Arms and the Senator

REPORT FROM WASTELAND: AMERICA'S MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX by Senator William Proxmire. 248 pages. Praeger. $6.95.

There is little novelty these days in attacking the Pentagon. The war in Viet Nam, the cover-up of the massacre at My Lai, the service club scandals, the inability to answer North Korea's flea-bite seizure of the Pueblo--all these things and more have combined to bring the American military establishment into the noisiest disesteem since before World War II. Wisconsin's Senator William Proxmire, a liberal Democrat--but no doctrinaire foe of the armed services --has won national attention with his disclosures about military overspending beyond original estimates for weapons procurement, notably on the giant C-5A cargo plane.

In this book, Proxmire brings together all his criticisms of the Pentagon and its suppliers. He takes his text from Dwight Eisenhower's valedictory warning against "unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."

Drawing on sworn testimony before the Economy in Government Subcommittee, which he chairs, Proxmire contends that U.S. weapons procurement today is a "welfare system" for companies that do a majority of their business with the Government. Extravagance and cost concealment are the rule; 90% of major weapons systems, says Proxmire, cost at least twice as much as first estimates indicated, because both the Pentagon and its contractors deliberately lie in order to get Congress committed to the program in the first place. "Military spending in the U.S. is out of control," Proxmire concludes. There is, he adds in a Germanic, jawbreaking locution, "a military-industrial-bureaucratic-trade-association-labor-union-intellec tual -technical -academic -service-club-political complex whose pervasiveness touches nearly every citizen."

Addis Attache. Proxmire's case is strongest when most specific. Among other examples, he cites a $4 billion cost overrun for the Minuteman II ICBM; a quadrupling of the original estimated price for the nuclear carrier Nimitz; hundreds of millions misspent on the bug-infested Sheridan and MBT-70 tanks; the $2 billion jump--to more than $5 billion--in the cost of C-5A Galaxy cargo planes.

The Galaxy case is particularly revealing. The C-5A, the world's largest aircraft, was intended to help the U.S. cut down on overseas based troops and supplies by providing speedy, capacious, emergency airlift from the U.S. to trouble spots abroad. A. Ernest Fitzgerald, a civilian cost analyst for the Air Force, was fired after testifying to the $2 billion C-5A cost overrun. Fitzgerald reported that an Air Force officer who raised questions about the cost of C-5A "was found to have unique qualifications to be the air attache in Addis Ababa." Had the Air Force stopped C-5A production after the first run of 58 planes, Lockheed Aircraft, the prime contractor, would have taken a substantial loss. But a year after the cost mess had been made public, the Pentagon went on to order a full 115, only one-third of which were necessary to carry out the emergency airlift mission.

The $2 billion wasted on C-5A, Proxmire observes, could have supported more than ten combat divisions for a year. It could also have paid for all the foreign economic aid in the fiscal 1970 budget. Two billion dollars is nearly twice the amount of federal funds set aside this year for low-and moderate-income housing; it is almost 20 times the 1970 federal budget for urban mass transit and high-speed ground transportation.

In part because of publishing delays, Proxmire's book is slightly out of date. After studying the C-5A case, the Nixon Administration decided that the Air Force can get along with only 81 air craft instead of the 115 originally planned and so, belatedly, saved about $600 million. The Pentagon budget has been trimmed by $10 billion to meet the scrutiny of a Congress alerted by Proxmire's probing. Proxmire gives too little credit to honorable men within the Administration, both in and out of uniform, who are as earnestly devoted to keeping down costs as any congressional watchdog.

Judge and Jury. For the future, Proxmire has some suggestions for ways to keep military costs down. Beyond ending the arms race by agreements with the Soviet Union, he has a dozen proposals for tighter control--notably, placing responsibility for administering military procurement contracts in the hands of an independent civilian agency, as the British have successfully done through their Ministry of Technology. Now, Proxmire says, "each service is judge and jury over its own contracting," an arrangement that leads easily to abuse. Among other means of saving money, he suggests instituting a uniform accounting system for all armed forces and cutting back the proportion of supply and support troops to combat forces from the present ratio of about 10 to 1. (The U.S.S.R. figure is roughly 3 to 1.)

While Proxmire insists that ending waste in the military is a cause that hawks and doves alike can agree on, he occasionally concedes that the views of what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex are not invariably wrong. Rather, he says modestly, "they do have a disproportionate influence on the decisions made by the Executive Branch of the Government." Nevertheless, even in an age grown numb to waste and stratospheric numbers, the sum of Proxmire's indictment is damning --and frightening.

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