The Great Deformation

by David Stockman

  Had the United States simply gotten a massive defense buildup that it didn’t need, there might have been no lasting impact save for a modest waste of resources; perhaps a few percentage points of GDP. In fact, however, the Reagan defense buildup gave birth to a historical monstrosity: the Bush wars of occupation and imperial pretension that were possible only because of the immense conventional war machine the Gipper left behind.

  THE ACTUAL REAGAN BUILDUP: RISE OF THE AMERICAN IMPERIAL ARMADA

  What got built with the $1.46 trillion Reagan budget was a conventional war-making capacity and force projection ability that the only military expert to occupy the White House in the twentieth century, Dwight Eisenhower, had rejected as of marginal value against a nuclear adversary. The fiasco in Vietnam had already proven him correct, demonstrating painfully and tragically that massive conventional forces cannot successfully occupy, pacify, and rebuild third-world nations of the unwilling.

  Yet that’s exactly what the Reagan top line bought: an occupation force which would have left General Eisenhower rolling in his grave. At the center were fifteen naval carrier battle groups armed to the teeth with attack aircraft, helicopters, cruise missiles, amphibious landing craft, and vast suites of communications and electronic warfare gear. Indeed, the standard aircraft carrier was accompanied by a fleet of eighty aircraft and a dozen escort ships, the equivalent of the entire military establishment of all except a handful of nations.

  It is these nuclear carrier battle groups which gave US policy makers their striking imperial arrogance. An example of how these platforms were suited to imperial power projection, not anti-Soviet defense, is the sea-based Tomahawk cruise missile force.

  The rise of Tomahawk force began in 1983 during the Reagan buildup, but the demise of the Evil Empire did not slow down its development one bit. By the end of the century the United States had about 150 surface ships and attack submarines that could launch these deadly cruise missiles and an inventory of nearly 5,000 missiles.

  Tomahawks have a range of seven hundred miles. This means that from their offshore platforms they can reach three-fourths of the world’s population. And during the last two decades they have been used in just this “stand-off” manner against targets in Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Libya, and others—teaching presidents that they could meddle freely without getting bloodied.

  The Reagan defense buildup also provided cover for a vast renewal of conventional fixed-wing and helicopter forces, a binge of procurement that had no peacetime precedent. During the eight Reagan years, the Pentagon was authorized to purchase nearly 9,000 planes and helicopters compared to only 3,000 during the previous eight years.

  This profoundly wasteful binge was predicated on the specious notion that the Soviets were fixing to launch a suicidal conventional land war in Europe. Yet even then the Red Army was proving every day that it couldn’t subdue RPG-toting tribesmen in the barren expanse of the Hindu Kush. Moreover, when the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991 high rates of aircraft procurement continued unabated: Congressmen had no trouble seeing them as “jobs” programs, even if Eastern Europe was now being rapidly occupied by Burger Kings and Pizza Huts.

  The Reagan buildup thus bequeathed national security policy makers approximately 13,000 fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters. Except for 20 B-2 stealth bombers this giant inventory was designed for conventional war-making and power projection on distant shores, including 4,000 conventional attack and fighter aircraft and more than 5,000 helicopters whose mission was conventional battlefield support in an attack, transport, or utility role.

  The two big land war programs launched during the Reagan build-up—the upgraded Abrams Tank and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle—experienced a similar untoward evolution. At the time of the Reagan top line windfall in 1981, there was ferocious debate among the experts as to whether a new, more expensive generation of the M1 tank should be developed.

  Yet issues of cost and efficacy were no longer even debatable after the 7 percent growth top line became operative on January 30, 1981. The empty space in DOD’s new $1.46 trillion plan was so vast that both programs were sucked into its budget like air rushing into a vacuum. Over the next decade 7,000 Bradley’s and 6,000 M1 Abrams tanks were procured—useless weapons against a Soviet nuclear strike, but ideal for missions of invasion and occupation.

  Moreover, once the Bradley and Abrams production lines were open, the odds of closing them down were between slim and none. Armored battlefield vehicles consist of an intensive mix of iron, precision machining, and complex electronic components and circuitry—which is to say, they are a “jobs program” par excellence.

  The case in point can be seen in Lima, Ohio, where the M1 tank line refuses to shut down—40 years after the 7 percent top line brought it unnecessarily to life. Since then all of the nation’s industrial enemies have either expired, as in the case of the Soviets, or retired to civilian life, as in the case of China.

  What passes for a state-based enemy is a nation of 78 million deeply unhappy citizens ruled by twelfth-century mullahs, whose major act of aggression over the past thirty years was to repel an attack by its Iraqi neighbor with twelve-year-old soldiers carrying stick rifles. Still, the military-industrial complex manages to keep retooling, upgrading, and modernizing its fleet of 9,000 Abrams tanks as if the Berlin crisis of 1961 never ended.

  When all is said and done, the accidental and unnecessary 7 percent top line of January 1981 gave birth to a vast imperial expeditionary force and conventional war-fighting machine. Yet after the Velvet Revolution of December 1988, it inhabited a world that had no need for imperial expeditions or industrial-strength conventional wars.

  THE PERSIAN GULF: PROVING GROUND FOR THE REAGAN ARMADA

  The remains of the Soviet empire soon settled into a handful of kleptocracies, Europe adverted to welfare-state senescence, and Red China morphed into the sneakers and Apple factory of the world. In short, there remained no place for a great expeditionary force to operate, save for the littoral states of the Middle East.

  The latter, unhappily, provided the ideal venue. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the six-hundred-ship navy began to steadily loose girth, but its capacity to rain destruction on the lands ringing the Persian Gulf from a standoff platform in the deep water could not be gainsaid.

  Likewise, the helicopter fleets, the close air support and attack aircraft wings, the fighter-bomber forces, and the raft of tactical missiles and smart munitions all proved suited for occupying the Middle Eastern lands of the unwilling and mostly unarmed. Nor could the vast open deserts and the crumbling mud and stone walls of its towns and villages have provided a more conducive proving ground for Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles.

  The only thing missing was any plausible and justifiable reason of state for the deployment of this accidental expeditionary force to the desolate hills and mountains of Afghanistan, the bloody plains of the Tigris-Euphrates, or even the empty, scorpion-ridden dunes of Kuwait. None of this made oil any cheaper, even if that were a valid reason of state, which it is not.

  By the Pentagon’s own reckoning there were never more than a few hundred Al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan. There should have been no surprise, therefore, when the holy warrior himself was found to have been holed up for six years in a farmhouse with three wives, six children, and a dozen goats. Above all else, Bin Laden’s final demise proved that it takes a few bundles of greenbacks, not an expeditionary army, to hunt down such terrorists as actually exist.

  There can be little doubt, therefore, that George W. Bush, and his father before him, carried out their imperial adventures in the lands ringing the Persian Gulf because they could. An accident of history had bestowed upon them a massive conventional war-fighting machine, so they went to war without having to prove the case or raise an army by taxing the people and getting a declaration of Congress.

  That much is plainly evident from the outcomes. What valid domestic security reason, for instance, can distinguish be
tween the corrupt, violent Afghan warlords still on our payroll ten years later and the equally venal tribal chieftains for whom the bloody terror of the Taliban is a way of life.

  Likewise, Iraq now consists of three principalities of corruption and thuggery rather than just one. Yet neither the old régime nor the new régimes did have or will have any bearing on the well-being of the American public.

  The same is true of Kuwait next door. From the viewpoint of the true national interest the only difference between the Emir Al-Sabah IV and Saddam Hussein is that the latter is dead, having been on the wrong side of an ancient border dispute that was none of our business in the first place.

  George W. Bush was appropriately castigated for landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier and declaring victory after great swaths of the ancient city of Baghdad had been reduced to rubble in only a few weeks. But that was not proof of victory at all, just evidence that wanton destruction could be rained on any city located within a thousand miles of the very aircraft carrier on which the forty-third president stood.

  THE WARFARE STATE’S 1981 TIPPING POINT: ALMOST GONE, UNNECESSARILY REVIVED

  At the dawn of the 1980s, the Soviet empire was dying under the weight of its statist economic yoke; its militarized “state-within-the-state” was sucking the larger society dry. What the United States needed to do at that juncture was to wait it out—safe behind an ample strategic retaliatory force of Minutemen missiles and Trident submarines. That this more benign course—upon which history had already firmly embarked—was denied at the eleventh hour can be blamed on the neocons primarily.

  Yet they prevailed only because they had a powerful assist from the willful obstinacy of two men—Caspar Weinberger and Ronald Reagan. Of the two, Weinberger is by far the more culpable.

  During his twenty years holding high positions in Washington, Weinberger gained a reputation as a conservative ideologue, but it wasn’t warranted. Weinberger was actually an ersatz statist—a relentless solicitor for whatever branch of the state he was currently heading. His calling card read: “have brief, won’t bend.”

  During his time at the Federal Trade Commission he was an enthusiastic regulator. At Nixon’s White House budget office, he became “Cap the Knife.” During his stint as Secretary of HEW in 1973–1975, its budget grew by 45 percent—the greatest two-year surge in social spending recorded at any time before or since.

  Within ten days of assuming his brief at the Defense Department, the “top line” blanks were filled in and thereafter Weinberger’s lawyerly summation never changed: 7 percent defense growth was held to be a first principle, meaning no debate was needed and no deviation was even thinkable.

  And so the Secretary of Defense clung to every single dime of the $1.46 trillion—obstinately, dogmatically, indefatigably. A crucial episode in March 1983 illuminates how Weinberger’s dogged adherence to the 7 percent top line unnaturally extended the Pentagon’s bonanza.

  At that point the fiscal equation had hemorrhaged, causing the deficit for the year underway—fiscal 1983—to reach nearly $210 billion or more than 6 percent of GDP. There had never been a deficit remotely that large since the Second World War, so the alarm bells were ringing loudly.

  That was especially the case among the Republican mainstream leadership on Capitol Hill, which hadn’t been all that enthusiastic about the Reagan Revolution from the beginning. Worse, the President’s recently submitted budget for fiscal 1984 was a calamity—calling for $200 billion annual deficits as far as the eye could see, or what amounted to $1 trillion of planned borrowing over the five-year fiscal horizon.

  The generation of Republican Congressional leaders then in power still respected the old-time religion of fiscal discipline. They had therefore been horrified by where the President’s budget was taking them.

  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.