WEBVTT NOTE Crisis and Liberty: Lecture 8 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:19.000 Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to session number eight. This session I'm going to be discussing the post-World War II operation of the national security state. 2 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:30.000 This has been a major avenue for the growth of government in American history, sometimes faster, sometimes slower. 3 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:47.000 Right now, here in 2003, we've entered into one of the spurts and it looks as if it's going to continue at least for another year or two, perhaps more, we shall see. 4 00:00:47.000 --> 00:01:00.000 During World War II, the United States built up a tremendous military industrial complex. 5 00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:14.000 It wasn't known as that at the time, but after that turn of phrase came into general use in 1961 when President Eisenhower used it in his final speech, 6 00:01:14.000 --> 00:01:31.000 Many people were able to look back and see that that's exactly what it was and indeed it was by many measures the biggest military industrial complex that ever existed in American history. 7 00:01:31.000 --> 00:01:47.000 We saw earlier today that some 40% of measured gross domestic product was being devoted to military purposes for some three years running during World War II. 8 00:01:47.000 --> 00:01:55.000 And the post-war military economy never consumed that many resources, 9 00:01:55.000 --> 00:02:05.000 World War II was such a big deal that, even in retrospect, it's still bigger than anything since then, without even comparing it to the economy or anything else. 10 00:02:05.000 --> 00:02:14.000 It was just a gigantic undertaking involving, I don't know, I don't know how to put it, 11 00:02:14.000 --> 00:02:18.000 without even comparing it to the economy or anything else. 12 00:02:18.000 --> 00:02:30.000 It was just a gigantic undertaking involving scores of millions of people in one capacity or another. 13 00:02:30.000 --> 00:02:39.000 Now when the war ended, the United States found itself in a position it had never before occupied in the world. 14 00:02:39.000 --> 00:03:04.000 The U.S. economy had been the biggest in the world for a long time. It became the biggest in the 19th century in terms of the value of its output, but even though the United States was a great industrial power, if you want to call it that, 15 00:03:04.000 --> 00:03:19.000 The United States did not channel that economic potential into military purposes except during World War I and then only very briefly. 16 00:03:19.000 --> 00:03:27.000 After World War I, the military forces that had been built up for the war were largely dismantled. 17 00:03:27.000 --> 00:03:35.000 The Army, which had four million people in 1918, was reduced back to a couple hundred thousand. 18 00:03:35.000 --> 00:03:50.000 And during the interwar period, the military typically received less than one percent of gross domestic product for its support. 19 00:03:50.000 --> 00:04:10.000 So it was not non-existent, but it was a very trifling military organization, even in absolute terms and certainly compared to the military forces of the major European countries or Japan. 20 00:04:10.000 --> 00:04:33.000 So, during World War II, when the United States became such a gigantic military power in every way, our Navy was built up enormously, it roamed the Earth's oceans, it had outpaced the British Navy by far during that time. 21 00:04:33.000 --> 00:04:45.000 The United States Air Force had been developed with the long-range bombing capacities and bases scattered around the world. 22 00:04:45.000 --> 00:04:55.000 The technology had been developed up to and including atom bombs, which only the United States possessed at that time. 23 00:04:55.000 --> 00:05:06.000 So in 1945, the United States was, in many respects, the world's military superpower. 24 00:05:06.000 --> 00:05:11.000 And that was a completely new situation for this country. 25 00:05:11.000 --> 00:05:21.000 And not one that everybody welcomed, but in a sense one that many people viewed as a kind of fate or destiny 26 00:05:21.000 --> 00:05:44.000 The United States should not simply dismantle its armed forces as it always had in the past after engagement in major war was because of the situation in Europe and Asia. 27 00:05:44.000 --> 00:06:13.000 As I said earlier, in many respects the Soviet Union was the true victor of World War II and at the end of the war it found itself in the possession of a big part of Europe stretching way out into what was then Czechoslovakia and penetrating deeply into Western Europe. 28 00:06:13.000 --> 00:06:21.160 in occupying part of Germany and Poland and all of those Eastern European countries that 29 00:06:21.160 --> 00:06:31.120 became its satellites and even though the United States and the Soviet Union had been 30 00:06:31.120 --> 00:06:38.600 allied in fighting Germany, I think it would be wrong to say that Americans in general 31 00:06:38.600 --> 00:06:47.600 The Russians never fully embraced the Russians in the same way that they embraced, say, the British allies. 32 00:06:47.600 --> 00:06:54.600 There was always lingering distrust. Many people were afraid of communism. 33 00:06:54.600 --> 00:07:03.600 And no matter how smiley a face the State Department and the President might paint on Stalin, 34 00:07:03.600 --> 00:07:18.600 It just didn't work for a lot of people, and they continued to view him as the worst kind of dictator, even though many of them still at that time did not understand what a horrible monster he was. 35 00:07:18.600 --> 00:07:31.600 But soon after World War II, many more people became aware of that, and that only heightened the tension between America and the Soviet Union. 36 00:07:31.600 --> 00:07:46.600 So the end of World War II merged almost seamlessly into this conflict with the Soviets. 37 00:07:46.600 --> 00:07:54.600 And within a few years, State Department officials such as George Kennan were propounding the Doctrine of Containment 38 00:07:54.600 --> 00:08:14.600 As a way of dealing with the Russians and what was taken to be their aggressiveness in the world, people feared that they had such a powerful military apparatus that they might simply overrun other parts of the world as they had overrun central and eastern Europe. 39 00:08:14.600 --> 00:08:24.600 And there was no doubt that they did have an enormously powerful military machine in 1945. 40 00:08:24.600 --> 00:08:36.600 We can say everything we want about the bungling Russians, but the truth is, although they got some aid from the United States in lend-lease assistance, 41 00:08:36.600 --> 00:08:46.600 for the most part, it was their own resources and ingenuity and blood that went into defeating the Wehrmacht. 42 00:08:46.600 --> 00:08:55.600 World War II, although most Americans don't appreciate it, was fought almost entirely on the Russian front, not on the Western front. 43 00:08:55.600 --> 00:08:59.600 I mean, there was hardly any fighting there at all until the last year of the war. 44 00:08:59.600 --> 00:09:05.300 and the fighting in the Mediterranean was a trifling affair by comparison with 45 00:09:05.300 --> 00:09:10.960 what was going on in Russia. So the Russians paid the price and they 46 00:09:10.960 --> 00:09:20.480 ultimately triumphed. They defeated the Germans. So I am not one of those who's 47 00:09:20.480 --> 00:09:26.000 inclined to just dismiss them and say it was a bogeyman. The idea that the world 48 00:09:26.000 --> 00:09:36.000 The idea that the world had anything to fear from the Soviets was just a creation of people who, for their own purposes, sought to have a Cold War. 49 00:09:36.000 --> 00:09:43.000 Now, of course, the fact that the Russians had a powerful military machine and an evil government, 50 00:09:43.000 --> 00:09:56.000 Those facts in themselves do not necessarily imply that they had aggressive designs or really hoped to overrun France or go any further than they had already gone. 51 00:09:56.000 --> 00:10:10.000 Those issues are more arguable ones, but I just want to make clear that I'm not among those who blame the Cold War entirely on Americans. 52 00:10:10.000 --> 00:10:19.000 I think there was another side involved, and there were some extremely evil people on that side. 53 00:10:19.000 --> 00:10:26.000 The more one reads about the history of the Soviet Union, the more disgusted one becomes. 54 00:10:26.000 --> 00:10:33.000 It was exactly what Reagan called it, an evil empire, in every sense of the word. 55 00:10:33.000 --> 00:11:00.000 But whatever might have been the reality, the view of decision makers in the U.S. government, in the Truman administration, quickly became one that favored stout resistance to Soviet expansion, and Truman himself took readily to that view. 56 00:11:00.000 --> 00:11:12.400 Now, the general public did not take quite so readily to it, particularly to the idea 57 00:11:12.400 --> 00:11:20.360 that huge amounts of money should be spent on the American military apparatus in order 58 00:11:20.360 --> 00:11:30.360 to provide the reality of resistance and the punch for an effective containment policy. 59 00:11:30.360 --> 00:11:38.280 After all, Americans had just finished paying enormous amounts to fight World War II, and 60 00:11:38.280 --> 00:11:44.880 they weren't exactly in the mood to keep coughing up those kinds of resources indefinitely as 61 00:11:44.880 --> 00:11:55.200 as of 1946 and 1947. Furthermore, these threats were far away. They were not so easily represented 62 00:11:55.200 --> 00:12:04.760 as immediate threats as Hitler had been or the Japanese after they let loose their bombs 63 00:12:04.760 --> 00:12:12.240 on Hawaii. So it was a harder sell for the government to persuade the general public 64 00:12:12.240 --> 00:12:17.120 that we needed to launch back into a big military program 65 00:12:17.120 --> 00:12:22.120 even though the leaders of the Truman administration decided fairly early that 66 00:12:22.120 --> 00:12:26.920 that's what they would like to do. 67 00:12:26.920 --> 00:12:31.680 Nonetheless, there was continuing resistance particularly by the public's 68 00:12:31.680 --> 00:12:33.920 representatives in Congress. 69 00:12:33.920 --> 00:12:38.520 When the administration proposed to increase the military budget there was 70 00:12:38.520 --> 00:12:41.880 tremendous opposition in Congress. 71 00:12:41.880 --> 00:13:03.880 And on one occasion, when the president was discussing this situation, with Senator Vandenberg, who by that time had transformed himself, he was no longer an isolationist as a result of the experience of World War II and the post-war situation and had become something of an early Cold Warrior in his own right. 72 00:13:03.880 --> 00:13:12.880 Vandenberg advised Truman that what was necessary was, in his words, to scare hell out of the American public. 73 00:13:12.880 --> 00:13:16.880 And I think that was good political advice. 74 00:13:16.880 --> 00:13:24.880 Indeed, that sort of scare works wonders, at least for a while, in the American political process. 75 00:13:24.880 --> 00:13:41.880 So, even in the late 40s, the government of the United States was working to represent the Soviet threat as really more menacing than in retrospect it appears to have been. 76 00:13:41.880 --> 00:13:47.880 They were releasing information about the number of Soviet divisions, for example, 77 00:13:47.880 --> 00:14:00.880 that counted divisions of the Red Army that were not fully equipped or manned or were not in active status and so forth. 78 00:14:00.880 --> 00:14:08.880 So it made it seem that the legions of potential Red Army personnel were endless. 79 00:14:08.880 --> 00:14:18.880 and the only way to keep them from overrunning Western Europe was by an enormous defensive effort. 80 00:14:21.880 --> 00:14:29.880 There's an essay I want to recommend to you that deals with this time and place by Ralph Reiko. 81 00:14:29.880 --> 00:14:36.880 It appears in the book, Reassessing the Presidency, which is edited by John Denson 82 00:14:36.880 --> 00:14:40.380 Published by the Mises Institute, and if you haven't read 83 00:14:40.380 --> 00:14:44.880 Rayco's essay on the Truman Administration, I highly recommend it. 84 00:14:44.880 --> 00:14:50.380 It's excellent, it's like everything Ralph writes. 85 00:14:50.380 --> 00:14:57.380 It's beautifully written, it's well documented, and it pulls together in a single essay 86 00:14:57.380 --> 00:15:04.380 more pertinent information and argument with regard to the Truman Administration 87 00:15:04.380 --> 00:15:10.780 and I've ever seen in one small space before so one can learn a lot from that single essay by 88 00:15:10.780 --> 00:15:20.220 Reiko and I hope you will read it if you haven't done so already. As part of the reorganization 89 00:15:21.020 --> 00:15:27.740 of the American defense apparatus after World War II in order to, in one sense, 90 00:15:28.780 --> 00:15:34.140 put into effect what had been learned during the war and in another sense to get ready for 91 00:15:34.140 --> 00:15:40.700 Future and Different Conditions. The military was reorganized. Congress passed a huge piece 92 00:15:40.700 --> 00:15:50.940 of legislation in 1947, the National Security Act, which created the Department of Defense. 93 00:15:51.660 --> 00:15:59.900 Before we hadn't had any single government agency, we had a separate war department and a Navy 94 00:15:59.900 --> 00:16:09.940 Department, now not only the Army and Navy, but another military department which was 95 00:16:09.940 --> 00:16:15.940 created at the same time, the Air Force, was brought underneath the Department of Defense 96 00:16:15.940 --> 00:16:22.980 and the Secretary of Defense became, from that time forward, if not the most important 97 00:16:22.980 --> 00:16:29.460 member of the cabinet, certainly one of the two or three most important in every administration. 98 00:16:29.460 --> 00:16:58.460 Besides the Department of Defense, for the civilian part of the war machine, the Act created the National Security Council, composed of high-ranking government officials, and in possession of its own permanent staff, so that these people could concentrate on and inform themselves with regard to issues bearing on national security, 99 00:16:58.460 --> 00:17:06.460 and then they would be the principal advisors to the president with regard to national security matters. 100 00:17:06.460 --> 00:17:15.460 So this became a very important part of the executive office of the president and remains so today. 101 00:17:15.460 --> 00:17:23.460 The Central Intelligence Agency was created at that time to replace the old OSS, 102 00:17:23.460 --> 00:17:52.460 The Office of Strategic Services that had provided intelligence organization during World War II and the Director of Central Intelligence was made the person responsible for bringing together all the intelligence that might be acquired not only by the CIA itself, but by any other government intelligence department, including those of the military service. 103 00:17:53.460 --> 00:18:07.980 Services. So we had from 1947 on this arrangement of national security affairs in the government 104 00:18:07.980 --> 00:18:19.700 that has operated ever since then. So this whole setup is now 56 years old and we've 105 00:18:19.700 --> 00:18:39.700 The events of the late 1940s helped to solidify what we can now see as the onset of the Cold War. 106 00:18:39.700 --> 00:18:45.700 Historians find it pleasant to argue endlessly about exactly when the Cold War began. 107 00:18:45.700 --> 00:18:51.700 It can't be dated in the same way as the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. 108 00:18:51.700 --> 00:18:53.700 That's pretty definite timing. 109 00:18:53.700 --> 00:19:02.700 But as I said, there was always some tension between the United States and the Soviet Union even before the end of World War II. 110 00:19:02.700 --> 00:19:07.700 But that tension really became much greater after the war ended. 111 00:19:07.700 --> 00:19:14.700 Soviet troops were occupying northern Iran at the end of the war. 112 00:19:14.700 --> 00:19:24.700 And the US government decided, well, they shouldn't be there. That was a kind of expansionism that shouldn't be tolerated because where were they going to go next? 113 00:19:24.700 --> 00:19:34.700 If they had moved into Iran, then perhaps the next thing you know, they'd be at the Indian Ocean. So that was protested. 114 00:19:34.700 --> 00:19:42.700 They seem to be acting as if they were trying to somehow gain control of the Dardanelles, 115 00:19:42.700 --> 00:19:48.700 which is an important chokehold on commerce in the Eastern Mediterranean. 116 00:19:48.700 --> 00:19:53.700 So the U.S. government protested those Soviet moves. 117 00:19:53.700 --> 00:20:00.700 Communist insurgents were operating actively in Greece at that time, 118 00:20:00.700 --> 00:20:06.200 and the US government decided that that wouldn't do either to have the Greek 119 00:20:06.200 --> 00:20:11.080 government go communist after all we already had this this huge area of 120 00:20:11.080 --> 00:20:17.200 Central and Eastern Europe under Soviet control so a line should be drawn at the 121 00:20:17.200 --> 00:20:23.760 border of Greece and so they did draw that line and and they in connection with 122 00:20:23.760 --> 00:20:29.400 Greece in particular propounded what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine 123 00:20:29.400 --> 00:20:40.400 And that was the doctrine that when existing governments were menaced with communist takeover, the United States would, in one way or another, go to their assistance. 124 00:20:40.400 --> 00:20:53.400 Now, one has to do very little thinking to realize that this kind of commitment was simultaneously a commitment to prop up a lot of really vile governments around the world. 125 00:20:53.400 --> 00:20:59.440 because many of the governments that were under attack to some extent by 126 00:20:59.440 --> 00:21:03.440 communists or people who could be labeled as communist even though they 127 00:21:03.440 --> 00:21:09.920 might be just unhappy peasants out in the local jungle, a lot of those 128 00:21:09.920 --> 00:21:15.040 governments were in no other regard governments Americans would care to 129 00:21:15.040 --> 00:21:26.240 Support. In fact, they were eminently loatheable in many cases. And yet, commitment to aid 130 00:21:26.240 --> 00:21:33.560 anyone resisting communism put the United States in this position of drawing lines according 131 00:21:33.560 --> 00:21:42.440 to that one criterion. And over the years, the operation of foreign policy in accordance 132 00:21:42.440 --> 00:21:55.640 had countless unfortunate consequences. It, for example, led the United States to overthrow 133 00:21:55.640 --> 00:22:03.680 the government of Iran in the early 50s and to bring in and support the Shah and to support 134 00:22:03.680 --> 00:22:12.120 a really tyrannical government in Iran and to make a lot of Iranians profoundly unhappy, 135 00:22:12.120 --> 00:22:17.800 Not just against the Shah's government, but against the United States for supporting it. 136 00:22:17.800 --> 00:22:25.800 And we're still living today with the unfortunate consequences of that particular implementation 137 00:22:25.800 --> 00:22:28.000 of the Truman Doctrine. 138 00:22:28.000 --> 00:22:38.480 But it had similarly unfortunate consequences all around the world, including the US support 139 00:22:38.480 --> 00:22:47.600 for Anti-Communists or Alleged Anti-Communist Forces in Vietnam, which eventually led to 140 00:22:47.600 --> 00:22:55.080 U.S. involvement in full-scale warfare there and got several million people killed in the 141 00:22:55.080 --> 00:22:56.080 process. 142 00:22:56.080 --> 00:23:04.080 So this was a doctrine that was, we might think in retrospect, too readily arrived at. 143 00:23:04.080 --> 00:23:26.080 It might have been one thing to say, all right, let's go help the Greeks and keep Greece from being taken over by Communists, but by making this a kind of general rule for the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, the country was put in a straitjacket that didn't always serve its best interests. 144 00:23:26.080 --> 00:23:41.080 In 1948, these tensions with the Soviets reached the point where the Soviets decided that they would exercise their chokehold over access to Berlin, 145 00:23:41.080 --> 00:23:51.080 which had the curious position of being contained entirely within the Soviet sector of occupation in Germany. 146 00:23:51.080 --> 00:24:00.080 So it was a little island in their sector, but itself divided into sectors among the occupation powers. 147 00:24:00.080 --> 00:24:11.080 So it made no sense strategically to have ever made it that way to begin with, and it was tailor-made for the Russians to use to blackmail the Americans. 148 00:24:11.080 --> 00:24:18.080 And so they did that by closing off land access to the city in 1948. 149 00:24:18.080 --> 00:24:42.080 And the United States, of course, rather than just letting the city go and saying, all right, it's not worth fighting over and it's not worth worrying about in some other respect, it's in your sector, it's yours, decided to keep the non-Soviet sectors of the city alive with an airlift. 150 00:24:42.080 --> 00:25:12.080 and with the aircraft of that day this was a monumental undertaking because they didn't really carry all that much cargo and so we had all of these these small cargo aircraft flying 24 hours a day flying from West Germany to deliver supplies to keep alive the people of West Berlin until finally the Soviets decided that they didn't want to go to war over this 151 00:25:12.080 --> 00:25:26.080 and it really wasn't working. Their chokehold wasn't causing the Americans to give up control of Berlin in their sectors, so they relented. 152 00:25:26.080 --> 00:25:38.080 But that whole Berlin closure and airlift episode was like verging on war between the Soviet Union and the United States 153 00:25:38.080 --> 00:26:02.080 In the very next year, 1949, the Chinese forces in China finally, after decades of fighting, drove their opponents off of the mainland on to refuge in Formosa. 154 00:26:02.080 --> 00:26:32.080 and that became known here as the fall of China or if you were one of the fall guys the loss of China for which certain American diplomats were blamed supposedly if the United States had acted differently or perhaps had given more military support to the Nationalist forces then the Chinese would not have won I think that quite unlikely myself but 155 00:26:32.080 --> 00:26:50.080 But this, of course, became a kind of litmus test for conservatives as opposed to Truman liberals for a long time in this country, recriminations over and finger pointing and blaming people for the fall of China. 156 00:26:50.080 --> 00:27:01.080 I actually blame Gordon Tullock myself, but it's not as much fun to do that when Gordon's not in the audience. 157 00:27:01.080 --> 00:27:07.940 Gordon likes to talk about when he was in the Foreign Service in China before the Communist 158 00:27:07.940 --> 00:27:16.040 victory there, so he makes a good patsy in my mind. 159 00:27:16.040 --> 00:27:24.560 Also in 1949, the whole tenor of the conflict with the Soviet Union changed when the Soviets 160 00:27:24.560 --> 00:27:31.560 The Soviets had all of these divisions of the Red Army and these tens of thousands of tanks and so forth, but we had atomic bombs, and the kinds of aircraft that could deliver them over very long distances, so we always felt that if worst came to worst, we had to do something about it. 161 00:27:54.560 --> 00:28:06.160 First, we had what it would take to defeat them, and now in 1949 we realized that oops, 162 00:28:06.160 --> 00:28:13.820 we never thought they could nearly so quickly find their way to the development of a working 163 00:28:13.820 --> 00:28:23.200 atom bomb, but they had, in part because while they were carrying off factories from East 164 00:28:23.200 --> 00:28:30.600 Germany, they were also carrying off German scientists who were instrumental in hastening 165 00:28:30.600 --> 00:28:39.860 their production of nuclear weapons. So that changed things and made tensions even greater 166 00:28:39.860 --> 00:28:48.520 than they had been. And then the North Koreans began their invasion in the middle of 1950 167 00:28:48.520 --> 00:28:56.880 of South Korea and almost drove American forces who went to the assistance of the South Koreans 168 00:28:56.880 --> 00:29:07.760 into the ocean before a successful counterattack was made and then of course that was too successful 169 00:29:07.760 --> 00:29:15.240 because MacArthur drove all the way almost to the Chinese border thereby provoking the 170 00:29:15.240 --> 00:29:22.760 and the Chinese to come across the border and counterattack the counterattack. 171 00:29:22.760 --> 00:29:32.680 So the outcome in Korea was a stalemate after a considerable loss of life on all sides and 172 00:29:32.680 --> 00:29:39.920 that stalemate has persisted to the very present and once again we have a situation here that 173 00:29:39.920 --> 00:30:09.920 is extremely germane to foreign policy today. We've now got this situation with these North Koreans claiming to have atomic weapons. And whether they do or not, they certainly have a gigantic conventional capacity right on the border, close enough that they can use artillery to blow soul to smithereens. And we know they can do that whether they have 174 00:30:09.920 --> 00:30:11.920 The Theory of Money and Credit 175 00:30:39.920 --> 00:30:47.960 South Korea in particular and perhaps against Japan as well. So the events of 176 00:30:47.960 --> 00:30:55.720 the past 55 years as it were in many cases just retain life. They never just 177 00:30:55.720 --> 00:31:06.560 happen and pass away. Situations continue to burn even if the embers don't seem to 178 00:31:06.560 --> 00:31:31.560 Well, we can look back and say definitely the Korean War got the Cold War started, for sure, even if we don't think it had already begun, and many people would think that war was certainly an unfortunate thing, but not Dean Acheson. 179 00:31:31.560 --> 00:31:39.560 Atchison wrote in his memoirs, Korea Saved Us. 180 00:31:39.560 --> 00:31:43.560 Well, what did he mean by that? 181 00:31:43.560 --> 00:31:51.560 Well, remember the Truman administration had been committed for years to a military build-up 182 00:31:51.560 --> 00:31:57.560 for the purpose of global containment of the Soviet Union and its proxies. 183 00:31:57.560 --> 00:32:05.560 But it had been unable to get Congress to approve the money. 184 00:32:05.560 --> 00:32:17.560 Well, with the outbreak of the Korean War and the intervention of large numbers of American military forces on the Korean Peninsula, 185 00:32:17.560 --> 00:32:26.560 the government could then go to Congress and get agreement for tremendous buildup of the military. 186 00:32:26.560 --> 00:32:34.560 And it's very easy to look back at the graphs and see this big jump up in military spending and associate that with the Korean War. 187 00:32:34.560 --> 00:32:42.560 But in a way, it's a spurious association. It's politically associated with the Korean War. 188 00:32:42.560 --> 00:32:52.560 But the great bulk of that buildup was not ever intended or ever directed toward anything connected with the Korean War. 189 00:32:52.560 --> 00:33:03.560 It was for the purpose of building and equipping forces in other parts of the world, in Europe and in other parts of Asia especially. 190 00:33:03.560 --> 00:33:18.560 So what Atchison meant was we were getting nowhere in getting Congress to give us the money for a big military build-up to wage the Cold War, but Korea saved us. 191 00:33:18.560 --> 00:33:34.560 And very often we'll see over the past 50 years some such crisis, some such flashpoint saves the government's whole military undertaking. 192 00:33:34.560 --> 00:33:47.560 This one worked like a charm. So we can view Korea as the fulcrum that turns us fully onto a Cold War status. 193 00:33:47.560 --> 00:34:09.560 Now, the Cold War was what we used to think of as a permanent war. I mean, all my life, I was born during World War II, so for all my life when I had any awareness of what was going on in the world, the Cold War seemed like just the state of nature. 194 00:34:09.560 --> 00:34:25.560 It's always been there, it'll always be there. It was hard to imagine there being no Soviet Union or no communists out there trying to, as our leaders always said, take over the world. 195 00:34:25.560 --> 00:34:41.560 Now, of course, we look back, we see this whole terrible central planning military machine called the USSR just went to wreck and ruin. 196 00:34:41.560 --> 00:34:52.560 It's no longer much of a threat to anybody directly, although it's still indirectly a threat because it still has all those nuclear weapons. 197 00:34:52.560 --> 00:35:03.560 And people can have accidents or let them fall into the wrong hands, so they're not without some danger. 198 00:35:03.560 --> 00:35:15.560 But the world no longer lives under the cloud of gigantic exchange of nuclear missiles that it lived under for decades during the Cold War. 199 00:35:15.560 --> 00:35:23.920 and the Cold War. So that's gone. It wasn't a permanent war after all. But now, just in 200 00:35:23.920 --> 00:35:29.800 the past couple of years, the authorities, having realized what a good deal in many ways 201 00:35:29.800 --> 00:35:36.240 the Cold War was, have found a new basis and an even better basis for permanent war, namely 202 00:35:36.240 --> 00:35:43.640 the war on terrorism. Whereas the Soviet Union could implode, the threat of terrorism can 203 00:35:43.640 --> 00:35:54.640 The President can never go away. The President can always come forth and announce that he knows something that we don't know about a terrorist threat out there. 204 00:35:54.640 --> 00:36:03.640 Nowadays, any of us could, if we cared to, actually take ourselves to Russia and hike around almost anywhere we wanted to go and say, 205 00:36:03.640 --> 00:36:11.640 Well, you know, it doesn't look too bad to me, but we can't hike around the world and say, well, I don't see any terrorists. 206 00:36:11.640 --> 00:36:17.640 It's in the nature of terrorists that one doesn't see them, right? They look like normal people. 207 00:36:17.640 --> 00:36:26.640 And that's good because anybody could be a terrorist, which means the government has to take measures not only against the whole world, 208 00:36:26.640 --> 00:36:33.720 World, any part of which might be harboring terrorists, but it has to take measures of 209 00:36:33.720 --> 00:36:40.260 surveillance and protection against all of us, because we might be terrorists, or in 210 00:36:40.260 --> 00:36:48.580 some way, perhaps even inadvertently be aiding or abetting terrorists. So what could be better 211 00:36:48.580 --> 00:36:51.300 for the conduct of a permanent war? 212 00:36:51.300 --> 00:37:00.980 I worked out a while back a little scheme, a mental model, if you like, of what you need 213 00:37:00.980 --> 00:37:05.180 if you want to have a permanent war. 214 00:37:05.180 --> 00:37:08.100 At the outset, you might think, that's a ridiculous concept. 215 00:37:08.100 --> 00:37:11.500 Why would anybody want to have a permanent war? 216 00:37:11.500 --> 00:37:17.620 So really what I'm thinking of is not a permanent shooting war. 217 00:37:17.620 --> 00:37:22.620 I don't think very many people want every year to be like 1944. 218 00:37:22.620 --> 00:37:26.620 That's not in too many people's interest. 219 00:37:26.620 --> 00:37:32.620 But if you can have permanent preparation for war, 220 00:37:32.620 --> 00:37:36.620 especially if that war never actually comes about, 221 00:37:36.620 --> 00:37:40.620 that can be a very good situation for many people 222 00:37:40.620 --> 00:37:45.620 who play some role in carrying on this permanent war. 223 00:37:45.620 --> 00:38:02.620 So what you need if you want to carry on such a campaign is first of all an ideology to justify doing it during the Cold War, anti-communism served that purpose. 224 00:38:02.620 --> 00:38:18.620 If we didn't already fear and hate communism, the government was continually exhorting us to do so, and most Americans were reared and instinctively came to revile communism. 225 00:38:18.620 --> 00:38:23.620 That was not a bad thing, except that it was embraced so mindlessly. 226 00:38:23.620 --> 00:38:31.620 It would have been all right if we had all done our homework and discovered who the communists are and what they do and had loathed them accordingly. 227 00:38:31.620 --> 00:38:54.020 Secondly, you need to have powerful political factions who benefit in terms of the realization 228 00:38:54.020 --> 00:38:57.300 of their very specific objectives in life. 229 00:38:57.300 --> 00:39:03.300 So if, for example, you want to get business interests involved in an enterprise, there needs to be money in it. 230 00:39:03.300 --> 00:39:08.300 Business needs to make money when it does things. That's what business is for. 231 00:39:08.300 --> 00:39:14.300 If you want to get politicians involved, then you need to give politicians what they want, 232 00:39:14.300 --> 00:39:21.300 which tends to be, for those who hold elective office, things that work toward helping them get re-elected. 233 00:39:21.300 --> 00:39:31.300 If you want to get the military organization involved, you need to provide somehow the things military officers want. 234 00:39:31.300 --> 00:39:42.300 Pay, perquisites, a big budget for the military organization, lots of opportunities for advancement and recognition of their military prowess. 235 00:39:42.300 --> 00:40:12.300 so you promote their careers and what we're talking about specifically here is what came to be called the military industrial complex and I called the military industrial congressional complex because in the United States by the late 50s and into the 1960s Congress had awakened to the potential that the military industrial complex held 236 00:40:12.300 --> 00:40:37.300 If Congress more actively micromanaged it, by doing so, members of Congress, particularly in the appropriation subcommittees that oversaw the military budget, and the military authorization committees, these people who held strategic positions with regard to Congress's military affairs, 237 00:40:37.300 --> 00:41:07.300 could, in fact, design things in a way that targeted benefits to people who would be grateful and then would, in return, see to helping them in various ways with getting votes and money for campaigns and in the good old days, in the 50s and 60s, just a lot of outright income and kind, entertaining them at hunting lodges, providing prostitutes, cash in a plain brown wrapper 238 00:41:07.300 --> 00:41:23.300 Congress began to take a much keener interest, so keen an interest that I think they need 239 00:41:23.300 --> 00:41:33.060 to be recognized as an important actor in the MIC, and so I add Congress to this whole 240 00:41:33.060 --> 00:41:34.060 setup here. 241 00:41:34.060 --> 00:41:40.060 I've got a little diagram here to add a few details. 242 00:41:40.060 --> 00:41:44.060 Notice at the top I've got the public, 243 00:41:44.060 --> 00:41:50.060 because it's easy to start talking as if the whole world is being run by a conspiracy. 244 00:41:50.060 --> 00:41:53.060 And first of all, it's not a conspiracy. 245 00:41:53.060 --> 00:41:58.060 A great deal of what's being done here is being done in a perfectly open way. 246 00:41:58.060 --> 00:42:03.060 There's a little bit of secrecy, like the cash in a plain brown wrapper. 247 00:42:03.060 --> 00:42:17.060 But most of it is not a conspiracy, it's just a coalescence of interests of people who have important roles to play in managing the military affairs of the country. 248 00:42:17.060 --> 00:42:27.060 Now the public is engaged up here because they pay the bills for all this and so they've got to be kept under the influence of the appropriate ideology 249 00:42:27.060 --> 00:42:36.260 They've got to be given the appropriate information to make them tolerate whatever it is that the machine is made to do. 250 00:42:36.260 --> 00:42:44.560 But furthermore, the public gets involved here because many members of the public will actually themselves benefit. 251 00:42:44.560 --> 00:42:51.060 They'll get earnings, they'll get jobs, they'll get profits for their businesses. 252 00:42:51.060 --> 00:42:58.540 So, it's not just a handful of key players who are getting something out of the operation 253 00:42:58.540 --> 00:43:06.140 of the MIC. It was actually millions and millions of people for decades on end. So, it's not 254 00:43:06.140 --> 00:43:14.580 a small political faction. It's not like there being 2,000 sugar farmers who get sugar subsidies. 255 00:43:14.580 --> 00:43:27.580 It's more like anywhere from four to eight, ten million people at any given time in the Cold War who are quite directly tied and many others indirectly tied. 256 00:43:27.580 --> 00:43:40.580 For example, all the people who run retail businesses in areas with a lot of military activity have a keen interest in keeping those military contracts or those military bases operating at a high rate 257 00:43:40.580 --> 00:43:46.660 because it's the people who work there who provide the customers for their businesses. 258 00:43:46.660 --> 00:43:56.660 So we've got the public up here, but it's a removed part of the whole scene. 259 00:43:56.660 --> 00:44:02.800 And in the complex itself, we've got the Department of Defense and the regular military 260 00:44:02.800 --> 00:44:04.960 departments and the National Guard. 261 00:44:04.960 --> 00:44:12.160 We sometimes forget about the Guard, but that's a large number of people, and quite a bit 262 00:44:12.160 --> 00:44:18.000 of procurement and equipment and what have you, and it's especially important where Congress 263 00:44:18.000 --> 00:44:24.720 is involved, because the National Guard units are the descendants of the militia, and they're 264 00:44:24.720 --> 00:44:34.580 local people, they're your friends and neighbors, and you can make very tightly focused promises 265 00:44:34.580 --> 00:44:38.620 is to them, if you're a congressman, you can say, I'm going to insert in the next 266 00:44:38.620 --> 00:44:46.420 military budget funds for another C-130 for the local Air Force base. And in fact, so 267 00:44:46.420 --> 00:44:54.540 dependent did the Guard become on these special congressional favors that the members of Congress 268 00:44:54.540 --> 00:45:02.500 and the military departments entered into thinly veiled conspiracies to make possible 269 00:45:02.500 --> 00:45:12.380 these kinds of add-ons. So, every year the official Pentagon request doesn't include 270 00:45:12.380 --> 00:45:18.780 many items of equipment for the National Guard. But they've already sat down in the back room 271 00:45:18.780 --> 00:45:25.900 to decide which member of Congress will add on how many C-130s for which bases where. 272 00:45:25.900 --> 00:45:31.620 But of course, the general public doesn't know this and then the congressman goes forth 273 00:45:31.620 --> 00:45:37.300 in his next election campaign and he says, remember I worked very hard and was personally 274 00:45:37.300 --> 00:45:45.600 responsible for getting additional equipment for the base here and he gets a certain amount 275 00:45:45.600 --> 00:45:53.020 of political points with some people for acting in that way. So the National Guard is not 276 00:45:53.020 --> 00:46:00.140 inconsequential. I've already mentioned Congress and the key committees there. The defense 277 00:46:00.140 --> 00:46:06.780 As contractors, of course, some of them do hardly anything but military contracting. They're 278 00:46:06.780 --> 00:46:13.620 very specialized in that line of work. And companies like that, indeed, turn out when 279 00:46:13.620 --> 00:46:20.120 they try to do other kinds of work, to be very bad at it. Because the kind of skills 280 00:46:20.120 --> 00:46:25.220 you need to be a successful, dedicated defense contractor, completely different from the 281 00:46:25.220 --> 00:46:39.300 Somebody like Lockheed, who relies very heavily on military contracts to make money, doesn't 282 00:46:39.300 --> 00:46:44.660 have a clue about how to do anything entrepreneurial in a real market, but they know everything 283 00:46:44.660 --> 00:46:54.700 about how to find out what the Pentagon might be led to want, as one of the generals once 284 00:46:54.700 --> 00:46:58.460 The General said, the contractors are where the babies come from. 285 00:46:58.460 --> 00:47:02.200 We tend to think, well, the generals sit around and dream up these super weapons and then 286 00:47:02.200 --> 00:47:07.800 they go out and look for contractors, but in fact it's just the other way around. 287 00:47:07.800 --> 00:47:14.500 Lockheed and Boeing and Martin Marietta are out there full of evil geniuses in computer 288 00:47:14.500 --> 00:47:20.820 science and retired admirals and they're sitting around dreaming up the super weapons of tomorrow 289 00:47:20.820 --> 00:47:25.820 and when they get one in their mind fairly firmly, so they can draw a picture of it, 290 00:47:25.820 --> 00:47:31.020 then they go give a presentation at the Pentagon and say, gee whiz, wouldn't you like to have 291 00:47:31.020 --> 00:47:38.100 something like that? And the generals say, well golly, that looks great, you know, can 292 00:47:38.100 --> 00:47:49.620 you cook that up? Sure, you know, 50 billion and it's yours. So this is how the process 293 00:47:49.620 --> 00:48:06.620 This tends to operate, and as I just suggested, there's a revolving door, and has been since World War II, whereby high-ranking military officers, when they retire, go directly into employment in defense contracting companies. 294 00:48:06.620 --> 00:48:11.620 Thousands and thousands of them have done that. 295 00:48:11.620 --> 00:48:19.620 Low-ranking too, of course, but the low-ranking ones tend not to affect policy. They just get jobs. 296 00:48:19.620 --> 00:48:30.620 But you find thousands of people who were colonels or higher moving in to work for Boeing and Lockheed and General Dynamics all the time. 297 00:48:30.620 --> 00:48:40.620 It happens every year. New ones are brought on board, and they're not there to tell these manufacturers how to reduce the costs of machining parts. 298 00:48:40.620 --> 00:48:49.620 They're there because they know the system and because they know the guys at the Pentagon who are still dealing with procurement. 299 00:48:49.620 --> 00:48:53.620 After all, those guys used to work for them. 300 00:48:53.620 --> 00:49:00.620 So now when they go back to cut a deal with military buyers, they're working with old friends, 301 00:49:00.620 --> 00:49:08.620 sometimes old friends of decades long standing and people who used to be under their command in the military. 302 00:49:08.620 --> 00:49:14.620 So what could be nicer than that? No wonder General Mullins called this a family affair. 303 00:49:14.620 --> 00:49:19.620 That's exactly what it is. The military often thinks of itself as a big family. 304 00:49:19.620 --> 00:49:22.620 We're just all here on the base together. 305 00:49:22.620 --> 00:49:31.620 So the procurement system is a very much old-boy, greased setup. 306 00:49:31.620 --> 00:49:40.920 It goes through the motions of being a business and it fills out forms and everything, but the reality is quite different. 307 00:49:40.920 --> 00:49:50.420 The reality is a lot of schmoozing and a lot of people trading places, not just officers going into the firms either. 308 00:49:50.420 --> 00:50:07.420 firms giving leave to their highest executives who then, for a year or sometimes four years, go take up positions in the civilian bureaucracy at the Department of Defense or one of the military departments. 309 00:50:07.420 --> 00:50:16.940 So all of these guys who moved to the Pentagon, they're smaller in number than the number 310 00:50:16.940 --> 00:50:22.660 of officers who go the other way, but in some ways they're more important because they all 311 00:50:22.660 --> 00:50:24.540 go to high-ranking positions. 312 00:50:24.540 --> 00:50:29.300 You don't leave Boeing to go work as a flunky in the Department of Defense. 313 00:50:29.300 --> 00:50:34.260 You go there as an assistant secretary or something of that level. 314 00:50:34.260 --> 00:50:39.860 So they go there, they're very important, and once again, now they're working for the government, 315 00:50:39.860 --> 00:50:45.540 dealing with people on the business side who used to be their colleagues last month. 316 00:50:45.540 --> 00:50:58.540 So the whole system is incestuous in the extreme, and the setup designed to give it the aura 317 00:50:58.540 --> 00:51:05.540 of bureaucratic punctiliousness is a fraud. That's all fake. 318 00:51:07.540 --> 00:51:14.540 We've got some peripheral actors down here. I just listed for completeness. 319 00:51:14.540 --> 00:51:19.540 And we could go on with that list if we wanted to. Universities, think tanks. 320 00:51:19.540 --> 00:51:27.540 Of course, around Northern Virginia and Maryland, the beltway bandits are thicker than fleas on a hound. 321 00:51:27.540 --> 00:51:53.540 is on a hound, and they're all living off defense money, channeled to them by the Department of Defense or the military departments or one of the intelligence agencies, so they're there, local governments, if they have a base or a big defense plant, they get involved, 322 00:51:53.540 --> 00:51:59.540 labor unions, if they have a lot of members working in defense production 323 00:51:59.540 --> 00:52:07.540 and the veterans and service organizations who are numerous come into play as cheerleaders 324 00:52:07.540 --> 00:52:15.540 and people who can be counted on to always give a kind of general support for enlarging the military budget 325 00:52:15.540 --> 00:52:22.540 they just instinctively favor that no matter what the situation or no matter how outrageous the proposal 326 00:52:22.540 --> 00:52:26.540 They always say, well yeah, more money for defense is a good idea. 327 00:52:26.540 --> 00:52:34.540 Kind of a faux patriotism comes into play, but it's better than that because it's organized. 328 00:52:34.540 --> 00:52:41.540 They have conventions, they have lobbyists, they continue to have connections with active military officers 329 00:52:41.540 --> 00:52:47.540 who come and give them inside scoop and make them feel as if they're still involved. 330 00:52:47.540 --> 00:52:55.540 are all involved, so they play a role even though it's a peripheral role. 331 00:52:55.540 --> 00:53:04.540 Well, this setup has been operating now for over half a century. 332 00:53:04.540 --> 00:53:09.540 And along the way a lot of money was put at its disposal. 333 00:53:09.540 --> 00:53:29.540 I calculate that since 1948, coming up to the present, if we measure defense spending in current dollars, we're getting into the neighborhood of 17 trillion dollars. 334 00:53:29.540 --> 00:53:40.540 That's almost two years GDP of the present US economy. That's an enormous amount of loot. 335 00:53:40.540 --> 00:53:47.540 I mean, most countries in the world GDPs could be swallowed up in there many times over. 336 00:53:47.540 --> 00:53:54.540 So this was a big undertaking and it's a big undertaking today. 337 00:53:54.540 --> 00:54:11.540 If Congress gives the President what he's requested for the next fiscal year, the defense budget will be $400 billion and the merest babe can forecast that it'll actually be more than that. 338 00:54:11.540 --> 00:54:22.540 Because that's not going to include enough for all the expenses in Iraq and surrounding areas and they're going to have emergency supplemental appropriations requests 339 00:54:22.540 --> 00:54:44.540 Congress is really a pretty easy touch when it comes to the defense budget whenever there's a crisis, and right now with the war on terrorism providing the important cover, the administration is in a position to get Congress to approve big infusions. 340 00:54:44.540 --> 00:54:56.540 In the late 90s, the fallback of the defense budget was considerable, and by the end of the 90s, the defense was consuming only about 3% of GDP. 341 00:54:56.540 --> 00:55:03.540 But already, just in the last three years, that's gone back up to 3.5% and rising. 342 00:55:03.540 --> 00:55:15.540 So, even though the Cold War is over, the permanent war is still going on. 343 00:55:15.540 --> 00:55:20.540 Now, I don't know, last night was Dr. Strangelove shown? 344 00:55:20.540 --> 00:55:25.540 It was shown earlier in the week? Okay, well good. 345 00:55:25.540 --> 00:55:30.540 I always recommend that film. It's the greatest film ever made of any kind. 346 00:55:30.540 --> 00:55:55.540 and especially in this respect it's a perfect representation of the situation during what you might call the high Cold War, the 50s, 60s period of nuclear standoff and there's so many things that you can learn from Dr. Strangelove that I couldn't even begin to list them all. 347 00:55:55.540 --> 00:56:07.040 I'm still learning from it myself after all these years and I expect to view it many more times before I die and learn something new every time. 348 00:56:07.040 --> 00:56:16.040 So keep watching Dr. Strangelove and as you do so you'll understand better and better the world of the high cold war. 349 00:56:16.040 --> 00:56:26.040 It seems like a kind of other world, a kind of mad world that couldn't really exist. 350 00:56:26.040 --> 00:56:32.040 It's just a movie, but the beauty of it is, it's not really just a movie at all. 351 00:56:32.040 --> 00:56:43.040 It's that far away from reality, just that far. 352 00:56:43.040 --> 00:57:06.040 When Vietnam War engaged the United States after 1965, we had another periodic crisis that pumped the defense budget up for three years running, brought it up to almost 10% again of GDP by 1968. 353 00:57:06.040 --> 00:57:14.040 After the peak then, it started falling and there was a long period of about a decade 354 00:57:14.040 --> 00:57:18.040 during which defense spending fell relative to the economy. 355 00:57:18.040 --> 00:57:25.040 And then at the end of the Carter administration, before Reagan took over and set his defense build-up in motion, 356 00:57:25.040 --> 00:57:33.040 a turn had already been made and defense spending was beginning to rise, even relative to GDP. 357 00:57:33.040 --> 00:57:39.240 but of course Reagan accelerated that increase considerably and during that 358 00:57:39.240 --> 00:57:45.240 build-up defense spending was increased by fifty percent so it's it's very easy 359 00:57:45.240 --> 00:57:53.320 to spot on a time series a big build-up and and it's one that we can't associate 360 00:57:53.320 --> 00:57:59.920 very easily with any any specific war or crisis there was no major major war 361 00:57:59.920 --> 00:58:07.640 are connected with its onset, but there were events that made mighty contributions to giving 362 00:58:07.640 --> 00:58:14.640 it a boost at the beginning, and those were principally the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan 363 00:58:14.640 --> 00:58:23.880 at the end of 1979, and even more important, the hostage-taking in Tehran. I have never 364 00:58:23.880 --> 00:58:33.880 I've never in my lifetime seen so many Americans so hysterically angry as I recall them being in 1980. 365 00:58:33.880 --> 00:58:45.880 They felt frustrated. Every night the television showed these Americans being paraded out, blindfolded and pushed around by the hostage takers. 366 00:58:45.880 --> 00:59:15.880 and Americans watched this night after night after night and they felt as if their noses were being rubbed in the dirt by people and they weren't doing anything about it and many of them became extremely angry and wanted to lash out and as the saying goes, nuke the bastards and I have no doubt that many would have been quite happy at America chosen to drop atomic bombs on the Iranians 367 00:59:15.880 --> 00:59:26.480 in 1980. But cooler heads prevailed and eventually, of course, that crisis was resolved. But meanwhile, 368 00:59:26.480 --> 00:59:34.040 the defense buildup had been given a huge boost and even though the public lost faith 369 00:59:34.040 --> 00:59:39.400 after a couple of years in the buildup, the Reagan administration was so relentlessly 370 00:59:39.400 --> 00:59:46.400 are all really dedicated to it, that it managed to keep it going for years after the public had stopped favoring it very much. 371 00:59:46.400 --> 01:00:15.520 Here we've got defense spending in constant dollars from 1940 to the early 1990s and then 372 01:00:15.520 --> 01:00:23.120 And I've added a few points later to show you what happened subsequently, but you'll 373 01:00:23.120 --> 01:00:33.520 notice that there's a kind of classic Cold War plateau, which in this level of purchasing 374 01:00:33.520 --> 01:00:39.560 power, $1991, tended to run close to $300 billion a year. 375 01:00:39.560 --> 01:00:46.480 And then around that level Cold War trend, we have these deviations associated with the 376 01:00:46.480 --> 01:00:47.480 Korean War. 377 01:00:47.480 --> 01:00:52.780 There you see the big buildup, and then it only comes back a little bit, because now 378 01:00:52.780 --> 01:00:55.800 we've got the real Cold War going. 379 01:00:55.800 --> 01:01:01.560 It stays this way, and here's Dr. Strangelove right here. 380 01:01:01.560 --> 01:01:07.640 And then we've got Vietnam, the fallback to the late 70s, the Reagan buildup, and then 381 01:01:07.640 --> 01:01:30.640 We've got this fallback in the 90s, but now we've begun, I don't show it here, but we've begun another turnaround and just in the past four fiscal years, spending has increased by more than a third in real terms, so we're off and running for another build-up right now. 382 01:01:30.640 --> 01:01:53.640 Here we see how many people were getting a job from this activity in terms of millions of persons. 383 01:01:53.640 --> 01:01:56.640 The dark part is military personnel. 384 01:01:56.640 --> 01:02:04.520 The next section is Department of Defense Civilians and then on top the Defense Industry Workers. 385 01:02:04.520 --> 01:02:09.360 So you can see that all together during the classic Cold War we tended to employ maybe 386 01:02:09.360 --> 01:02:16.640 six to seven million people, somewhat fewer here, closer to five or six million in the 387 01:02:16.640 --> 01:02:24.240 70s and 80s, although it got close to the old totals by the end of the Reagan build-up. 388 01:02:24.240 --> 01:02:34.600 So this is a big chunk of the work that's getting done in the United States over half a century. 389 01:02:34.600 --> 01:02:49.420 Now we did see some changes in the political complexion of the Cold War, starting in 1968, 390 01:02:49.420 --> 01:02:53.160 and they took place very suddenly. 391 01:02:53.160 --> 01:03:00.780 What I'm showing on this chart is a measure I constructed myself by using public opinion 392 01:03:00.780 --> 01:03:03.200 survey data. 393 01:03:03.200 --> 01:03:09.360 For many years, going all the way back to the late 1940s, Gallup and Roper and these 394 01:03:09.360 --> 01:03:15.740 other survey organizations would often ask people when they were making surveys, do you 395 01:03:15.740 --> 01:03:21.340 Do you think the U.S. should spend more for defense, or less for defense, or about the 396 01:03:21.340 --> 01:03:24.260 same as now? 397 01:03:24.260 --> 01:03:30.580 And that question, in almost identical form, was asked again and again and again. 398 01:03:30.580 --> 01:03:38.980 I found altogether 193 surveys, which were national, which asked that question in almost 399 01:03:38.980 --> 01:03:44.400 identical form, and which lacked any cues, they didn't have any introductory phrases 400 01:03:44.400 --> 01:03:52.480 is about in view of the Soviet menace or anything that might have biased the respondents toward 401 01:03:52.480 --> 01:04:00.180 an answer. And I took all of those data and in any given year I just averaged all the 402 01:04:00.180 --> 01:04:06.960 different ones in a simple fashion if I had several. And by the 70s and 80s every year 403 01:04:06.960 --> 01:04:18.960 I never had a number of such surveys available, so those data are more solid, but whatever I had, I created a variable called the opinion balance. 404 01:04:18.960 --> 01:04:27.960 I simply took the percentage of people favoring more defense spending and subtracted the percentage favoring less. 405 01:04:27.960 --> 01:04:37.960 Now, if people favored the same as now, or if they express no opinion, they're not playing a role here in this variable. 406 01:04:37.960 --> 01:04:46.960 The number in that third category I call the residuum, and in my statistical work I actually use that measure of residuum 407 01:04:46.960 --> 01:04:53.960 because it actually is a kind of measure of the inertia in the expression of public opinion. 408 01:04:53.960 --> 01:05:07.960 If there's a big residuum, then you would not expect any given opinion balance to have much political import compared to if almost everybody has an opinion, then the balance has more punch. 409 01:05:07.960 --> 01:05:19.960 But just from what I've shown here, the opinion balance itself, you can see that up until 1968, every time that question was asked, 410 01:05:19.960 --> 01:05:30.960 In the past, the balance was always, to some extent, positive, always a greater percentage of respondents said more defense spending than said less. 411 01:05:34.960 --> 01:05:36.960 Unbalanced opinion balance. 412 01:05:36.960 --> 01:05:54.960 In some years, crisis years, like here is 1961 and there was a transitory Berlin crisis that year and that clearly led a lot of people to favor increase in defense spending. 413 01:05:54.960 --> 01:06:02.960 At the beginning of the Vietnam War, you'll see here in 1965, 66, 67, that balance remained positive. 414 01:06:02.960 --> 01:06:09.000 in fact there was quite a lot of support for the American involvement in the 415 01:06:09.000 --> 01:06:15.920 Vietnam War in those first three years it was just a few college professors and 416 01:06:15.920 --> 01:06:24.880 hippies and Bob Higgs who were opposing the war but the massive Americans 417 01:06:24.880 --> 01:06:30.440 thought yeah they say it's a good idea President Johnson says we've got to 418 01:06:30.440 --> 01:06:45.320 What Happened As Casualties Began to Mount, People Began to Lose their Enthusiasm for 419 01:06:45.320 --> 01:06:57.400 What Was Happening There, John Mueller Tracks What Happens to Public Opinion As Casualties 420 01:06:57.400 --> 01:07:05.320 change in the course of war and when you look at both the Korean War and the war in Vietnam, 421 01:07:05.320 --> 01:07:14.120 it turns out that every time casualties increase by a factor of 10, the public opinion favoring 422 01:07:14.120 --> 01:07:21.200 the war drops by 10 percentage points. And it's the same statistical relationship in 423 01:07:21.200 --> 01:07:26.040 both wars, interestingly, even though in Korea we didn't have street demonstrations and so 424 01:07:26.040 --> 01:07:33.040 and so forth. We still had growing opposition to the war. People were just expressing it more privately. 425 01:07:33.040 --> 01:07:53.040 Ten percentage points. So what happened here was that already the support for the war, and in this case support for military spending, a kind of proxy closely related to that support, 426 01:07:53.040 --> 01:08:06.040 is down to a low level in 1967 already, but then it takes a precipitous drop, it's one of the biggest drops ever measured in public opinion surveys in 1968. 427 01:08:06.040 --> 01:08:18.040 And the reason for that was that the Tet Offensive at the beginning of the year made people realize that they'd been lied to all along, 428 01:08:18.040 --> 01:08:23.040 that the government had consistently been telling the public that we were winning. 429 01:08:23.040 --> 01:08:31.040 It was just a matter of a little more time before we had eliminated all these, you know, a handful of gorillas in the jungle. 430 01:08:31.040 --> 01:08:34.040 We had them on the run. We controlled all the cities. 431 01:08:34.040 --> 01:08:40.040 And then suddenly, there they are. They're running around in all the cities, killing Americans. 432 01:08:40.040 --> 01:08:43.040 I mean, right in the middle of things in Saigon. 433 01:08:43.040 --> 01:08:55.040 And the public said, wait a minute. We've been led down a path here. You've tricked us. 434 01:08:55.040 --> 01:09:00.040 And support for the war collapsed among the general public. 435 01:09:00.040 --> 01:09:06.040 And when it collapsed among the general public, then the politicians began to bail out. 436 01:09:06.040 --> 01:09:21.040 First of all, some members of Johnson's cabinet and advisors to the Johnson administration decided that it was a losing proposition, that they should terminate it. 437 01:09:21.040 --> 01:09:28.040 And the President himself realized that in the circumstances he could not be re-elected. 438 01:09:28.040 --> 01:09:55.040 He had reached the point where he couldn't even travel around the country because everywhere he went, so many protestors turned out and he feared for his life that somebody would kill him, so he cowered in his quarters and wasn't even able to make public appearances, so Johnson dropped out and Nixon was elected promising that he had a secret plan to end the war. 439 01:09:55.040 --> 01:10:18.040 Well, it was very secret. It's so secret that it took five years to be carried out, but at least Nixon did, I guess, begin the turnaround of diminishing the extent of the military engagement there. It's just that he wasn't prepared to just walk away from it. Yes? 440 01:10:18.040 --> 01:10:26.040 I saw some historical film footage where Nixon basically admitted that there was never any plan at all. 441 01:10:48.040 --> 01:10:51.040 and I arrived at this Paris Peace Agreement. 442 01:10:51.040 --> 01:10:59.040 Now, when public opinion collapsed, it had an effect. 443 01:10:59.040 --> 01:11:05.040 What I show you here is on the top, that same public opinion balance, 444 01:11:05.040 --> 01:11:09.040 I was measuring with the bar chart in the previous display. 445 01:11:09.040 --> 01:11:13.040 But below it here, I'm measuring on this left-hand scale, 446 01:11:13.040 --> 01:11:17.040 the rate of change of defense spending. 447 01:11:17.040 --> 01:11:25.880 And as you see, there is a very close association in the two profiles. 448 01:11:25.880 --> 01:11:28.400 Their movements are very closely connected. 449 01:11:28.400 --> 01:11:43.600 And I did a variety of econometric tests to find out what was leading what and to work in controls for the opinion residuum and to check all kinds of functional forms and so forth. 450 01:11:43.600 --> 01:12:03.600 So I rang the econometric changes on this baby, and I'm satisfied that what was happening here was that with some lags, changes in public opinion were being followed by changes in the rate of growth of defense spending. 451 01:12:03.600 --> 01:12:12.600 Now the easy way to interpret this would be to say, wow, public opinion is just as powerful as David Hume said. 452 01:12:12.600 --> 01:12:31.600 Public opinion is decisive in the end. When people decided they wanted less defense spending, then defense spending began to diminish at least in its rate of growth and actually became negative in its rate of growth. 453 01:12:31.600 --> 01:12:43.600 There's a zero line here, so by the time we get in some portions here, we're not really growing at all, to any significant extent at least. 454 01:12:43.600 --> 01:12:56.600 But it's not that simple. And it's not that simple because public opinion is not simply what the econometricians call an exogenous variable. 455 01:12:56.600 --> 01:13:03.600 It's not something that's just determined out there in the world somewhere and then brought to bear on the political process. 456 01:13:03.600 --> 01:13:13.600 And certainly when we talk about the operation of the MIC, we have to recognize that everybody from the President and his National Security Council 457 01:13:13.600 --> 01:13:25.600 down through these vested interests of the MIC itself are actively engaged at all times in attempting to determine what public opinion will be. 458 01:13:25.600 --> 01:13:32.600 to shape people's beliefs and preferences about national security affairs. 459 01:13:32.600 --> 01:13:43.600 And so it's even possible that the very public opinion to which the military apparatus seems to be responding 460 01:13:43.600 --> 01:13:48.600 has been created in the first instance by that very military machine. 461 01:13:48.600 --> 01:14:18.600 Now, I don't want to suggest that that's quite it either, because if you if you look at what happened, there are periods such as after 1968 for a decade, and there are periods in the 1990s when indeed there are substantial reductions in the resources being devoted to military purposes, and I think it's fair to presume that those were not desired by 462 01:14:18.600 --> 01:14:28.600 by the members of the MIG, and sometimes not even desired by the President and his Chief Ministers either, and yet they were forced upon people. 463 01:14:28.600 --> 01:14:40.600 So I'm not suggesting that these people pull all the strings, but only reminding us that public opinion is not exogenous. 464 01:14:40.600 --> 01:14:58.600 In the political process there is continual give and take between members of the public who come in all sizes and shapes and degrees of influence and information and members of the government who similarly differ in all sorts of ways. 465 01:14:58.600 --> 01:15:04.600 And they're interacting, trying to influence one another's beliefs and preferences constantly. 466 01:15:04.600 --> 01:15:11.600 And so what happens is the net result of all of these forces going one way than the other. 467 01:15:11.600 --> 01:15:19.600 On some occasions, clearly, the forces supporting military build-up are dominant, and we get the build-ups. 468 01:15:19.600 --> 01:15:26.600 On other occasions, the forces opposing build-up are dominant, and we get military cutbacks. 469 01:15:26.600 --> 01:15:33.600 So we do have a relationship here, but it's a tricky one to interpret. 470 01:15:33.600 --> 01:15:55.600 I did make some efforts in later work to try to build more elaborate econometric models to try to capture some of these intricacies, but those were never published or reported and indeed they never proved very satisfying to me either in trying to make sense of them. 471 01:15:55.600 --> 01:16:19.600 Did the Soviet Union have an analog to the Mech, or was their system so different than what the Maryland Congress had? 472 01:16:25.600 --> 01:16:45.600 The Soviet Union was above all else for its entire existence just a big military organization, and in fact, when we think of, we all know it was a failure in many ways, but in the ways that we can identify it as having succeeded, they all turn out to be a failure. 473 01:16:45.600 --> 01:16:51.680 When we think of, we all know it was a failure in many ways, but in the ways that we can 474 01:16:51.680 --> 01:16:59.800 identify it as having succeeded, they all turn out to be just technical military ways. 475 01:16:59.800 --> 01:17:06.200 Defeating the Nazis in World War II, that's just a military undertaking, developing ICBMs 476 01:17:06.200 --> 01:17:13.000 and big rockets and all that, that's just a military task. So the only things the Soviets 477 01:17:13.000 --> 01:17:19.880 ever, ever had to show for themselves that were genuine accomplishments, were military, 478 01:17:19.880 --> 01:17:27.600 and they put all of their best resources, their scientists, their engineers, their educated 479 01:17:27.600 --> 01:17:34.640 people, all were focused on the MIC over there. They don't have a congress muddying the water 480 01:17:34.640 --> 01:17:41.980 of course, but they have a military and an industrial side working together and a party 481 01:17:41.980 --> 01:17:47.980 Apparatus, which for them was kind of serving the same purpose as our executive 482 01:17:47.980 --> 01:18:10.980 and Congress over here. I just read Andrei Krypschenko's book, I Chose Freedom, and he was one of the first Soviets to defect, and he defected right after the war, and he makes the claim in his book 483 01:18:10.980 --> 01:18:40.980 that in fact it wasn't the Russian military machine that defeated the Nazis that it was the German military machine that defeated the Nazis because Germans came so far into Russia and they were surrounded and the Russians captured tons of German armaments and they used German armaments to defeat the Germans so he claims that their war machine was a disaster that they didn't have any of the materials, the raw materials, the metals or anything to make any arms 484 01:18:40.980 --> 01:18:47.980 so that they had to use the German armaments to defeat them, so that didn't even work. 485 01:18:47.980 --> 01:18:50.980 That's true to some extent that they didn't produce arms of change. 486 01:18:50.980 --> 01:18:54.980 Yeah, they got the bulk of the punch from their own making. 487 01:18:54.980 --> 01:19:00.980 I mean, that obviously helped them, that they were able to snatch so much German equipment at Stalingrad, 488 01:19:00.980 --> 01:19:05.980 but they shed the blood, and they won the Battle of Stalingrad. 489 01:19:05.980 --> 01:19:09.980 That's how they got that stuff to begin with, so they deserved some credit. 490 01:19:09.980 --> 01:19:39.980 I have a question for you, but just real quick for Bob. You're in Malta, not in the Cost of War books, but in the Cost of War tapes. He has to talk about the Russian military and the Russian economy, and how it was the Russian economy, but it's hard to get, you know, when you've worked in the MIC, it's hard to get your mind around this monstrous organization, especially since they try to sort of mimic 491 01:19:39.980 --> 01:19:45.540 the Market. But at one point, you know, far enough back in the stages of 492 01:19:45.540 --> 01:19:49.940 production, they do have to face prices somewhere. I mean, I mean, World War II 493 01:19:49.940 --> 01:19:53.620 they could just, and other times they can just confiscate things. Yeah. But way back 494 01:19:53.620 --> 01:19:57.020 at some point they have to face prices, they have to entice people through 495 01:19:57.020 --> 01:20:03.420 incomes to join, they have to buy raw materials. After that though, would you 496 01:20:03.420 --> 01:20:06.700 say it's true that they really don't, I mean, I would think that after that point 497 01:20:06.700 --> 01:20:09.780 where they initially buy their raw materials, from people who could sell it 498 01:20:09.780 --> 01:20:28.700 The arms manufacturers have to pay for their materials and the people they hire, of course, 499 01:20:28.700 --> 01:20:35.780 and they are in competition with market actors in doing that, but they still don't have to 500 01:20:35.780 --> 01:20:42.660 to pass a market test in the same way that market firms do, because let's suppose that 501 01:20:42.660 --> 01:20:50.260 they go out and they conduct their business and they lose money. Now, if you do that for 502 01:20:50.260 --> 01:20:55.540 some time running in the market, you're just going to have to go bankrupt. Your creditors 503 01:20:55.540 --> 01:21:05.500 will insure that. But in the case of the big military contractors, it's almost certain 504 01:21:05.500 --> 01:21:11.100 that you won't actually be allowed to go bankrupt because you'll be bailed out, and you can 505 01:21:11.100 --> 01:21:16.100 be bailed out in a number of different ways. You can be bailed out directly. The Defense 506 01:21:16.100 --> 01:21:22.260 Department can just give you additional money, and there are any number of accounting entries 507 01:21:22.260 --> 01:21:29.260 that can be done under. They are constantly readjusting contracts, and so you can do it 508 01:21:29.260 --> 01:21:35.740 in the guise of engineering changes, you can do it in the guise of adjusting for earlier 509 01:21:35.740 --> 01:21:43.780 failures to anticipate full costs of production, or any number of names you can give it. Or 510 01:21:43.780 --> 01:21:52.580 one of the ways that was frequently used in the Cold War is that a company's floundering 511 01:21:52.580 --> 01:21:58.580 and it's on the verge of going broke, well, give it a brand new contract to do something 512 01:21:58.580 --> 01:22:01.580 and shower it with a lot of advance payments. 513 01:22:01.580 --> 01:22:05.220 So that puts it in a flesh condition again, 514 01:22:05.220 --> 01:22:06.780 and it's off and running. 515 01:22:06.780 --> 01:22:11.780 So the bailout guarantee was absolutely critical 516 01:22:12.820 --> 01:22:14.700 in the operation of these sperms. 517 01:22:14.700 --> 01:22:17.700 At one time or another, they all got bailed out. 518 01:22:17.700 --> 01:22:22.100 Lockheed, Martin Marietta, they all got bailouts 519 01:22:22.100 --> 01:22:24.620 in a big way at some point, 520 01:22:24.620 --> 01:22:26.620 and many of them got repeated bailouts. 521 01:22:26.620 --> 01:22:43.620 So they're in the market, to be sure, and they have to make payments to market actors in order to acquire resources, but they don't have to meet a bottom line test in the same way that a commercial firm must. 522 01:22:43.620 --> 01:22:45.620 Yes, sir? 523 01:22:45.620 --> 01:22:57.620 I've heard people make statements that the Cold War resulted in a technology boom because of the competitive nature that existed between capitalism and socialism. 524 01:22:57.620 --> 01:23:10.620 I've heard criticism of this saying that you can't compare that to the existence that didn't exist in two capitalist structures where they compete and support one another. What are your thoughts on that? 525 01:23:45.620 --> 01:23:52.620 The Boeing 707 was actually designed as a tanker, and they pretty much just took out 526 01:24:15.620 --> 01:24:29.620 The 707 developed various techniques and materials and you can accumulate a gigantic list of examples. 527 01:24:29.620 --> 01:24:35.620 But again, the question is, this is what we see, what is unseen. 528 01:24:35.620 --> 01:24:39.620 If we hadn't been using resources in these purposes, 529 01:24:39.620 --> 01:24:52.620 What might we have produced with those same funds, those same resources aimed directly at producing something beneficial to the civilian economy? 530 01:24:52.620 --> 01:25:03.620 And just as a general principle, it makes sense to suppose that if you directly try to produce useful, profitable commercial items, 531 01:25:03.620 --> 01:25:28.620 I think the argument has always been used as a kind of propaganda to suggest that we don't have to worry that we're squandering resources when we use them on the military because it has all these great spillovers. 532 01:25:28.620 --> 01:25:45.620 Plus, all those engineers are being used to make war things instead of civil war? 533 01:25:58.620 --> 01:26:28.620 In some cases, if you look at, say, physicists, a majority of them, a big majority of them were working in the military and whenever there's a big military cutback, we'd find these highly skilled scientists and engineers being thrown in sometimes into work that seemed way below their level of training and preparation and often was, but you know, there's not that much demand for physicists outside the world of military 534 01:26:28.620 --> 01:26:34.820 R&D. Big percentage of like college students in America who are in engineering 535 01:26:34.820 --> 01:26:42.180 and science who are not of foreign descent are in ROTC. Yeah. Big percentage. 536 01:26:42.180 --> 01:26:50.180 I can understand that. When you go to the physics department or any department in the state, a lot of foreign students, most of them now, but the ones who are Americans, a lot of them are in ROTC. 537 01:26:50.180 --> 01:26:58.180 Yes sir. Also the prices of things, you can see how they've been really manipulated around, like what price it was back then. 538 01:26:58.180 --> 01:27:05.180 They had a contract for a thousand, maybe it was Hebron's, and a million dollars each. 539 01:27:05.180 --> 01:27:12.180 And within three years they was doing all kinds of funny things. It was the same thousand, but now it's three million dollars each. 540 01:27:12.180 --> 01:27:37.180 The airplane cost $350,000 thanks to the airplane. The next thing you know, it's being replaced by a $1 million airplane from $350,000 to $1 million. Then it was $8 million, and then it was, I think, within just something like 20 years, it had gone from the $340,000 thing to $25 million. 541 01:27:42.180 --> 01:27:48.180 The unit cost is when they have a stretch out. 542 01:27:48.180 --> 01:27:57.180 Normally when they plan these weapons programs, they'll plan to produce a certain number of units over a certain number of years. 543 01:27:57.180 --> 01:28:06.180 And then if Congress, in its wisdom, gets involved and sees the end of the production run looming and the closure of the plant, 544 01:28:06.180 --> 01:28:15.940 They are in Long Island. They may micromanage the defense budget to provide that Grumman 545 01:28:15.940 --> 01:28:24.420 should produce another 12 A7s this year. I know about that airplane in particular because 546 01:28:24.420 --> 01:28:33.500 I studied it for an article I wrote. They go on producing a handful of items on a production 547 01:29:03.500 --> 01:29:13.500 And this is just another aspect of the waste that Congress injects into what is already a wasteful process. 548 01:29:16.500 --> 01:29:19.500 Very well. Thank you very much.