President Obama Re-Elected - Page 1196

A cynic might conclude that this militaristic enthusiasm could be explained by the simple fact that Pentagon contractors spread a lot of bribe money around Capitol Hill. That is of course true, but there is more to it than that. Some members of Congress will claim that they are protecting constituents' jobs, but even that doesn't really explain it. The wildly uneven concentration of defense contracts and military bases means that some areas, such as Washington, D.C., and San Diego, are heavily dependent on DOD spending, but in most of the country the balance is a net negative: More is paid out in taxes to support the Pentagon than comes back in local contracts.

Economic justifications for Pentagon spending are even less persuasive when one considers that the $600 billion spent every year on the DOD generates comparatively few jobs per dollar spent. The days of Rosie the Riveter are long gone; most weapons projects now require very little touch labor. Instead, a disproportionate share is siphoned off into high-cost R&D (from which the civilian economy benefits little), exorbitant management expenditures, whopping overheard, and out-and-out padding--including, of course, the money that flows back into the coffers of political campaigns. A dollar appropriated for highway construction, health care, or education will create many more jobs than a dollar appropriated for Pentagon weapons procurement: The jobs argument is thoroughly specious. A University of Massachusetts study claims that several alternative ways of spending money would produce anywhere from 35% to 138% more jobs than spending the same amount on DOD (http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/published_study/PERI_military_spending_2011.pdf ).

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When I arrived on the Hill during Reagan's first term, I was a conventional, mainstream Republican. I believed in the notion of peace through strength. At that time the slogan translated quite literally into spending more money on the Pentagon. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan not long before, and the Warsaw Pact seemed like a powerful and monolithic threat. I did not know then (and was probably too naively trusting to have believed it even if someone had tried to dispel my illusions) that the intelligence agencies were systematically inflating the Soviet threat, and that the Soviet military was far weaker than we imagined.

The senior appointees at the CIA--chief among them Robert Gates, who was then deputy director for intelligence--became so enamored of the concept of the Soviet threat that they somehow missed the fact that the collapse of the Warsaw Pact lay only a few years ahead. Senators attending the hearings for Gates's confirmation as CIA director in 1991 brushed aside testimony from former CIA employees about his intelligence distortions because the fix was in, and President George H. W. Bush was not to be denied his nominee.

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My doubts as to the proper management of our military-industrial complex here at home began to grow around the same time. I worked in a congressional office representing a district in Ohio where the B-1 bomber--a project the Carter administration had canceled and the Reagan administration had revived as a cornerstone of its buildup policy--was a significant source of employment. One can generally tell which weapon system is built in a congressman's district by the contractor models on the office desks, the pictures on the walls, and the frequent presence of lobbyists from the company that builds the system. In our case, it was all B-1 all the time.

By the late 1980s, as the first production examples began to enter service, a funny thing happened--although it would not have been funny to the taxpayer who was funding the plane at a then considerable cost of $280 million each. The aircraft's defensive avionics, which were supposed to detect and neutralize enemy electronic systems seeking to find and destroy the B-1, were seriously interfering with the plane's own offensive avionics, whose goal was to help it find enemy targets and attack them. In other words, the contractors had managed to build a self-jamming bomber.

Three planes were written off in crashes shortly after the B-1 entered operational status. Two of these were caused by a poor design in the fuel of hydraulic lines. It soon became evident that needless secrecy surrounded the crash reports: The services hid the details even from Armed Services Committee members with the requisite clearances and an obvious need to know what had happened. The B-1 was AWOL in the first Gulf war, and when it took part in operations in Kosovo in 1999, it flew only after older aircraft--like the antique B-52 it had been intended to replace--had already suppressed Serbian air defenses. There are dozens of weapons systems like the B-1 rattling around in the Pentagon's closet--cold war dinosaurs that are overpriced, underperforming, and unreliable. Every one of them has a coalition of congressional supporters who protect it from conception until decades later, when the military retires it from service; and even then, many in Congress will lobby for a reversal. Keeping these dinosaurs operating assures jobs for constituents. But at what cost to the rest of us?

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This procedure (referring to numerous cover-ups) is now standard both in military departments and civilian agencies. If there is a procurement scandal, the solution is the Band-Aid of toothless "acquisition reform," leaving the same people to administer the programs. The failures of high-level policy judgments that played the biggest part in allowing 9/11 to occur were disguised as the much less significant failures of intelligence collection, analysis, and interagency sharing. Why? If the public were to blame policy judgments at the top, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condolezza Rice, and several cabinet secretaries might be on the hook. But if the fault could be placed on operatives lower down the food chain, as well as on "institutional failures" of the bureaucracy, Congress and the public could be distracted by the monkey motion of "reform" and government reorganization. This is how we ended up with even more bureaucracy in the form of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, not to mention the monstrosity of the Department of Homeland Security.

The dysfunctions of our uniformed military, our intelligence agencies (85 percent of whose funding flows through military budgets), and the rest of government did not arise overnight, and they did not form in a vacuum. They are partially the products of odd and seldom-remarked schizophrenia that has grown up in our political culture. There are many people active in politics who claim they would man the barricades and fight to the death against socialism. But these are almost always the same people who also say they adore the U.S. military, which is probably the largest--certainly the most lavishly funded--socialist institution remaining on Earth since the collapse of the USSR and the transformation of China.

America's military bases are separate little worlds with their own law enforcement and traffic rules--not to mention their own grocery stores (commissaries), big-box stores (PXs), and so on, down to their own DOD Dependents School system, child care centers, housing, and comprehensive health care system--all of them run by the government. There are important historical reasons why these facilities arose, having to do with the low salaries of the old draft military and the frequent remoteness of military bases from retail business, schools, and essential services (on the frontier or overseas, for example). These facilities remain an important factor in the retention of military personnel, particularly those with dependents, to this day. But it is a socialist, or at least highly welfarist state, arrangement. Today, with the advent of the all-volunteer force, salaries are much higher; according to the Congressional Budget Office, military pay averages around the seventy-fifth percentile when compared to civilian jobs with comparable skills. Other studies by the CBO have demonstrated that in several cases, such as the commissaries (the huge retail grocery chains operated by the DOD), a cash allowance would give service members the same level of grocery benefit that they enjoy now--at substantially less cost. Yet whenever the Pentagon offers a proposal to change these arrangements--such as letting annual healthcare premiums for retirees rise with inflation (they have remained the same since 1995)--Congress invariably rejects it, with the free-market, fiscal hawk Republicans usually leading the opposition.

This same sort of military socialism prevails in regions of the country heavily dependent on military contracts. Loudon County, Virginia, an outer suburb of Washington, D.C., offers a perfect example of this ethos. It is the richest county in the United States when measured by median household income. It is very enthusiastically Republican. And the number-one and number-two military contracts in the country, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, are located there. Fairfax County, the county next to Loudon, has the second-highest median household income in the country. The fifth-ranked military contractor, General Dynamics, is based there.

It is no anomaly that areas of the country heavily involved in military contracting are so wealthy. A study by the Project on Government Oversight found that in the thirty-three of thirty-five job categories the government paid billions more to private companies than they would have paid government employees to do the same job. On average they paid about twice as much. A source industry has told me that DynCorp employees acting as security guards at military bases are obtained under contracts paying the company four dollars for every dollar the guard gets paid. Beyond the extravagant profit margins involved, this arrangement reveals that the military can no longer guard its own facilities with its own personnel. Since the 1990s, our army can no longer even feed itself whenever it takes the field; service contractors such as Halliburton do that for the usual exorbitant markup. And the taxpayer takes a further hit, because the contractors often hire retired military personnel (or lure serving personnel to retire by offering them more pay); this means that these ostensibly private employees are frequently getting paid both a salary from the government that is washed through the contracting company, which takes its cut, and a government pension. To top off the bargain, this process is how the military loses some of its most experienced personnel.