Who Stole the Peace Dividend?'

...Official estimates of the war's cost have never been reliable...

...Apparently such a study has been made...

...U.S...

...As befits its lion's share of Federal expenditures, the Department of Defense accounts for at least two dozen pages in the basic budget document and more than 100 pages in the appendix, which details, among other esoterica, the fact that the Corps of Engineers will spend $100,000 at Irondequoit Bay, New York, and that $250,000 has been allocated to the Petroleum Distribution Fund in the Ryukyu Islands...

...Defense officials have said in private," Bernard D. Nossiter recently reported in The Washington Post, "that when Congressmen have to tell constituents that economy measures are cutting off local jobs the pressure to pare down military spending will subside...

...Since strategic forces—which include ABM and MIRV—are the heart of the nuclear arms race, this is no small escalation...

...In his 1962 book, A House Divided: America's Strategy Gap, Laird urged that the United States "reserve to ourselves the initiative to strike first" against the Soviet Union...

...Pressed by public opinion and last year's Congressional revolt against high military expenditures, the Pentagon has, in fact, trimmed some of its programs...

...Senator Proxmire estimates that the gross savings in fiscal 1971 from reduced Vietnam expenditures, personnel cutbacks, base closings, and other economies announced by the Pentagon or decreed by Congress should amount to $25 billion and the net— after generous allowances for inflation, pay increases, possible double counting, and other costs—should come to more than $15 billion...

...But the tables that appeared last year under the heading, "Estimated Special Support for Southeast Asia Operations," with a projected total of $25.7 billion in fiscal 1970, have no counterpart in the new budget...

...that the Federal Field Committee for Development Planning in Alaska will have to get along on $263,000...

...We believe in making information available in an open and forthright way," Laird said at the luncheon...

...What is "deemed appropriate" is still greater emphasis on huge, costly, and dangerous weapons systems which manage, by a happy combination of circumstances, as the Pentagon's Strangeloves see it, to undermine the prospects for international strategic arms limitation, to promote the profits of major military hardware corporations, and to sate the military chiefs' craving for the capability to meet any "greater than expectable threat...

...that loans totaling $7,960,000 have been allocated to the Indus River Basin Project...

...We are moving forward with the short-range attack missile (SRAM), and we propose to continue development of a new subsonic cruised armed decoy (SCAD) for our bomber forces in fiscal year 1971," Laird said in his Posture Statement...

...We are indebted to the indefatigable I. F. Stone for spotting this figure, which appears nowhere in the budget, and for prying out of the Pentagon comparable figures for other years—$9.1 billion in 1969 and $10 billion in 1971...

...The Posture Statement contains the pious hope that the Vienna arms limitation talks between the United States and the Soviet Union "will move both our nations well along the road toward the era of uninterrupted peace we all seek...

...Congressional Quarterly, quoting sources in the Pentagon and industry, said $10.8 billion could be cut without affecting "U.S...

...Who gets it...

...For the first time, therefore, the economic report includes year-by-year projections through 1975 of every major area of Federal expenditure but one: There are no projections for military spending...

...With much fanfare the President announced in his budget message "a significantly different set of priorities from those contained in the budget presented by the previous Administration a year ago...

...Sufficiency," the useful term that President Nixon added early last year to the cluttered lexicon of the arms race, has been dropped from the Administration's vocabulary...

...actions depend upon the actions of the other side in Paris and on the battlefield, as well as on progress in Vietnamization," he says...

...Proxmire asked...

...Each of these conjectures—and especially the last—has a measure of plausibility...

...Who usurped the military cuts...

...Instead, some hints of a return to the catastrophic doctrine of pre-emptive war are creeping into official rhetoric...

...Each of these moves has been given maximum publicity under a Pentagon propaganda program that works this way: 1) announce intention to effect certain economies...

...But where has the $15 billion plus gone...

...Is the logical explanation for the Administration's refusal to give us the facts about the cost of military operations in Southeast Asia that we do not intend to substantially reduce our forces or our expenditures in Southeast Asia or to reduce them at anything like the rate we have been led to believe...

...Defense outlays in fiscal 1971, he said, "are expected to account for a smaller proportion of the Federal budget than in any year since the demobilization period following World War II...

...Our plan to end the fighting in Vietnam as rapidly as possible consistent with achieving our basic objective of self-determination for the South Vietnamese people is well underway...

...Because of the need to maintain the security of this plan, certain information included in recent budgets does not appear this year...

...No amount of diligent research will uncover the money for the Central Intelligence Agency, which is "disguised" in other sections of the budget—for all we know in the funds of the American Battle Monuments Commission, among others...

...Is the situation in Laos far more serious than we have been officially led to believe and is the Administration hiding the cost associated with that situation...

...Other, less radical critics proposed more modest economies: Fortune magazine found savings of $20 billion feasible...

...Instead, the President offers, in one brief paragraph of his budget message, two contradictory explanations for deleting the Vietnam cost data...

...Is the cost of Vietnamization going to be much greater than we have thought...

...Because of the need to maintain the security of this plan," he says, "certain information included in recent budgets does not appear this year...

...And if strategic forces rise by a third in cost, we may expect much the same rise for 'general purpose' forces...

...The actual dollar amounts will be higher if inflation continues...

...President Richard M. Nixon, 1970...

...In justifying the Administration's request for accelerated deployment of the Safeguard antiballistic missile system, the President and Laird have often cited the need for preventing "nuclear blackmail" on the part of China...

...His plan, he stressed, ;was designed to preserve American security "before international disarmament agreements of any sort are completed," but to curb first-strike capability, overkill, and foreign intervention...

...Last year, when fervor for reducing the Pentagon budget ran high, a number of authorities indulged themselves in the pleasant and constructive pastime of drafting a rational budget for the Pentagon...

...In the very next sentence, however, the President implies that he has pierced both these imponderables in formulating his "plan" to end the war...

...The Air Force is spending more money for AW ACS, its warning system against modern intercontinental bombers (which the Russians do not have), and the Pentagon's inexhaustible fund of acronyms also includes S ABM IS, a sea-based an-tiballistic missile system...

...2) announce that the specific economies will be announced in a few days...

...The result of this information program is the creation of an illusion of constant economy moves...

...But that is an old story...

...We have learned that one-year planning leads to almost as much confusion as no planning at all, and that there is a need to increase public awareness of long-range trends and the consequences for future years of decisions taken now," President Nixon declared in his economic message, which accompanied the budget...

...Why is the Pentagon budget only $5.3 billion below last year and $6.7 billion below the peak fiscal year 1969 outlays...

...The question is, who stole the peace dividend...

...Is the buildup of North Vietnam supplies very much greater and far more threatening than we have been led to believe...

...The implication is clear: The costs of the war in the coming fiscal year cannot be ascertained because they depend on the whims of Ho Chi Minh's heirs in Hanoi and on the capabilities of Nguyen Van Thieu's minions in Saigon...

...Even accepting the official estimates, however, Laird's $17 billion projection suggests that the war in fiscal 1971 will cost about $13 billion less than it did in fiscal 1969...

...According to an apparently inadvertent announcement by Air Force Secretary Robert C. Seamans Jr., the first Min-uteman 3 missiles with multiple warheads (MIRVs) are to be deployed in June, triggering a new and probably uncontrollable round in the arms race...

...Senator William Proxmire, the Wisconsin Democrat who has rendered a unique service in subjecting Pentagon expenditures to close scrutiny, recently suggested several possible explanations for the Administration's decision to withhold the costs of the war: "Is it possible that the Administration is not going to de-escalate the war at the rate they have led the public to believe...

...According to the annual report of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, the National Security Council and the Cabinet Committee on Economic Policy have analyzed "various defense strategies" and translated them into "a large number of possible forces and budgets...

...The President's Budget Director, Robert P. Mayo, put the Administration's view of the "peace dividend" in perspective at a budget briefing in February...

...The decision to suppress the Vietnam cost estimate apparently came fairly late in the budget-making process...

...About half of the Vietnam saving—what used to be called the "peace dividend"—has already been swallowed up by other military programs...

...A $10 billion "miscalculation" by President Johnson five years ago was essential to his assumption that "we can have guns and butter too" and instrumental in creating the present inflation...

...In his annual Defense Posture Statement tti the Congress a couple of months ago, Secretary Laird called it "a rock bottom budget," and on many occasions he has warned that any attempt to reduce it would immediately imperil the national security...

...In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last February, Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard projected "total costs for investment and operation of our strategic forces at about $12 billion (1969 level) in future years...

...The obverse, of course, is that Safeguard will leave China totally vulnerable to nuclear blackmail on the part of the United States...

...4) announce that the cutback or closing has actually occurred...

...In an analysis of "The Economics of Vietnam" published last February 21, The Economist (London) found "some ground to suspect" that the true costs of the war have been significantly higher than is indicated by budget allocations...

...combat capabilities...

...In this agglutination of statistics, a diligent researcher may discover that the American Battle Monuments Commission will spend $2,734,000 in fiscal 1971...

...Except where it counts...

...The new budget represents a return to the all-out quest for overkill...

...A year ago the Secretary disavowed that policy, noting in the then-fashionable phrase that the world has moved "from an era of confrontation to an era of negotiation," but his latest Posture Statement reserves the option of "initiating a strike against Chinese ICBMs before they are launched...

...It may well be that when Laird released his $17 billion estimate last fall—a few days before the President's major speech on Vietnam— the Secretary was carried away by his enthusiasm for "Vietnamization...

...Open Doors, Open Eyes . . "It is time we once again had an open Administration—open to ideas from the people, and open in its communications with the people— an Administration of open doors, open eyes, and open minds...

...In this report, and in the budget message, long-range projections are made that will enable the people to discuss their choices more effectively in the light of what is possible...

...Senator Proxmire's Joint Subcommittee on Economy in Government concluded that the fiscal 1971 Pentagon budget "should be reduced by no less than $10 billion...

...Where did $10 billion disappear...

...he dismissed it as "a rather oddball concept...

...Who Stole the Peace Dividend?' by ERWIN KNOLL President Nixon's proposed Federal budget for the fiscal year starting next July 1 is a 611-page document, supplemented by a 1095-page appendix and a 295-page collection of special analyses...

...It may be that the President decided to avoid the risk of opening up a "credibility gap" by omitting the figure from his budget...

...Hard targets" are protected missile silos, which would presumably be empty after an enemy's first strike...

...Yet the proposed Pentagon budget for fiscal 1971, excluding military assistance, atomic energy, and defense-related activities, is only $6.7 billion below the 1969 level...

...Last year Laird disclosed that the Poseidon missiles now being installed on Polaris submarines will be "improved" to enhance their "effectiveness against hard targets," and General John D. Ryan, the Air Force Chief of Staff, has described his service's efforts to develop "a hard-target killer...

...Projecting military spending trends is a tricky business...

...Using these figures we can see the Administration plans an increase of about one-third in spending on strategic forces over 1969 in terms of 1969 dollars," Stone wrote in his BiWeekly...

...3) announce the details—preferably through a member of Congress...

...Professor Seymour Melman of Columbia University presented to the Senate Armed Services Committee a detailed, line-by-line proposal that would have trimmed $54.8 billion from the $80.8 billion Defense budget for fiscal 1970...

...If we are to improve the quality of life in this nation, we must first improve the quality of debate about our national priorities," the President said...

...We are making available the facts and figures that will enable the people to make more intelligent judgments about the future...

...The only reason for developing "hard-target killers," therefore, is to establish a first-strike capability for the United States...

...The answer is concealed, but not entirely obscured, in Secretary Laird's Posture Statement, which describes the new Pentagon budget as "essentially transitional . . . designed to move the nation's defenses in a safe and orderly way from the national security policies of the 1960s to those deemed more appropriate to the 1970s...

...he asks...

...Retaliation requires no resort to "hard-target killers...

...But if the $17 billion figure is taken at face value—and it has never been officially repudiated —it suggests quite another reason for withholding it from the budget computations: To include it would make a mockery of the Administration's claims that it has achieved heroic economies in military expenditures...

...Accordingly, this economic report 'opens up the books' as never before...

...Closings or cutbacks at more than 600 military bases have been announced since the autumn of 1969...

...As will be shown, the war dividend in the new budget is actually considerably higher...

...According to official announcements, the total number of military personnel will be reduced by 600,000 within the next year or so, and 150,000 civilian jobs in the Defense Department are to be eliminated...

...Candidate Richard M. Nixon, 1968...

...Meanwhile, however, the budget proceeds apace not only with the accelerated ABM but with an array of other new weapons systems...

...In addition to the Army's Safeguard ABM, which will eventually cost $50 billion, the new budget provides for the Air Force's advanced manned strategic aircraft (AMSA), also known as the B-l, whose cost for a 200-plane fleet has been officially projected at $12 billion and will probably run to twice that amount, and the Navy's equally expensive underwater long-range missile system (ULMS) submarine...

...Consequently, estimates are not shown for either the size or the timing of our future actions...

...Inflation, cost overruns, waste, mismanagement, and profiteering have made the doubling of official estimates a reasonable—but not infallible—rule of thumb...

...The Subcommittee also urged the Pentagon to prepare "at least five-year projections of the future expenditure consequences of current and proposed defense programs including weapons procurement, military force levels, and other meaningful components of the defense budget...

...A new story in the budget for fiscal 1971 is the disappearance of cost estimates for the war in Vietnam...

...At a "background" luncheon with Washington correspondents last October 22, "a high Defense Department official"—subsequently identified as Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird— announced that the annual rate of Vietnam spending would drop to about $17 billion by the start of the new fiscal year...

...ERWIN KNOLl is the Washington editor of The Progressive...