Casting the Pentagon as Guide for U.S. Industry Begs for Calamity

The country’s biggest fund for research and development, a colossal $40 billion per year, goes to the Pentagon. So, on the enshrined principle of going where the money is, policy doctors are prescribing military finance and guidance to keep American high-tech industry in the race with Japan and Western Europe.

In the annals of formulas for economic calamity, this casting of the Pentagon as an industrial savior merits a senior place. It calls to the rescue the impresarios ofthe frequently grounded B-1 bomber, the producers of the stealth bomber--at $500 million apiece--and various other historic monuments to technological extravagance. Our market-minded competitors abroad have frugally shunned such productions as they single-mindedly go about their business of making money from science.

Nonetheless, with industry trimming its research accounts and no agency of the U.S. government responsible for industrial research, the turn to the Defense Department is natural, even if not sensible. Thus, with American industry obsessed with quick payoffs from research, the Pentagon is putting up $30 million to maintain a U.S. presence in research that underpins a sure-fire commercial winner of the 1990s--high-definition television (HDTV), which provides a crystal-clear picture far superior to today’s televised images.

Like many other advanced technologies, HDTV technology is “dual-use”--capable of serving both civilian and military needs. But the military market for electronics is relatively so small that it intellectually feeds from research in the civilian sector. The difficulty with HDTV, however, is that the civilian sector in the United States, fearing the long-term research costs, has abandoned the field to Japanese and European firms--to the dismay of the military services, which increasingly depend on TV for battlefield uses.

The clearest call for the military to take a major role in sustaining civilian high-tech industry was sounded last October by the Defense Science Board, the Pentagon’s senior science-advisory body. Citing declines in dual-use industries that are important for defense, the board urged the Department of Defense “to act in a new and unfamiliar role,’ adding that “DOD cannot meet its mission without a strong commercial base and it should recognize and accept this broader responsibility.’

In the absence of other means of finance, DOD has been quietly slipping into that role--explaining, when queried, that industry and the military are old partners. What’s left out, however, is that in the new era of savage high-tech competition the Pentagon’s traditional indifference to research costs and consumer needs is poison for civilian enterprises. In fact, some industrial research managers insist that too much time in military research renders a scientist or engineer unfit for the cost-conscious, customer-sensitive atmosphere of civilian enterprise.

The Pentagon’s new role has not gone wholly unchallenged in the inner debates of the technocratic community. Last September, in an uncharacteristically critical speech, Robert M. White, the president of the National Academy of Engineering, urged recognition of the fact that “the Department of Defense has become the nation’s de facto Ministry of Technology by default. While we need to be thankful that some agency is taking the lead,” White said, “the Defense Department is not where it should be. I find it interesting,” he continued, “that the recent budget proposals by the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry targeted such fields as artificial intelligence, superconductivity and hypersonic planes among others for concerted attention.

“And where are the analogous initiatives in the U.S. government? Largely in the DOD,” he noted.

Given the absence of an alternative bankroll, that’s where they are bound to remain.