WASHINGTON REPORT: The American Disease

...To meet the vast requirements of the open-ended American military plan, American military manufacturers have had to create the capacity for very large-scale production...

...The importance of the six billion lies in its evidence that in spite of everything-and everything is a lot-we still basically believe the American Disease is a good thing and everyone should have it...

...those at Colorado Springs maintained a ring of forgery and theft for five years...

...And for military men everywhere, it makes sense to run any organization along military lines, with no back talk and with prior discussion limited to peers in rank or function...

...That capacity can only be maintained by an ever increasing volume of business...

...At any rate, during those two centuries of Anglo-French compliments, it must have irked many a patriot on these shores, encountering the terms in life or letters (actually, the "French letter" was a widely used English preventative measure), that there seemed to be no such thing as "the American disease...

...Those were gloomy days for the cause of freedom, as we oddly call it, but, preoccupied by the even more momentous defense of freedom in Vietnam and Cambodia, we suffered the humiliation bravely, did not invade India and learned absolutely nothing from the whole adventure...

...Career training...

...The latter contention may well be true, the buyer-sellers being the only people who really understand the business...

...This cross-channel practice of mutual attribution of origin appears to have declined at the time of the Entente Cordiale, perhaps because of the extreme cordiality of the entente at the very highest levels...

...Lockheed and Northrop were following an established American business pattern with the difference that they weren't handing out bons-bons to the people who paid the bills, only to insiders...

...All this comes to mind with the announcement of a new drive for Congressional approval of plans to unload another six billion dollars worth of military equipment on a waiting world...

...Moot himself is a Pentagon graduate now in industry, but beyond that, you'd have to be a pretty dumb arms merchant not to get the connection and rush in your contribution...

...To express our concern over this de-fiance of American arms in other hands, we sailed a warship up and down the coast to warn the Indians not to interfere with American-sponsored genocide...

...Our amazement turned to distress when the Indians, moved by neighborly compassion, went to the assistance of the people being slaughtered by their own government...

...In fact, of course, our understanding of our arms disease is much more primitive than that poor hooker's grasp of the itchings and suppurations going on in her principal business asset...

...The point about Pakistan is that the outcome was not some freak or sport of nature brought on by unique circumstances...

...As Broadway producers and magazine distributors have known for years, the easiest way to generate a lot of business in a hurry is to buy it...

...Prince Bernhard was following the example of many an American housewife subscribing to the Ladies' Home Journal: the price is so good, you can't afford not to...

...It's cheaper that way...

...And in truth, we encounter little enough resistance to our military solicitations...

...For the same two hundred years, the French invariably referred to the same group of pathological manifestations as "the English disease...

...The next thing to happen was that the Pakistan military dictatorship, having all these American arms, decided to use them against their own people, the East Pakistani, presumably because they were handy and their extermination gave fairer promise of success than any expedition against the Russians or Chinese...

...The Chinese pulled out of their own accord, certainly not at the urging of either ourselves or our toy soldiers in that part of the world...

...The six billion, to be sure, is the equivalent of perhaps two more recruits joining the Times Square regiment of platform boots and rococo wigs, an increment hardly to be noticed...

...Major arms procurement officials now automatically arrive in the Pentagon from second-rank positions in the arms industry, engage in procurement from their old firms at a good clip, then return to industry in first-rank positions...

...The circumstances were those normally either created or greatly enhanced by the flow of American arms into our client states...

...The Indians recklessly defied us and plunged ahead in their mission of mercy, putting an end to the slaughter and assisting the survivors to organize a government of their own without American arms and hence without the capacity for mass killings...

...We armed that country-or its military regime, actually -to the teeth in the belief that this constituted an important defense against any possible drive into south Asia by the Russians or the Chinese...

...If military goods are the chief import of a state and the obvious obsession of the state's supporter among the great powers, it makes a kind of common sense to have the state run by military men...

...Meanwhile, at West Point, cadets cheat on examinations and are welcomed into continuing classes...

...Try it, we tell them, once you get the hang of it, you'll love it...

...FRANK GETLEIN...

...We were amazed...

...The week's news budget that began with the six billion increment in the arms dump ended with the word that Robert C. Moot, treasurer of the President Ford Committee, has been appointed to head a Pentagon advisory committee on the restructuring of arms contracts...

...Two-fers" are institutionalized on Broadway and anyone who subscribes to a large-circulation magazine at the printed rate is throwing money away...

...It can hardly surprise us that the itchings and suppurations we find so distressing when they appear among our arms clients, also turn up at home...

...The practice definitely ceased when, ten years later, the entente modulated into World War I, perhaps because of the shared experiences of such large numbers of the troops of both nations, perhaps because of the slowly-dawning perception that the French disease was really Marechal Foch, the English disease Field Marshal Kitchener, both far more voracious for the blood of young men than the twirling spirochete ever dreamed of being...

...No one really gives a damn about any of them...

...The destruction of governments in Japan, Italy and now Holland by the American Disease is likewise no accident but absolutely inevitable in the system we have constructed...

...Those troubled shades can rest easy...

...When the Chinese did, in fact, run their brief and still somewhat mysterious incursion into India, the Pakistan arms kings naturally did nothing, except perhaps to hope that the Chinese would do a thorough job of it...

...Given comparable symptomatic signs, we take them for evidence of blooming good health, seize any chance to preserve and increase our own infection, insist upon passing it along to friends and casual acquaintances everywhere...

...If it is true, however, it is ground not for acquiescence but for seriously questioning the whole system, for addressing the American Disease as something to cure, or at least contain, not as something to enhance and further...

...From the strict point of view of United States self-defense, this involved the interesting assumption that the Russians-Chinese (whom we regarded as the same thing during most of our arms build-up in Pakistan) would want to get to the Indian Ocean in order to sail around the Cape of Good Hope and up the Atlantic to attack us...

...That's the way things are and will go on being...

...Our disease is called Arms and we pass it along to the nations of the world as promiscuously and enthusiastically as any hooker with a heavy quota and no notion at all of hygiene...

...When this practice, now almost routine, is questioned, we are assured a) that contracts are awarded strictly on merit, never on the basis of past and future business connections, and b) that any other method is impossible...

...The classic case of the American Disease is Pakistan...

...She at least understands that something is wrong, uncomfortable, inconvenient...

...Our main concern in the aftermath was to restock the Pakistan arsenal, filling the gaps caused by the expenditure of so much ammunition, the loss of so much equipment in the effort to maintain domestic tranquillity in Pakistan...

...We have an American disease and have had for several decades now...