The Price of Power
Through a driving rain that swept the Cuban coast, 2,100 U.S. Marines stormed into Guantanamo Bay, the tiny U.S. military base that perches like a lighthouse on the eastern tip of Fidel Castro's island fortress.
Most landed by helicopter from seaborne troop carriers, but a quarter of the force hit the beach in more classic Marine style, splashing ashore aboard tracked amphibious vehicles. Though their rifles, tanks and howitzers were unloaded--no live ammunition was carried throughout the operation--their performance was intended by Jimmy Carter to be a firm and well-publicized demonstration of Washington's concern about the presence of a Soviet combat brigade in Cuba.
But that was only one of a pride of U.S. military maneuvers round the world last week. At Grafenwohr, West Germany, a U.S. tank battalion roared into combat exercises after having been flown in from Fort Hood, Texas, on a "no notice" emergency drill. At Florida's Eglin Air Force Base, 20,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen prepared to launch "Bold Eagle 80," a nine-day maneuver to practice coming to the aid of an invaded ally. In the Indian Ocean, a U.S. Navy seven-ship carrier task force joined up with a five-ship Middle East force to show the flag.
All these military activities were designed to maintain the U.S. readiness needed both to protect the nation and meet its far-flung obligations. But just how well the Pentagon would be able to carry out its awesome responsibilities is a matter of growing concern in Washington. Both in the Administration and in Congress, officials confront a question that will not go away: Could the U.S. successfully counter a major Soviet military thrust, no matter where it came? If the answer seems doubtful, then the next question inevitably is: What must be done to ensure the nation's security?
Those two related questions have dominated the Senate debate on ratification of the SALT II accord. More generally, they have been influencing the way other countries view the U.S. as a world power. The search for answers has already caused one of the most far-ranging U.S. defense controversies since World War II.
The debate began stirring in scholarly journals, inside think tanks and on Capitol Hill. It has assumed a heightened sense of urgency during the SALT hearings, in which both expert witnesses and Senators have been expressing grave concern about the state of the nation's military strength. Armed with volumes of facts and statistics, they have convinced a growing number of citizens that the U.S. can no longer afford to postpone tough and costly defense decisions if it intends to remain a superpower. As a result, a consensus has been emerging that favors a stronger U.S. military establishment, something that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago. Badly--and unfairly--scarred by the Viet Nam War, the armed services were forced into a period of retrenchment, receiving little popular backing for their expensive needs.
But the national mood and the international realities are both changing.
In the coming months, the focus of the debate will be the fiscal 1981 defense budget, the final details of which are now being drafted in highly technical but often heated sessions behind closed doors at the Pentagon, White House and Office of Management and Budget. Congress will get a look at this draft in a few weeks, two months before the rest of the federal budget is shown to Capitol Hill. This unusual preview, at first resisted by the White House, is an attempt by the Administration to prove that it will increase defense spending. Several key Senators have been threatening to oppose SALT II unless more money is earmarked for modernization and expansion of the U.S. arsenal. This, they say, is the price of power.
A key participant in the mounting debate is the officer who must plead the Pentagon's case, the top-ranking man among the nation's generals and admirals and the only military personage who can carry his arguments directly into the President's Oval Office. He is David C. Jones, 58, the cool, persuasive Air Force general who serves as ninth Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In an interview with TIME Pentagon Correspondent Don Sider, Jones stressed that he is more worried about U.S. security today than when he became chairman 15 months ago. Because of the "continued military buildup by the Soviet Union," he says, there is a "need for us to do more." Fully in agreement is Jones' civilian boss at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown: "The gap between U.S. and Soviet defense expenditures cannot continue to expand without a dangerous tilt in the relevant balances of power and a weakening of the overall U.S. deterrent."
The loudest alarm has been sounding on Capitol Hill. Senator Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat who is emerging as one of the most influential military experts in Congress, has warned, "We in this country have gone to sleep, [while] the Soviet Union has diligently, consistently, steadily set about the task of building the most awesome military machine mankind has ever seen." As a result, argues Arizona Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, the U.S. is "no longer the No. 1 military country in the world." Rather, it is "No. 2, and not a very good No. 2."
What many critics of current defense policies want is an increase in military spending of 5% annually (after adjustment for inflation) for at least the next five years. Such an increase has been endorsed by General Jones. Harold Brown, however, has argued that a 3% boost might prove adequate; this is the rate of annual growth pledged by the U.S. and the other NATO states last year. But Brown has also said, "It may not be feasible to do what we need to do with the 3%. If not, we'll ask for more." Brown also has warned, "The last thing I would want to see is some unsustainably large increase in defense budgets over a very short time, followed by no increase or by decreases over a much longer period. We've experienced that too often in the past."
Even the lower 3% figure means billions of extra dollars in military costs at a time when the White House has been struggling to trim the estimated $29 billion federal budget deficit in order to fight inflation. The defense outlays for fiscal 1980, which began Oct. 1, will be about $122 billion, although Congress and the Administration have not yet definitely agreed on a figure. Simply to maintain this level for the next fiscal year, compensating only for an estimated inflation rate of 10%, the Pentagon would need an extra $12.2 billion. A 3% hike, after inflation, would require spending $4 billion over that; a 5% real boost would mean yet an additional $2.6 billion outlay.
Other critics charge that a nation in which 25 million citizens are classified as living below the official poverty line can ill afford huge increases in military spending. The $2 billion to $3 billion required to build one new nuclear carrier, says Democratic Representative Patricia Schroeder of Colorado, could support 1,000 New York schools for a year. The $4.3 billion needed to build 860 miles of track for the proposed MX missile could finance all the nation's mass-transit systems for two years. Even the $60 million used to build one C-5A transport could feed 12,000 families of four for a year.
Asks Schroeder: "How do we let them get away with that?" Somewhat more cautiously, Senator Edward Kennedy, who now supports an increase in defense spending, has warned against asking "the poor, the black, the sick, the young, the cities and the unemployed to bear a disproportionate share."
If the conflicting demands for military and social-welfare spending cannot be reconciled, the two alternatives are to increase taxes, a measure that most Americans strongly oppose, or increase deficit financing, which would worsen the inflation that is already ravaging the economy. The debate over the Pentagon budget is thus not simply a debate over defense requirements--though that is fundamental and important enough--but also a debate over national priorities, over how best to allot resources among the nation's pressing social, economic and security needs.
General Jones and his allies do not flinch at any such challenges. Although the financial requests of the military appear staggering, Jones argues that "we are spending less on defense in real terms today than we did at the time of the '62 Cuban missile crisis." He is right. When reckoned in "constant dollars," to avoid the distortion of inflation, the estimated U.S. defense outlays for fiscal 1980 are just about what they were in the strikingly low military budgets of the last Eisenhower years and lower than in most years since then. An even more telling comparison is the one between Pentagon spending and some key economic indexes. In 1955 defense spending claimed 58.1% of federal expenditures and equaled 10.5% of the gross national product. Ten years later, it had shrunk to 40.1% of federal spending and 7.2% of G.N.P. In the current fiscal year, it is down to 23% of federal spending and 4.9% of G.N.P., the lowest it has been since the early 1940s (see chart).
What makes today's military budget appear gargantuan is inflation. The Pentagon has not been immune to the rising prices that plague all Americans. As a consumer of 170 million bbl. of fuel annually (conservation measures have cut that from 193 million bbl. in 1974), the military has been extraordinarily hard-hit by last spring's OPEC price jump, which added $888 million to the Pentagon's fuel bill. Other costs have similarly skyrock eted. Inflation has pushed up the salary-and-benefits cost of both uniformed personnel and civilian employees (the uniformed-to-civilian employee ratio is 2 million to 900,000).
The steady decline in the share of U.S. national wealth devoted to arms would be a welcome development if the same had happened to the Soviets. Instead, they continue to pour an estimated 11% to 13% of G.N.P. into defense. Today they spend from one-fifth to two-fifths more than the U.S. does on the military. (The range in estimate is so broad and imprecise be cause ruble costs in the U.S.S.R. are hard to convert to dollar out lays in the U.S.) While the Pentagon is just now asking for at least a 3% larger budget, So viet annual increases have been at about 5% for the past 15 years.
Says Harold Brown:
"Through all our negotiations with the Soviets, they have kept on increasing their military efforts, carrying out what they had planned to do and beginning new pro grams." Overall, Moscow has spent about $100 billion more than the U.S. on arms in the past decade.
The result of these divergent U.S.-Soviet trends was inevitable: a substantial Soviet gain in the balance of forces. The comfortable strategic superiority that Washington enjoyed only half a dozen years ago has now been replaced by, at best, nuclear parity. The Soviets deploy more land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles than the U.S. (1,400 vs. 1,054), and more submarine missile-launching tubes (950 vs. 656). By 1985 they could nearly close completely the current U.S. lead in strategic nuclear warheads (9,200 vs. 5,000). The only remaining category of clear-cut U.S. strategic superiority is the manned bomber; the advantage is 348 vs. 150, but the aircraft providing this lead are almost all aging B-52s, some of which date back to 1956
Because of the Soviet strategic buildup and modernization, the U.S. Minuteman iCBMs will soon be subject to destruction by a surprise attack. This is what Pentagon officials label the window of vulnerability, a period that could last from four to six years, beginning in the early 1980s. This window and the current strategic balance will scarcely be changed by SALT II, though the treaty could restrain the Soviets from further widening of the gap.
In conventional arms, Soviet gains have been almost equally impressive, and in some ways are of more concern. Explains William Perry, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering: "The Soviets are outproducing us by 2 to 1 or more in most categories of military equipment [and] deploying military equipment that is no longer inferior in quality." The U.S.S.R. leads the U.S. in total military manpower (3,658,000 vs. 2,022,000), tanks (50,000 vs. 10,500), artillery (40,700 vs. 18,000), tactical warplanes (4,350 vs. 4,164) and major warships (523 vs. 260). The main American advantages are in high-technology weapons, such as guided antitank missiles, and the ability to deploy forces rapidly into distant areas with aircraft carriers, Marine Corps units and airborne forces.
There are substantial geopolitical dangers in the Kremlin's expanding military strength. Senator Henry Jackson, the Washington Democrat, warned the Senate that Moscow's growing power could "mean an increasingly aggressive Soviet international policy." Harold Brown agrees. Referring to increasing Soviet interference in Africa and the Middle East, he says, "We've seen the Soviets become more adventurous in their behavior. This is an inevitable consequence of their greater confidence in their military capabilities."
To counter Moscow's buildup, the U.S. is already modernizing its forces with new weapons systems, ranging from the Trident nuclear-missile submarine to the Patriot antiaircraft missile. But much more will probably be required, and at a quicker pace.
The most important measures concern strategic arms, even though such weapons systems take only 7% of the defense budget. As Jones put it, "The strategic balance sets the tone for what goes on in the rest of the world." The Administration has just taken an important step in this area by approving a $33 billion, ten-year program for the MX ICBM. The movable MX is theoretically invulnerable to surprise attack, so when the Pentagon starts deploying the first of these missiles in Utah and Nevada in 1986, the window of vulnerability will begin closing. The U.S. has also been moving ahead with the $4.4 billion air-launched cruise missile program; the 1980 budget provides $90 million for it. Under the current timetable, the first cruise missiles are to be deployed at the end of 1981 and would probably be launched from converted B-52s.
Another step to increase the nation's strategic capability, a proposal by Air Force Chief of Staff Lew Allen Jr., is to radically upgrade 155 of his F-111s. A major part of his plan: extending the fuselages of 66 of the FB-111 fighter-bombers 104 inches and installing the General Electric engines that were designed originally for the canceled B-l bomber. This would enable these FB-111s to fly into the U.S.S.R. faster (at 740 m.p.h., vs. 450 for the B-52) and more safely at low altitudes. The FB-111 would be more difficult for the Soviets to detect, hi part because it shows up as a smaller radar image than the B-52. What might prevent Allen's project from taking off is its price tag: $6 billion.
More certain of deployment is the Pershing II nuclear missile, a $1.5 billion weapon system that occupies a gray area in analysts' calculations of the strategic balance. Because its 1,000-mile range would prevent it from hitting the Soviet Union from the U.S., the Pershing II is not, strictly speaking, a strategic weapon. But since it could strike Russia from bases in Western Europe, it is something considerably more than a tactical, battlefield nuclear device like the atomic cannon or the proposed neutron warhead.
Moscow has recently expanded its own arsenal of similar weapons. In the past year the Soviets have stationed in Eastern Europe an estimated 100 atomic-tipped, multiwarhead SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missiles and about 90 supersonic Backfire bombers. These could strike all Western European countries. Warned Henry Kissinger at a September NATO conference in Brussels: "If there is no [Western] theater nuclear establishment on the continent of Europe, we are writing the script for selective blackmail in which our allies will be threatened."
Far along in development, the Pershing II could be based in Europe by the mid-1980s, and this prospect has already prompted denunciations from the Kremlin. Britain is expected to base some new Pershings on its territory, but West Germany last week indicated that it would do so only if joined by one other Continental NATO member. Bonn's ruling Social Democratic Party is worried about a potential uproar from its vocal left wing if West Germany becomes the only Continental NATO state to have nuclear missiles capable of reaching the U.S.S.R. Washington remains optimistic that at the mid-December meeting of NATO, several countries will agree to accept the Pershing II.
Despite all the attention paid to strategic weapons, experts are nearly unanimous that the U.S. would be making a dangerous error if it continued concentrating as much as it has on the nuclear balance. As long ago as the mid-1960s, when targets in the U.S. first became vulnerable to Soviet ICBMS, the threat of massive nuclear retaliation lost some of its credibility, and thus some of its ability to deter Soviet aggression. Would U.S. leaders really defend Western Europe by launching a nuclear strike against the U.S.S.R. if that could trigger a devastating Soviet counterstrike at New York or Los Angeles? The question echoes more loudly now that the U.S. no longer boasts strategic superiority. As Kissinger put it in Brussels, "It is absurd to base the strategy of the West on the credibility of the threat of mutual suicide." With U.S. and Soviet strategic nuclear forces tending to cancel each other out, Washington needs adequate nonatomic forces to counter threats that could range from an armored invasion of Germany to a brushfire war in the Third World. Says Jones: "If you don't have the capability to respond around the world to different crises, then the risks can be very great."
Since 1975 the Army and Air Force have been allocating increasing resources to conventional weapons and missions. But so widely is it felt that more must be done that the Pentagon plans to spend most of any budget boost it gets on its conventional forces. Initially, says Jones, the extra funds would mostly be used for "new procurement, more supplies, more ammunition and fixing personnel problems."
Translated into specifics, here is where the money might go:
Ground Forces. The Army requires more trucks, supplies and ammunition. In mid-September, Nunn charged that the Army had only "one-third of the ammunition and equipment it needs to ... sustain simultaneously a war in Europe and a minor contingency in the Middle East or outside of Europe." Nunn was referring to the official U.S. doctrine of having the resources to fight 1 1/2 wars at the same time: a major confrontation with the Soviets in Europe, plus a regional skirmish. Said Nunn: "In the category of tank ammunition designed specifically to destroy other tanks, the Army has on hand about one-fourth of the requirement postulated by the Department of Defense for sustained combat in Europe." In addition, he said, the service is short almost 60,000 wheeled vehicles "required to move ammunition, fuel, wounded soldiers, food, weapons and to support just about every other Army mission."
Providing these needed vehicles would cost about $4 billion. An extra $600 million is needed annually by the Army just for enough bullets, artillery shells and mortar rounds for adequate training. So tight has money been that Army crews training in Europe have been allowed to fire only one TOW antitank missile (cost: $5,000 each) a year. Experts believe that minimum proficiency would require three TOWS annually for each crew. Several additional billions of dollars in each of the next few years would be required if the Army sought faster delivery of some major new weapons. Only eight Black Hawk helicopters are produced monthly, the minimum needed to keep the assembly line open. The Army would like 15 choppers a month.
Maintenance of more prosaic materiel has long been shortchanged too. Overhauls are needed for heating plants, sewage systems, hospitals and living quarters.
The cost of putting Army facilities and equipment into shape: $1.1 billion. Millions could also be used to give U.S. ground and air units more training and better gear for fighting on battlefields that have been contaminated. Soviet forces have been practicing extensively on techniques for disabling foes with chemical and biological agents.
Tactical Aircraft. The U.S. Air Force deploys the world's most sophisticated and deadly warplanes, but the Soviets have been catching up. No longer are their planes confined primarily to air defense.
In the past decade, the Soviets have deployed a family of aircraft that, like U.S. warplanes, can support ground units in combat and strike deep inside enemy territory to destroy airfields and supply depots. Says Brigadier General John Chain, the Air Force's deputy director of plans:
"They've closed the technology gap. They have damned good equipment and their people are well trained."
The latest U.S. warplanes--the F-15 Eagle, A-10 Thunderbolt and F-16--far outclass anything the Soviets now fly, but American quality ultimately could be overtaken by Russian quantity. The Soviet Union has been turning out about 1,150 fighters annually, of which 25% are exported to its Warsaw Pact allies. By contrast, the U.S. has been building only 500 such planes each year, and 30% have been sold to other nations.
This year the U.S. Air Force is scheduled to take delivery of 350 new fighters.
General Chain would also like to see a more rapid deployment of the EF-111.
This $25 million aircraft is packed with computers and other electronic gear that can jam the radar on Soviet planes that would be used to spot U.S. aircraft and guide missiles to them. The EF-111 also could neutralize Soviet ground-based radar. Current plans call for the Air Force to buy 42 EF-11 Is over an unspecified period of time. Like the Army, the Air Force has an ammunition shortage. Currently, it is very low on air-to-air missiles.
Naval Forces. In no area has the U.S.S.R. been catching up faster than at sea. Just two decades ago, the Red fleet was primarily a coastal defense force, rarely venturing far from its home shores. Today, its 1,769 vessels constitute a full-fledged blue-water navy (see picture page). Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy has been steadily declining, from 955 ships two decades ago to 458 today. This is roughly half the number of ships the Navy had before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Complains a high Navy official: "We've been underinvesting for 15 years. Shipbuilding has been dismal." Because of its 13 mammoth aircraft carriers and the high technology crammed into its other surface ships and submarines, the U.S. Navy still commands the seas. For how long, is another matter. There are indications that the Soviets may be building their first large-deck aircraft carrier and are already well along with the construction of a 30,000-ton nuclear battle cruiser.
Just to keep the U.S. fleet at its present size would require construction of 17 new vessels annually. Yet the fiscal 1980 budget authorizes only 14 new ships. This includes a $2 billion aircraft carrier, six guided-missile frigates and two nuclear attack submarines. The admirals would like an extra $2 billion to $2.5 billion for shipbuilding in 1980. This would buy two more attack submarines, one more destroyer armed with the devastatingly accurate AEGIS guided-missile weapons system, a landing ship for the Marines and two oilers. The oiler shortage typifies the Navy's plight. While at least 21 oilers are needed to keep the fleet steaming, only 16 are available and ten of these were commissioned before the end of World War II. Mines are also scarce, and torpedo stockpiles are so low that there are not even enough to arm all U.S. attack subs for two patrols.
Amphibious Forces. Sending in the Marines has traditionally been one of the nation's most effective means of intervening in distant lands. There is concern now, however, over whether the Leathernecks could really reach the beaches. Declares Nunn: "If the U.S. Marines were called upon to undertake a major landing in the Persian Gulf or elsewhere in the Middle East, they would probably have to walk on water to get ashore." With only 63 amphibious ships, the Marines are suffering from a severe shortage of vessels for such operations and probably could not land more than one division at a time.
The fiscal 1980 budget earmarks $41 million for start-up costs for the first $300 million LSD-41, a 15,774-ton amphibious vessel that could carry about 340 Marines. But senior officers would like a commitment of $1.2 billion for four of the new LSDs. The Marines also want 336 British-designed, vertical-takeoff Harrier attack planes (cost: $5.7 billion), plus 33 heavy-lift and attack helicopters ($400 million for the first year's production). Bringing Marine Corps ammunition stockpiles up to a level that could sustain combat operations would cost an extra $1.5 billion; improving battlefield command systems would run $400 million.
So hard up for cash is the corps that it is reluctantly planning to shrink itself. Through attrition, it will drop to 179,000 by mid-1980, a reduction of 10,000. Says a senior Marine officer: "We are reducing manpower to pay our bills. There is no sense in having a force like the Marine Corps if it does not have the means to go to war."
Resupply Capabilities. According to General Jones, "In any large operation or full-blown conflict short of a nuclear exchange, lift becomes a very critical factor." He feels that the Pentagon's ability to resupply troops rapidly on the battlefield is "one of the areas in which we run into limitations early." Though the Air Force would have sufficient planes to rush troops overseas, including requisitioned commercial airliners, it would not have enough to take along-their arms and equipment.
The Air Force wants more transport aircraft, but has not yet decided how many. Also needed are additional tankers for airborne refueling of transport and combat planes. In fiscal 1980 the Air Force will be buying four KC-10 tankers, a version of the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 jetliner, at a total cost of $200 million.
In all, the service will purchase 20 of the $50 million tankers.
The total annual cost of the programs that the experts have cited tops $30 billion, and even these would not exhaust the Pentagon's shopping list. Yet this sum already exceeds what a 5% military budget boost would yield. Chairman Jones and the Joint Chiefs therefore will have to set program priorities, an exercise that has almost always aggravated interservice rivalries.
More and better weapons would obviously strengthen all the armed forces, but they will not solve what many experts feel is perhaps the nation's most serious military shortcoming--manpower. Admits Chairman Jones: "We have a growing personnel problem in the military."
To Senator Gary Hart, the Colorado Democrat, "the big factor in the strategic equation is not weapons. None of them makes any difference if the people aren't there to man them."
The basic total numbers reveal no manpower shortages. The 562,419 men and women in the Air Force and the 524,514 in the Navy bring both services up to 99% of their authorized minimum force levels; the Army with 752,468 soldiers and the Marines with 189,000 stand at 98%. But these figures are deceptive. The Air Force, for example, badly needs pilots and technical officers. The Navy is short of more than 20,000 petty officers in a variety of skills and also officers in such critical areas as aviation, nuclear propulsion and medical care.
Complains Admiral Thomas Hayward, the Chief of Naval Operations:
"Our retention of second-termers has dropped from a barely satisfactory 59% in 1975 to a totally unsatisfactory 48% today." First-termers have been proving even harder to retain; the Army's re-enlistment rate for this group is a dismal 38%. Notes a senior Pentagon official: "The absence of skilled people can take a very sophisticated weapons system and turn it into mush."
One of the most disturbing trends has been the fall in recruitment. For the first eleven months of fiscal 1979 (through this August), the 127,500 men and women recruited by the Army were only 89% of its goal and a 5% drop from a year earlier. Though the other three services have been doing better, all are below then-targets.
Worse yet, the quality of the recruits has been dropping. Only 72% of those inducted during the first eleven months of fiscal 1979 had high school diplomas, compared with 76% for the previous year. Yet the electronic gear on today's battlefields requires highly skilled G.I.s. Warns General Edward Meyer, the Army's new Chief of Staff: "Clearly there is some level at which the Army has to say, 'Whoa! That's far enough. We can't take any more of the [low intelligence] category.' " Meanwhile, the intense pressure on military recruiters to fulfill quotas, as well as the lure of bonuses they receive for doing well, apparently has prompted widespread cheating among them. Some 1,100 recruiters are now being investigated by the Pentagon.
Would more money cure the manpower problem? Some experts think so. States C.N.O.
Hayward: "Since 1972, when we had the last major pay adjustment, real military compensation has declined about 17% in purchasing power. Average union pay and benefits have increased 5% in purchasing power during the same period." From this, the nation's top admiral concludes that "the system is totally out of whack when a janitor on union scale makes almost the same salary as a chief petty officer with 17 years of service."
General Jones puts it in different terms.
"There is a popular perception that the military receives too many benefits. I say, if military benefits are all that great, why are we having all these people leaving?" But to improve pay and benefits would be very costly. A wage increase that simply permitted servicemen to catch up with inflation since 1972 (about 75%) would cost $5 billion. Reinstating attractive educational benefits, similar to the old G.I. Bill, would run an additional $1 billion.
Whether the Pentagon can afford to pay billions more for manpower when it needs billions just for ammunition is going to be one of the most controversial questions in the defense budget debate. Yet even now, a surprising 600 of every Pentagon dollar goes for personnel costs. The Soviets, by contrast, devote less than 30% of their defense outlays to personnel. How the Kremlin does this is no secret. Because the U.S.S.R. never abolished conscription, 75% of all Soviet males are drafted. (The rest are deferred for the familiar reasons:
poor health, family need, employment in a critical job.) But the Pentagon is compelled to rely entirely on volunteers and thus must pay wages and offer benefits reasonably competitive with those available in the private economy.
For demographic reasons, the manpower squeeze is going to get even tighter. Because of generally declining birth rates since 1960, a decreasing number of Americans will be reaching the minimum military enlistment age of 18 in the 1980s. The Pentagon will have an ever more difficult time getting enough recruits to maintain the armed forces at their present strength of 2 million. In view of this prospect, there has been a revived questioning of the concept of the all-volunteer force, which was started in 1973.
Some analysts have called outright for the restoration of the draft. Others have suggested merely a return to compulsory registration for all 18-year-olds so that conscription machinery could start moving quickly if needed in a crisis. In September, the House of Representatives voted against restoring registration but asked the White House to study the question and report to Congress.
That the American arsenal needs strengthening is a proposition that has a diminishing number of dissenters, at least in Washington. There are some, like Senator Hart, who continue to argue that the Soviet threat has been exaggerated and that the Pentagon might not need all the money it has requested. Among most officials and experts, however, the debate is no longer whether to boost defense spending but how much and in what way.
One substantial fear is that a higher defense budget would fuel inflation. Insisted Maine's Edmund Muskie in a mid-September Senate speech: "The enemy who has the capacity ... to devastate the economy--the defense budget, the Government's overall budget--is not the Soviet Union or any other enemy I can foresee.
It is the enemy called inflation."
Aioninflationary means of obtaining the money needed to buy more arms might be to free funds by cutting the Defense Department's fat. Though Chairman Jones has stressed that it is "just plain wrong" to think that "somebody can tap a 'mother lode' by issuing an order to get more efficient overnight," he has admitted that "our feet should be held to the fire to be more efficient."
One recommendation by Washington's Brookings Institution: about $500 million could be saved annually if the Pentagon stopped paying civilian blue-collar employees more than what comparable non-Government workers earn in the same community. Another by Congress's General Accounting Office: a gain of $300 million if the military would simplify the methods by which it protects its telephone conversations from eavesdroppers.
Even if these recommendations are feasible (and accepted), the Pentagon would still have to turn to the federal budget for more money. This would alarm those critics who have argued that defense expenditures are particularly inflationary.
Concluded Columbia Professor Seymour Melman in a report on the subject: "Cause and effect links the military economy to inflation and unemployment." The kernel of a thesis put forth by Professor Lloyd Dumas of the University of Texas is that "people who do military-related work and the firms they work for receive a flow of money that is not balanced by a production of goods and services that can be used to absorb that money."
Such reasoning, however, could be applied to just about every expenditure by a Government bureaucracy, from the State Department's outlays for American diplomats to the battalions of inspectors employed by regulatory agencies. Moreover, whatever inflationary impact the Pentagon might have, it is relatively minor compared with that of other Government programs. Today, defense outlays are only half as much as Washington spends on social welfare programs. Says Murray Weidenbaum, a member of TIME's Board of Economists:
"The inflationary effects of defense spending are sufficiently mild so that the decision about how much is to be spent on arms should be made on other, noneconomic grounds." It is notable that those years when the Pentagon budget was largest in real dollars, and took its greatest share of the G.N.P. and federal budget, were also the years when the nation enjoyed some of its lowest inflation rates. In 1955 inflation was nil, and in 1965 it was around 2%. Increases of more than 2,000% in Government spending on health and housing in the past decade, declares Nunn, show that the pattern of inflation fits "the real increase in nondefense spending." Observes Oregon Senator Bob Packwood: "Let's lay to rest the shibboleth that we have been chipping away at human resources spending on behalf of defense."
It can be maintained, in fact, that a nation's most fundamental social-welfare obligation to its citizens is to defend them against attack. The responsibility for this is entrusted to the armed forces, but the U.S. military has been denied sufficient resources to fulfill the responsibility.
Catching up now is certain to be expensive. How much it will cost and how long it will take are urgent questions that the mounting debate on national defense will have to resolve. What exactly is the price of power?
Even more critical perhaps is another question: Are Americans willing to pay the price? There is, of course, a widespread sense that the U.S. confronts a deadly threat from the Soviets, and that something must be done about it. But deciding what to do will test the nation's confidence and nerve as well as its ability to see issues in a long-term perspective. It will alsa require a challenging self-examination in which the U.S. weighs its role as a superpower and balances the inherent heavy burdens against the benefits. How such a process turns out could set America's course for the closing decades of the century.
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