Proxmire's Probe of Military Waste
Nossiter, Bernard D.
Proxmire's Probe of Military Waste Report from Wasteland: America's Military-Industrial Complex, by Senator William Proxmire. Foreword by Paul H. Douglas. Praeger. 248 pp. $6.95. Reviewed...
...Reviewed by Bernard D. Nossiter THE Senate has become almost the last refuge of civilized government in Washington...
...It is a climate in which the highest ranking military men lie with straight faces to civilian superiors and Congressional committees, in which the Pentagon's civilian aides dissemble, equivocate, and spin nightmare fairy tales...
...Whether it will cut or not depends on popular support, which rests on popular understanding...
...Many of those still in the "inventory"—the grounded F-llls or the aircraft carriers as relevant as the horse cavalry—-are sustained less by military logic than by their energetic lobbyists, uniformed, civilian, and Congressional...
...He has looked at the proliferation of costly gadgets that neither work nor make military sense, providing security only for the companies that produce them and the 2,000 high ranking officers the companies hired on retirement...
...This technique, used in Canada, Britain, and France, would permit the military to select the arms they want, but it would strip the uniformed men of their present power to dispense largess...
...In the end, civilian control of the military is unlikely to be restored without cuts, drastic cuts, in military budgets...
...Its better men, genuine conservatives in an era when the word has been badly debased by its self-proclaimed apostles, hold out hope for a country wracked by fevers it can hardly diagnose...
...The $23 million spent on abandoned "systems" is only part of the story...
...Thanks to Proxmire, the country witnessed the spectacle of the Secretary of the Air Force insisting that A. E. Fitzgerald had been dropped in an economy move, not fired for committing truth about the C-5A...
...The Senate is disabused, and the Senate is ready to cut...
...The Senator suggests that military pyramid building is essentially designed to create a welfare state for the dozen or so aerospace firms which can do little else and for the officers who look to them for post-service jobs...
...The Supreme Court, battered and bruised after an extraordinarily creative period, is being reshaped to the President's narrower tastes...
...He wants—and this is perhaps his most novel proposal—a new civilian agency, outside the Pentagon, to procure weapons and supervise contracts...
...If there is no coherent voice to address domestic ills, one is unlikely to emerge until the foreign adventures of a past generation are liquidated...
...Just as important, Proxmire has probed the climate of moral corruption bred by this careless orgy...
...From Proxmire and Senator Stuart Symington, from Perry McCoy Smith's study, The Air Force Plans for Peace, and from hard experience, we have learned that roles, missions, and commitments are simply the language of rationalization, that "national security" has become a shell game, and that the military barkers simply cannot be trusted with its unhampered direction...
...Proxmire has explored the fantasy contracts that bind no one to anything ($2 billion overrun on the C-5A, $4 billion on the Minuteman II...
...Senators Mike Mansfield, George McGovern, J. W. Fulbright, Albert Gore, Edward W. Brooke, John Sherman Cooper, Clifford Case, Mark Hatfield, and others are slowly forcing a reckless diplomatic and military bureaucracy to curb its global appetite...
...The executive branch is led by a White House suffused with insular mediocrities of a caliber not seen in the Capital since Warren G. Harding's day...
...To this latter day flowering of the Senate, the contribution of William Proxmire of Wisconsin simply cannot be overstated...
...Lacking the power of subpena, and against the subtle opposition of the committees traditionally charged with military oversight, Proxmire has made plain the absurd boondoggle of swollen military budgets...
...He wants a diplomatic as well as a military posture statement presented each year, outlining the nation's responsibilities, challenges, and means to cope with them...
...His staff has consisted of essentially one man, a bright lawyer-economist, Richard Kaufman...
...He wants expert Congressional oversight, removed from the traditional Armed Services and Appropriations Committees...
...There is reason to believe that more is involved, that at bottom the enterprise aims at the accumulation of power, a power expressed in money and its command over resources, a power that shapes foreign relations to a military vision and now threatens to create a military mold for domestic affairs...
...Proxmire offers several modest suggestions to bring the military machine back under control, to dissolve the accretions of the past quarter century...
...Remarkably enough, Proxmire's vehicle has been a subcommittee of the powerless Joint Economic Committee...
...If the cuts are made, if civilian control is regained, we will all owe a large debt to Senator Proxmire and his inquiries...
...His remarkable series of hearings into the character of military procurement have demonstrated for all to see the operations of a reckless machine, out of control, threatening the representative institutions to which it is nominally subservient...
...The House is a creature of its aging bloc of committee chairmen who effectively stifle critical and independent members...
...But the Senate, its establishment in disarray, no longer The Citadel of Washington author William S. White, offers a forum for talent and sanity...
...He wants an annual Congressional debate on priorities, comparing military demands with civilian needs...
...Report from Wasteland is a brisk and effective summary of Proxmire's useful labors...
...The notion deserves far more attention than it has received...
Vol. 34 • June 1970 • No. 6
