Many Heroes of Cold War Still in Diapers

Today I’ll be eating breakfast with two heroes of the Cold War. One will sink his teeth, both of them, into soupy gruel from Gerbers. The other will squirm and sing her way through a bowl of Alpha Bits. They are my children, and to their generation will fall the hard task of finishing a struggle started in their grandparents’ prime.

Yes, we beat the Soviets, but we did it on credit. We borrowed heavily to assemble a high-tech Trojan Horse that the enemy could not match. Now, and for decades to come, tax money that otherwise might have gone to schools, or roads, or hospitals, or as yet unimagined technical advances, instead will be needed to settle Cold War accounts.

This is not to argue that the bloodless struggle should have been conducted in another manner. I doubt we needed the Pentagon’s $7,000 toilet seats to prod the Soviets to collapse, but why nit-pick. My point simply is that the Cold War victory belongs to those who will pay for all the scary hardware, and these fiscal warriors are still in diapers.

It is a point often overlooked today as the nation, and Southern California in particular, begins to dismantle its great war machine and discharge the brainy army that built it. Instead, we are subjected to television images of tearful aerospace workers clutching pink slips, and we are warned--as the region that profited most heavily by the Cold War--of impending economic doom.

About two weeks ago, an economic analysis of what Pentagon cutbacks will mean for Los Angeles County’s aerospace industry was made public. The report foretold the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs. And it recommended a series of government relief schemes--from retraining workers to providing tax incentives for defense companies willing to convert to peace-related endeavors.

The document received much attention, not all of it favorable. A RAND analyst dismissed the report as “a political rather than analytical exercise,” the London Economist poked fun at its inflated layoff predictions, and a Wall Street Journal columnist criticized the underlying motive: “Having flown for one of the longest and highest tax-paid rides in the history of the Free World, the aerospace industry of Los Angeles wants a golden parachute.”

The work, it turns out, was sponsored in part by the same pro-business types who have advanced the notion of a mass exodus by California business. They have an agenda. Just as they blame workers’ comp and anti-smog rules for downturns caused by the recession, they now present defense cutbacks as evidence the state must soften business regulations. Right.

Despite such baggage, the report did raise a timely question: What do we owe the defense industry? I would say, not much. The defense contractors did the job they were paid to do. And any obligation to retrain workers rests, not with taxpayers, but with the companies which lured them here on the promise of long-term stability, and taught them well how to milk government budgets for every available drop.

I doubt, though, that the defense industry will rise to this challenge. So far, mainly stock clerks, secretaries and blue collar-types have been laid off; management has managed to save itself and many of its prized employees. Also, with some exceptions, the prime contractors have demonstrated a collective wariness toward conversion to non-defense pursuits, like the development of clean-running vehicles. They appear more willing to reduce their payrolls, ride out the cutbacks and wait for the next war. History is on their side.

Nonetheless, some of their smarter workers already are in pursuit of alternatives, retraining themselves for non-defense jobs, starting small businesses, moving on. They see an end coming and are preparing for it. “Personally, I don’t think anyone owes us anything,” one working aerospace engineer told me.

Understand, nobody wants to see anyone lose a job. And we all can recall fondly those robust days of the early 1980s, when the defense money poured into Southern California. This region had it both ways back then--guns and butter. But the boom is over, and as cutbacks ripple through the regional economy, as we struggle to survive on less than our accustomed $20-billion Pentagon infusion, we’re in for hard times.

At least we’ll suffer in the here and now, and not pass along the pain to future generations. The bigger danger is that those who believe the need for jobs trumps all other social considerations can persuade government to pull a Chrysler and engineer some form of defense industry bailout. That would make life easier on us now, but tougher on our children later, and we’ve done enough of that already.