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The Myths of Defense

In the area of non-nuclear forces, the U.S. now fields about the same military force as it did in the immediate post-Vietnam period: 2 million soldiers. Some fluctuations are apparent; for example, the number of ships has fallen but the number of army divisions has risen. Yet the continued maintenance of such an enormous fighting force does not appear to reflect doctrinal and technological changes.

Doctrinally, the U.S. officially changed from a "two-and-a-half war strategy" to a "one-and-a-half war strategy" in 1971 when President Nixon began his rapprochement with the Chinese. The older doctrine presented the U.S. with the objective of fighting two-and-a-half wars simultaneously: China to the west, the Soviet Union to the east, and a half war in the Americas, possibly Cuba. Now the China war has been eliminated from doctrine, yet the forces still remain.

Technologically, the Vietnam and Mideast wars have shown large and expensive equipment such as aircraft carriers, fighter aircraft, and tanks to be increasingly vulnerable to highly accurate, deadly, and cost-effective precision-guided munitions. Yet the defense budget still shows a greater commitment to these weapons: for example, although Assistant Defense Secretary William Perry portrays "smart" weapons as the most important revolution in military hardware since radar, the budget includes a request for a fourteenth, multi-billion-dollar aircraft carrier.

If these points were seriously addressed, today's defense budget could be reduced far beyond its projected 4-5 per cent real rise this year.

Myth 4: The Warsaw Pact is now dominant over NATO forces.

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Much of this year's requested rise in defense spending is based on a perceived imbalance in NATO-Warsaw Pact forces, in favor of the latter. Thus we hear of the required "3% NATO increase" in the budget, although the increase is greater than 3% and seems intended more for strategic and naval forces than for NATO troops.

But incremental buildups have occurred on both sides of the central European front, although both NATO and the Pact voice sincere interest in the ongoing Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction talks. The situation is not imbalanced, as some would have us believe; neither side could attack, however improbable that might be, with any significant hope of success. Allegations of a Pact "48-hour blitzkrieg" attack, such as those suggested last year by Senators Nunn and Bartlett, have little basis in fact: indeed, recent war-gaming has reportedly indicated that after an outbreak of war the front in Central Europe would likely stabilize east of Vistula rather than west of the Rhine.

Myth 5: The present level of defense spending must be maintained to avoid worsening unemployment.

Every congressman finds it difficult to support defense reductions--or any other cutbacks for that mwtter--when they involve jobs in his constituency. There is increasing recognition, however, of several issues which question the apparently positive employment impact of defense spending. Although it does create jobs, defense spending, because it is so capital-intensive, affords fewer jobs than non-defense spending. Thus, $1 billion, estimated to create 75,000 positions in defense industries, would create over 180,000 jobs in the education sector, for example.

Myth 6: SALT will legitimize Soviet nuclear superiority.

The pending agreements from the SALT talks, ongoing now for a decade, will limit for the first time all strategic nuclear delivery vehicles--ICBM and SLBM launchers, heavy bombers, and long-range air-to-surface ballistic missiles--to 2400, eventually to 2250. The U.S. currently possesses about 2100 such systems, the Soviets about 2500; it will thus require the Soviets to reduce by about 250 missile launchers.

SALT II also gets aggregate sublimits on multiple warhead or MIRVed systems, thus seeking to cap the rising number of warheads on both sides. The U.S. currently fields about 10,000, the Soviets 5000; under SALT II these numbers might rise to 12,000 and 7500 respectively, still extraordinary nuclear power.

SALT thereby sets equal limits on quantitative expansion of the nuclear arms race. It allows both the Soviets and Americans to be on an equal numerical basis, albeit with some very different nuclear systems. It does not in any sense allow either side any important measure of superiority.

Myth 7: SALT will limit defense spending and the nuclear arms race.

SALT fails to limit the qualitative nuclear arms race. It allows both the Soviets and Americans to continue to modernize and replace their current weapons with more powerful ones. Therefore SALT partially funnels strategic competition from quantitative to qualitative grounds. SALT will allow both sides to deploy on new land-based system such as the MX ICBM in the U.S.; it will also allow those systems to be mobile, although the U.S. wrote in the 1972 SALT I agreements that mobile systems would violate the spirit of the negotiations.

By allowing improving accuracies and yields in ICBMs, SALT does not solve the long-term problem of vulnerability of land-based systems. This is a goal for SALT III. It also will not limit military spending and may very well increase it. The U.S., in not atypical fashion of "negotiating through strength," is deploying the new Trident submarine; the projected ten Tridents will cost the taxpayer about $20 billion. Additional systems, under consideration as "bargaining chips" to obtain Senate ratification of SALT, are the MX ICBM at $30-50 billion, and several thousand air-launched cruise missiles at $30 billion.

SALT should be supported; it is a positive, albeit small, second step towards regulating an increasingly dangerous and costly nuclear weapons competition. But it is far from the answer to the dreams of arms controllers; and if it encourages the U.S. to spend $100 billion-plus on new strategic systems, it has not served its function and will not be worth further support.

These seven myths point up a number of paradoxes in U.S. military policy. This country has experienced over 30 years of relative peacetime, yet spends more today on preparation for war than during any past era except for the World War II and Vietnam years. We negotiate strategic arms limitations, yet deploy newer, potentially destabilizing nuclear weapons. We negotiate arms limitations in Europe, yet build up U.S. forces in NATO. We state that new precision-guided, highly accurate technologies are "revolutionizing" the battlefield, yet request funding for increasingly vulnerable, cost-ineffective weapon platforms such as aircraft carriers. And the federal government voices concern over inflation, yet expands spending in a sector which is one of the most inflationary. In short, military spending and force deployments are increasingly in conflict with stated federal policy objectives and military strategies.

In an era of rising needs in many sectors--energy, environment, health, education, urban planning--and apparently diminishing resources to meet those needs, every citizen should ask what we do really need for defense.

Paul Walker is a research fellow at the Center for Science and International Affairs of the Kennedy School of Government, and co-author of The Price of Defense [Times Books, 1979].

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