Arming the Future: Preface

1999

Preface

A funny thing happened to me one day. After years of being an interested but relatively passive participant in the activities at the Council on Foreign Relations, I was asked to chair a study group on defense demobilization and its implications for the U.S. economy and world arms trade. I responded to the invitation by proclaiming my relative ignorance on the subject and was advised by Les Gelb that that was an immense virtue, since I was likely to pay attention to the discourse. I signed on.

Let me state what the study group was not about. There was no breast-beating about why we hadn’t demobilized it sooner or why we don’t do it faster. There was no attempt to suggest that we had committed some moral lapse by not transferring the money saved in the defense budget to compelling domestic needs. There was no effort to second-guess the Pentagon as to what the state of military preparedness should be in the years ahead.

There was instead a fascinating dialogue among a group of highly informed and intelligent people stretched out over two years. It was led by an extraordinarily able scholar, Ann Markusen, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject matter and an open mind regarding solutions to tough questions about conflicting public imperatives in this field.

The guts of this monthly dialogue was a series of papers prepared by scholars on various of these public policy conundrums. Although the study group was not charged with reaching a consensus on future policy, it became clear that the issues tackled in these discussions were of critical importance to the safety of the world and the economy of the United States. Because these matters are rarely the subject of reporting in the daily press and don’t have the visual characteristics (such as shuttered military bases) that might make for good television, it has to be difficult for an otherwise informed citizenry to understand the major issues that we dealt with in our study group.

Hundreds of thousands of jobs were eliminated as a result of cutbacks in defense expenditure. What were the effects on unemployment? What kind of effort was made to retrain or provide alternative employment opportunities for those involved?

How does the United States maintain its superiority in military technology as research and development expenditures are reduced and the number of contractors with the capacity to develop and build the necessary hardware has shrunk? What are the implications for the proliferation of dangerous weapons around the world given that rapidly declining military spending puts enormous pressure on manufacturers and their employees in this country to sell more sophisticated weaponry abroad?

This is not an exclusive list but merely an indication of the gravity of the issues with which the task force contended. This book makes these data and analyses available to the general reader. This is done with a seriousness of purpose and a sincere hope that we will be prepared for all the consequences of our demobilization process, not just the ones we have intended.

Richard Ravitch
New York
September 1998