The Great Deformation (17 page)

By early that spring, however, the Republican congressional leadership had broken ranks with the White House—at least in the privacy of their cloakroom. The Senate Republicans led by Majority Leader Howard Baker and budget chairman Pete Domenici had hammered out a courageous plan to reduce the out-year deficit by $100 billion annually.

The Baker plan involved real stuff including social security cuts and other entitlement reforms, big reductions in pork barrel spending, and a moderate allowance for further revenue increases beyond the large package of loophole closers that the President had signed into law the previous fall.

But the vital glue which held it together was a 5 percent annual real growth cap on defense spending—that is, just a breather after three years of massive DOD increases. Yet the obstinacy emanating from the big office in the Pentagon knew no bounds. Weinberger portrayed the Senate Republican plan as a grave threat to national security even though real defense spending had already increased by 12 percent each in 1981 and 1982 and by a further 8 percent in 1983—for a total gain of 35 percent. Telling the Republican leadership to take a hike, he then insisted on every dime of the President's budget for 1984, which called for another huge increase of 11 percent after inflation.

Given their fears of the ballooning budget deficits and the political pain implicit in the sweeping domestic cuts they were about to embrace, the idea of permanent double-digit real growth in defense spending was not something that the Senate Republican elders could abide; it made them sputter in disbelief. They saw red, the more Weinberger insisted on it.

Howard Baker thus made one last effort to compromise, proposing real dollar percentage increases of 7.5, 7.0 and 6.0 for the next three years, respectively. Weinberger still refused to yield, and in this intransigence there was irony wrapped in the unconscionable.

Reagan had signed a tax increase bill in August 1982 only on the basis that there would be three dollars of spending cuts for each dollar of taxes.
But included in those spending cuts was $50 billion of defense savings over three years—cuts which had been forgotten by the Pentagon even before the ink on the deal was dry and which had been totally ignored in the President's current budget.

As it happened, Howard Baker's last ditch compromise on the fiscal 1984 budget would have resulted in a $50 billion defense savings over the first three years—that is, the Senate Republicans were willing to settle for “used cuts.” Out of a desperate desire to accommodate the White House, the same savings they had extracted in the previous budget cycle would be counted again.

When Weinberger refused to accept even this fig leaf of compromise, the clock finally ran out. The Senate Republicans went their own way, and after that there was no possibility of a comprehensive mid-course correction of the nation's fiscal policy mess, nor any basis for an intelligent and orderly retrenchment of the runaway defense budget.

Yet that wasn't the end of this particular folly. After the economy recovered Reagan took to lamenting the 1982 tax increase deal on the grounds that he had been hoodwinked on the three-for-one spending cut promise. In fact, the primary shortfall from the spending cuts Congress had promised him was the $50 billion in defense savings. So the President had indeed been hoodwinked, and by his own Secretary of Defense.

Nor was this the first time. Weinberger had been misleading the President from Day One—albeit not by means of deliberate untruths with respect to the facts. The larger deception was that Weinberger was not who Reagan thought he was—that is, he was not Cap the Knife.

Clinging to his defense brief with monomaniacal purpose, Weinberger cared not at all about the things a renowned advocate of stinginess in government might have pursued. Running a tight ship was not part of his modus operandi, nor was rooting out waste and duplication, asking hard questions about weapons systems, or looking for ways to accomplish missions at lower cost.

Weinberger thereby denied the President of the United States the honest services expected of any Cabinet officer. Instead, he led the President to believe there were no options, no trade-offs, and no gradations in the immensely complex business of providing for the national security.

Indeed, Weinberger's message over and over was that the DOD top line was a cut-and-dried necessity. The professionals and patriots over at the Pentagon were making scientific choices about its allocation—so no one on the White House side of the Potomac needed interfere or had the competence to do so.

Ronald Reagan's Fatal Mistake:

Blind Reliance on “Cap the Knife”

Ronald Reagan failed miserably as commander in chief. In most other policy areas, even on the matter of raising taxes, Reagan had proven capable of flexibility and compromise when the moment required it.

But he was unbending on the matter of his runaway defense buildup. In a fatal error of judgment, the president had delegated the issue fully and blindly to an advisor, Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, who was preternaturally obdurate and imperious on everything within his brief.

This exposed the nation's decision-making process to a terrible historical mistake. Ronald Reagan had swallowed hook, line, and sinker the neocon narrative, with its vastly exaggerated notions of the Soviet threat and its spurious theory that the Kremlin was pursuing nuclear war–winning strategies.

Even worse, he possessed an almost childlike confidence in the military. Accordingly, he was oblivious to the fact that interservice rivalries, bureaucratic aggrandizement, and the plain old pork barrel of the military-industrial complex were rampant in the “swampland of waste” known as the Pentagon.

Reagan's startling innocence was especially apparent with respect to the top brass. Whenever the joint chiefs visited the White House, the president seemed awed, as if they had deigned to come down from Mount Olympus.

The truth is, the warfare state never had a more pliable tool in the Oval Office. Ronald Reagan campaigned for three decades as a small-government conservative, but he had come to the creed from the wrong side of the tracks: from the red-baiting precincts of the 1950s. Indeed, after his break with the Hollywood left, Reagan spent his conservative years absorbing the Manichean Cold War gospel of
Human Events
and the
National Review
.

Accordingly, his speeches portrayed an illusory world caught in a titanic struggle between the forces of freedom and the Kremlin's purported quest for world domination. Faced by an apocalyptic threat, Citizen Reagan had found no trouble believing that a massive military establishment kept in a continuous state of readiness was imperative for national security.

In fact, Reagan was an out-an-out statist in the realm of the military and national security. All the well-warranted skepticism he had about Big Government—the empire-building tendency of the bureaucracy, the inherent inefficiency and waste of public sector monopolies, the self-serving propensity of bureaucrats to hide the facts and twist the truth—did not apply on the Pentagon side of the Potomac.

Nor did he have any sense that money spent on defense imposed the same burden on taxpayers and drain on the economy as did all other kinds of government spending. Instead, he would say over and over, “No, when it comes to national security you do not spend based on a budget, you spend based on what you need.”

Needless to say, the Pentagon brass and the defense contractors could not have agreed more wholeheartedly. Nor could they have defined “need” more expansively. And so, ironically, the tribune of small government became the great enabler of the 1980s warfare state revival—a project of staggering waste and lamentable historical consequence.

GENERAL EISENHOWER AND THE PATH NOT TAKEN

There is no better way to illuminate the “path not taken” character of the Reagan defense buildup than by comparing its magnitude and spirit to the legacy of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike was the one postwar president who had soberly assessed the dangers of both the Soviet adversary and also the warfare state which had been mobilized to contain it. In so doing, he had established two fundamental national security markers as pertinent to the 1980s as the 1950s.

Firstly, Eisenhower sharply reduced the army and other elements of the conventional forces, believing that the academic concept of limited war favored by the liberal foreign policy establishment was an illusion in the nuclear age. He therefore rebuilt a much smaller and leaner defense budget on the predicate that the Soviet Union could ultimately be contained only by threat of massive nuclear retaliation.

Secondly, he believed that a strong civilian economy and resolute fiscal discipline were as important to national security as military power. In this respect, Ike spent the entire eight years of his tenure in the White House personally engaged in a campaign to not only reduce the conventional force structure, but also to squeeze, scrimp, economize, and retrench wherever possible from programs which were needed.

In so doing, he established what might be termed the “Eisenhower Minimum.” Described more fully in
chapter 11
, it was the level of defense spending that the only war general to occupy the White House in the twentieth century believed was adequate to contain the Soviets. Thus, when he left office the Department of Defense was one-third smaller in real terms than the war-bloated levels he inherited from President Harry Truman.

Expressed in 2005 dollars of purchasing power, Ike's final defense budget was $370 billion compared to $515 billion when he took office. The remarkable fact is that this Eisenhower Minimum reflected Ike's assessment of national
security requirements at the very peak of the post-
Sputnik
vigor of the Soviet industrial economy.

By contrast, Reagan's outgoing defense budget was $482 billion, measured in the same dollars of purchasing power. Not only was the Reagan defense spending level 30 percent larger in real terms than Ike's last budget, but it came at a point in history when the Evil Empire was already descending into its final collapse.

Moreover, the fact that the dead hand of the Soviet state had already asphyxiated its industrial economy was by no means a secret: there was plenty of open-source evidence of the looming Soviet breakdown. This historical development brought the possibility of relieving the American taxpayers of the three-decade-long financial burden of the Cold War. Accordingly, defense spending should have declined sharply below the Eisenhower Minimum to perhaps $200 billion by the end of the 1980s.

Instead, it soared recklessly and unnecessarily above it toward the $500 billion mark. One reason for this untoward outcome is surely that in his inordinate deference to all things associated with the military, Ronald Reagan was entirely oblivious to the profound admonition that Eisenhower had issued twenty years earlier.

In his farewell address, Ike famously warned the nation that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Foremost among these potential abuses of political power was the obvious possibility that the military-industrial complex would extract unwarranted and excessive defense spending through the mobilization of fear and the enormous pork barrel dynamics inherent in the warfare state. And here Eisenhower distinguished himself from all of his successors during the Cold War era up to and including Ronald Reagan.

All these presidents could be described as military Keynesians; that is, they believed that defense spending involves a “twofer”: the provision of national security and the creation of jobs and technological progress, as well.

By contrast, Eisenhower held the old-fashioned view that military spending is inherently wasteful. It consumes resources that would otherwise be available to meet the needs of the civilian economy.

Indeed, in a stunningly lyrical rife he had once insisted that “every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is
spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children … Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Needless to say, none of his successors, including left-wing community organizer Barack Obama, ever came close to such eloquence on the societal cost of military spending. In the Reagan White House, especially, cluelessness was the order of the day as the great defense surge gathered momentum, and the warfare state became its own reason for imperialism abroad and economic burdens at home.

The legends of the Reagan era are legion, but the greatest legend is that the feckless Reagan defense buildup caused the collapse of the Soviet Union. As has been demonstrated, the $3.5 trillion (2005$) spent on defense during the Gipper's term did not cause the Kremlin to raise the white flag of surrender. Virtually none of it was spent on programs which threatened Soviet security or undermined its strategic nuclear deterrent.

In procuring new conventional tanks, planes, helicopters, missiles, and munitions, the United States did not launch an arms race that the Kremlin feared it could not survive. The 1980s race to rearm, in fact, resulted in the creation of a vast expeditionary force for no valid reason of state, and which got used for no redeeming purpose except that presidents could.