Heavy Losses: The Decline of American Defense
By James Coates and Michael Kilian
Viking, 430 page, $2.95
I sometimes think that the Pentagon`s real function is not to fight wars but to serve as a grim symbol of what America could become if the Soviet Union ever took over. The defense establishment is the closest thing the United States has to an Iron Curtain economy: a vast, central bureaucracy
unrestrained by the markeplace, by political leaders or by common sense.
The result is the depressingly long list of absurdities catalogued in this book. Wade through all the acronyms and you`ll understand why America`s warriors can`t afford to spend time worrying about defending the country. They`re too busy firing memos at one another.
Suppose, for instance, that a crisis is looming and the President asks for advice from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The book explains exactly how the chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines skirmish for turf. First each of the joint chiefs assigns his own aide--called an ``OpDep``--to write a paper. Each OpDep, assisted by a staff of 100, prepares a report on onionskin paper. The joint chiefs convene with their respective onionskins--called
``flimsies``--and try resolve their differences. Then the four OpDeps each prepare a new report on tan paper. The four ``tans`` are then brought to another meeting, which yields a single compromise draft on green paper. When the ``green`` is approved--with further discussion and compromises, of course --the final draft is typed on purple paper and sent to the President. And then it is usually ignored.
Somehow, I don`t think this was how Napoleon operated.
Coates and Kilian, both veteran Washington reporters for The Chicago Tribune, provide a comprehensive, insider`s view of the Pentagon--with all the advantages and disadvantages thereof. The book is useful because it takes a sympathetic view of the honorable, well-intentioned officials caught up in a ridiculous system, and because it gives a broad view of how the whole defense establishment has operated since World War II. It`s a nice primer for anyone trying to undersand the arcana of the Pentagon bureaucracy.
Why does a $15 Sears hammer cost the Navy $409? Because it`s not in anyone`s interest to save money. The more money and time and people needed for a project, the better it is for the project leader`s career, because then there`s an impressively large organization chart with him at the top.
But someone who gets a job done quickly may find himself out of a job when the project is over. If an officer cuts costs by reducing the number of people on the project, he may not be promoted to a higher rank simply because there aren`t enough people for him to command. And if he has been too cost-conscious, then the defense contractor won`t reward him with a comfortable job when he retires.
The problem with a comprehensive look at a bureaucracy is that bureaucracies are not always fascinating. The acronyms start to blur halfway through the book, and one wishes the authors had been a little more selective. I was fascinated to learn how many visits to the Soviet Union have been made by the National Security`s ranking staff ``expert`` on Russia (zero), but I could have done without the knowledge of how many escalators there are in the Pentagon (19). And was it really necessary to spend a paragraph dragging in Clark Clifford and his record just so that he could deliver the following quote: ``The major task of the president of the United States is to find a way to get along with the Soviet Union``? I would have taken Coates` and Kilian`s word for it.
But there are enough juicy tidbits scattered throughout the book to keep any taxpayer steadily outraged. The book explains why interservice rivalry has delayed a vital program--the Navstar system of satellities that enables soldiers, pilots and sailors to know their position within about 30 feet. Everyone agress that the system is essential for the nation`s defense, but each service has been trying to get the other services to foot the bill.
This interservice rivalry also produces needless duplication of efforts. In the 1950s the different services each had separate rocket programs and refused to cooperate with one another--which was one of the main reasons that the Soviets beat America to the punch with Sputnik. Today the services are wasting more time and money setting up their own space commands.
Many of the ideas in the book have already been made by other critics of the Pentagon, but Coates and Kilian also come up with some fresh points. I was intrigued by their argument that the antiwar movement actually prolonged the Vietnam War because the protesters` radicalism alienated Middle America so much. Coates and Kilian believe that most Americans didn`t particularly support the Vietnam War--but when forced to choose between Jane Fonda and Richard Nixon, they took Nixon.
The book`s proposed reforms are generally useful and make a refreshingly pragmatic alternative to some of the pie-in-the-sky reforms floating around elsewhere. In addition to suggesting obvious economies--eliminating the B-1 bomber, for instance--the book outlines nitty-gritty bureaucratic
reorganizations that might actually force military officers to put the national interest ahead of their bureaucratic ambitions. The bureaucracy, of course, is sure to resist.