The Revolt Against Militarism

Gottlieb, Sanford

Sanford Gottlieb has worked for SANE in Washington since 1960. He is SANE's Executive Director. Two PILLARS of the military establishment in the House, Mendel Rivers and George Mahon, clashed...

...Nor should one think that the secret ties with the military about which there is a growing uproar on the campuses is pursued furtively in sealed-off laboratories...
...One of these senators was Stuart Symington of Missouri...
...Among these "mistakes" are: • The accidental killing of 6,400 sheep by nerve gas in Utah...
...The military has no intention of surrender ing its power or claims...
...Melvin Laird has already announced that the military will not have its budget cut as long as he is Secretary of Defense...
...Clearly, the revolt faces formidable obstacles...
...Only since the latter stages of the Vietnam war has the military establishment begun to lose its privileged status in Congress...
...Traditionally, the two had worked hand-in-hand to anticipate (and often surpass) the desires of the military for new weapons systems, bases, force levels, and other appurtenances of the most destructive war machine in the history of man...
...The enormous cost overruns on such items of military hardware as the C-5A cargo plane...
...International unions that take advanced positions on social legislation are often countered by some of their locals which agree with Russell, Stennis, and Rivers on such questions as base closings...
...The Urban Coalition will publish surveys of domestic human needs with itemized costs...
...Although the two conferred after the public exchange, Mahon did nothing to alter his statements...
...Rivers is Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Mahon Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee...
...The venting of radioactive debris from undeground nuclear tests in Nevada, debris that was monitored in Canada...
...The list is impressive...
...No different in this regard from the House until quite recently, the Senate has been accustomed to little discussion of military bills...
...The aborted effort to ship tanks of nerve gas across the country •by railroad, then to sink them off the New Jersey coast...
...Two PILLARS of the military establishment in the House, Mendel Rivers and George Mahon, clashed heatedly on the chamber floor on May 20...
...The "complex" of 1969 has already dwarfed the phenomenon against which Dwight Eisenhower warned in 1961...
...Rivers, who is unaccustomed to challenge in his sphere of influence, retorted: "You are playing into the hands of the enemies of the military, and the other body is full of them...
...When Wald demurred, he was asked: "Wouldn't you rather temporarily blind people than kill them...
...But one should not overlook as contributing factors the "mistakes" made by the military, as Congressman Mahon suggested...
...This struggle could last a decade and largely shape the future of the country...
...The stepped-up military pressure in Vietnam, which led to the bloody encounter on "Hamburger Hill...
...Keep on saying it and the enemies of the military will love you for saying it...
...The accidental sinking of a nuclear submarine in San Francisco Bay...
...The third point of the triangle will be those who feel deeply about a decent life at home and peace in the world...
...Members of Congress for Peace through Law, a bipartisan group in both Houses, has hired its own staff to explore specific means of cutting the military budget...
...We are now pledged to defend 42 countries and operate over 3,000 bases throughout the world...
...The struggle over resources will be threesided...
...Spurred on by the political energies released by the young, the rebellious, and the supporters of Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, and George McGovern, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has become the main carrier of the new antimilitary heresy...
...And precisely because of America's agonizing, interlocked and potentially fatal internal problems, this alternative will gain support in coming years...
...The Coalition on National Priorities and Military Policy has been established in Washington, encompassing 25 national religious, peace, liberal, and scientific organizations which are dedicated to fighting military influence...
...A society degenerating into war between races and generations in the ghettos and on the campuses can put its skills and resources to better use...
...But the business community's traditional answer to the disposal of available resources--cutting taxes—will do nothing to solve social problems or to give income to those who don't earn enough to pay taxes...
...The fight against ABM provided for the first time the possibility that Congress would actually defeat a new weapons system proposed by the Executive Branch...
...Today Senator Symington heads a subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee, which is expected to delve most thoroughly into the international commitments of the United States...
...Under the pressure of the ABM controversy, the Committee did hear a few dissenting scientists for the first time but refused to hear the spokesmen of religious, peace, and other voluntary organizations...
...THE ANTIMILITARY revolt has gained in both Houses...
...They are just starting to organize...
...The Brookings Institute plans to issue an annual critique of the military budget...
...This statement, of course, lends itself to certain inevitable con clusions...
...Unions whose members work in the defense firms and on military bases constitute a pow -erful force for the maintenance of the status quo, as they have shown whenever contract COMMENTS AND OPINIONS cancellations or base closings threatened...
...It will be quite a brawl...
...Rivers then stalked from the chamber, later deleting his unparliamentary remarks from the Congressional Record...
...Probes are under way or planned by Senator Albert Gore into the economics of the ABM, by Senator William Proxmire into military procurement practices, by Senator Symington into international commitments, and also by Representatives Henry Reuss, Cornelius Gallagher, and Richard McCarthy into various aspects of chemical-biological warfare...
...The p-omilitary control of key committees, the fear of confronting the Pentagon "experts," who use secrecy classifications to good advantage, and the general tendency to equate military hardware with national security have always assured rapid passage of "defense" bills in both Houses...
...Giant defense-dependent firms such as GeneraI Dynamics and Lockheed—which have difficulty competing for civilian markets—receive a lion's share of the public funds...
...Senator Richard Russell's Armed Services Committee may have been handled in a more courtly manner than its House counterpart, but its hearings were just as closed to the public, and its reception for the armed services just as cordial...
...Mahon, a conservative Texas Democrat, warned: "The military has made so many mistakes, it has generated a lack of confidence...
...While only two senators, John Sherman Cooper and Philip Hart, organized the nearly-successful antiABM drive in 1968, it is the Foreign Relations Committee which exercises the leadership in 1969...
...As for the other key unit in the Senate, the Appropriations Committee, a former Senate staff aide has characterized it as "hostile to civilian control...
...That equals $1 trillion, the amount invested in the military during the postwar generation...
...It is already pressing for ABM, multiple warheads for land-based and sea-based missiles, a new manned bomber, long-range cargo planes, fast deployment logis tics ships, a manned orbital laboratory, and other costly goodies of the Buck Rogers age...
...Agencies which, at best, can be called semiautonomous—the Defense Department, AEC, CIA, National Security Agency—spend most of these resources...
...Their clash, triggered by Mahon's support of a spending limit on all federal expenditures, including military ones, reflected the new and growing mood of skepticism toward the military on Capitol Hill...
...Martin charged that the aides of such senators even had trouble gaining access to the Committee's hearing rooms...
...George Wald of Harvard, Nobel prizewinner in biology and medicine, recently recounted how he was called on the telephone by a man in Chemical Warfare who asked him to become a consultant on temporary blinding agents...
...When Americans begin to ask themselves the hard questions, namely, how to finance the job that must be done to keep the country whole, they will necessarily confront the military-industrial complex...
...The insensitivity of the Navy to Commander Lloyd Bucher and the men of the Pueblo...
...When peace finally comes in Vietnam, the mil itary intends to absorb the "peace dividend...
...When Russell relinquished the chairmanship to John Stennis this year, the Committee barely changed...
...It indicates that the military, grown arrogant and careless by vir tue of a $1 trillion national investment since the end of World War II, plays fast and loose with the environment, human lives, livestock, and the public treasure—a politically volatile combination...
...For example, the recommendations of the Kerner Commission Report were issued without a price tag, but Hyman Bookbinder, a former official of OEO, has estimated that they would cost $50 billion a year for 20 years...
...A former Secretary of the Air Force, member of both the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, and a towering figure of support for the military establishment, Symington moved from hawk to critic during the war—perhaps the most important nonre COMMENTS AND OPINIONS ligious conversion of recent years in this country...
...There is another alternative, one for which we have only the beginning of a national consensus: improving the quality of life at home...
...After watching the military and military-minded civilians tell President Johnson for three full years that just a little more military pressure would bring "light at the end of the tunnel," some senators began to worry that the light could well prove to be a Viet Cong campfire...
...Much of the rest goes to installations such as the following, all of which happen to be located in the South Carolina district represented by Mendel Rivers: an Air Force base, Marine Corps air station, Polaris missile facility, naval shipyard, Navy fleet ballistic missile, submarine training station, naval supply center, naval weapons station, naval station, Army depot, two naval hospitals, and a Marine Corps recruiting depot...
...The $1 trillion investment in the military, including the $80 billion-a-year budgets since the Vietnam war, has produced a monster that could more accurately be called the military-industrial-labor — union-congressionalacademic complex...
...PRESIDENT NIXON'S DECISION to deploy the Safeguard ABM system ranks immediately behind Vietnam as a specific catalyst for the antimilitary opposition...
...Reed Martin, now with the Urban Institute in Washington, told a SANEsponsored conference of academics on May 3 that senators critical of the military had difficulty securing answers about defense bills from the Committee...
...The military will be challenged to some degree by the business community, which has become disenchanted with the Vietnam war...
...In calendar year 1968, of all the funds voted by Congress 66 percent went to the military and to pay the costs of past wars...

Vol. 16 • July 1969 • No. 4


 
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