A Newer-Model War Machine

William Greider, who has been a shrewd and unorthodox observer of the American government for many years, has an arresting tale to tell in his latest book, “Fortress America.” A Pentagon think tank, he recounts, recently asked a group of military people at the colonel level to take a fresh look at ways to reconcile the miliary’s desire for new kinds of weapons with the restraints of a limited budget.

That’s simple, the colonels replied.

In the Army, eliminate three divisions and cancel plans for a self-propelled howitzer to free money to develop a digitalized Army force that can fight wars the way kids play Nintendo games, with computer-run weapons that make fighting safer for the soldier and more lethal to the enemy.

In the Air Force, drop six fighter wings, retire the B-1 bomber and scrap plans for building a Joint Strike Fighter in order to build 200 pilotless, reusable airplanes and to buy 20 airborne laser weapons.

In the Navy, retire three aircraft carrier groups, cancel a new carrier and thereby make it possible to build some futuristic ships, including five “arsenal” ships, huge armored barges that look somewhat like the Monitor and the Merrimac of the Civil War and can fire 500 missiles with a crew of only 50.

But none of these steps will be taken, Greider says, because the inertia left over from the Cold War propels the armed forces along the same grooves they have been traveling the last 50 years. No matter that the great Cold War enemy has collapsed, no matter that the danger has faded from World War III to a collection of smaller, diverse threats from smaller, angry nations, like Iraq, and from terrorism.

That the great war machine just keeps rolling along, unexamined, unchecked, is the point of Greider’s book. The mighty engine of the machine is what Greider and others have called “the Iron Triangle,” the connection among the Pentagon, the defense contractors and Congress. (And its constituents and their defense jobs.) The Iron Triangle has dominated the American economy and American life so long that few people can even remember when it didn’t.

It is most useful to be reminded, as Greider does for us, that since the Cold War began in 1948 “the ensuing five decades of war mobilization have been an era unlike any other time in American history.”

How to demobilize, how to take apart the mighty war machine, is the subject at which Greider strikes his blows in “Fortress America.” Some of them are right on, some just glancing. Greider’s breezy style--he is national editor of Rolling Stone magazine--may for some readers disguise the importance of this book.

His most telling point, because it is so obvious to any observer who pays attention, is that the Pentagon cannot afford to do everything it would like to do all at the same time. The usual option for Congress and the Pentagon is to pursue many projects, but without enough resources to adequately complete them. That is just what is happening now. Reluctant to cancel whole weapons systems, Congress and the Pentagon stretch them out and skimp on training.

The approach to the budget problem that the colonels at the think tank had, or something like it, is what Greider has in mind as a solution. And, with enough public discussion through means like this book, and with enough time, something like this kind of modernization may well come about.

But making military planning rational is simple compared to the other principal questions Greider raises: What is America’s role in the world, anyway? For just what purposes does the United States have its huge military force?

Greider struggles to find the answers. He argues that the United States will have to stop acting as if it had, as the only superpower left, a duty to set the world to rights. That path will only lead to the resentment of other nations and nasty surprises, he says.

He somewhat vaguely advocates that the United States should “devote its diplomatic power (and sense of invention) to creating new institutions and strengthening old ones like the United Nations.” This way, Greider writes, the United States would “commit its power to constructing international security forces and mechanisms for conflict resolution that everyone can trust.” Until that happens, Greider says near the close of this well-informed book, American security will be anything but secure.