The Most Costly Addiction of All

One strains to imagine recent conversations between President Bush and Defense Secretary Cheney:

G.B.: A few more of those, entirely your decision of course, those Vulture 13 heat-seeking fighter planes with the can openers attached. You could use 'em, right?

D.C. (deftly translating from the Bush-speak): Can't use the ones we already have. They don't fly, remember? Plus there's a worldwide enemy shortage, as you might have noticed.

G.B.: It's the damn polls, Dick, economy thing -- Reagan Democrats, Clinton Republicans, every which way. Get the jobs out to the ZIP codes, Jim says, or it's January in Kennebunkport, too cold for golf.

D.C.: But sir, we're running out of storage space, and Lynne says absolutely no more Vultures in the garage

They must go through this over and over. There was Homestead Air Force Base, for example, which probably would have been mothballed anyway if Andrew hadn't got to it first. Bush wanted to spend $480 million rebuilding Homestead. Why not use the money to rebuild Floridians' actual homes? And what the Pentagon won't take, someone else will buy: 72 F-15s to provide jobs for Missourians, 150 F-16s for the Texans -- with Saudi Arabia and Taiwan footing the bills.

The Democrats too have been using the military pork barrel as a grab bag of gifts. Bill Clinton, for instance, backs more Seawolfs for Connecticut. And of course nothing turns a liberal Congressman into a hawk faster than the threat of a base closing on his home turf.

It gets painful after a while, like watching people who can no longer control their actions: the drunk bellying up to the bar for one last drink to keep the other 10 company. We could just as well put people to work weeding the median strips on the interstates or digging holes and filling them back up, but we make weapons, so when we want to employ people, we make more weapons; any other form of publicly sponsored employment is derided as "leaf raking" and possibly socialism.

Addiction is the operative metaphor here. Obviously, money spent on the military, as much as $10 trillion over the duration of the cold war, was money not spent on developing new technologies for consumer use, on retraining workers for domestic production or on social-welfare programs to ease the plight of the dislocated and unemployed. So what is to be done with 3 million workers in the military industry and nothing but a pinched, depleted domestic economy awaiting them? Just one more fix, is the addict's witless, blubbering solution -- one more useless, death-dealing, high-IQ toy.

You can hardly blame the defense workers. They have no reason to trust that their jobs would survive if the warm, nourishing flow of federal dollars were cut off, cold turkey. That would be the "free market" solution, which has already cost 300,000 defense workers their jobs since 1989. Weapons firms are notoriously loath to beat their swords into plowshares: Why brave the rigors of the market if you've been suckled on cost-plus contracts? It's easier to mail out the pink slips.

Then there's the arms-for-export approach: If the U.S. can't afford any more high-tech weapons, find some Third World potentate who can. Saudi Arabia gets its F-15s; Taiwan gets F-16s (in violation, incidentally, of a 1982 agreement signed with China). Why not atom bombs for Ciskei? Cruise missiles for Serbia? Lofty moral objections aside, one problem with the export approach is that it puts the U.S. government in the unseemly position of pimping for the military- industrial complex -- using taxpayers' money, for example, to set up arms fairs abroad. The other problem is that today's arms customer may be tomorrow's armed brigand, a Saddam with his own stock of U.S.-made missiles.

There is an alternative: planned conversion of our military-industrial capacity to production for civilian use. Let the defense firms, workers as well as management, figure out what else they could produce, while the rest of us figure out what we could use. The late Congressman Ted Weiss's Defense Economic Adjustment Act shows how to go about it, as does the fine new book Dismantling the Cold War Economy, by Ann Markusen and Joel Yudken. The possibilities are endless: high-speed transit systems, waste-disposal technology, high-tech machinery that we now (like any Third World country) are forced to import.

One can imagine the fervent ideological objections: planned conversion, like planned anything, would be an "industrial policy," meaning "social engineering" in George Bush's lexicon, meaning socialism and leading straight to the gulag. But military pork-barreling is a kind of industrial policy itself, in which the "plan" seems to be that millions of Americans will make weapons or go without jobs. As for socialism, the military-industrial complex already represents a Soviet-style command economy in the midst of capitalism, a haven from the perils of the market, financed by public largesse.

Overcoming denial is the first step in confronting addiction. We got into this state of toxic dependency on militarism through conscious choices, made all too often by opportunistic politicians and profit-hungry arms dealers. Getting out requires another set of choices; call it "planning" if you will. We can continue with the ghoulish fixation that condemns our nation to production-for-death. Or we can, through an open and democratic decision- making process, find some more life-affirming way to keep 3 million Americans employed.