Readers Write
READERS WRITE
SKYWAY ROBBERY
STAR WAR'S THREAT TO A POST-INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY
by Justin Schwartz
One trillion dollars is $4,264 for every woman, child and man in the U.S. It is $8,333 for every taxpayer. As Reagan pointed out, it is a stack of $1,000 bills 67 miles high. (Actually, it would be 63 miles high, but as usual Reagan got his figures scrambled.) It is a third the administration's estimate of the 1990 national debt And $1 trillion is the price tag for Star Wars. Reagan claimed that Star Wars will make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete," something even the project's chief scientist, Dr. Gerald Yonas, dismisses as a fantasy. What Reagan did not mention is that it may make the American economy impotent and obsolete, polarizing our country and the world, and shooting down our hopes for a humane postindustrial society.
No one knows how much Star Wars will really cost Supporters cite figures of about $250 billion - equivalent to the whole 1982 U.S. military budget. That "low" figure is just a bait-and-switch trick. The average Pentagon cost overrun is 333%. (The F-lll fighter-bomber, initially proposed at $3.9 million apiece, came in at $18.5 million each.) Former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger's estimate of $1 trillion is probably closer. Some experts argue it could be even more. Meanwhile, Congress has approved $26 billion for Star Wars research over 1985-89.
What does this mean for us? Today, we are undergoing a revolution in high technology that will transform people's lives, for better or worse, more profoundly than the industrial revolution of the 1800's. If backed by a new democratic movement, the vastly increased productivity these technologies promise could ensure abundance for all, free people for creative and satisfying work, and democratize the economy. This is the hope of the New Democratic Movement, a national organization devoted to realizing this promise for all peoples. Star Wars betrays the bright promise of the new technologies and sets us firmly on the darker path to an increasingly polarized and militarized world.
Wasting Capital and People
Star Wars is even worse for the economy than ordinary military spending. Because it is high-tech, it is a particular threat to a postindustrial society which depends on peaceful and humane uses of high technology. Developing high technologies that will enhance productivity and enrich people's lives requires an unprecedented investment of capital in research and development (R&D). From this point of view, spending $1 trillion on Star wars is like flushing it down the toilet. Unlike money spent on commercial supercomputers, developed in Japan because U.S. firms would not invest in them, it is not used for production. It is not used at all - we hope.
"Our strength is in technological innovation," says Alvin Streeter of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, arguing for Star Wars. But innovation in what? Today, federal funding for R&D is 73% military, and 95% of all new federal R&D funding now goes to the Defense Department; 30% of it for Star Wars. The fate of KMS Fusion, an Ann Arbor company which researches fusion power, is very much to the point Harnessing fusion, the force which powers the sun, offers the possibility of limitless, safe energy. But R&D funds for commercial fusion have vanished, and KMS has become a subcontractor to Livermore Labs, the government's nuclear weapons design and Star Wars research facility. According to Congressman Carl Pursell, KMS has made "not one inch" of progress towards commercial use of laser fusion since it became a "node in the U.S. nuclear weapons complex," as the Department of Energy called it. "All KMS has done is to adapt to its environment," says KMS investor John Long. Doubtless that is true.
Commercial fusion may be a distant dream, but America's competitive decline is a present reality. The Star Wars drain on R&D will only accelerate it. "Our relative productivity increased and our net rating in technology vis-รก-vis other nations have on the whole been hurt rather than helped by our heavier involvement in military technology," says Simon Ramo, former president of TRW, the number 2 Star Wars contractor in Fiscal Year 1985. In 1982, the U.S. spent only 1.9% of its Gross National Product (GNP) on nonmilitary R&D; Japan spent 2.5%. Productivity (output per person-hour) in U.S. manufacturing grew only 11% in 1975-1982; just one quarter the rate in Japan, where the military spending is constitutionally limited to 1% of their budget.
While U.S. scientists and engineers devote themselves to neutral particle beams and Star Wars communication software, commercially useful innovation is being taken up abroad. The number of U.S. patents granted to U.S. citizens dropped 40% in 1971-82, and in 1982 42% of U.S. patents were granted to foreign nationals, double the percentage in 1966. The Japanese have virtually taken over the consumer electronics market. They were the first to introduce 64K RAM and 256K RAM computer memory chips. In 1983, they controlled about 70% of the world market and 40% of the U.S. market for 64K RAM chips. Declining productivity and innovation have helped to make the U.S. a debtor nation this year for the first time since 1917, owing more to foreigners than they owe to Americans. The U.S. is now a bigger debtor than Brazil, owing over $107 billion.
But Star Wars is not just a waste of money. It is also a waste of people, of human ingenuity and skill which might go to improve people's lives, and in particular of the kinds of technical skill needed for high-tech development. Writing the 10 to 100 million lines of computer code minimally necessary for Star wars might entail more than 81,700 person-years of work, or at least 8,170 analysts and programmers working for about 10 years, estimates Herbert Lin. Star Wars will also require comparable amounts of labor in electrical, electronic, and computer engineering, essential fields for the development of post-industrial society. More than 55% of private civilian firms have reported shortages of skilled people in these fields. Star Wars is a brain drain on the civilian economy.
Since WWII, around 50% of the nation's scientific and engineering workforce has been employed in military related projects, according to Simon Ramo. Star Wars will vastly increase this diversion of human knowledge to the service of destruction. Aside from the technologies which consequently will not be developed in the U.S., the cost-plus salaries paid by military contractors flush with Star Wars money will drive up the cost of technical labor - and the price of U.S. high technology. High-tech imports grew from 8.3% of the U.S. market in 1974 to 11.9% in 1983. The U.S. will become even less technologically competitive as firms buy more cheaply from abroad.
The skills necessary for progress in Star Wars, as with other military research, are not easily transferable to civilian applications. The programming languages for Star Wars will be so esoteric (and in fact classified) and the technologies so baroque that they will not exist outside the military. Star Wars experts may find it hard to leave the field, and unable to find jobs which use their skills in the commercial economy. When Star Wars is done, they may be thrown away.
No Spinoffs
Some Star Wars advocates argue that military research produces "spinoffs" which are useful in the civilian world. We do owe such developments as jet engines and integrated circuits to military-sponsored research, but if one wants commercial applications, it makes more sense (and costs less) to develop them directly. And in fact, since the early 1960s, military R&D has produced virtually no spinoffs, precisely because military technology has become so specialized and exotic as to have little civilian application.
This goes double for Star Wars. Rather than transistors, Teflon, and microwave ovens, as John Boies observes, Star Wars will produce such useful technologies as: lasers which can punch 18-inch holes in several inches of aluminum at 3,000 miles; high resolution infrared imaging systems which could survive accelerations of 300 times the earth's gravitational field; phased array radars which can simultaneously track 15,000 targets moving at 17,000 mph at 5,000 miles distance.
Jobs for the Few
As it undermines U.S. competitiveness in high technology, Star Wars spending will also directly worsen U.S. unemployment. A post-industrial society requires full employment and the participation of all its people in creating a better life, but the current direction of the U.S. economy, driven by massive diversion of capital to the military, is quite the reverse.
Joblessness has "stabilized" at over 7% officially; in reality it is over 10%. Military spending in general, and Star Wars spending in particular, accelerates this trend because it absorbs vast amounts of capital and employs relatively few workers. About 10,000 jobs vanish every time the military budget goes up $1 billion, estimates economist Marion Andersen. Traditional industrial workers, minorities, and women - the groups hit hardest by military-created unemployment, tend to lack the education and the high-tech skills the military jobs demand.
But "the solution" is not just to cut the money from Star Wars and other military boondoggles and transfer it to "creating jobs." We should do that, but such redistribution could not be achieved without gaining political power over the basic decisions in our society. It is the monopolization of these decisions by a tiny minority which ultimately produces both Star Wars and de-industrialization. Star Wars alone, wasteful as it is, is a symptom, not a cause.
It would be no less mistaken to try to hang on to old jobs in the face of new highly productive technologies, and simply try to redistribute a shrinking pie more equitably. We need to enlarge the pie. A high-tech, post-industrial society would use the new technologies to reduce or abolish many dangerous or stultifying jobs and create fulfilling, interesting work at the very high levels of productivity needed to provide enough for all. But today, the new technologies are misused to abolish or deskill precisely well-paying unionized jobs. The former industrial workers are often simply abandoned. The fastest growing new jobs are low-wage, low-skill nonunion service sector jobs. If your ambition is to flip hamburgers, Star Wars will help to ensure that you have a bright future.
Reagan Hood
Actually, it would be better for a humane post-industrial society if the money were simply flushed into space rather than spent on Star Wars. Because private firms alone, driven by the need to maximize short-term profits, cannot make long-term investments in re-industrialization, we need democratic control over large scale investment. There must be large-scale public -private cooperation in democratic economic planning and decentralized management.
What Star Wars will do, instead, is to redistribute $1 trillion dollars from the taxpayers to Boeing, TRW, AVCO, Lockheed, Rockwell, Highes, LTV, Aerojet General, Litton, and McDonnell Douglas - the top 10 Star Wars contractors for FY 1985 - and their ilk. The short list will change, but not much: 75% of all military awards go to 100 giant firms; 70 of which are in the Fortune 500 list, and 34 of which are in its top 50. This doesn't include the gargantuan conglomerates like TRW and Morton Thiokol. 87% of the Star Wars contracts for FY 1983 and 1984 were received by just 10 big firms.
In 1949, Business Week criticized Truman's welfare-state spending and argued for military Keynesianism instead. "Military spending doesn't really alter the structure of the economy. It goes through the regular channels. But the kind of welfare and public works spending that Truman plans does alter the economy. It creates channels of its own. It redistributes income. It shifts demand from one industry to another. It changes the whole economic pattern" (Feb. 12, 1949). In other words, public works and social welfare spending - though ever so slightly - reduces the power and privileges of the rich.
Of course, a welfare-state program does not alter "the structure of the economy" enough, nor by itself promote postindustrial development. Welfare state spending in the 1960s did virtually nothing to increase the political and economic power of the poor, and certainly did not save us from the current crisis of productivity. The way out lies in exploiting the new technologies to create a highly productive, people-oriented economy, a path which will be closed as long as the basic investment decisions are made by a few giant corporations.
But a humane post-industrial society also requires education, job training, and social services on a very large scale so that people can work effectively in the decentralized, democratic, and extremely demanding context of a post-industrial economy. Here it is ironic that the $2.3 billion FY 1986 Star Wars appropriation equaled the administration's proposed cut in student aid, foreclosing the chance for higher education which hundreds of thousands of low and middle-income youth need in order to contribute to and benefit from a high-tech economy.
If military spending is a direct subsidy to the capitalist class, ensuring that "the structure of the economy" will not change, Star Wars is what one investment analyst called "money from heaven" {New York Times, July 22, 1985). Profits from this $1 trillion gift will not be reinvested in productive industry but used for mergers and takeovers. In 1985, General Motors (a top 20 military contractor) bought Hughes Aerospace for $5 billion; the auto industry languishes, but GM's profits do not. What the gift will do is to vastly increase the excessive power of the military-industrial complex over our nation's resources which allows them to block the changes we need to build a society that serves the general welfare rather than the welfare of the generals.
Ultimately the money will flow to a handful of wealthy and powerful investors. In 1978, the top 0.5% of the population controlled about 20% of the total wealth in the U.S. (excluding real estate, 40%) and about 80% of the stocks and bonds. Simon Ramo and three other people own 40% of the stock of TRW. This minority's slender commitment to a democratic economy and a peaceful world will not be increased by the fat dividends Star Wars will bring them. The old joke about Reagan Hood who robs from the poor and gives to the military-industrial complex could hardly be more apt.
The Great Pork Barrel in the Sky
Like cancer, Star Wars spending feeds on itself. Although many technical people like to delude themselves that work on Star Wars today is "only research" to see if it is possible, the business executives know better. As is usual with military programs, the companies which are being asked to determine whether Star wars is feasible are the same ones which will be given $1 trillion to build it if their answer is yes. They will now kill the goose which lays the golden eggs. "Everybody knows you don't make money in technology research programs," one contractor said; "We've got to have deployment."
Looking at the rubble of the hamlet of Ben Tre during the Vietnam War, an American officer said, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." Star Wars will help the financial privateers destroy America's future ("in order to save it") even more thoroughly than the U.S. military leveled Ben Tre. Even if Star Wars fails to trigger a nuclear war, its astronomical price tag threatens our chances for a humane postindustrial society. Stopping Star Wars will not get us where we have to be; for that we must acquire the power to reshape America's economy along new democratic lines. But not stopping Star Wars will make the task a great deal harder.