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War
and the military-industrial complex
By Henry C K Liu
The evolving arguments for or against a renewed war by the United States
against Iraq have been well presented by now, especially after the State of the
Union speech by President George W Bush on Tuesday evening. The purpose of this
article is not to repeat these arguments, but to focus on the geopolitical and
economic impact of the key official pretext for the pending invasion, which is
to facilitate disarmament of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) on a defenseless
sovereign nation by the world's sole superpower.
It is immaterial whether a nation actually possesses WMD to warrant attack; it
is enough that the sole superpower insists that it does and deems the targeted
nation hostile. As US Secretary of State Colin Powell, whom many regard as the
sole voice of reason in the Bush administration, said on January 24, "The issue
is not inspection; the issue is Iraq."
It is increasingly clear that the real issue on whether a nation faces attack
from the world's sole remaining superpower rests not on its possession of WMD,
but on whether it possesses a creditable counterstrike force as a deterrence to
preemptive attack from a nation which itself has steadfastly refused to adopt a
no-first-use doctrine on WMD.
The shift from deterrence to preemption was incorporated into US national
security strategy in September 2002, a year after the September 11 terrorist
attacks. After the war on Afghanistan, which left its main objective of
eliminating Osama bin Laden unfulfilled, coercive disarmament of Iraq has
become the centerpiece of the Bush administration's war on terrorism. But
Afghanistan and Iraq are merely the opening shots of a broad general shift from
deterrence to preemption. Arms control itself now encompasses the unilateral
abrogation of the stabilizing Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic
Missile Systems (ABM treaty) and the deployment of the destabilizing theater
missile defense (TMD) and national missile defense (NMD) systems.
The 1991 war on Iraq has never ended. For over a decade, US and British war
planes have enforced a no-fly zone over Iraqi air space. When UN arms
inspectors left Iraq in 1998, the US and Britain launched "Operation Desert
Fox", bombing suspected weapons sites and anti-aircraft installations. Such
bombings have continued. Economic sanctions, generally recognized as acts of
war, have caused the death of an estimated 2 million Iraqi civilians, including
women and children, which Madeleine Albright, as US secretary of state,
declared publicly on television as being "worth it". The pending invasion is
merely a new phase in a continuous war. Yet the pretext for the original 1991
war was to reverse the invasion and occupation of Kuwait by Iraq, while the
pretext of the pending renewed war is WMD disarmament.
It is predictable that superpower military action to effect a regime change in
Iraq will have the opposite result from the proclaimed objectives of the US war
on terrorism. Iraq is a country that has not attacked the US, that has no plans
to attack the US and that has no capabilities of attacking the US. Iraq's
current force projection range is about 150 kilometers via missiles, posing no
intercontinental threat to the US. These are obvious facts. Iraq is led by a
leader who has emerged as a living symbol of secular Arab nationalism which,
with US backing, fought a protracted war against Iran, a neighboring Islamic
fundamentalist theocracy.
In February 1982, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the State
Department's list of countries supportive of terrorism. In December 1983 and
March 1984, the administration sent Donald Rumsfeld, who had served as US
defense secretary in the 1970s, and who is again holding that office now, to
Baghdad as a special envoy seeking restoration of diplomatic relations. Thus
the direct link of Iraq to extremist Islamic terrorism is far from definitive.
Yet the pending US invasion of Iraq will be a rallying point for terrorist
cells everywhere to attract newly radicalized recruits willing to die to kill
US citizens and others on US soil, whatever their nationalities. The lesson of
Iraq is that if a nation plans to acquire WMD, it needs to achieve its aim
quickly with counterforce capacity, or be allied with another power with such
capability. Thus the net effect of the Iraq crisis is to accelerate the
proliferation of WMD, not to retard it.
By the growing size of recent protest rallies and the findings of recent
opinion polls, anti-war sentiment appears to be rising both within the US and
globally. There is also considerable speculation among economists in the US on
the potential adverse economic impact of an uncertain war without an end game
in a strategically significant region, such as anticipated increases in
terrorist attacks for indefinite periods, further instability of a precarious
Middle East, uncertainty over the future of oil prices, and the political
fallout of a prolonged US occupation, and the worsening budget deficit from war
costs, particularly at this time of global economic stagnation.
In Ernst Cassirer's The Myth of the State there is a sentence in the
chapter on Hegel: "Hegelianism has had to pay the penalty of its triumph,"
which is very applicable to superpower statism. In the US, the state apparatus
of the New Deal, as constructed under President Franklin D Roosevelt in the
1930s, evolved seamlessly into the post-war military-industrial complex. Hans J
Morgenthau of the University of Chicago (Politics Among Nations)
developed the theme that post-war US foreign policy was "imperialistic" in the
non-pejorative sense of the word, because it was expansionist and
empire-building for the post-war Pax Americana.
Of course, both an interventionist government and a military-industrial complex
were necessary for an "imperialistic" foreign policy. The hawks or doves and
the guns or butter debates touched on another key issue in US foreign policy:
arms control and its scholastics, within the Cold War framework of a bipolar
ideological struggle and superpower confrontation. Since the end of the Cold
War, the US, as the triumphant superpower, has embarked on empire building in
earnest through globalized "free" trade, and since September 11 has imposed WMD
disarmament on arbitrarily identified foes through overwhelming force, with
little fear of direct counterattack retribution.
Comments justifying the need for a benign superpower empire as a desirable and
sensible post-Cold War world order are heard with increasing frequency in the
US mass media. It is a trend not easily ignored by all other nations. France,
Germany, Russia and China, through different perspectives, to different
degrees, with different diplomatic styles and for different geopolitical
reasons, all oppose US preemptive military plans on Iraq. There is a danger
that Afghanistan, Iraq or North Korea, or any future flash points, may turn
into the kindling for a World War III inferno, just as Sarajevo did for World
War I and Czechoslovakia did for World War II. Unilateral preemption inevitably
solicits multilateral counterresponses in global politics.
Arms control is a fall-back regime from peaceful disarmament which by
definition must be universal. Unilateral disarmament can only by imposed by
war. The post-World War II arms control regime was an exclusive game between
the two superpowers that focused mainly on nuclear arms, leaving conventional
arms largely unregulated though not unaffected as "balance of forces" factors
in nuclear arms control negotiations. This is because the separate logic
governing conventional arms and nuclear arms are as different as those
governing Newtonian mechanics and Einstein relativity.
To the nuclear category of WMD are now added chemical and biological weapons,
which have a long history of international convention but which have taken on a
new technological imperative in recent times. All three WMD types, nuclear,
chemical and biological, have been used both on the battlefield and on
civilians in previous wars.
Between 1754 and 1767, the British distributed smallpox-infested blankets to
unsuspecting native Americans during the French and Indian wars. In 1932, the
Japanese began a series of horrific experiments on human beings at "Unit 731"
outside Harbin in Manchuria, China. Some 11 Chinese cities were attacked with
the agents of anthrax, cholera, shigellosis, salmonella and plague, and at
least 10,000 people died during the gruesome experiments.
Declassified US government documentation on the controlled use of biological
warfare by US forces in the Korean War has been found by researchers, and the
indiscriminate use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War is well documented. On
nuclear weapons, the US still enjoys the dubious distinction of being the sole
deployer, not once but twice, although it is controversial whether Hiroshima
and Nagasaki constituted one or two events, much like the controversy on
whether the September 11 attacks on the two World Trade Center towers
constituted one or two events, a dispute with serious implications for
insurance claims.
Until the Age of Manifest Destiny, marked by the Mexican War in 1845, which
combined massive land grabbing (annexing Texas and California, depriving Mexico
of half of its territory), with self-serving idealism of extending the
"benefits" of US values and institutions beyond its borders, the US had been a
relatively peaceful nation, with the exception of continuous wars on native
Americans and the failed war of 1812 to annex Canada from Britain. It is
historically inaccurate to think that a military-industrial complex always
existed in the US, or that it is inseparable from capitalism. Captains of US
industry like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford were consistently vocal in their
anti-armament and anti-war sentiments. The military was relatively small for
the size of the nation or the economy up to the eve of World War I, and defense
contracts were negligible and less than prestigious. Respectable businesses
were not particularly interested in government defense contracts. Even navy
shipbuilding was mostly done only in government yards, not by private
contractors.
Nevertheless, Jane Addam (1860-1935), woman suffrage leader and peace activist,
recipient of the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize, led the Woman's International League
for Peace to protest at the Hague in 1915, asserting private profit from
armament to be a hindrance to the abolition of war, but US entrance into World
War I stopped further protests and the post-war rapid and extensive
demobilization in the US made disarmament a non-issue until the mid-1930s. The
peace movement has been robust throughout much of US history.
The Washington Conference of 1912-22 sanctioned parity for the US and British
navies. The lack of popular resistance on the navy buildup was partly due to
the navy, unlike the army (excepting the National Guards), having a more
defensive role, given the long US coastlines on two oceans, and partly because
the navy had always been more professional and less dependent on conscription
than the army, thus insulating it from general demobilization pressures and
effects.
War planning in World War I caused a radical restructuring of the US economy.
Yet the aggregate profits of US industry were lower in the war years of 1917-18
than in pre-war 1916. While wages increased generally, lower wages increased
more than the cost of living, thus raising the living standard of the working
poor. Labor benefited from wartime full employment and from government
regulations on minimum wages, working hours and working conditions in defense
contracts. Farmers became better off financially during the war, but
agriculture fell further behind industry on the macro developmental level. The
railroads gained spectacular efficiency from centralized government control.
Shipping became a super efficient industry through transport and logistics
support for a large US armed forces in Europe. Air transportation received a
boost from war support for aviation. Transportation in general was rescued by
the war from the disastrous pre-war effects of market failure.
The most significant factor was that about 10 million men, 25 percent of the
workforce, were taken out of productive work and had to be supported at a high
level of military consumption. The lesson was that by a deliberate collective
effort, an enormous expansion of production was effected through a planned war
economy of full employment. The return to normalcy after the war abruptly
dismantled the US war production machine and prevented it from making any
contribution to sustainable economic expansion in peace time. This contributed
to an excessively speculative boom and bust cycle the ended with the Great
Depression, which led to another world war.
In the spring of 1934, Fortune magazine ran an article entitled "Arms and Man",
a cheap expose unworthy of its lofty title. Among other things, it claimed that
while it cost $25,000 to kill an enemy soldier, Chicago gangsters were doing it
for $100 a head. Senator Gerald Nye (Republican, North Dakota), chairman of a
special committee to investigate illegal links between business and armament,
entered the article into the Congressional Records, remarking that "there has
not been published in ages anything so enlightening". The Nye investigation
exposed a few well-known "surprises" about the international arms trade: that
bribery occurred in Latin America and Asia - without linking the observation to
the fact that most arms purchasers were located in those two regions, that home
governments were enlisted to secure foreign sales, that arms manufacturers
always sold to any customer paying cash or with good credit regardless of
morals or politics, and often to both sides of the same conflict, and that arms
embargoes were universally opposed by the arms industry as ineffective and only
resulting in smuggling. The investigation did reveal that DuPont's plant near
Nashville had grossed a profit of 40,000 percent on its capital, soliciting a
response from Pierre DuPont that since his company was selling explosive
technology rather than a commodity (gunpowder) to the government, looking at
return on capital was misleading. Microsoft uses essentially the same
rationalization on spectacular profits derived from intellectual property a
century later.
War planning by the War Production Board (WPB) in World War II learned from the
dismal experience of the War Industries Board of World War I in its inability
to quickly marshal the economy for war. Immediately on its establishment, the
WPB conducted a complete national inventory of material and capacity for
setting priorities and allocations. Its advantage over its predecessor was its
final authority not only over industries but also over all production,
including consumer goods. As such, it had the power to halt civilian
automobiles in favor of munition production. A second and more important
advantage was that war planning could immediately be executed by existing
institutions already manned by in-place trained personnel of the New Deal.
The economic benefits of war were substantial: full employment, price stability
through control and rationing, insatiable war demand that translated into
guaranteed markets for the private sector, priority allocation of resources to
support the spectacular miracle of war production. The US economy quickly
became addicted to these euphoric vitamins from war, at least until market
fundamentalism started to take over Washington, beginning in the 1970s. Since
then, high-tech warfare can happily coexist with high unemployment and stagnant
demand, as its demand on labor and production is narrowly concentrated.
Following the Gulf War, the US economy contracted by 0.5 percent in 1991, its
only shrinkage in two decades. The only visible economic spin-off from the 1991
Gulf War to civilian consumption was the introduction of the Hummer as a luxury
special utility vehicle.
At the end of World War II, the New Dealers, now operationally powerful and
ideologically unapologetic, were determined to extend war planning into peace
time. The economic tools developed in war by the War Production Board, such as
data on national income and production, were readily applicable to peace time
management of the economy. The National Bureau of Economic Research had made
significant advances in understanding the phenomenon of business cycles in
industrial capitalism, monetary and fiscal policy implications on growth and
the credit economics of the regulated banking system. Employment and
unemployment data were readily available through national registration of
worker insurance and social security, and payroll tax withholding. The lessons
of the post World War I demobilization and the abrupt return to "business as
usual" of the New Era which led to the calamitous depression in 1929 were fresh
in the minds of the public leaders and government officials after World War II.
The need for a planned mixed economy that was neither pure market capitalism
nor command socialism became mainstream conventional wisdom until the 1970s,
when supply-side emphasis began to overshadow demand management in a religious
revival of market worship.
Post-World War II demobilization affected the economy differently than that of
post-World War I, due to the availability of a host of social programs:
unemployment insurance; a system of public employment agencies; government
guaranteed bank loans for low and middle income home buyers, farmers and small
entrepreneurs; federal assistance in urban renewal, an interstate highway
system and federal aid to higher education, a GI bill for education; veteran
medical benefits and hospitals, and housing subsidies, etc. Even price control
continued until the fall of 1946 for fighting inflation and speculation.
War-time saving by the public fueled a pent-up demand for big ticket consumer
items: homes and furnishings, automobiles, major appliances, etc. Congress
passed the Employment Act of 1946 which required an annual economic report to
Congress and a formal administration program for implementing the policy aims
of the act. It also created the Council of Economic Advisors.
Post-war economists devised the infamous concept of "structural unemployment"
which for the US economy was then defined at 4 percent of the work force. Three
"scientific" factors behind structural unemployment were identified by the
economic advisors to the president:
1) Post war baby boomers causing a population jump;
2) Racial discrimination, and
3) The existence of severely depressed areas.
The solution for these structural factors was considered to require a different
time frame than conventional business cycles, as they were really social
problems with economic dimensions. The baby boom problem was to be solved by a
lengthening of the period of education and by enlarging enrollment, thus
reducing the number of first time job seekers and delaying their entrance into
the job market. The racial issue would have to wait decades (until Kennedy and
Johnson and in large measure still unresolved today despite widespread tokenism
which is now being misused as a twisted argument against affirmative action).
And the Area Development Act tackled the third issue with rural development
programs. This "scientific truth" condemns 4 percent of the American workforce,
mostly minorities facing institutional discrimination, into permanent exile
from the economy and allows the economic establishment and policymakers to
close their eyes to this man-made "natural" evil without feeling guilty of
derelict of duty. As the economy expands in size, the natural rate now is
considered to be over 6 percent, adding up to 8.5 million unemployed workers.
If even cancer is expected to be conquerable, and a man was placed on the moon
three decades ago, it is unbelievable that the problem of structural
unemployment cannot be solved. The real reason it has not been solved is
because mainstream economics has accepted this condition in a man-made economy
as scientifically "natural" and necessary, thus depriving vital financial
oxygen to all necessary research into seeking a solution. There is no greater
institutional terrorism than policy-induced unemployment and poverty as
foundations of an economic system.
Even then, two alternative economic scenarios for post-World War II were
generally accepted as unavoidable. One expected a return to high unemployment
and depression and deflation, while the other anticipated high inflation as a
natural price for keeping unemployment low. International geopolitical
developments soon provided a third scenario which was quickly seized on by a
convenient coalition of diverse domestic interests: the ideological
anti-communist right; academia and think tanks which thirsted after war-related
research funds, big business which wanted to continue the security of war
contracts in peace time over the uncertainty of market forces, demobilized
military officers who joined the private sector and who sought to maximize the
value of their war time experience in the private sector, government planners
who saw a way to militarize the peace for economic purposes. The Cold War was
not only good politics, it was good economics, and even good social and
physical science. And it was infinitely more preferable to any hot war.
But the nature of armament was fundamentally changed with the arrival of the
age of nuclear weapons. Initial calculations concluded that the cost
effectiveness of nuclear destruction was geometrically superior to conventional
bombs in terms of TNT per dollar. The problem was that only the US had the
bomb, thus there was no need for a large stockpile and also no need for even
conventional arms under conditions of absolute nuclear monopoly. It is
reasonable to surmise that of the various interests that helped the Soviets to
quickly develop a nuclear capability, ideology was not the only consideration.
Arms control scholars in US strategic think tanks actively promoted the need to
let the Soviets have the bomb and an effective delivery system, being confident
at the same time that the US could stay technologically and quantitatively
ahead enough of the Soviets to not compromise national security. By 1971, total
offensive force loading (nuclear warheads) stood at: US 4,600 and the USSR
2,000. MIRV (multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles) technology
and SLBM (submarine-launched ballistic missiles) were urged on the Soviets by
US arms control experts to maintain "stability". Moreover, the US system of
relying on private defense contractors was in a better position to reap
economic benefits from nuclear armament than the Soviet system of state
enterprises. This strategy to bankrupt the USSR with arms spending was
essentially the one which Ronald Reagan employed to win the Cold War.
The military on both sides soon embraced arms control with religious fervor,
having understood that arms control is the deadly enemy of disarmament, which
all military leaders detest like the plague. Within the verity of arms control
was the need to make it easy for the opponent to reach a normative state of
parity to play the game but not any overwhelming advantage to win it. That
state of parity is known as stability. If either side achieves destabilizing
advantage, the incentive for surprise attack is enhanced. So giving the Soviets
nuclear secrets up to a point was to enhance the protection of US security.
This fact created a Byzantine complexity in the game of Cold War espionage.
The problem with a single superpower world order is the disappearance of a
military parity state, thus reducing incentives for political solutions on the
part of an unrestrained superpower. Afghanistan and Iraq are the early victims
of this new world order. Overwhelming military power on one side transforms
terrorism into a viable option as resistance of last resort.
President Dwight D Eisenhower, a conventional war warrior who had an old
soldier's distaste for the unheroic new kill technology and the perversity of
the new scholastics, who built his entire career on his inability to complete a
whole sentence, had Malcolm C Moos, his speechwriter, come up with the eloquent
and catchy term "military-industrial complex" for his farewell speech from the
White House. Throughout his presidency, Eisenhower was confronted with a new
and dangerous phase of the arms race that significantly curbed the policy
options available to the highest office of the land, and that quietly eroded
the traditional independent authority of the president on foreign policy.
Technological imperative pushed weaponry toward intercontinental missiles that
had been openly demonstrated by Sputnik in 1957, and the prospect of
missile-launching nuclear submarines was becoming real. Not being able to tell
the US public about military "secrets" that US enemies already knew - that
there was really no "missile gap" - and not being able to overcome a soldier's
adversity to giving an enemy military secrets, Eisenhower naively thought that
by alerting the public to the unsavory link between business and the military
he would slow down the arms buildup. There is truth to the saying that generals
always re-fight the previous war in the current one. Eisenhower, too old to
fight the next war, was trying to frame its rules by slowing the development of
its armament technology. Eisenhower knew that Sputnik was a stunt rather than a
real feat. It was a showcase for big booster rockets at the time when the US
was achieving radical size and weight reduction of her hydrogen bombs, making
big booster missiles irrelevant as a delivery system, just as US President
George W Bush knows that terrorist attacks are the handiwork of groups outside
of government, never the result of direct government action, thus there is no
more logic in attacking a nation to effect a regime change in a war on
terrorism than in bombing a school to prevent radicalism in the young.
As it turned out, big booster rockets provided the technological imperative for
the development of MIRV technology more than a decade later. Yet public and
press hysteria forced both Eisenhower and Kennedy to lose control of their
defense budgets to include large amounts of waste and redundancy to remove the
nonexistent "missile gap". So Sputnik actually did more to hurt the less
developed Soviet economy down the road than any other factor. It was a fact
that the hawkish advisors to Reagan understood and they urged on him a strategy
of a heightened level of conventional arms race in the name of nuclear arms
control progress that eventually bankrupted the Soviet economy, and thereafter
the Soviet political system as well. The Cold War was not won by US democratic
ideals. It was won by a US arms control strategy that was sustainable only by a
capitalistic system that depended on the private sector to produce weapons
systems for profit.
The US now is seeking a replacement of the economic role of the Cold War. The
attacks on Iraq and Yugoslavia were part of that search - it is a convenient
way to burn off fast technical obsolescence to make room for the next
generation of smart bombs and cruise missiles. The economies of Massachusetts,
California, Texas and North Carolina are closely tied to smart-bomb production,
at a cost of $2 million a pop. The Pentagon announced that in the pending
invasion of Iraq, up to 400 cruise missiles a day would be launched, more than
all fired in the 1991 war. With 4-6 percent unemployment being now accepted as
a scientific necessity for long-term economic growth, and the prospect of total
mobilization for a massive troop confrontation with another superpower being
unrealistic in the foreseeable future, the economic impact of regional wars
needed for empire building is expected to concentrate on high-tech innovation
and tele-application, to maximize kill-ratio advantage, and on superior
long-distance command and control of battlefield tactics via satellites, and
not on the general economy.
With the public acceptance of the "missile gap" after Sputnik in 1957,
internecine warfare within the Department of Defense - known respectably as
inter-service rivalry - broke out in earnest and in public. The newly
independent air force proposed to rename itself as the Aerospace Force to close
the irrelevant and basically non-existent missile gap. The navy harked back to
science fiction to point out that spaceships were the province of the navy
because ships had always been naval vehicles, whether they sailed on a sea of
water or in the air. The army, having lost control of the Army Air Corps,
fearful of becoming obsolete in a strategic nuclear age, promoted the concept
of limited nuclear wars with tactical nuclear weapons where the foot soldier
remained key. The term "wish list" became Pentagon budget parlance to denote
serious fantasy. This mentality eventually led to Star Wars during the Reagan
administration and the current national missile defense and theater missile
defense anti-ballistic missile defense systems.
Response time became a major factor in strategic nuclear defense. Response time
to enemy attack by long-range bombers carrying nuclear bombs had been shortened
to hours, as compared to weeks by the airlift movement of conventional troops
and tanks. With the on-coming missile age, response time was further reduced to
minutes. Kennedy was the first president who had "the button". Kennedy's
political deal with the US right was that while he would be liberal in domestic
economic policy and civil rights politics, he would be a fervent Cold War
warrior in foreign relations. That inverse relationship between domestic and
foreign policies, as engineered by Kennedy, is still visible today. Bill
Clinton, on entering the White House, served notice to all that his first term
was going to be devoted entirely to domestic issues, with foreign policy taking
a back seat, meaning no change from the Reagan/Bush foreign policy. Starting
with Kennedy and notwithstanding the Eisenhower warning, defense expenditure
rose. The defense budget of eight years of Kennedy/Johnson exceeded the
pervious 15 post-war years, even not counting Apollo, which was disguised as a
civilian project to reach the moon for scientific purposes instead of the heavy
payload missile research program that it really was.
Richard Barnet in his The Economy of Death published in 1969 detailed
the rise of the new super-rich like David Packard, who parlayed an electronic
hobby in his garage into a $300 million personal fortune by the mid 1960s;
Simon Ramo and Dean E Wooldridge of TRW, which catapulted from a $6,000
operation in auto parts into a $120 million defense contractor by 1967. Since
these companies were involved in selling "threat reducers", it was necessary
for them to first sell "threats". James Ling, the founder of LTV, who with a
$3,000 investment built a $3.2 billion business, declared to the press, "One
must believe in the long term threat."
Believing in security threats, unlike believing in God, has secular rewards.
The two-way revolving door for business executives and military officers
between the Pentagon and the private sector nurtures a common culture in which
fundamental assumptions are accepted as givens. Robert McNamara and the whiz
kids, fresh from turning the Ford Motor Company back into profit by making cars
cheap in both price and quality, not to mention safety, brought the same
systems analysis approach they borrowed from war planning to apply to Ford back
to the Pentagon where it had begun, but where it had since been largely
forgotten by the postwar generals. With mission-oriented cost/effectiveness
analysis, concepts of kill-ratio; flexible response etc, McNamara
de-politicized the military, and in the process militarized politics. Foreign
relations became exceedingly complex and dominated by nuclear strategic
scholastics. It fell mostly beyond the grasp of non-specialists because of the
special logic of arms control scholastics, and its unique parlance defies
common sense.
The post-Cold War, post-Vietnam anti-war movement of the new century is
different. Increasingly, the radical left and the extreme right are becoming
uneasy allies against war, with the liberal middle assuming an unprecedented
hawkish posture of moral imperialism and humanitarian intervention.
The logic of nuclear arms control evolved into a modern scholasticism that gave
new meaning to the language of war. Deterrence, rather than victory, became the
sacred aim. Since political accommodation was ruled unrealistic with an
opponent possessing the power of instant massive destruction, peace could no
longer be achieved through diplomacy until nuclear war was eliminated as a
possibility. The doctrine of deterrence was based on a balance of terror, to
make war so mutually destructive that the very thought of it was enough to
terrorize potential opponents into maintaining peace. The doctrine of massive
mutual assured destruction became enshrined in every think tank engaged in
nuclear strategy.
The originator of this type of theory was Herman Kahn in his famous Thinking
About The Unthinkable, which defines stages of escalation of terror so
that the final stage of nuclear war will never come. These stages are to be so
well understood by both opponents that the first sign of escalation was enough
to induce de-escalation back to normal. DECON1 and DECON2 became common
strategic terms that spilled over to the movies. Under this theory, stability
is achieved only by parity of military nuclear capability. Nuclear weapons that
kill people are stabilizing (good, because they reinforce terror as a deterrent
to nuclear war), weapons that destroy nuclear weapons are destabilizing (bad,
because they reduce terror by providing protection against incoming
destruction). This is the context in which the proposed Star Wars, ABM, NMD and
TMD were debated originally. Civil defense is bad because it implies a
preparation to neutralize an enemy counterattack after mounting a first attack,
in order to launch a second attack.
It is ironic that the post-Cold War, near-universal opposition to terrorism on
a localized scale is promoted by the same government that had employed massive
global nuclear terrorism as the basic tool for constructing an arms control
regime that enabled it to win the Cold War. Clausewitz's concept of total war,
the aim of which is not merely to rob the enemy of military capability but to
destroy the enemy's will to resist, was revived as gospel by nuclear war
scholars. War, according to Clausewitz, was merely a continuation of diplomacy
by other means. Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), in his influential book: On War,
insightfully identified war as merely an extension of diplomacy, which is a
tailor-made dogma that the modern nuclear war regime needs.
Prior to the onset of the Clausewitzian view, traditional military doctrine
always considered diplomacy as an instrument of peace, while war was the result
of failed diplomacy. Clausewitz, being a realist of the age of Napoleonic wars,
viewed war as a natural condition in human affairs. His ideas enjoyed renewed
attention in the post-World War II era of superpower Cold War military doctrine
in which, due to technological imperative and ideological irreconcilability,
war by nuclear weapons, though unthinkable, let alone desirable, is considered
as an inherent and imminent possibility and its deterrence achievable only by
making its projected outcome utterly unbearable, even to the surviving winner.
It is a war prevention theory based on the politics of terror and fear.
Should the US now invade Iraq, preceded by massive bombing or, as reported in
the US press, even tactical nuclear attack, it would dilute deterrence of war
or terrorism by fear. It would be a message to terrorists that their handiwork
will elicit blind punitive attacks on whomever happens to be on the US's enemy
list at the moment. It would also be a message to all governments that
counter-terrorism punitive attacks lack focus, or worse, that the war on
terrorism is merely a pretext for unrelated geopolitical objectives on the part
of the sole superpower. Under such circumstances, terrorist attacks would not
cease. Far from it, such attacks would escalate from being threats of potential
mayhem to address particular grievances, to realities of pandemonium to bring
down the whole system, as counter-measures would degenerate into state actions
of arbitrary self interest. When two hijacked civilian airliners can cause the
sudden death and casualty of more than 3,000 civilians and the sudden collapse
of a nation's tallest skyscrapers, it is proof that potential WMD are
commonplace and everywhere, not just within the organized military. It is a
problem that cannot be solved by attacking one or two "rogue" states that
happen to fall outside the US code of acceptable conduct at the moment. When
the police are intoxicated with unlimited power without accountability, law
enforcement effectiveness suffers.
Under the Cold War doctrine of deterrence by fear, prevention of nuclear war
rested on the unacceptability of the horror of mass destruction threatening
both opponents, an end-state terror that would justify a permanent
militarization of peace as the price for survival. Diplomatic options in Cold
War superpower relations escalated from a relatively fluid scenario of if-then
(if you transgress with action - then we will attack), to the impasse of
either-or (either you desist in intention or we will escalate) and finally to
the locked position of neither-nor (neither you start - nor will we start), all
based on the doctrine of "Massive Mutually Assured Destruction", known among
nuclear warfare scholars by its perceptive acronym: MAD. The war on terror has
yet to reach such levels of sophistication.
This was the point when the terms hawks and doves appeared in Cold War
politics. Doves wanted weapons that killed populations, such as
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM); hawks wanted weapons that destroyed
other weapons, such as anti-ballistic missiles (ABM - a bullet to shoot an
incoming bullet, known also to skeptics as a solution in search of a problem
since stability preempts first attacks.) Doves wanted to expose the population
of both sides to defenseless attack, as hostage to peace. Hawks wanted civil
defense to protect populations. Doves wanted unprotected missiles for both
sides, exposed to enemy attack, to remove the possibility of a second strike by
either side. Hawks wanted mobile missiles that were hard to target and deep
protective silos for missiles that would survive a first attack. Doves wanted
B-52 bombers (470 bombers) that were slow enough for a recall; Hawks wanted
missile-launching nuclear submarines (600 Polaris missiles and 64 Poseidon
SLBMs each with 10 50-kiloton warheads) under the North Pole that could still
launch after Washington had been obliterated, a doomsday machine. Technological
imperative gives the world MIRVs, named Minuteman III, each carrying three
20-kiloton warheads (100 Minuteman III, plus 900 Minuteman I&II). Doves
wanted to deny the defense system (54 Titan IIs with 10 megatons, 10 times
Minuteman's kill power) of any second-strike capability. Yet the
characteristics between stabilizing and destabilizing weapons often overlapped,
depending on the scenario of escalation, with some weapons systems claimed by
both hawks and doves as contributing to maintaining the peace.
The agreement with the Russians not to aim ICBM warheads on US cities was in
fact a victory for the hawks. Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT)
negotiations between the US and the USSR resulted in two treaties and several
less formal agreements. SALT I, begun in 1969 and ended in 1972, with agreement
on the Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems (ABM Treaty)
and the Interim Agreement on the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. The
ABM Treaty limited the number of weapons and radar equipment allowed each
country and regulated their type and location, while allowing for continued
development of weapons. The treaty also established commissions for monitoring
violations and considering further arms-control proposals. Under the interim
agreement, the parties agreed to limit their supply of strategic missile
launchers to the numbers and types then existing or under construction, but
they allowed for the improvement of those existing types. Installation of both
NMD and TMD systems required the abrogation of the ABM Treaty.
SALT II began in 1972 and was signed in 1979 and set precise limits on the
numbers of each type of strategic launcher. SALT II permitted the testing and
development of certain kinds of launchers. Although SALT II never entered into
force, both the US and the USSR did pledge to abide by its limits. In 1982,
Ronald Reagan advanced his proposal for a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty
(START). Direct talks between Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev led to
the signing of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987. In 1991,
President George H Bush and Gorbachev signed the START I Treaty, by which the
two countries agreed to reduce the number of nuclear warheads by about 25
percent. After the breakup of the USSR in 1991, negotiations on START I began
between the US, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. All five countries
eventually ratified START I, which became effective in November 1994. The START
II Treaty, which called for the elimination of almost three quarters of the
nuclear warheads held by the five countries, was signed in 1993. START III
limits the number of deployed strategic warheads to about 2,000 on each side,
still enough to wipe out civilization many times over with a single first
strike.
Donald Rumsfeld, while out of office during the Clinton administration, spelled
out his hawkish views in the "Report of the Rumsfeld Commission to Assess the
Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States", dated July 15, 1998, with the
following conclusion: "Concerted efforts by a number of overtly or potentially
hostile nations to acquire ballistic missiles with biological or nuclear
payloads pose a growing threat to the United States, its deployed forces and
its friends and allies. These newer, developing threats in North Korea, Iran
and Iraq are in addition to those still posed by the existing ballistic missile
arsenals of Russia and China, nations with which we are not now in conflict but
which remain in uncertain transitions. The newer ballistic missile-equipped
nations' capabilities will not match those of US systems for accuracy or
reliability. However, they would be able to inflict major destruction on the US
within about five years of a decision to acquire such a capability (10 years in
the case of Iraq). During several of those years, the US might not be aware
that such a decision had been made.
"Iraq has maintained the skills and industrial capabilities needed to
reconstitute its long range ballistic missile program. Its plant and equipment
are less developed than those of North Korea or Iran as a result of actions
forced by UN resolutions and monitoring. However, Iraq has actively continued
work on the short range (under 150 kilometers) liquid and solid-fueled missile
programs that are allowed by the resolutions. Once UN-imposed controls are
lifted, Iraq could mount a determined effort to acquire needed plant and
equipment, whether directly or indirectly. Such an effort would allow Iraq to
pose an ICBM threat to the United States within 10 years. Iraq could develop a
shorter range, covert, ship-launched missile threat that could threaten the
United States in a very short time.
"Iraq had a large, intense ballistic missile development and production program
prior to the Gulf War. The Iraqis produced Scuds, and then modified Scud
missiles to produce the 600 kilometer range Al Hussein and 900 kilometer range
Al Abbas missiles. The expertise, as well as some of the equipment and
materials from this program remain in Iraq and provide a strong foundation for
a revived ballistic missile program.
"Prior to the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Iraq could have had nuclear weapons
in the 1993-1995 time frame, although it still had technical hurdles to
overcome. After the invasion of Kuwait, Iraq began a crash program to produce a
nuclear device in six to nine months based on highly enriched uranium removed
from the safeguarded reactor at Tuwaitha. Iraq has the capability to
reconstitute its nuclear weapon program; the speed at which it can do so
depends on the availability of fissile material. It would take several years to
build the required production facilities from scratch. It is possible that Iraq
has hidden some material from UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) inspection, or
that it could acquire fissile material abroad (eg from another "rogue" state.)
Iraq also had large chemical and biological weapons programs prior to the war,
and produced chemical and biological warheads for its missiles. Knowledge,
personnel and equipment related to WMD remain in Iraq, so that it could
reconstitute these programs rapidly following the end of sanctions."
Not a single word on terrorism was found in the entire report dated 1998, three
years before the September 11 attacks. Largely on the basis of this report, the
US under Bush abrogated unilaterally the Treaty on the Limitation of
Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems (ABM).
By the ABM Treaty, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed that each
might have only two ABM deployment areas, so restricted and so located that
they could not provide a nationwide ABM defense or become the basis for
developing one. Each country, thus, through the ABM Treaty, left unchallenged
the penetration capability of the other's retaliatory missile forces. Precise
quantitative and qualitative limits were imposed on the ABM systems that might
be deployed. Both parties agreed to limit qualitative improvement of their ABM
technology. The ABM Treaty was signed in Moscow on May 26, 1972, and ratified
by the US Senate on August 3, 1972. It entered into force on October 3, 1972.
The US and the USSR signed a protocol to the treaty which entered into force in
1976 and which reduced the number of ABM deployment areas from two to one,
deployed either around each parties' national capital area or, alternatively,
at a single ICBM deployment area. The USSR deployed an ABM system around
Moscow, but the US elected not to deploy an ABM system and in 1976 de-activated
its site at Grand Forks, North Dakota, around a Minuteman ICBM launch area. The
treaty had subsequently been extensively modified by amendment, with various
common understandings and protocols. Five-year review meetings were held in
Geneva. The ABM Treaty thus had enshrined as strategic doctrine the principle
of deterrence through threat of counter strike retaliation.
Post-Cold War developments have resulted in the emergence of substantial
bipartisan support in the US for the development and deployment of active
defenses against ballistic missiles of less than strategic range (theater
ballistic missiles) in the form of theater missile defense systems, which would
defend US military forces and allies overseas, where issues of MAD deterrence
do not apply. Although much more controversial, there is also considerable
backing for the development of a national missile defense (NMD) system, which
would defend US territory and population against a limited missile attack,
directly refuting MAD deterrence principles.
The ABM Treaty has come to play a critical role in the debate over both TMD and
NMD. But this role is very different for the two types of systems. The ABM
Treaty did not limit theater missile defense systems per se. The treaty limits
ABM systems that are defined as systems "to counter strategic ballistic
missiles or their elements in flight trajectory". Since TMD systems are aimed
not at countering strategic ballistic missiles but at shorter-range theater
ballistic missiles, they are outside the scope of the ABM Treaty.
The problem is that the term "strategic ballistic missiles" is not defined in
the ABM Treaty, leaving open the question of what constitutes a "strategic
ballistic missile" as opposed to a "theater ballistic missile". The situation
is complicated further by article VI of the treaty, in which the parties agreed
to two things: not to give non-ABM systems "capabilities to counter strategic
ballistic missiles or their elements in flight trajectory" and not to test
non-ABM systems "in an ABM mode". Again, the treaty nowhere defines the phrase
"capabilities to counter" or what constitutes "testing in an ABM mode". While
the United States made a unilateral statement at the time of the negotiations
as to what it considered "testing in an ABM mode", this statement was directed
toward the testing of air defense systems and sheds little light on the testing
of TMD systems.
This has meant that development of US TMD systems has, almost from its
inception, occurred under a cloud of possible non-compliance with the ABM
Treaty. The secretary of defense was given responsibility for US compliance
with the treaty shortly after it was ratified. The secretary has been assisted
in this role by the Compliance Review Group (CRG), established within the
Department of Defense. In trying to decide whether a TMD system in development
has "capabilities to counter" strategic ballistic missiles, the CRG has based
its assessment on the "inherent capabilities" of a TMD system against a
strategic ballistic missile. In making this judgment, the CRG has relied on
computer-based calculations and simulations of a one-on-one engagement between
a TMD interceptor and a single strategic ballistic missile, rather than on more
realistic scenarios involving projected performance in real-world combat
situations (force-on-force engagements). This has tended to overstate the
capabilities of TMD systems.
Further, this approach is inherently one-sided. The ABM Treaty is verified only
by national technical means (NTM). This means that the US can object to Soviet
(now Russian) compliance based only on observable activities (via satellite)
such as actual testing of TMD systems. The US has little insight into the
theoretical computer-based capabilities of Russian TMD systems, and therefore
cannot raise compliance objections based on them. Yet the US is constraining
its own development of TMD systems based on just this kind of analysis.
The upshot has been significant limitations on the technical capability of US
TMD systems under development. For example, the army's Theater High Altitude
Area Defense (THAAD) system has been certified by the US as ABM Treaty
compliant only through the demonstration and validation phase of development.
It is uncertain as to whether the system will be certified for deployment. To
the extent that it will, certification is likely to be conditioned on the
system being rendered incapable of receiving sensor data from sources other
than its own radar. Thus, the system will be unable to acquire targeting data
from satellite-based sensors (such as the former "Brilliant Eyes" satellite
constellation). If THAAD were permitted to receive data from such sources, the
potential area that it could defend against attack from a ballistic missile
fired from 1,000 kilometers away would nearly double in size.
Similarly, the Navy's Theater Wide Defense (NTWD) system (formerly the Navy
Upper Tier system) has been certified by the United States as ABM Treaty
compliant, but it is based on a concept of operations that restrict the NTWD to
making interceptions while the target is within the range of the SPY radar
aboard AEGIS cruisers or destroyers that will carry the NTWD. This effectively
restricts the potential for interception to the ascent phase of a theater
ballistic missile's flight (from initial launch to burnout of the missile's
rocket motor). The AEGIS ship must be close enough to the launch point of the
theater ballistic missile that its radar can track the flight and guide the
interceptor to the target before that target either attains a velocity that the
interceptor cannot overcome or flies out of the radar's range. If the
interceptor could rely on data about the target's flight provided from other
sensors - such as satellites - then the NTWD system could engage theater
ballistic missiles or their warheads in mid-course flight (after the missile
has burned out or a warhead has separated from the missile). Bush approved for
sale to Taiwan four Kidd-class destroyers and advanced missiles for Taiwanese
fighter jets, but Taiwan will not be allowed to buy AEGIS systems.
In terms of national missile defense, the essence of the ABM Treaty was that
each side forswore the deployment of a defense of its territory against the
strategic ballistic missiles of the other. The treaty did permit the deployment
of ABM defenses initially at two sites on each side, designed originally for
the national capitals and one ballistic missile field each. Only the Soviet
Union took advantage of this freedom, and Russia still maintains an ABM system
to defend Moscow.
What both nations eventually would benefit from, however, is not limited
defenses of specific sites, but a thin layer of protection for their entire
countries - to defend not against each other's ballistic missiles, but against
ballistic missiles from third countries that could threaten them both, or from
accidental or unauthorized launches. By its terms, the ABM Treaty makes this
difficult. Sea-based ABM systems (such as might be achieved by an upgraded navy
NTWD system), or air or space-based systems (such as "Brilliant Pebbles"
pursued by the Reagan and Bush administrations), are proscribed. A single site
centrally located in the continental United States for deployment of a fixed
land-based ABM system would, with today's technology, have a difficult task in
providing an effective defense of Alaska and Hawaii.
The Bush Sr administration sought to enlist first the Soviet Union and then
Russia, along with US allies, such as Japan and Taiwan, in building a global
protection system that would provide a limited ballistic missile defense to all
nations committed to nonproliferation norms. It sought Moscow's agreement to
relax the ABM Treaty constraints to permit the development and deployment of
such a system. However, Soviet consent was never achieved, and Russian
officials had increasingly indicated their commitment to the strictest possible
continuation of the ABM Treaty.
The Bush Sr administration had been pursuing negotiations with the Russians to
define the demarcation line between an ABM system (limited by the ABM Treaty)
and a TMD system (unlimited by the treaty). This was consistent with the
administration's view that theater ballistic missiles constitute the only near
or medium-term danger and that the US's most important priority is to ensure
that it can develop and deploy those TMD systems needed to defend against that
threat. Negotiators for the two sides had apparently agreed that "testing in an
ABM mode" means testing a TMD system against a ballistic missile target that
anywhere in its target flight has a velocity in excess of 5 kilometers per
second or flies to a range of over 3,500 kilometers. TMD systems tested against
such a target would presumably be deemed to be "tested in an ABM mode" and
subject to ABM Treaty limitations.
As to giving TMD systems "capabilities to counter strategic ballistic
missiles", the parties were apparently nearing agreement that systems having an
interceptor with an intercept velocity of three kilometers per second or less
(it is unclear whether this was a theoretical capability or is to be determined
by what has actually been demonstrated in test flights) would not be considered
to have "capabilities to counter strategic ballistic missiles" and would not
qualify as NMD systems as long as they were not "tested in an ABM mode". Those
systems having an interceptor with an intercept velocity of greater than three
kilometers per second, however, would be subject to the compliance judgment of
the side deploying that system as to whether it possessed "capabilities to
counter" strategic ballistic missiles. Additionally, the parties might agree on
a number of joint TMD activities, including joint exercises, joint development
contracts, and possible sharing of early-warning data. Confidence-building
measures would also be discussed.
The Bush Sr and Clinton administrations had believed that this approach would
ensure that its near-term TMD systems (upgraded Patriot missiles, THAAD and the
Navy Lower Tier missile defense system) could be deployed without ABM Treaty
problems. It was less clear whether this approach would protect planned
follow-on systems (such as NTWD and a possible boost-phase intercept system
launched from aircraft) or future generations of systems required to deal with
more sophisticated theater ballistic missile threats.
The abrogation of the ABM Treaty has a profound negative impact on US efforts
to reduce Russian and Chinese strategic nuclear arsenals and to build a
stronger nuclear nonproliferation regime.
On December 13, 2001, President Bush officially announced that the US would
withdraw unilaterally from the 1972 ABM Treaty with Russia. "I have concluded
the ABM treaty hinders our government's ability to develop ways to protect our
people from future terrorist or rogue-state missile attacks," Bush announced
following a meeting with his National Security Council. "Defending the American
people is my highest priority as commander in chief and I cannot and will not
allow the United States to remain in a treaty that prevents us from developing
effective defenses," Bush said at the White House Rose Garden, in a
definitively hawkish statement by the standards of arms control lexicon.
A statement by the press secretary on the withdrawal from the ABM Treaty read,
"The circumstances affecting US national security have changed fundamentally
since the signing of the ABM Treaty in 1972. The attacks against the US
homeland on September 11 vividly demonstrate that the threats we face today are
far different from those of the Cold War. During that era, now fortunately in
the past, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in an implacably
hostile relationship. Each side deployed thousands of nuclear weapons pointed
at the other. Our ultimate security rested largely on the grim premise that
neither side would launch a nuclear attack because doing so would result in a
counter-attack ensuring the total destruction of both nations.
"Today, our security environment is profoundly different. The Cold War is over.
Today the United States and Russia face new threats to their security.
Principal among these threats are weapons of mass destruction and their
delivery means wielded by terrorists and rogue states. A number of such states
are acquiring increasingly longer-range ballistic missiles as instruments of
blackmail and coercion against the United States and its friends and allies.
The United States must defend its homeland, its forces and its friends and
allies against these threats. We must develop and deploy the means to deter and
protect against them, including through limited missile defense of our
territory.
"Under the terms of the ABM Treaty, the United States is prohibited from
defending its homeland against ballistic missile attack. We are also prohibited
from cooperating in developing missile defenses against long-range threats with
our friends and allies. Given the emergence of these new threats to our
national security and the imperative of defending against them, the United
States is today providing formal notification of its withdrawal from the ABM
Treaty. As provided in Article XV of that Treaty, the effective date of
withdrawal will be six months from today."
It is true that defense peaked as a share of US GDP (6.2 percent) in 1986.
Before that, it had not been as high unless one goes back to 1972, the height
of the Vietnam War. In 1998, the defense/GDP ratio was 3.2 percent. The Clinton
budgets caused the defense/GDP ratio to continue to decline. Localized
conflicts on the scale of the Gulf War did not alter the basic trend of
stagnation in military spending. Defense/GDP ratio continued to decline from
1989 to the 2000. The Bush administration is on record to want to reverse that
trend. In February 2002, the president proposed a total of $379.3 billion for
the Department of Defense for fiscal year 2003 (including $10 billion to fight
terrorism.) with a defense/GDP ratio of 3.8 percent. This is a $45.3 billion
increase from FY2002. Added to this must be $15.6 billion for the nuclear
weapons activities of the Department of Energy.
The Council for a Livable World, a Washington-based public policy think tank,
states that "the US increase of $48 billion is larger than the annual military
budget of any other country in the world". By FY2007, the defense budget is to
increase to $451.4 billion (plus $16.9 billion for the nuclear weapons
program). Development of layered missile defenses will take $7.8 billion. The
Navy Area Theater Wide program has been canceled. An additional $815 million
will go into space-based sensors, while the Space-Based Infrared Systems
(SBIRS) Low Component Program slips by two years from its initial 2004
deployment. Over $27 billion of the budget is reserved to fight the war against
terrorism. In this context, the president plans an additional $37.7 billion
budget for homeland defense. One cannot resist the temptation of speculating
how much terrorist hostility can be neutralized by an aid and friendship
program of that dimension.
The real grease in military spending for lubricating the economy comes from
hardware and research and development, not from soldiers' pay. By supporting
anti-missile defense development during the last eight years, Clinton and the
Democrats already gave the contractors all that they could have asked for.
There is also the lead time factor. Military spending requires first the
depletion of inventory before the replacement phase can come later. Armed
conflicts, even localized ones, accelerates this cycle.
The last thing a military hardware vendor wants is a battlefield test of his
product. To maximize sales, both buyer and seller have an interest in
controlled tests that make them look good, not real tests which could be
embarrassing. The technical and budgetary fallouts are more R&D and
upgrades. One B2 bomber now costs over $3 billion due to upgrades, up one third
from its original cost. The construction cost of the World Trade Center towers
was $1.5 billion at its completion in 1972, and its replacement cost today
would be about the same as the cost of a B2. The Stealth fighter will cost 30
percent more to make it more stealthy and less vulnerable. The new price will
be around $65 million each. Yet military spending meant more back in 1962 when
the defense budget was near 10 percent of GDP. It is precisely the fact that
military spending has not been a significant factor in the economy in the
post-Cold War decade that gives new incentives for new violent conflicts.
Military spending has always had an international strategic dimension. Reagan
used it in Star Wars to bankrupt the USSR, paying the price of record high
deficits and national debts. After the Cold War, the US economy was fueled by
neo-liberal globalization of trade and finance, which went bust in 1997. With
global trade contracting, and anticipated recovery delayed, military spending
takes on new importance.
Defense spending is now again a necessary option, but it takes time and
eventually it will take a total war to work as it did in World War II. The NMD
and TMD systems are part of the developing trend. For FY2003, defense spending
with military and homeland security expenditure represents 17 percent of the
federal budget. It will rise to 22 percent by 2007 under current projections.
Regional conflicts such as Afghanistan and Kosovo ran at about $100 million a
day in the first phase and $200 million in the intensive later phases. For
Iraq, an expenditure of over $1 billion a day is being bantered about. It has
been announced that the Defense Department plans to deploy a barrage of 400
cruise missiles a day on the opening days of the Iraq offensive, which at $2
million each, would incur a cost of $800 million a day just for cruise
missiles. Pretty soon, that adds up to a lot of money, even though it pales
against the $8 trillion loss of market capitalization since the beginning of
2000.
The reason defense spending at this moment in history contributes relatively
little to US GDP is because the US economy is so much bigger than those of its
perceived adversaries. In that sense, it is correct to observe that the role of
defense spending has shifted from one of domestic economic stimulant to global
geopolitical weaponry. But the very nature of war has changed, the link between
economic warfare and physical conflicts has become continuous. Neither Russia
or China, or even the European Union or Japan can afford an arms race with the
US, so NMD and TMD will go forward, but not to completion for lack of a
credible adversary. The EU is on record in opposing the two systems. As for the
so-called rogue states, their identities are quite whimsical and they may well
change before the systems are operational. But the nature of armament has again
fundamentally changed with the arrival of the age of biological and chemical
weapons. The nature of the threat has changed. The logic of TMD and NMD is
fundamentally faulty: why should terrorists resort to ICBMs that are costly and
difficult to launch when a small bottle of biological agent can do more damage
at a tiny fraction of the cost? A recent NATO study shows that the costs of
conventional weapons ($2,000), nuclear armaments ($800), and chemical agents
($600) would far outstrip the bargain basement price of biological weapons ($1)
to produce 50 percent casualties per square kilometer (1969 dollars).
Terrorism can only be fought with the removal of injustice, not by
anti-ballistic missiles and smart bombs. It is a straw-man argument to assert
the principle of refusal to yield to terrorist demands. It is a suicidal policy
to refuse to negotiate with terrorists until terrorism stops, for the political
aim of all terrorism is to force the otherwise powerful opponent to address the
terrorists' grievances by starting new negotiations under new terms. The
solution lies in denying terrorism any stake in destruction and increasing its
stake in dialogue. This is done with an inclusive economy and a just world
order in which it would be clear that terrorist destruction of any part of the
world would simply impoverish all, including those whom terrorists try to help.
The US can increase its own security and the security of the world by adopting
foreign and trade policies more in tune with its professed values of peace and
justice for all.
Henry C K Liu is chairman of the New York-based Liu Investment Group
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact
content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication
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