Welcome to the defense debate of the 1990s. The struggle between hawks and doves is history. An entirely different battle lies ahead, pitting proponents of radically new weaponry against defenders of current technology-and the vast industrial complex erected since World War II. Last week Washington was in an uproar over a presidential commission’s recommendation to close 25 military bases and 10 laboratories by 1997 and eliminate 37,000 civilian jobs. That’s just a taste of what’s ahead for private industry-and workers. “There is a problem very similar to the closing of bases,” says David B. H. Denoon, a New York University professor and former Pentagon official. “You may only need one operational shipyard, and you may have to choose between Pascagoula and Newport News.”
The Pentagon is betting that high technology will let it do more with less. “The electronics revolution is upon us,” remarks Deputy Defense Secretary Donald Atwood. A new generation of weapons is on the way that makes the heralded hardware of the Persian Gulf War-laser-guided bombs, cruise missiles, ultrasensitive infrared sights-look like yesterday’s toys. The cost will be steep. To swing it, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney proposes a daring strategy: abandon much of today’s defense industry and leap to the weapons of tomorrow. “We’ve got to make the decision, shut down production and move on and invest in the next-generation equipment if our forces are going to have what they need in the future,” Cheney said last month.
The economics are simple enough. With the cold war over and budget pressure intense, the Department of Defense faces a long-term financial squeeze. Spending is slated to drop 13 percent after inflation by 1996, on top of a 22 percent decline over the past six years. Procurement is on an even steeper slide: funding was halved from 1985 to 1991 and is projected to drop $12 billion in the next three years.
Cheney’s call to a new generation of arms is causing fissures in Washington. As Martin Libicki of the National Defense University explains, “DOD is trying to push through two revolutions simultaneously. We’re demobilizing after the cold war, and we’re trying to take a jump-step in technology. A lot of people are coming to believe that’s too ambitious or, at a minimum, that if the process isn’t handled with extreme care we risk doing lasting damage to important national-defense assets.”
Demanding a “peace dividend” is easy in principle. But legislators look at the matter quite differently when they consider that two in five of the nation’s 1.5 million defense-manufacturing workers will lose their jobs over the next decade-and that few blue-collar workers can match their defense-industry wages in the commercial sector. Builders of abandoned weapons systems are angry, too: the Reagan administration encouraged Northrop Corp. to erect a floor big enough to make 60 B-2 bombers a year, but the Air Force may end up ordering only 15 planes. Much of Cheney’s own military establishment is in revolt for an entirely different reason: if production is shut down now, it may not be easy to bring back later. “There is a significant danger that the industrial base that supports the Army will erode to the point that when it comes time to build the next generation of systems … in the late part of this decade, the industry won’t be there to support us,” Assistant Secretary of the Army Stephen Conver warns bluntly.
Worries about the defense industrial base, of course, are as old as the military itself. Dozens of industries whose high costs make them uncompetitive in international commerce, from boot manufacturers to the merchant marine, have long appealed to “national security” as an argument for subsidies, import protection or other types of aid financed directly by taxpayers or indirectly by consumers. And no one doubts that the 21st-century armed forces will still need fighter planes, armored vehicles, missiles and other items the civilian economy cannot possibly supply. But today’s forces are overstocked with weapons and support systems ordered years ago. With the Army shrinking from 28 to 18 divisions and the Air Force from 36 to 26 fighter wings, the Defense Department faces a conundrum: it doesn’t need to buy much now, but if it doesn’t keep suppliers alive, it may be unable to buy what it needs in the future.
Faced with these difficult issues, the White House has waffled. The administration’s only official statement, issued last February by the Council of Economic Advisers, observed that defense cuts will let market forces redirect resources to other uses-and, in the next paragraph, cautioned about the need to remain able to supply the military in future conflicts. “I don’t think there are many people in the administration who worry much about it,” says Norman Augustine, head of Martin Marietta Corp., the defense contractor. “It’s a little bit of a religious issue there that you don’t intervene in industrial matters and things will take care of themselves.”
Without a coherent policy for dealing with the defense industry, politics takes over-and politicians want to keep workers (read: voters) on the job. In the abstract, many lawmakers might agree with Pentagon consultant Jacques Gansler, who says, “In the aircraft industry, we have far too many plants today. Some should be closed rather than trying to maintain them all.” But successive administrations have spent close to a decade trying to shrink the Bethpage, N.Y., plant where Grumman Corp. makes A-6 strike aircraft and F-14 fighters. To no avail: New York’s congressional delegation has kept the production line turning out airplanes the military doesn’t want.
The bleak budget picture makes the issue even more critical. Both the Air Force and the Navy have their eyes on new tactical fighters. But Robert Hale, director of national-security programs in the Congressional Budget Office, contends the money to buy the planes won’t be there without sharp cuts in current purchases: “This time the wolf is really at the door, and I don’t think we have quite grasped the implications of that yet.”
Aside from pork-barrel politics, the conventional wisdom offers three reasons for keeping defense plants going. First, they represent a vast investment in a skilled work force that will be hard to rebuild. Second, as House Armed Services Committee chairman Les Aspin points out, “If we gamble everything on high-tech systems we don’t have yet and then the technology hits snags, we could be in trouble.” The third concern is “surge capacity,” the ability to boost output quickly if conflict threatens. In many key supplier industries, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. David Jeremiah, testified last month, capacity “has already declined to the point where domestic capability to support rapid reconstitution may no longer exist.”
Those rationales, however, don’t all hold up under scrutiny. Those old production skills may not be needed again: the global spread of sophisticated anti-ship mines probably signals the end of amphibious landing vessels, whether or not the electronics revolution delivers radically new weapons. And in key defense manufacturing sectors, surge capacity is an illusion. If the Army were to ask General Dynamics Corp. to step up production tomorrow, it would be 14 months before new tanks could roll out the door (below).
Simply buying more unneeded hardware, then, won’t ensure the survival of a useful defense industrial base. Nor is it enough to advise contractors to go find some civilian business to keep defense production lines warm. Sopakco, a Mullins, S.C., food packager, would love to sell Meals Ready to Eat to civilian customers. “There’s no commercial market,” laments contracting director William McCreary. “Believe me, we’ve looked.” At Norden Systems, which got its start making bombsights in the 1920s, “if anybody has an idea for applying a military product or technology for a civilian product, we review it,” says business planning manager Roger Geronimo. “So far, we haven’t found any.” If something were to turn up, Geronimo adds, Norden’s parent, United Technologies Corp., probably wouldn’t make the product in Norden’s high-cost Connecticut or New York defense factories anyhow.
The Pentagon could take some steps to protect vital industries. It could content itself with readily available equipment whenever possible, a strategy the Army tried successfully with laptop computers during the Persian Gulf War. “We accepted they might not stand up as well under all battlefield conditions,” recalls Brig. Gen. Bill McClain, head of Army public affairs. “But when one broke down or filled with sand, hey, we just took another off the shelf.” It was still cheaper than developing our own." Unfortunately, laptops are an exception that highlights the rule: efforts to make it easier for the world’s biggest customer to buy commercial are moving at a snail’s pace (next page).
Companies say they’d also do better if Uncle Sam changed arcane accounting rules. The Defense Department and Congress force contractors to keep separate sets of books for military and commercial business to make sure the government doesn’t overpay. That, however, constantly reminds companies that their defense work is less profitable than their commercial business-and encourages them to steer their investment dollars elsewhere. Companies also claim the military rules cook the books: after Intel Corp. spent 18 months developing an accounting system to meet Defense Department standards, “We found out we could capture only 40 percent of our costs through the government accounting system, " says Ron Williams, general manager of Intel’s military division. The experience cost the semiconductor maker $2 million-which it couldn’t bill to DOD.
Promoting flexible manufacturing would also strengthen defense manufacturing. This isn’t a novel idea: commercial industry has long since moved away from single-purpose machine tools and toward computerized systems that can turn out dozens of different products on a single assembly line. That means fewer factories: if demand is strong for large widgets and slack for small ones, any given plant can shift its output quickly. Defense lines, by contrast, typically manufacture one product at a time; multipurpose assembly lines are rare. The Pentagon’s Manufacturing Technology Program, which is supposed to encourage them, is slated for a 70 percent budget cut in 1992.
If the new high-tech weapons perform as advertised, much of the existing defense plant can be shuttered with no risk to national security. Even if they don’t, there is plenty of room to close factories and shipyards whose main justification is that they were essential in the 1950s. There’s no need to be entirely self-reliant, either: the Pentagon already gets many components from suppliers in allied countries, and the proportion can safely grow. At the same time, however, there are defense industries the country needs no matter what. By refusing to confront the issue squarely, the Bush administration runs the very real risk that political clout, not military need, will determine which companies live or die. That, too, is an industrial policy-but one the nation can ill afford.
The F-22 “Lightning 2,” still years from active service, could make aerial dogfights a thing of the past.
Composite materials and rounded design help evade radar, and engines reach supersonic speeds without afterburners, to avoid detection.
The F-22’s computers carry five times the data of the F-15 it will replace, giving it far greater combat ability.
The Lightning 2 should be easy to maintain-important for an Air Force that has to cut back on mechanics and other staff.
The armor is ceramic, not steel-and a high-voltage field deflects the molten-metal warheads of antitank missiles. The gun, using magnetic induction or superheated gas, propels shells twice as fast as a cannon. There might not even be a turret. It is most definitely not your father’s tank.
This high-speed, high-tech fighting machine of the future lies at the heart of the debate over what to do with the nation’s defense industry. For tanks, that industry is centered in the gritty northwest Ohio town of Lima. Amid a jumble of refineries and train tracks, General Dynamics Corp. operates a vast Army-owned factory to make the M-1A1 Abrams, America’s top tank. Lima can turn out 720 M-1A1s a year at $1.9 million a pop. Business isn’t good: with 8,000 of the 63-ton beasts in inventory, the Defense Department isn’t eager to buy more. A sister plant in Warren, Mich., closes its tank line in September, leaving the 369-acre Lima facility as the nation’s sole assembly plant.
Leaping to a new generation of tanks might mean shutting down Lima, too. With 1,600 foreign orders on the books and an Army request for 60 new-model M-1A2s before Congress, the plant can keep going into 1995. General Dynamics pins its long-term hopes on a proposal to put new guns and electronic guts into 3,200 older M-1s. That would occupy Lima’s 2,300 workers until the turn of the century. But it costs money that could be spent on even newer technology.
Lima’s massive metalworking equipment-robot welders big enough to turn a whole tank body upside down, plasma cutters that slice 1 1/4 -inch-thick armored plates like butter-won’t be of much use in assembling a tank of ceramic and composite parts. The debate over the future of the tank thus becomes a debate over the Lima plant. “You have to question whether the facilities we’re currently operating will have much applicability to that future tank,” says a key congressional staffer. If, on the other hand, tomorrow’s tank ends up looking pretty much like today’s, Lima will be needed to weld it together. Gordon England, head of research and engineering for the tank maker, argues that it is vital to keep upgrading existing tanks. “If we do nothing, just let the base decay, then all 8,000 tanks will basically become obsolete,” he warns.
That prospect doesn’t keep Pentagon strategists awake at night. Although the M-1A1s performed well in the gulf war, air power determined the outcome. In the next war, the tank’s role is likely to be even smaller. “The tank’s not going to disappear,” says a top Pentagon weapons expert. “But I think its role on the battlefield will diminish.” The reason: tanks are too big to hide and too easy to kill. The infrared sights on U.S. aircraft and helicopters can detect targets that are a scant one half of 1 degree Celsius warmer than their surroundings. Once that technology spreads, any tank that turns its engine on will reveal its infrared signature to the enemy. And the gulf war proved that even tanks with sophisticated armor, once discovered, are easy prey in air attacks. British tank expert Richard Ogorkiewicz, a consultant to the U.S. Army, argues that tanks will remain viable, though they will have to change radically. “We’re looking to new combinations of materials-metals, ceramics, composites-and to new geometries, new shapes,” he says. The factories that produce those tanks will be radically different, too. For welders earning $15.84 an hour in Lima, that’s not reassuring.
The M-1A1 is the world’s most lethal battle tank. It can hit targets more than two miles away while charging at 40 miles an hour. By the year 2000 advances in antitank weapons could give even the M-1A1 problems.
Uranium mesh resists tank shells, but the top is vulnerable.
120-mm cannon outdueled Iraqis, but upcoming weapons will outrange it.
Heat is a beacon for infrared sensors and a target for enemy missiles.
Large engine and four-man crew require a vehicle that is too heavy.
No turret; the gun rotates directly atop a body of light but virtually impenetrable ceramic armor.
Electrothermal or electromagnetic gun doubles muzzle velocity and range.
New engine: designers are working on prototypes half the size of today’s.
Crew of three, or even two. An automatic ammo loader replaces one man and a computer does the gunner’s job.
