Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!amdcad!military From: wmartin@STL-06SIMA.ARMY.MIL (Will Martin) Newsgroups: sci.military Subject: Future of the Military Message-ID: <27406@amdcad.AMD.COM> Date: 22 Sep 89 06:52:01 GMT Sender: cdr@amdcad.AMD.COM Lines: 107 Approved: military@amdcad.amd.com From: Will Martin I've only recently regained access to the "military" list, due to the long mailing-list hiatus. I've received a lot of the back issues and will be going thru them shortly. I wanted to post this right away, though, since it is fresh in my mind. Did many of you see the "60 Minutes" coverage this Sunday of Admiral Crowe (the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) visiting the USSR and touring their military bases (& other places -- having a dinner with dancing girls in Kazakh, I believe... :-) with a group of other high-ranking US officers? This was a return visit in response to the recent touring of US facilities by a Soviet marshal. There were some rather incredible statements made during this program. Soviet military leaders said things like, "We have never considered the United States to be our enemy" and "We were allies during WW II, and should be allies now" and the like. It appears that glasnost has pretty thoroughly imbued the upper levels of the Soviet military, at least in their "for public display" personae! Mike Wallace was talking with Admiral Crowe on the flight back, and asked him about the relationship between the US and the USSR, from a military point of view, based on his recent experiences. He was obviously torn as just how to respond, and ended up admitting that the situation would have to be "reevaluated". Well, I've been working for the Army for over 20 years now, and have been fairly much of a hawk all this time, but I think that I, too, am starting to do some "reevaluating". All this change in the USSR may be temporary, and it may be a great propaganda disinformation campaign, but the degree of openness seems to be too great for that to be the case. The Soviets opened up highly secret installations to this visit, and appeared to hold back nothing. It was obvious that the US officers on theis tour were gleaning vast amounts of intelligence data -- I expect they spent weeks in debriefing afterwards! Too much was revealed for this to be just a "for show" imitation of an attitude change on the Soviet side. What if it all is for real? What if there is a fundamental alteration in the USSR's government and attitude, and this persists beyond Gorbachev's period in power? What if things really do change for the better? We won't really need a military establishment any more. We won't have anybody to defend against. The only enemies we will have left will be the occasional weird-dictator-led crazy realm, like Libya, or religious fanatics like Iran, and they can be handled by a military with a strength somewhat equivalent to Norway's, coupled with a reserve program that would allow a rapid buildup in the face of an unforeseen threat. The only other possible enemies end up being the Martians or the visitors from Antares that may pop up next week or next century... Just last night I see senators debating on McNeil-Lehrer about the catastrophic health protection program for the elderly, and the costs of providing expanded long-term care coverage that some want -- they were talking about the latter costing $60 billion, and how it would be hard to pay for it. I'm getting old enough to start thinking about that myself now.... Couple all this stuff together, and I can see an enormous upheaval ahead. We could reduce taxes by about 80% [The military cost isn't anywhere near 80% of the budget; its well under half --CDR] and STILL have enough income to pay for all the health-care expenses, if the need to support the military goes away, or is cut down to 10% or less of what it is now. There won't have to be any expensive new weapons programs, because the stuff we have now will be plenty to just mothball and use over the next decades for the reduced fraction of the military we have left. But we would also have a depression that would make the 1930's look like a picnic -- a vast number of people now in the military or in the DoD civilian workforce (including me) would be out of work (with luck, I have enough years in to retire in that case :-)); all the military-industrial complex would fall apart, with all of those companies going out of business and their workforces becoming unemployed. The stock market would fall to a tiny fraction of where it is now, which would probably wipe out the retirement savings for a large percentage of the people who would otherwise be able to live on those resources (so the "luck" I mentioned isn't all good :-(). If the Soviets continue to project this "good guy" image for much longer, it doesn't seem likely that continued high military spending will be defensible in the Congress. So some sort of change is inevitable. Will welfare for the military and the contractors be perceived as being vital enough that taxes will be kept at their current level, and the money be rechannelled into the space program or some other high-tech area so that the military can run it and the contractors be kept on to support it? Or will the artificial supports be pulled out from under this part of the economy and it be allowed to tumble as described above? Is this really what is going to happen in the next ten years or so? If it DOES happen, would the repressed hardline factions in the USSR use this opportunity to have a resurgence, rise up and remilitarize and then take over the remains of a chaotic and disorganized West? Or would they not be able to revive the "old" pre-Gorby Soviet attitudes after the "new" USSR has a good long taste of peristroika? Should we all be getting cabins in the woods and learning subsistence farming? Japan went through all this is the 40's, but they had it easy... :-) They were bombed into dust and forced to remake their whole economy and lifestyle by outside forces. We are going to have to do it ourselves and that's MUCH harder! [ An interesting book, if you can find it, is _Winding Down_, which discusses improving US National Security AND vastly reducing defense expenditures by orienting more strongly towards the tasks the US Military will actually need to perform. --CDR] Bemusedly, Will Martin