Star Wars Won'T Die

...The result is a militarized America that conforms to no notions we hold of militarism, and a post-Vietnam military for which fighting wars is an amazingly peripheral activity...

...It may, then, hardly matter whether critics question and discredit the cost or strategic value of individual weapons systems...

...In the process, the military has become a vast, inefficient multinational/ bureaucratic enterprise for which the fighting of wars is only one useful end product, one that in the real world, rather than in computer simulations, it might largely prefer to forget in order to go about its business...

...See Page 24...

...So the fact that SDI—and issues like it-are still the debating domain of experts arguing mainly about the technical, strategic, or financial feasibility of weapons systems is hardly encouraging...

...Those who defend Pentagon involvement in the economy hark back to World War II, when a military/corporate/scientific alliance seeded the world with a host of new technologies...

...In fact, looking at the shambles into which assorted militaries from Latin America to Poland have driven lesser economies, one would think the scale of military involvement in our economy would cause a national panic...

...It hardly matters whether SDI "works," shoots itself in the technological foot, or never makes it into space at all...

...In the Reagan-Bush era, the military has gone undercover in the world that we see, though not in the world that sees us...

...weaponry out of sight (literally so, in the case of our underground In the Reagan-Bush era, the military has gone under cover...

...In the meantime, hightech R&D funds for the Pentagon's most expensive research project continue to beam down onto universities, research labs, and the computer, aerospace, and electronics industries...

...That life, measured in multibillions of research and development dollars, has from the start proved impermeable to only one thing—criticism...

...The militarization of America is a fact of life, and the transformed nature of the American military is a mystery that should not remain unexplored...

...Its proponents, including Vice President Dan Quayle, hail it as a defensive-weapons breakthrough (though no longer as an impermeable shield that would, in Reagan's words, render Russian missiles "impotent and obsolete"), and claim it will save billions of dollars in an era of financial limits...

...Whether or not Star Wars, for instance, has a military justification, whether or not it has an enemy, whether or not it ever goes into space, it will survive—that is, unless the Government finds some equally fabulous military project, replete with exotic research possibilities, to replace it...

...witness its recent attempt to seed civilian development of high-resolution television screens, which is expected to power innovation in the semiconductor industry...

...Our military is, if anything, less visible in our lives than it was a decade ago: No uniforms in the streets, seldom even for our traditional parades...

...Even SDI's popular name, "Star Wars," was initially part of an attack designed to banish SDI and the Movie President who proposed it to the realm of the fantastic and infantile...

...But its dominance of corporate America is so complete that the United States may no longer even have a civilian economy...

...As Reagan absorbed the Lucas film label ("The Force is with us," he commented genially), so, too, has a critical stream of opposition been absorbed into the Star Wars process...

...missile forces and their almost invisible support networks...

...In the four-and-a-half decades since 1945, the military has not only thoroughly transformed American society in startling (and hardly discussed) ways, but also has transformed itself in at least as startling a fashion...

...Government's central mechanism for organizing long-range, high-tech research that corporations are unable or unwilling to pay for, while maintaining a fiction of nonintervention in national economic planning...

...Star Wars Won't Die The Pentagon zaps the civilian economy BY TOM ENGELHARDT President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, the impermeable antimissile shield meant to render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete," has gained a life on Earth that it may never have in space...

...There is evidence (though one must look to valuable publications with microcirculations like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to find it) of the immense and economically crippling deformations which a Pentagon-organized program of R&D causes, as well as the disappointing level of spin-offs that present-day military-directed research leaves in its wake...

...The Soviet state has, at least, the theoretical potential to shift military savings elsewhere without running up against an American-style aversion to state economic planning...

...To the extent that any takeover may be possible, it has already taken place, hardly noticed, in the economic sphere of our lives...

...The United States, by such standards, still has the look of a civilian society...

...Those who fantasize about the possible militarization of America in terms of a future military coup should not hold their breath...

...And while it continues, high-tech Tom Engelhardt is a senior editor at Pantheon Books...

...There, the militarization of the economy and the cor-poratization of the military is a process so far gone that it seems reasonable to ask whether the United States can even be said to have a civilian economy...

...Even the Pentagon is coming to recognize this...

...The numbers are staggering: 65 to 70 per cent of all Federal R&D money (more than $40 billion a year) is now funneled through the military...

...This debate of limited scope and within a limited community of experts has enveloped Star Wars since it was first proposed...

...By default and without public discussion, the Government has appointed the Pentagon to lead the nation's economy into the next century...

...Can American science be considered civilian in any meangingful sense, given the Pentagon funding presence in the labs and the universities, or the number of scientists whose work is dependent on such funding...

...Military planners are, however, considering such support for consumer-product development (or, as they are called, "dual-type technologies") mostly out of fear that only the Japanese, in particular, could end up with an electronics industry whose innovations might be the basis for the most promising military technology of the next decade...

...SDI is part of a vast economic program of First World development—and the money spent on it to date is hardly a drop in the bucket compared to the deluge to come...

...What happens when high-tech research projects must be expressed in "military" terms...

...Although its "final" products are meant to be space weapons and weapons-detection systems, these are largely an excuse to maintain funding for an Earth-bound high-tech research program to fuel the corporate economy...

...a civilian, elected government...

...Without significant public oversight or debate the Department of Defense, billions in hand, is marching through our econdavid suter omy, in effect determining events that will shape or misshape our lives for decades to come...

...But SDI as a vast, ground-level R&D project is untouchable...

...Consider the latest suggestion for SDI— the "Brilliant Pebbles" proposal for the lofting of tens of thousands of miniaturized rockets into space...

...the draft and the idea of a civilian army a thing of the past...

...As a crucial part of a system for planning our economic future it is, if anything, aimed at the civilian, state-funded Japanese and European economies...

...11 SDI is not aimed at the Russians...

...The issue of how to demilitarize hightech R&D has proved otherwise almost unapproachable in this country because the context for such a discussion is so seldom acknowledged...

...Each new SDI proposal sends reporters to a small set of experts who either supply praise (and futuristic boosterism) or offer strategic and technical criticism...

...For if it is absent from our everyday culture, its influence is omnipresent in corporate America, that world beyond our politics and out of our control—the world which, nonetheless, plans our high-tech future of work and consumption...

...R&D work funded at phenomenal levels— $17 billion so far—rolls inexorably on...

...These ranged from radar and computers to missiles and nuclear power, and their spin-off applications powered whole industries...

...Militarization is, of course, commonly associated with uniformed, usually exalted troops in evidence and a dictatorship, possibly military, in power...

...The SDI debate has, in effect, masked what might otherwise seem self-evident realities about Star Wars—realities that will determine what kind of America will enter the Twenty-first Century...

...Can a civilian Congress be said to control a military to which, in financial terms, it is all but incapable of saying no...

...It's time for some nonexperts to address the nature of the society here on Earth that is creating Star Wars...

...These can be expressed in the form of four simple propositions: 11 The Pentagon is the U.S...

...11 SDI could not be canceled by any conceivable Administration...

...H SDI is not basically a space-based weapons system...

...It has become our equivalent of MITI, the Japanese Ministry of Industry and Technology...

...SDI naturally puts limits on superpower disarmament schemes, no matter the geopolitical situation at hand, since to disarm in any significant way would deal the economy a potentially crippling blow...

...Delays or cutbacks in devloping parts of SDI, even the delaying or cancellation of testing and deployment in space, are policy options...

...The loss of any particular system can only lead to the creation of others...

...Thus it makes sense for critics of SDI (and other major weapons systems) to turn away from issues involving expertise and to try launching a national debate on what it means for the Pentagon to organize American technological and economic development...

...That economy must, after all, compete with the economies of states like Japan and Germany, which can plan and support technological development meant for direct corporate application to the civilian marketplace...

...If, to do research on artifical intelligence, you have to think in terms of "talking cockpits" for future Air Force jets, how does the civilian economy suffer...

...Its critics immediately cry cost-overrun and launch a fierce technical assault on the un-workability of embryonic and untested weapons systems based on technologies that are more a matter of theory than reality...

...Today, however, the military organization of R&D seems painfully cumbersome in the face of sleek civilianized economies elsewhere...