The Aliens Are Coming! Pass the Cash

Until I saw the movie “Independence Day,” I wasn’t going to write about the “smart weapons” fiasco. Why say anything if you can’t say something nice? And as you may have heard, the definitive word on the so-called smart weapons used in the Gulf War is that they didn’t work any better than dumb weapons, and they cost hundreds of billions more.

Or maybe you haven’t heard. The media, particularly TV, had such a ball celebrating the new super high-tech missiles and airplanes during the Gulf War that they are understandably loath to admit to having been conned. But we all were.

After an exhaustive four-year study, the respected and nonpartisan General Accounting Office concluded that claims for the success of smart weapons “were overstated, misleading, inconsistent or unverifiable.”

The Pentagon does not dispute the report’s findings, which are based on the military’s own data as well as interviews with the Gulf War’s key officers, planners and more than 100 combat pilots. In combat, clouds, rain, fog, smoke and humidity all conspired to defeat the smart weapons, and “pilots reported being unable to discern whether a presumed target was a tank or a truck and whether it had already been destroyed.”

While smart bombs and missiles, which have cost taxpayers $58 billion, accounted for 84% of the cost of munitions in the Gulf War, they represented only 8% of the tonnage dropped and proved no more accurate for the most part than old-fashioned cheap bombs. Nor does the Pentagon deny that the much touted stealth fighter jets failed to outperform older, cheaper aircraft. “It is inappropriate,” the report concluded, “to characterize higher-cost aircraft as generally more capable than lower-cost aircraft.”

Bummer. If stealth fighters that cost more than $100 million apiece add nothing to U.S. security, how will Congress justify plans to build more of them along with the stealth bombers that cost $2.2 billion each? The stealth technology was aimed at penetrating sophisticated Soviet defenses that no longer exist, and now it turns out to be a waste against the pipsqueak dictators who remain our only enemies.

Still, we will churn out ever more advanced weapons. Profits are at stake, not to mention campaign contributions, and the great thing about smart weapons is that, being on the technological cutting edge, they are obsolete before they are even built so you always need to be designing and building even smarter ones.

Members of Congress love smart weapons as the only way to bring massive federal dollars into their districts without being called socialists. The stealth fighter is built by Lockheed in Speaker Newt Gingrich’s backyard, and his “revolution” has received major backing from Lockheed and other defense contractors. No wonder Congress has appropriated $8 billion more for weapons modernization than the Pentagon requested.

That also explains why the Gingrich Congress has eliminated the funding of the GAO division that does independent technological analysis. This ensures that Congress will not be inconvenienced by any future GAO reports on weapons systems that don’t work. Shooting the messenger remains the most effective battle tactic of the military-industrial complex.

But shutting up the independent analysts at the GAO is only a short-term solution. Eventually the public will wake up to the fact that we are wasting many billions of taxpayer dollars on weapons that make no sense in the aftermath of the Cold War. The U.S. spends more money on sophisticated weaponry than the next 10 biggest-spending nations combined. And most of them are our buddies. Regretfully, the U.S. will not soon be able to find an opponent worthy of high-tech weapons on this planet.

But wait! Why restrict our military calculations to Earthlings?

Here’s where the movie “Independence Day” comes in. Why not identify a new enemy truly worthy of very expensive weapons that don’t work--aliens from a far-off planet? In the film, weapons that no longer have a purpose on Earth are eventually turned against invading space ships to surprising advantage. Indeed, our myriad differences on this planet are suddenly forgotten and all of us, including Iraqis, team up to destroy the squiggly beasts from outer space.

Give me some credit here. Even if you’re not into extraterrestrial terror, this is the best argument anyone has yet come up with to justify the current military and spy budgets of $300 billion a year. Pass it on: The aliens are coming, and we’d better get ready, cost be damned.