Not A Pretty Picture
Shulman, Seth
Not a Pretty Picture The Pentagon pays for high-tech TV BY SETH SHULMAN Washington is in the grip of Sputnik-like fervor. But the perceived threat this time is from the Japanese, not the Soviets....
...As William Schreiber, director of MIT's advanced television research program, told Technology Review, "$30 million is peanuts to the military...
...Technology...
...At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, as much as three quarters of total funding in the Artificial Intelligence Lab comes from the military, and most of that from DARPA's deep pockets...
...Combined with foreign private-sector investment in HDTV, the research-and-development total abroad easily tops a billion dollars...
...Weapons technology funding in constant dollars doubled during the Reagan years, while funding for civilian technological research projects, including alternative energy programs, was cut by two-thirds...
...company—Zenith—still makes today's low-definition television sets, and that company reportedly is now attempting to sell off its TV division...
...And the issue is not space satellites but—of all things—television...
...But serious questions need to be asked about the military's multimillion-dollar investment in HDTV...
...More dangerous for this country than foreign domination of consumer electronics is the subordination of scientific and technological research priorities to military purposes...
...The rest was left to be split among all the nation's pressing concerns, including AIDS, cancer, and other health and environmental issues...
...In its thirty-year history, DARPA has funded research on lasers, advanced aircraft, "stealth" technology for planes to evade radar detection, and "smart" weapons designed to penetrate enemy defenses en route to their targets...
...The Defense Department has already thrown $30 million into high-definition television research, and there is more to come...
...While about half of the agency's money is allocated for work on new types of weaponry, the rest goes into basic research in such areas as supercomputers and machine-tool design...
...The military R&D crowd is getting desperate at the prospect of a winding down of the Cold War and the arms race," he says...
...ment of Science, military dominance over research dollars is greatest in technology development—exactly the category so aptly illustrated by HDTV...
...Compared to the military's research and development budget of $41 billion, adds Melman, "what's a few hundred million dollars here and there...
...In Japan, for example, the armed forces allot only about 4 per cent of the government's total research funds...
...But the Pentagon, while channeling a huge proportion of the nation's resources and talents towards technologies of destruction, also tends to turn out costly DAVID SUTER and unreliable products, as demonstrated by the problem-plagued Sergeant York gun or the Army's thousand-dollar coffee pots...
...So it was all but inevitable when the "TV gap" appeared that the Pentagon would rise to the occasion...
...All told, military-related projects absorbed three quarters of the Federal R&D budget...
...The vehicle for funding HDTV research is a formidable but little-known arm of the Pentagon called DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, formed in 1958 in response to the panic that followed Sputnik...
...The Pentagon, he notes, imposes a high degree of secrecy upon its research, and emphasizes such "arcane goals" as designing computers for use after a nuclear holocaust...
...The Japanese have already started broadcasting high-definition television (or what they call "Hi-vision") for an hour a day to the handful of department stores and corporate sponsors willing to pay $60,000 for a set...
...The entire Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, received $335 million for research and development in fiscal year 1989—less than one-hundredth of the Pentagon's R&D budget...
...In Germany and Japan, the military plays a comparatively negligible role in setting research priorities...
...policymakers, reeling from the shock of being beaten into space by the Soviet Union— which, they reasoned, might design space sattelites capable of raining nuclear bombs upon America—formed the agency in order to stay on the cutting edge...
...The Pentagon, he points out, has been a drain of talent and resources that could have been used more productively elsewhere...
...But why high-definition television...
...Seth Shulman, a free-lance writer in Watertown, Massachusetts, specializes in science and technology policy...
...DARPA and all the lesser-DARPAs, like Los Alamos and the labs of aerospace companies, are becoming overwhelmed with a wave of panic...
...In the Reagan years, Pentagon research-and-development spending grew even faster than the overall military budget itself, almost doubling in constant dollars to more than $37 billion a year...
...Within a few decades, they are expected to be in a majority of American homes...
...In the wake of the nation's largest military buildup in recent history—at a time of relative peace and with no credible, overwhelming security threat—the military may well be hedging its bets, trying to maintain its bureaucratic dominance any way it can...
...electronics industry did not begin with high-definition television...
...These television sets of the future boast images as sharp as movies and sound as crisp as compact discs...
...Because of its central role in funding university research, DARPA has won many supporters in academia...
...But even if HDTV were to improve America's preparedness for war, that would still be no justification for letting the military set industrial policy...
...In the past decade, the United States has relinquished even the pretense of competing in the international consumer-electronics arena...
...That prediction—and the specter of Japanese dominance of the market—has members of Congress flailing about in a protectionist furor, the Commerce Department proposing softer antitrust laws, and the nation's electronics industry pleading for a $1.35 billion taxpayer-funded handout...
...The military is trying to diversify to retain its "well-padded racket," says Columbia's Melman...
...Housed in an anonymous office building in a Virginia suburb of Washington, DARPA has a total staff of fewer than 200, but funds almost a billion dollars worth of military research each year at universities and private firms...
...The military cannot make a constructive contribution to the health of the civilian economy, says Lenny Siegel, director of the Pacific Studies Center in Mountain View, California...
...DARPA started Sematech in hopes of developing new chip-manufacturing techniques that would make U.S...
...While the devices themselves are still not publicly available even in Japan, widespread commercial sales of high-definition TV sets around the world are expected within the next decade...
...It seems doubtful, then, that DARPA funding of HDTV research will turn out to be a worthwhile expenditure of public money—or that the military will prove to have a legitimate interest in putting a sharper picture on our television screens...
...Their reasoning is simple enough: According to one estimate, about ten million computers are in use in the United States, but there are 160 million television sets...
...Echoes MIT economist David Staelin, "The issue is not a prettier picture in the living room...
...In his view, while Government involvement might be used, for example, to develop "industrial policies that are environmentally rational," such policies "will never be fostered by the military...
...It's called high-definition TV—HDTV for those in the know...
...Only one U.S...
...military expenditures, the total allocated for HDTV will be only a tiny fraction of the Pentagon's yearly budget...
...According to the American Association for the AdvancePentagon funding of high-tech TV may not be a worthwhile use of public money, but the Pentagon views it as a way of diversifying, since the Cold War appears to be winding down...
...Pentagon insiders say that in the near term, military funding for HDTV is likely to double...
...Military officials have long boasted of the great potential for civilian product spin-offs from weapons-technology research...
...What, then, really accounts for the Pentagon's interest in funding the exploration of HDTV...
...In the United States, the Defense Department is the only Government agency with sufficient resources to consider sponsoring research into crisper television...
...Columbia University's Seymour Melman, a leading critic of bloated military budgets, is among those who fault the Pentagon for America's neglect of civilian technology...
...DARPA has long been the leading source of Federal funds to universities for computer research, often with civilian applications...
...Redoubtable DARPA, gushes the financial weekly Barron's in a headline featuring the agency, It Shapes the Future of U.S...
...During the Reagan years, Federal allocations for R&D made by all agencies other than the Pentagon dropped by 24 per cent in real dollars to less than $ 19 billion...
...Even that total included about $5 billion for military projects funded by such agencies as the Department of Energy and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA...
...The use of military dollars to prop up the domestic U.S...
...If current trends are any indication, few of those sets will bear the label, Made in the U.S.A...
...The Japanese and European governments have already sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into research and development on HDTV technology, trying to stake out a corner of what is predicted to be an astronomically profitable market...
...DARPA officials say the military has a vested interest in maintaining a strong domestic computer-chip industry, and HDTV products will use a lot of chips...
...Representative Don Ritter, Pennsylvania Republican, says a failure to catch up will mean "missing out on the Twenty-first Century...
...One proponent is Michael Dertouzos, head of the Computer Science Laboratory at MIT, who lauds DARPA for funding open-ended, basic research, including projects some would consider risky...
...The Pentagon now allocates two-thirds of all Federal R&D funds and pays the salaries of almost a third of the nation's scientists and engineers...
...Japan has a strong civilian agency, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), to organize the industrial programs credited with making it a major economic power...
...The issue is the industrial future of the United States...
...DARPA provides half the funding—$100 million a year—for an industry consortium called Sematech, a group of computer-chip manufacturers exempt from antitrust laws...
...That is why it is investing not only in HDTV and Sematech, but also in civilian space research and medical technologies...
...firms a factor in the global market...
...Given the size of overall U.S...
Vol. 53 • September 1989 • No. 9
