Pumping up the Pentagon The Domestic Geopolitics of Military Spending By William D. Hartung All last year, as the White House and the Congress were debating how far to go in shredding the social safety net by cutting welfare, health care, education, nutrition and scores of other domestic programs in the name of deficit reduction, one agency was repeatedly spared from the budget-cutting ax: the Pentagon. Six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States is still spending more than $250 billion a year on the military. This is three times the military spending of any other nation on earth, and eighteen times more than the combined military budgets of the so-called “rogue states” (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, North Korea, and Cuba) that the Pentagon claims are its principal potential adversaries in the post-Cold War era. Not only have President Clinton and the Congress failed to scale back the Pentagon’s massive budget overkill, they have actually pushed through a budget that is higher than what Secretary of Defense William Perry asked for. The Clinton Administration’s January 1995 military budget proposal was an astounding $257 billion, a figure roughly comparable to what the United States was spending at the end of the Nixon/Ford administrations, when the U.S.-Soviet arms race was still a going concern. Throughout the spring and summer of 1995, Congress made matters worse by tacking on more than $7 billion to the Pentagon’s already enormous request, to pay for big ticket weapons like the B-2 bomber and Star Wars defense systems. The last straw came in December, when President Clinton signed Congress’ inflated defens appropriations bill (despite threatening for months to veto it because of the $7 billion in added spending) because he thought it would help him win over key members to support his proposed troop deployment to Bosnia. Why is the Pentagon getting a free ride when every other program in the budget is on the chopping block? Two key factors explain why this is happening: the U.S. military'’s misguided post-Cold War defense strategy, and the latest variation on the Pentagon’s budgetary weapon of last resort, pork barrel politics. At present, the military budget constitutes the world’s largest corporate welfare fund. Mission Implausible To the extent that there is any logic to the decision to hand over more than a quarter of a trillion dollars per year to the Pentagon, it lies in the U.S. military'’s current strategy of preparing to fight two major regional conflicts simultaneously. This approach was originally devised under the direction of Colin Powell during his stint as head of the National Security Council in the Bush Administration, and then ratified by the late Les Aspin’s “bottom up review” of defense spending during the Clinton Administration’s first year. As Michael Klare makes clear in Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws, the decision to focus on preparations for war with ambitious regional powers like Iraq and North Korea had little to do with any legitimate attempt to reassess America’s defense needs. Its real purpose was to conjure up a threat that sounded menacing enough to justify continued high levels of military spending. Maverick Pentagon budget analyst Franklin Spinney has asserted that many of his colleagues are well aware that their strategy bears little resemblance to reality, but he argues that that was never the point: “The two-war strategy is just a marketing device to justify a high budget.” Merrill McPeak, the retired Air Force Chief of Staff who served in that post from 1991-1994, reinforced Spinney’s point in an interview with Time magazine reporter Mark Thompson: “We should walk away from the two-war strategy. Neither our historical experience nor our common sense leads us to think we need to do this. We'’ve had to fight three major regional contingencies in the past 45 years [Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq]. One comes along every 15 years or so. Two have never come along simultaneously.” If the two-war scenario is just a marketing device, then the Pentagon deserves the salesman of the decade award. Other than a few independent voices like former House Armed Services Committee chairman Ron Dellums (D-CA), hardly anyone with political authority in Washington has dared to question the assumptions underlying the Pentagon’s ill-considered new strategic doctrine, for fear of being labeled “soft on defense.” It’s a lot safer to be “soft on defense contractors,” and rake in the contracts and campaign contributions that come with such a stance. And that’s exactly what most members of Congress have been doing, particularly the Republican conservatives who are part of Newt Gingrich’s so-called “revolution.” The B-2 Bomber The fall and rise of the B-2 bomber is a case study in the workings of the new domestic geopolitics of defense spending. The B-2 — which at over $1 billion per copy is the most expensive aircraft ever built — was originally designed to wage nuclear war against the Soviet Union. The plane’s original mission was absurd enough, but now that the Cold War is over and the Soviet Union no longer exists, even the Pentagon and the Air Force have had to admit that the B-2 no longer makes sense. Yet despite vocal opposition to building more B-2s by everyone from Secretary of Defense William Perry to House Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich (R-OH), Congress still pushed through nearly half a billion dollars in new spending for the aircraft last year. These funds were merely the down payment on what could amount to an additional 20 B-2s, at a cost of more than $30 billion. The B-2 may not be needed to defend the country, but it is definitely needed to defend the flow of Pentagon dollars to California and other defense-dependent states. The victory of the B-2 in the House of Representatives, which involved beating back two separate amendments aimed at killing the plane, drew upon an unholy alliance of unreconstructed hawks like Robert (“B-2 Bob”) Dornan (R-CA) and liberal Democrats like Los Angeles representative Maxine Waters who happen to have B-2 contractors in their districts. The majority of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus joined their colleague Waters in voting for the B-2, as did a number of other prominent liberals who seem to view defense spending as the last truly invulnerable form of federal aid. Wavering members of Congress had a good deal of help making up their minds on the B-2, in the form of a barrage of letters from B-2 employees orchestrated by prime contractor Northrop Grumman, and a flurry of glossy television, newspaper, and magazine ads that touted the plane as one of the “right technologies” for “right now.” The independent National Security News Service has estimated that a coalition of B-2 contractors spent over $1 million on print advertisements alone in a one-month period prior to the House vote. TV spots on major Sunday talk shows such as ABC’s “This Week With David Brinkley” undoubtedly ran into additional hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. Members needing further persuasion could also count on receiving a friendly little reminder note from the Political Action Committee (PAC) of Northrop Grumman or another firm involved in the B-2 project, complete with a generous check. These corporate investments apparently paid off: an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics indicates that the 219 members of the House who voted for the B-2 in June 1995 received an average of $3,285 from major B-2 contractors during 1993/94, nearly three times the average amount received by the 203 members who voted against the plane. After the June vote, Northrop Grumman kept the PAC money flowing, handing out an additional $70,000 over a six week period. More than 70% of these funds went to members who had supported the B-2, with the biggest contributions reserved for members of Congress from California (where most of the production work on the plane is done). Apparently every penny counted: a September resolution by Ron Dellums and John Kasich to strip B-2 funding out of the defense budget came within 6 votes of succeeding. Bringing Home the Bacon The spending patterns of Northrop Grumman and other top defense firms provide a window onto the shifting politics of defense spending. Historically, defense industry PACs have tried to hedge their bets by funding incumbent members of both parties, reserving their largest contributions for members of key committees such as Armed Services and Appropriations, or for members with a special interest in helping the firm (e.g., because the company has a major plant in the member’s state or district). Since the Democrats ran the House of Representatives for the four decades prior to the November 1994 elections, they routinely received more defense industry funding than Republicans. That is, until the fall of 1994, after Newt Gingrich began warning corporate PACs that they would face “the coldest two years in Washington” they had ever seen if they didn’t get on the stick and start giving money to Republican challengers. It took defense firms a few months to respond to Gingrich’s message, but they jumped to attention and adopted a strong pro-Republican tilt once the new Republican majority took over the Congress in January 1995. From January through April of 1995, nine top defense contractors donated a total of over $450,000 to members of the House, with more than 77% of it going to Republicans. The top recipients were House Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Livingston (R-LA), $15,000; B-2 advocate Norman Dicks (D-WA), $10,500; House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX), $9,000; and (surprise!) House Speaker Newt Gingrich, $8,000. A study of 1995 defense spending votes in the Senate by the Council for a Livable World demonstrates that the pattern of pork barrel politicking that accompanied the B-2 budget battle in the House was far from an isolated instance. Of the $5 billion that the Senate Armed Services Committee added to the Pentagon budget beyond what the Department of Defense had requested, 81% of the added monies were targeted to states represented by Senators who sit on one of the two key defense committees, Armed Services and Defense Appropriations. The members of these panels certainly brought home the bacon. Senator Trent Lott inserted $1.4 billion for an amphibious assault ship to be built by Ingalls Shipbuilding, a major employer in his home state of Mississippi. Senator Christopher Bond (R-MO) benefited from the addition of 12 McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 aircraft that will be built at the company’s St. Louis-area facility. And pro-defense Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut helped steer through $90 million to fund three CH-53 “Super Stallion” helicopters for the Marine Corps, aircraft that will be built by the Sikorsky Division of the Connecticut-based defense conglomerate United Technologies. Other examples of pork barrel spending on defense projects abound. An October 1995 House-Senate conference committee on defense appropriations threw in $20 million for a cyclone coastal patrol boat built in Louisiana, the home state of Republican House Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Livingston; $34 million more for the Multiple Launch Rocket system, built primarily in Texas and Arkansas; and last but not least, $30 million to build more cluster bombs at the Kansas Army Ammunition Plant in Parsons, Kansas. A Senate aide described the cluster bombs for Kansas as “a Dole item,” referring to the role of Senate Majority Leader and Republican presidential candidate Robert Dole in adding the money to the defense bill. Not so coincidentally, Dole’s presidential bid has received $5,000 — the maximum allowable by law — from Day and Zimmerman, the Pennsylvania firm that runs the Kansas Army Ammunition plant. In parallel with this pronounced tendency to shower contracts and political contributions on either Republican or Democratic members of the key defense committees, there has been a trend since the end of the Reagan military spending boom toward consolidating defense production in less unionized, lower cost areas in the South. This trend will probably accelerate under the new Republican majority in the Congress, for the simple fact that most of the key Republican leadership hails from the South or Southwest. And as one defense official put it in an interview with the Washington Post, “All politics is local . . . If I’m a defense contractor I’m going to do everything I can to locate in a powerful chairman’s district because I have immediate access. Jobs are important on the Hill.” Aside from the independent-minded Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-OR), all the powerful chairmen of the key Armed Services and Appropriations panels that deal with defense matters are southern Republicans like Floyd Spence and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, and Robert Livingston of Louisiana. The geographic dispersion of the newly formed defense behemoth Lockheed Martin, a product of the March 1995 merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta, further explains why the industry’s march to the south is likely to continue. A majority of the workers at Lockheed Martin’s 10,000 strong Marietta, Georgia facility live in Newt Gingrich’s district, building everything from C-130 transport planes to P-3C anti-submarine warfare planes to the next generation F-22 stealth fighter plane. Funding for the company’s Fort Worth, Texas fighter plane factory is zealously guarded by home state Republican powerhouses: House Majority leader Dick Armey and Senator and erstwhile presidential contender Senator Phil Gramm. And the firm is in the process of providing a $236,000 golden parachute to former Tennessee Governor and self-described “Washington outsider” Lamar Alexander in recognition of his service on the Martin Marietta board of directors in the period leading up to the merger. What to Do: Cut the Pentagon Down to Size Advocates of higher military spending won most of their budget battles during 1995 with relative ease, but they may yet lose the war. As cuts in health care, welfare, education, and other necessary programs start to be felt in communities throughout the country, the Pentagon’s charmed status will come under much harsher public scrutiny. Even during 1995, there were important victories for supporters of Pentagon spending cuts. In a small but significant gain for fairness, Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) shamed a majority of his colleagues into stripping out $31 million in taxpayer funding that the Pentagon had planned to hand over to Lockheed Martin to help pay lavish bonuses to “truly needy” executives and board members like Lamar Alexander and Norman Augustine who were affected by the company’s spring 1995 merger. The Sanders amendment is just one example of a long list of issues relating to waste, fraud and abuse at the Pentagon that have been raised by the Congressional Progressive Caucus under the leadership of Sanders and Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR). Other issues brought to light by the caucus include the Air Force’s routine practice of flying generals and cadets around in its own fleet of Lear jets for such critical missions as returning from vacations in Europe or attending football games in Hawaii; setting aside funds to build a third golf course at one particularly favored military base; and spending funds on Star Wars research that could have been used to get thousands of military personnel and their dependents off of Food Stamps. Like the $900 hammers and the $6,000 toilets seats that finally helped raise public outrage over the Reagan military buildup in the 1980s, the concrete examples of unconscionable waste that have been highlighted by Sanders and DeFazio offer the best hope of sparking a popular backlash against the Pentagon’s $260 billion-plus post-Cold War budget. To his credit, DeFazio has also taken a stand against special interest money in defense decisionmaking by being the first lawmaker to sign a pledge organized by Peace Action, the nation’s largest national grassroots peace group. Signers commit themselves to accept no funds from any weapons manufacturing company or trade association. If President Clinton was smart, he would support the Progressive Caucus in its efforts to cut the Pentagon budget, instead of tilting rightward on defense issues every time he needs a favor from the Republican-controlled Congress. Otherwise he will have precious little to distinguish himself on Pentagon budget issues from his Republican opponent in the 1996 campaign, and he will have thrown away an issue that could have brought populist Reagan Democrats and Perotistas back into the Democratic column. As this article went to press, the Clinton Administration put forward a total military spending proposal of more than $252 billion for Fiscal 1997, a modest inflation-adjusted cut of roughly 6% from the bloated budget that was passed by Congress last year. Republican Congressional hawks like Floyd Spence and Strom Thurmond have already threatened to increase the President’s proposal by $10 to $12 billion. Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense William Perry reassured major defense contractors that the re-election of Bill Clinton would be good for their bottom lines. Perry pointed out that the Pentagon plans to increase spending on new weapons systems from $38 billion this year to over $60 billion by the end of this decade. So much for reinventing government. Whether or not Clinton chooses to act, there must be a grassroots outcry against the unnecessary billions that are being handed to the Pentagon and its contracting network at the expense of already underfunded domestic needs. Otherwise, the Department of Defense will continue to live off the fat of the land while necessary public investments in the health, welfare, and employment of the majority of Americans go begging for funds. We can’t afford to let that happen. Resources: Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws: America’s Search for a New Foreign Policy, Michael Klare, 1995; “Our Overstuffed Armed Forces,” Lawrence J. Korb, Foreign Affairs, November/December 1995; “Ready for What? — The Phantom Readiness Crisis,” The Defense Monitor, Center for Defense Information, June 1995; “Why the Pentagon Gets a Free Ride,” Mark Thompson, Time, June 5, 1995; Nancy Watzman and Sheila Krumholz, The Best Defense: Will Campaign Contributions Protect the Industry?, Center for Responsive Politics, July 12, 1995. Editor’s note: This article is an adapted and updated version of William D. Hartung, “Notes from the Underground: An Outsider’s Guide to the Defense Budget Debate,” which appeared in the Fall 1995 edition of the World Policy Journal, available from the World Policy Institute at the New School, 65 Fifth Ave., Suite 413, New York, NY, 10003, tel. 212-229-5808. For information on what you can do: Peace Action, 1819 H St. NW, Suite 660, Washington, DC 20036-3606, tel. 202-862-9740. _________________________________________________________________ COPYRIGHT 1996 THE ECONOMIC AFFAIRS BUREAU William D. Hartung is a Senior Research Fellow at the World Policy Institute of the New School for Social Research and the author of And Weapons for All.