumping system and is investigating methods of mining the valuable manganese modules that cover huge expanses of the ocean floor.

Westinghouse Electric, General Electric and a host of other companies also are involved in ocean-systems work of one kind or another and to one degree or another. But most of the work is merely exploratory and almost all of it is vastly underfunded. Federal expenditures for oceanography in fiscal 1971 totaled $518,500,000. That's about the equivalent of seven days of warfare in Vietnam when we were spending 28 billion dollars a year there defoliating the countryside, destroying villages and crashing helicopters in the jungles as though they were dime-store toys with make-believe occupants.

Proponents of the SST argued that many George Floreas could have been employed if Congress had not voted to end Federal funding. I was among those who voted against it. I did so because I believe the SST is an unjustified aeronautic, environmental and economic gamble that neither the country nor the aviation industry really needs.

Our real aviation needs are easier to meet: faster access to and from airports; fewer delays in landings and take-offs; greater flying safety, both at airports and in mid-air; nonpolluting, quieter aircraft; and, most notably, short-take-off-and-landing planes (STOLs) capable of feeding smaller and more conveniently located airports.

STOL aircraft are capable of operating on 1500-foot runways. Such planes, already being experimentally flown by McDonnell-Douglas, could serve the 90 percent of our 11,261 airports that conventional jets, requiring 7500-to-10,000-foot runways, cannot use. They could relieve congestion at our major airports by making short hauls to places not served by the big jets. Short hauls, airline executives have pointed out, are the real meat and potatoes of the business--not flying a few affluent travelers across the ocean at supersonic speeds.

We need greatly improved ground-to-air traffic control and microwave landing-guidance systems, and we need high-speed, nonpolluting ground transportation between airports and adjoining cities. What air traveler hasn't had the frustration of being caught in car-bus jams on airport streets, spending as much time fighting traffic and fumes on the ground as he spends in the air?

Alternatives are available. A 200-milean-hour overhead monorail and aircushion vehicles can be built. Systems have been proposed for both Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C, and between Los Angeles Airport and the San Fernando Valley. But, again, Federal financing has been hesitant, meager and late. Had President Johnson, for example, decided in 1965 to put $800,000,000 into designing and subsidizing an air-cushion train--instead of the ill-fated and inglorious SST--he would have promoted a largely pollution-free new industry that today would be employing tens of thousands of industrial and construction workers. And though President Nixon, shortly after he took office, announced that our cities would need at least ten billion dollars in Federal aid to meet their mass-transit needs over the next 12 years, the bill the Administration supported limited the amount that could be obligated during the first five years to just 3.1 billion dollars.

How far can that kind of money stretch on a two-to-one Federal/city matching basis (as the law proposes), in light of our needs? Not very far. San francisco has already spent 1.4 billion dollars (93 percent of it in local funds) on its Bay Area Rapid Transit. Los Angeles estimates it will cost 2.5 billion dollars over the next eight years to meet the transportation needs of its inner city and New York puts its need at ten billion dollars over the next five years.

I proposed giving the Department of Transportation immediate authority to obligate the Federal Government up to the full ten billion dollars, so our cities would know for sure how much money they could expect from Washington in the next decade and could move rapidly ahead to meet their mass-transit needs. My proposal won 24 Senate votes--not enough to win. I also proposed a mass transit trust fund, similar to the highway trust fund that has made freeway construction so prolific. But I lost on that, too. I intend to try again, however, on both counts.

With the right kind of Government help, the aerospace industry could tackle another air-travel problem--the monstrous noise that plagues millions of people who live and work under jet landing and take-off paths. And it could create more jobs in the process. Through retrofitting--soundproofing engine nacelles and enlarging the size of the engine's exhaust outlets--jet noise could be cut at least in half. I have introduced a bill that would require that the near-2000 jet planes now in use be retrofitted by January 1, 1976. Based on formulas prepared by the Aeropace Industries Association, I estimate that if my bill becomes law, 35,000 people will be employed for two years developing and installing the retrofits, and these jobs will generate another 57,000 jobs outside aerospace. Hundreds of these jobs would go to aerospace engineers presently collecting food stamps and reading want ads.

Health and education systems also are ready targets for new electronic, computerized systems. Medical-information specialists believe the crists in medical care cannot be solved without quantumjump improvements in information systems, using computer banks and video matrix terminals (two-way televisionlike communication devices). Lockheed Missiles and Space Company at Sunnyvale (Florea's old firm) designed and built a video-computer medical information system for a hospital, utilizing space-age communication devices. The system involves computerized record keeping on all patients and television devices that flash diagnostic and treatment information to doctors and nurses.

Many education specialists believe similar systems are needed to modernize schools and improve individualized self-teaching through mass-media techniques--primarily television and computers.

The makers of the weapons of mass death have, ironically, considerable capacity to perfect and produce nonlethal weapons, ones that could help civilian police reduce the unpleasantness of some of their unpleasant work and, at the same time, vastly increase their ability to maintain law and order--justly. Because of the general unavailability of effective nonlethal devices, police often have difficulty dealing adequately with civil disorders in which the use of deadly force may be uncalled for or stopping a fugitive or responding to an attack for fear of shooting bystanders.

Police also need flexible, effective and quickly available protective equipment to shield them from bodily harm during the performance of their duty. In many instances of so-called overreaction, law-enforcement officers are, in fact, reacting to real or imagined threats to their lives. A policeman or a deputy who doesn't feel his life is in imminent jeopardy is better able to keep his cool and act in a restrained, professional manner.

The Ground Systems Group of Hughes Aircraft Company recently completed a detailed design for a $45,000,000 command-control communications system for the Los Angeles Police Department that may revolutionize policework. A digital radio transmitter in each patrol car is connected to computer terminals and enables the policeman to obtain immediate data on suspects, stolen cars and other missing property. By means of broadcast radio signals, every car is automatically tracked by computers. Dispatchers are able to spot car locations instantly on electronic maps and each policeman has an emergency-trigger device in his pocket to use if he is in trouble away from his car. The trigger, a tiny transmitter, broadcasts an SOS signal through the car radio. This centralized computer-automated dispatch center can cut down by an estimated 62 percent the time it takes to get a patrol car to the scene of a crime or an accident.

The scientists and engineers who designed and built the marvelously intricate systems for the Saturn rocket and the Apollo missions recognize that the same techniques can be applied to overcoming the problems of mass urban transit, health, education, crime and pollution. Many of us in the Government see the possibilities, too.

Why don't we get on with it? All of those systems and more could be built with the help of the 85,000 unemployed Floreas, whose precious time and talent are going to waste. We have the manpower, the technology, the plant equipment and the know-how. But diversification isn't easy in a depressed economy.

In a well-intentioned but sadly misdirected effort to combat inflation, the President deliberately set out to cool the economy (a rather dubious objective, by the way, for the millions who live on the edge of unemployment or underemployment, for whom the economy wasn't so hot to begin with). His fiscal and monetary policies all too obviously didn't deflate our continuing inflation. But he did succeed in raising unemployment to a ten-year high (the highest since 1959 in California), in driving homes out of the reach of most middle-and even upper-middle-income families and in throttling down the economy.

The Administration has consistently thwarted Congressional efforts to reverse this deplorable state of affairs. Perhaps the most egregious example is the freeze that the office of Management and Budget placed on 12 billion dollars Congress had appropriated in 1970 for domestic needs ranging from health services, mental health, education and economic development to urban renewal, reclamation, housing and model cities. I estimate that at least 1.613 billion dollars of these job-stimulating funds would have gone into engineering and science-related fields.

By the end of 1971, 12 billion dollars appropriated by Congress for various domestic programs still had not been spent by Mr. Nixon. In hopes of breaking some of this money loose--and to dramatize the paradox of our spending 2.6 billion dollars in military and economic aid overseas while retrenching here at home--the Senate amended the foreign-aid bill just before Christmas recess to require that the Administration spend 2.268 billion dollars of those impounded funds: 1.71 billion dollars for the Department; of Housing and Urban Development; $429,000,000 for the Department of Agriculture, including $56,000,000 for water and sewer projects in communities of under 500,000; and $131,000,000 for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

Thousands of jobs could be created for unemployed aerospace and defense workers with the release of frozen appropriations, such as $10,000,000 for the National Science Foundation, $20,000,000 for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, $43,000,000 for the Corps of Engineers and $170,000,000 for the Atomic Energy Commission. Government economists estimate that for every billion dollars spent by the Federal Government, 70,000 jobs are created. Thus, release of those 12 billion dollars would provide jobs for 840,000 unemployed Americans.

Our priorities must be to:

1. Restore economic growth and full employment, with expanding opportunities (concluded on page 168)Aerospaced Out(continued from page 165) for everybody and with full consideration for the protection and preservation of our environment.

2. End our debilitating inflation by ending its primary cause: the cruelly immoral Vietnam war that has bled our youth, split our country and cost us more than 120 billion dollars.

3. Halt the unspeakably dangerous, unbelievably expensive nuclear-arms race that will one day destroy us and the Soviet Union financially if we don't first destroy each other physically.

We both keep pouring millions upon millions of dollars into ever-more-monstrous systems of destruction, even though we already possess enough weapons to wipe each other out several times over. It doesn't make sense. And it doesn't make for national security. Quite the reverse. The danger of an interntional or accidental attack grows with each provocative deployment and counterdeployment. Fear, suspicion and a treacherous sense of insecurity are the self-defeating consequences of the nuclear-arms build-up, together with a staggering waste of the natural resources and human talents we so desperately need to put to better use.

The Administration's proposed defense budget for fiscal 1972 calls for 76 billion dollars, some one to two billion dollars more than was spent in fiscal 1971. Not an encouraging sign, but I hope to help see to it that the figure is substantially lower by the time Congress gets through working the budget over. I was pleased to note that the new budget calls for a $700,000,000 increase in military research and development, the first such big jump in several years. I look upon research and development as an insurance policy for national security. It cuts lead time on producing essential new weapons when production is legitimately called for and enables us to avoid producing weapons prematurely and deploying them out of fear.

I also believe that defense-research funds should not be limited to military purposes. I have urged the Armed Services Committee to allow defense contractors to use basic-research funds supplied by the Government to diversify their operations to meet the domestic needs they are particularly qualified to handle.

We are wasting precious time looking for ways to motivate aerospace and defense industries to diversify. There's no big secret in how to redirect American space and arms production into domestic channels. The Government, in partnership with private industry, must make the switch profitable; American capitalists and labor will do the rest.

First, the Government must put its priorities in proper order, so that pressing needs such as housing, education, health, mass transit and pollution control are placed ahead of fighting wars, piling up Provocative missiles, financing dictatorial foreign governments and building unwanted supersonic gewgaws.

Next, the Government must back up those priorities with substantial sums of money, not token amounts that finance a few timid, tentative steps but money on the massive order of what we normally spend on ABMs and MIRVs and space shots without blinking an eye.

Finally, the Government should let contracts. We need to create a central source of Federal funding and contracting that can do for our domestic priorities the kind of job the Department of Defense has done for defense and NASA has done for space. There is a huge, unmet market demand for peacetime goods and services in our crowded schools and crime-infested cities, in our urban ghettos and rural slums and in our understaffed hospitals and on our polluted freeways. We need to infuse money into those markets, so that their needs will have behind them the ring of hard cash that Private industry can hear.

Unhappily, we still have not defined our basic goals as a nation. As a result of not being sure of where we want to go, we have only the foggiest notions of how to get there, or anywhere. The American system is notorious for its lack of over-all planning, with the momentary demands of the market and of the electorate determining our economic and political directions. That method has its obvious drawbacks: waste, inefficiency, stumbling from crisis to crisis.

But it also has a great advantage: freedom. Human affairs are too diverse and unorganized to be directed tidily from the top. Governmental institutions should encourage diversity, not stifle it in regimentation.

But diversity and individuality need not mean social chaos. People can have common goals and universal needs as well as personal ambitions and individual desires. Indeed, man thrives best when he has a clear sense of direction, for both himself and his society.