Booknotes

Mr. WILLIAM GREIDER (Author, "Fortress America"): Yeah. Well, this book is going to try to gently prod some lines to light up. But he's right, of course. We're in a peacetime where the Cold War ended, after 40 or 50 years of national struggle, and I think it's quite natural that people don't want to think about it anymore. They think that the armed forces is a bit smaller than it used to be. The defense budgets fell some. There were a lot of layoffs and consolidations in the defense industry. What's the problem? And what I'm trying to do, as you know, is describe the crisis now within the military establishment, and it involves all elements of that.

Mr. GREIDER: Oh, it's kind of a nostalgic reference to the--the mobilization that really began in World War II and fell a little bit and then took off again with the Cold War and has continued to this day. And we have a history in this country of demobilizing after great wars. World War II was the exception, and we are still pretty much poised for the big one, even though we use different words to describe our national defense system now. I think that's not--I think that's a huge mistake, and I--I really think it's a--it's such a difficult problem that everybody has evaded it for the last eight, 10 years.

Mr. GREIDER: I--I guess I did, I don't know, half a dozen military bases, including sailing for a day on the USS Arleigh Burke out off Norfolk, Virginia. I went to a--a bunch of factories, many of them rather gloomy now. Even though they're still operating, they have acres of empty space. And I made the rounds of people like Senator McCain and others in and out of the military, who are really trying to force a debate on this subject. And they have been deeply frustrated for lots of reasons. They don't all agree on what ought to happen next to the military institution, but they all see pretty much the same collision that I outline in this book, and that is despite the downsizing, we have ambitions that don't begin to match a budget of $260 billion.

As a result, in recent years, in order not to give up on this fighter plane or that ship or the size in this service vs. other services, the Pentagon has had to whack here and there, not very systematically: cut a little bit of the personnel, cut a little bit of training and operations. In other words, take some money from the prosaic daily functioning necessities of a--of a--of a force that's ready to fight and put them in the account for the next weapons system or this or that. It--it--I think of it as a--as a--as somebody with a disease that's really consuming its own body. And I--and believe me, if you talk to people in the ranks, from the--from the privates and seamen all the way to the generals and admirals, they know this is true. They--for lots of reasons, they can't very well stand in broad daylight and announce it, but it surfaced this year in the budget compromise, and--and I think most people are not aware of this.

The defense budget was increased this year by a substantial chunk, by $8 billion, in so-called emergency spending. They busted the budget caps. And the reason they did that is because this fall, for the first time, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before a Senate hearing, acknowledged the readiness problem. And everybody said, `Oh, my goodness, we didn't know this was the situa'--the readiness problem is you've got all these fighting forces with all of this brilliant high-tech equipment, and they're not either trained or manned up to the level of--of operational readiness. So the specter of a hollow Army again surfaces before us. I think that's a wild exaggeration, but it's not--it's a real problem.

Mr. GREIDER: No, I--no. You know, I've done a lot of military reporting over the years, but not, say, in the last 10 or 15 years. And going to Ft. Hood, Texas, or Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada and all these other places was kind of eye-opening for me because the services--maybe from--maybe it's a hangover from Vietnam. I don't know quite where it came from, but they're really open and cooperative and just, you know, take you to where you want to go with a minimum of fuss and questioning. And--and--and, in fact, pretty much the same thing is true in the defense industry. Now they don't open the drawer and show you their secret plans, but I went to a number of factories and--and--and I like that very much.

Mr. GREIDER: It's in Killeen, Texas, hill country of Texas.

Mr. GREIDER: Gosh, how did I get there? I flew to Dallas, I guess, and--or--or Houston. I can't remember. No, I flew to Austin, I guess, and drove west from there.

Mr. GREIDER: I guess I got a little flight into Killeen. It's a small town, which is like a lot of military towns, very dependent on the base. But, you know, Ft. Hood, one of the officers there said, is a--is--it generates about $2 billion in economic activity between employment and contracts and so forth, and then that makes it the largest corporation in Texas.

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah. And--and--and...

Mr. GREIDER: ...I went there mainly because it's the--it's the central armor f--base for the US Army, and people had told me I ought to go see it for myself because the motor pool there is the largest assembly of track vehicles: tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, M1 tanks, Humvees, trucks, tanks, etc. And I had the experience of driving down this motor pool with a sergeant, very slowly, and he's telling me what I'm seeing behind the fences--this incredible array of armament. And it went on for five and a half miles. I saw something like 2,500 fighting vehicles, like tanks and...

Mr. GREIDER: Bradley is a--is a sort of--it's a--both a personnel carrier and a guy--a squad gets in the back, but it also has a cannon on it that can be highly destructive.

Mr. GREIDER: Yes, tracks. And then--and then the--the M12A tank, as it's now called, is--is--is--actually, looks kind of sleek for a tank. It's--it's not the old tanks that you used to know. It's--it's low sitting and--and very fast for a tank and extremely accurate at a long distance because it's electronically advanced and so forth and so on.

Mr. GREIDER: General Omar Bradley. Who else?

Mr. GREIDER: I'm sorry, it's not the--the Bradley is--is after Bradley. The--the Abrams M1 tank is named after General Creighton Abrams, who--who was a commander in Vietnam. But--but, actually, I think people forgot he was a great young armor commander in World War II. That's where he first made his reputation in the Army.

Mr. GREIDER: Now you're sticking me with all these numbers. I don't know. What? Fifty thousand, 60,000? I for--I forget off the top of my head. It's the biggest Army post in--and I think it's actually the biggest military installation in terms of people in the country.

Mr. GREIDER: I talked to people. I--I mean, one of the purposes of going to these places was not the hardware, but to get--just get a kind of daily non-newsworthy feeling of what it's like inside the services now and ran into there, as I did elsewhere, this very contradictory human story.

On one level, you watch these, not just officers, but young kids, they seem to me, doing really intensely technical work with weapons and also control systems and so forth. On the other hand, you hear this faint subtext of frustration, a little uncertainty about where things are going. They've been squeezed, in various ways, by the--by the declining defense budget and their commitments. And wh--and--and you sort of get a sense of this incredible arsenal we have, which is overabundant. I think the Army has something like 10,000 or 11,000 tanks, and only a fifth of them are actually deployed because, among other things, it is very expensive to operate a tank, even in training. And they told me at Ft. Hood to operate an M1 tank in--in training mode, which is out in the--this huge prairie landscape, where they do mock battles and so forth, I think it costs $2,000 an hour.

Mr. GREIDER: Oh, it's less than two, I think. I--one and a half miles to the gallon. And there's also a high maintenance cost. They actually have a vehicle--and I'll forget the name of it--that you--you put the tank on this flatbed truck and drive it out to the field, where it will be deployed because just the mere cost of driving one of those things over miles of--of road and terrain takes its own toll in cost.

Now one of the things I discovered at Ft. Hood, which--which became a kind of metaphor for the book, is that faced with this dilemma--strinking budget, extraordinary costs built in to maintaining this system at high levels of readiness--they decided to opt for simulators. And the title of that chapter is "The Virtual Tank." And you--the--Lockheed Martin and some other contractors built these huge boxes, about the size of this room almost, that--that are like a Bradley fighting vehicle or a M1 tank and some others, and the crew climbs into this box, and inside it's like a--a marvelously advanced video game.

You've got a screen up in the cab, where you see the terrain ahead of you, and another screen that shows you the map of the battlefield and where the enemy tanks are and so forth, and you go through all of the motions. Now I, frankly, having talked to lots of people in the service, have my doubts about whether sitting in that box is quite the same experience as actually training on a tank. But the reason they're doing it is it's--is they're trying to save money.

As they're showing me through this training center, which is filled with, I don't know, 40 or 50 of these sim--huge simulators, I go into the--to the computer room, where the guys are keyboarding in codes for the battle, and one of the operators says to me, `When we're actually doing this, we're--we're configuring this to fight the Soviet tank strategy because that's what we know, and that's what--that's what we train people on.' And I observed that, `Well, the Soviet Union no longer exists. Why are you still using this?' And the--one of the contract managers says, `Well, it costs a lot of money to change it now. We--we started this thing nine years ago, and we just got 'em ready to use. Why should we--why should we spend a lot more money redesigning it when, hell, we don't know who the enemy is anymore?' And I--I mean, he said this quite candidly and innocently. But it seems to me, that's a pretty good portrait of the dilemma.

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah.

Mr. GREIDER: Sure.

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah.

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah. I mean, if somebody says, `We--we can't get into that,' you--you don't get into it. When I was at Nellis Air Force Base following the red flag exercises, which are these live flight training exercises mainly for fighter pilots in F-15s, F-16s, you can't get up in the air with those guys. I mean, maybe if you were somebody really important, they would take you along, but, basically, you watched the--you--you watched the battle on a--on a--on a bunch of video screens and maps with--along with a lot of other Air Force people. And I think I probably bumped into some questions there that--about air space and stuff that they didn't want to talk about. But I--I--I was--I was--just because I hadn't done military reporting in a while, I was--I was pleasantly surprised at the directness and openness of the services.

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah, sure.

Mr. GREIDER: Nevada.

Mr. GREIDER: Southern Las--Las Vegas, Nevada.

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah.

Mr. GREIDER: The base itself is the--about the size of the state of Connecticut. And they have, at the north half of the base, a--basically, a battle zone where they--they'll fly American planes--us--our guys, which they call--always call the Blue Team in the services against a Red Team coming from the west, mostly flying US planes, too, but they'll be electronically coded as the bad guys. And they--and you could watch all this on a big video battle map.

Well, I--I had a captain next to me explaining the--the cross talk. You could hear the pilots saying, `I'm'--there's a wonderful moment when they can--they score this--this thing very--'cause it's--it's really training the pilots, you know, to enter in what is probably as close to the real thing as you can create, how to--how to react to an enemy force. And you've got electronic surveillance planes flying in. You've got AWACS. You've got a couple of transports. You've got the whole picture. So they're really judging the tactical skills of those guys in the planes.

And when the--when the--when the Red Team hits you with an electronic signal, they have a little panel of judges who say, `You're--you're--you're gone, and get off of the field,' and you're suppo--have to go up to a higher altitude and fly home. And I heard this wonderful back and forth as--I can't remember the numbers, but it said the--the code name for that plane saying, you know, `147, you're dead.' They didn't say dead. I can't remember the word--the phrase they use, but, `You're hit,' and there was this silence. And they said, `You're hit.' `I know I'm hit. I'm coming'--you could see this guy, who'd probably flown all the way from New Mexico or even South Carolina to participate in this exercise, and he was out in five minutes.

But this, too--I--I mean, they've--they've spent 20, 30 years developing this training system. It is very expensive. And--and I'm not criticizing the Air Force for doing that. That's what they're supposed to do, to keep these guys keyed. But, meanwhile, you talk to the guys on the ground, crewmen and pilots, and they have this incredible life now where they may not be at Nellis, they may be at New Mexico or many--Tinker, where--any--any number of different air bases, but they are rotating in and out of the Gulf, and they're rotating in and out of Bosnia and other of these short-term--supposedly short-term, temporary, overseas assignments with a--with a frequency that's quite extraordinary.

That puts enormous strain on people, partly just the coming and going and uncertainty of it, but on families. It's not quite what they signed up for, even as pilots, because a--a number of them said to me, `You know, we go over Iraq and we fly the no--we do a kind of patrol over those non--no-fly zones. I was trained as a fighter pilot. You're going 500 miles an hour. This is like driving a bus, by comparison, and it really isn't training me as a fighter pilot to do that.' A lot of pilots are getting out now. That's part of a readi--that's probably the most-visible dimension of the readiness problem.

Mr. GREIDER: Well, if--both.

Mr. GREIDER: The F-14 is being--is--is the Navy, and the F-15, F-16 is Air Force. They're--I mean, that's--leads to another dimension of the problem. That's--the Pentagon is altogether now preparing to build three new fighter planes: the F-18AE--I might get the designation wrong--which will replace the F-14, which I think probably has the most justification because the F-14 is old and they're not building any more. And the...

Mr. GREIDER: Oh, boy. I should have brought my list. It--it's probably--I'm--I'm going to guess. I think it's probably $120 million each, something like that. The F-22, I know, is now up to $180 million per plane.

Mr. GREIDER: The F-22 is going to replace the Air Force F-15 fighter plane. It is being built in Georgia by Lockheed Martin. They've rolled out the first model. The Air Force intends to buy 300 and--I--I forget the number, but it's going to pay $180 million for a--a plane that'll--that'll produce--that--a total cost of something like $340 billion over many years, of course.

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah.

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah. Well, what happens is there are two causes here. One is you stretch out production, and what--and what the--the other thing the Pentagon had been doing in the last five years is stretching out the production schedule and reducing the numbers of the total buy. That has the effect of raising the per-plane cost because you're--you're making--you've built--you've paid the heavy up-front costs, the design costs, the engineering costs. You--you've reconfigured a factory to build these things, and now you're going to produce fewer of them, and you're going to take it over a longer period of time. And as any manufacturer will tell you, that raises your per-unit cost.

Plus, the general downsizing of production, defense procurement, adds unwanted, unneeded overhead to the cost of everything you're still producing, which is another component of my story in this collision. And this is, again, not something that is unknown in the Pentagon, but they don't know quite what to do about it as long as they want to build all this stuff.

So you're--you're in this--this money squeeze that is only going to get worse unless people step back and say, `Wait a minute. We need a general reconfiguration, not only of the size, but of the purpose of our military forces. And--and we need to reconsider, not all, but many of these new generations of weapons system,' almost all of which, after all, were conceived in the Cold War in an utterly different situation. And--and--and we could then get a defense budget that--that can meet what we really need.

Mr. GREIDER: Oh, sure. We have a lot of readers in the--the military. I forget what the numbers are, but...

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah, I--look, I was going down to the engine room in the USA--USS Arleigh Burke, a destroyer sailing around in the Atlantic off Virginia.

Mr. GREIDER: Arleigh Burke was a great admiral in World War II and, later, chief of staff of the Navy. Was he chairman of the Joint Chiefs? I--maybe. The chief in the engine room announces...

Mr. GREIDER: ...that he has the reporter from Rolling Stone present, and everybody sort of quickened their interest at that point.

Mr. GREIDER: I have had--I've worked for Rolling Stone longer than any other publication. As you know, I was at The Washington Post for about the same amount of time, 15 years. I left The Post in the early '80s partly to do a midlife correction and changeover, which led to writing a series of books and writing to this much younger audience, much less influential, theoretically, than the audience of The Washington--that reads The Washington Post.

On the the other hand, it was very simulating for me, and I think it had a very sort of re--reinvigorating impact on me, partly 'cause I was talking to an audience still making up their minds about a lot of things, maybe not as well informed as--as the readers of The Post might be since they're in Washington, DC, but--and more contentious with what I have to say about issues than--than the average newspaper reader might be.

Mr. GREIDER: 'Cause you hear from them.

Mr. GREIDER: Letters, phone calls. People stop me in the street. I mean, it's--and a lot of it is positive, and a lot of it is, `You're full of it.'

Mr. GREIDER: Well, I wrote a piece about Newt Gingrich, which...

Mr. GREIDER: ...upset some folks.

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah.

Mr. GREIDER: Well, I said that, you know, the Monica--the pre-election obsession with Monica and Clinton's difficulties obscured this other scandal, which is the speaker of the House. And it was really a portrait of--of, I would say, as I said in the piece, Gingrich's failure as speaker. And I don't mean that ideologically. I mean it as his failure to build a working majority that could really govern in the House of Representatives. And some people would say, well, that wasn't his fault or that it was--it's too complicated or his margin was too thin. But the fact is I think you saw in the election results what I was talking about.

Mr. GREIDER: No. I talked to a lot of Republicans, though, many of whom wish to remain anonymous, as you would expect, and I'm talking about House members; others who would go on the record, at least to a limited way. But it was very clear--and some of the reporting was back in the summer--they--they--that many of them were burned out on him. And that's not a--whether they were moderates or--or right-wingers, they all had similar complaints about his leadership, including his lack of honesty to them personally. And they just wanted him to go away, and they didn't know quite how to achieve that. Th--he had told them or spread the word in the House caucus that he was going to resign probably sometime in 1999 and run for president, and so a number, especially of the--of the--what I think of as the hard-right, newer members, took that as a signal that, `OK, keep your mouth shut. Get off his back. He'll go away.' And, well, we'll see whether that's happening or not.

Mr. GREIDER: I grew up in a suburb of Cincinnati called Wyoming, Ohio, a very lovely, beautiful town.

Mr. GREIDER: My father was a--a chemist, an inventor, worked for a manufacturing company, died 10 years ago and I--at 90--age 94, but--and had a--he was just a--a wonderful, wise, gentle, serious person. My mother's still alive. She's in a nursing home, a--alas, in Ohio, in not very good shape. And she was also really I want to say intellectual, but that's not how they were. They--they--they were--they loved the world and experienced it in lots of different ways, whether that was gardening or reading books or whatever. And that was sort of the--I was the youngest of four kids, and everybody spoiled me, which I'm grateful for and--and loved me. And--and they were all--they were--they are real smart, engaged people. So I--I grew up in this very stimulating and some--my wife would say voluble family.

Mr. GREIDER: Greider is, in its origin, Swiss Mennonite. I happen to know this, though, because in--in the last 20 years I've--I've--well, partly because my name appears in print, I hear from other Greiders, and some of them have done their homework on the genealogy. And 20 years ago a--a--an engineer at NASA, whose wife was a Greider, filled in the blanks for me, which was of two brothers who came to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in the--1720 and built a little house by the Conestoga River. And from that--I mean, there were other Greiders coming in. And the--these were Swiss Mennonites who, as you know, were radical Christians, who were literally driven out of Switzerland by the Calvinists, who regarded them as beyond the fringe, settled i--for--in Germany for a couple of generations and then immigrated to William Penn's colony in Pennsylvania.

And what--and what I've always loved about this story is that eight or 10 generations later my grandfather, who--William Greider, William Henry Greider, whom I'm named after, was living in poverty on a small farm in Indiana. He still could speak a little German, but the--the religion was pretty much gone. And his father, to be blunt about it, my great-grandfather, was a--not a very nice guy. And he took my grandfather and--and his brother out of school when they were six or seven and put them to work on the farm, said, `You don't need an education,' and `What--what would you need that for?'

And my grandfather ran away from home at a very young age. He ran away first when he was 11 or 12, and then--and they caught him and brought him back and he ran away again, went to the Midwest and worked on farms across the Midwest, no--uneducated, settled in Kansas, finished high school, went to college, became a schoolteacher himself. And--and his whole life was sort of looking over the next hill and seeing--seeing what was there, just for the fun of seeing what was there. And I--for a lot of years I thought of hi--he's my model. I mean, he's the guy I got all this curiosity from. Now--now I--I think I got it from--from all of them, my mother and father as well.

Mr. GREIDER: I left when I was a teen-ager to go to college, Princeton University in New Jersey, which was partly an expression of, you know, `I want to see what it's like outside the Midwest.' And...

Mr. GREIDER: Sort of flukish, actually. I mean, I--I always thought I'd wind up somewhere in the Midwest. And I thought, `Well, there--there's a friend of mine in the same high school class, a very small high school, applying to Princeton.' I thought, `Well, if he can get in, I could get in,' and so I sent in my papers. My advisers thought it was a--a waste of time, but I did get in and got a good education there. I mean, I got more than a good education there, in spite of myself, I emphasis. So...

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah.

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah, and--well, Stockman--David and--and me...

Mr. GREIDER: He's living in Greenwich, Connecticut. He's working for, I think, still the Blackstone Group, which is Pete Peterson's investment house in New York. Well, I haven't talked to him in a couple of years. David was a young congressman from Michigan when I first met him, and I saw some stuff he had written in Commentary or the Public Interest, one of the conservative journals, and he was--I thought, `Gee, here's a congressman who thinks for himself.' And although he and I disagreed on a lot, we started talking to each other, and I got him into the Outlook section when I was editing that for The Post. That led to our relationship, which was so controversial and produced the series and--and fin--eventually a book called "The Education of David Stockman and Other Americans."

He was then budget director for Ronald Reagan. We had a private, off-the-record lunch--or breakfast, rather, every--almost every Saturday morning for the first six, nine months of the Reagan years, and he told me candidly that, `This thing isn't working.' That--that instead of producing this sort of steady state growth that--that Reagan and others were predicting, and the public certainly wanted, the tax cuts, plus doubling the defense budget were going to produce `a sea of huge deficits as far as the eye can see,' as David put it.

When that was published in The Atlantic in the fall, it--it provoked a firestorm and--of--and--and it was--it was educational for me on many levels, in--in--especially--and I think for Stockman, that we were insiders in a way. I was a--an assistant managing editor at The Post then, and I was taking the material from these look--breakfasts and feeding it to different reporters on the national staff. And we were actually writing stories--albeit attributed to anonymous sources mostly--that told this story through the year. But putting it altogether, and particularly to the broader audience across the country, was a big shock because they had a certain set of expectations, which they'd been led to believe by Washington, and this piece was saying, `The guy who designed this thing, says it ain't working.' So that was my 15 minutes of celebrity notoriety.

Mr. GREIDER: Well, it quadrupled the--the national debt. My argument, which I made, actually, in a subsequent--my next book, which was "The Federal Reserve," and we'll get to that, but Paul Volcker and the Federal Reserve were launching a process, which is really finally completed, which is disinflation. The--the inflation rate in this country was running 8 percent to 10 percent, sometimes even higher, 20--al--nearly 20 years ago. And in order to do that, they've got to keep interest rates high, higher than normal, and ratchet out the inflation and a little bit each year. The presence of huge deficits, $200 billion, $300 billion a year deficits be--out of the--growing out of the Reagan program, made that job a lot harder, and I would say, a lot bloodier than it--than it had to be.

Now had Reagan people--I'm not sure--I think David Stockman would certainly agree with me up to that point. Some people would say, to give the other side its due, the--the deficits were stimulus, the tax cuts helped people weather the--the process of disinflation. I don't--I think that's wrong. I mean, I think it injured certain people: home buyers and industrial workers. We had huge downsi--deindustrialization, really, through the '80s because of that collision between monetary policy and fiscal policy. I mean, there are lots of--there are lots of things to argue still over about that history, but that was the beginning point.

Mr. GREIDER: The message is: We've got to have a big debate in this country, not just at the expert level, but I think at the--at the popular level; a debate that ordinary people can understand about what is it we want and need in a military institution?

Mr. GREIDER: I think it's one--it's 1.5 million, going down to 1.4 million.

Mr. GREIDER: Two to 2.1 in the '80s.

Mr. GREIDER: There--they were--Reagan's goal, as you recall, was a--What?--What?--a 600-ship Navy, and it's now down to, I think, 350. Maybe even lower than that.

Mr. GREIDER: The Arleigh Burke?

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah. No, it's a new--it's a new sort of high-tech, missile-loaded destroyer. It has 90 medium-range missiles on it.

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah. Tomahawks, and a bunch of others. The Tomahawks are the great big ones. These are--these are like cruise missiles. And there's a--a--the center of the ship has got these tubes with this incredible arsenal. And they've got--got something like 20 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers that they built in recent years, and they want to build another dozen or so.

Mr. GREIDER: Eight hundred and fifty million, I think, each. I mean, I'm conflicted on this, because when you see this stuff up close, and you--and you scurry around the--the--the--the runways and up and down the ladders, and you talk to the people operating it, particularly the young people doing extraordinarily difficult high-tech jobs, I think you would be inhuman not to be impressed by that, and it just takes your breath away sometimes.

On the other hand, you--you have to pull back and ask, `Well, to what end? What is--what exactly do we need all this for,' and especially, `What do we need more for, given that there--there--hey, there's no major enemy anymore.' And--and you--you really have to strain the imagination to--to believe in the Pentagon's rationale, which is that, `Well, we're preparing for two regional wars at once, plus assorted expeditionary missions like...

Mr. GREIDER: ...Bosnia or whatever.'

Mr. GREIDER: Well, it started with--in the Bush administration--as a kind of quickie reconfiguration of, `OK, the Cold War's over. What are we--what are we doing now?' It was--Les Aspin came in as defense secretary and did his so-called bottom-up review, which I think was not a bottom-up review at all, but it was a kind of search for rationales to justify what you already have, plus a modest cut in the budget. And he said, I think, two and a half wars, plus assorted other goodies. And Bill Cohen, the present secretary of defense, dropped out the half, so--so we're now down to two wars. But believe me, if you talk to military thinkers--and I'm talking all three services and--and think tank types--they know this is just a cover, and they have various arguments about rethinking the--the--the military establishment in a way that would be more rational and probably smaller. Most of them have variation--varying plans which would, first of all, cancel a lot of the weapons systems in the pipeline.

Mr. GREIDER: Well, I w--I mean, depends on who you talk to, but John McCain would cancel the F-22, for instance, and his point--he would cancel the new--there's a new class of attack submarines which the Navy is building. Don't ask me what the total cost is. I have a--I guess I didn't bring it--a l--a l--a sheet of--of sort of 10 obvious examples. That's one of them. We don't need a new class of attack submarines.

Mr. GREIDER: Five billion dollars each. They're building right now at Newport News, the shipyard at--on the corner of the Chesapeake Bay, the Ronald Reagan.

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah. And we have a fleet of--of, I think, 12 active aircraft carriers with--which form the core of a battle group that are in different parts of the world. Not all of those are at sea all the time, but y--you have to start with the--with the whole concept of--of: What exactly are these for? And you--you, obviously, need some of them, but do we need eight, 10 battle groups? And then do we need to replace all the ones we have now with an even bigger and more expensive version, which is the plan at present?

Mr. GREIDER: Oh, sure, including his own friends from the Navy. You know, as--as you know, he was a Navy pilot, hero in Vietnam, imprisoned in Hanoi for many years. And this is why I--I like him. I don't know whether I agree with all of his particulars or not, but I--it takes a lot of guts to stand up with that background as a US senator and say, `This is irrational, what we're doing now.' He also makes a huge complaint about the pork that hi--various of his colleagues stuff into the defense budget. But he should say, for instance, `We gotta go back to our overseas deployments and look at the list and reargue each one of them. Does this really make sense now? Does the level of commitment make sense?'

Second, he has a--a concept which I think makes just good sense. The readiness problem is--i--it requires this--keeping everybody tuned right to the--to the 100 percent level of--of readiness. That's the concept. It always has been. Why don't we have what he calls tiered readiness so that some fighting forces would be ready to go tomorrow and others would be training at a lesser level of preparedness, which means--which reduces your training costs, which reduces your maintenance costs, etc. He says you gotta make a choice. We've got these three new aircraft--fighter aircraft coming along which are gonna consume something like, I think, two-thirds of the--of the projected procurement budget. That's--that's nutty, you know? It's--just doesn't make sense.

Mr. GREIDER: Gotta c--he says, `You gotta choose one of those, make those kinds of tough choices.' Every time you make a choice like that, you're making somebody mad, not just in the Congress but in Texas or Georgia or California, or some of the other places where these things are made.

Mr. GREIDER: The joint strike fighter is--is, in theory, a unified fighter which all of the services will use. Now we went through this in the '60s in--you remember, with the--the McNamaras had the same dream and it didn't work.

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah, TFX. It's supposed to roll out in 2008 so that in theory, only in theory, that will displace the need to build more F-18s and F-22s. I mean--and it can spin it a while--a l--the wheel a bit more, I was at Ft. Worth, at Air Force plant four, which we taxpayers still own, where Lockheed Martin is still building a few F-16s totally for the foreign market, sells them to our--Taiwan or Latin America if it can and so forth. We--this factory is a mile long. It's extraordinary to see. It's like that motor pool at Ft. Hood. You--people ought to see it just to see what we built, starting in World War II. It was built in 1942. They're trying to keep that plant alive, even though it would make more sense to just close it down and eat the cost, and I mean we'd have to eat the cost of that. They're trying to keep it alive so these future projects will come in and--and the boom will begin again. I don't think anybody running a multinational company that makes cars or semiconductors or whatever would take that strategy, 'cause you're really--you're sort of making a hunch bet that the taxpayers will put up with this for five, 10, 20 years, and I--it's--it's not a good bet for anybody, really.

Mr. GREIDER: Because the Air Force doesn't wanna close it either. That's the short answer. The...

Mr. GREIDER: Well, they have costs associated with management, but yeah, it's...

Mr. GREIDER: ...it's our building. I--and I--and I--I make a further point Lockheed Martin, which is now the biggest defense manufacturer, after all the consolidations, has made a--a venture of privatizing other parts of government, like welfare reform. They wanna manage welfare systems in the state level and so forth. I ask the question: Why not privatize those defense facilities, manufacturing facilities? And they don't wanna talk about that.

I mean, we--w--I think the U--these--these mostly started--not all of them, but most of them started in World War II, and people who are old enough will remember there was a psychology that came out of Pearl Harbor that's still kind of buried in the American political psyche. We got caught flat-footed. We're not gonna let that happen again. So that in the--in this e--enormous and successful mobilization from World War II, we never really took it apart afterwards. Ft. Worth was building B-24s in 1942, turning them out one every hour at its peak. Then it moved from one plane to another throughout the Cold War years. It's been building F-16s for the last 20 years. At some point, you gotta ask the gut question: Are we really expecting a World War III? And I'm not talking about the alternative is disarmament. I'm talking about scoping down both the size and the kind of preparedness levels that we have been used to having for the last 30 or 40 years.

There's one other dimension to this, and you--you also hear this from military people with, again, very conflicting views. What's the next war gonna be like? Is it gonna be technological, information warfare? Is it gonna be biological weapons? Is it gonna be something--some version of terrorism? And as a congressman said to me not long ago, if the problem is terrorism, it's kind of hard to see how several hundred F-22s are gonna do much for us. Meanwhile, we're not really developing the kind of commitment and--and redesign of the forces to take on those other problems.

Mr. GREIDER: You know, I don't know the numbers off the top of my head. The--the situation is--is a kind of paradox because arms--international arms sales have fallen since the end of the Cold War, mainly because Russia is no longer selling much. And--but...

Mr. GREIDER: The US.

Mr. GREIDER: U--U--no, French and the Germans and--and some others are making fighter planes and tanks and other kinds of armaments. But the US portion of--of global sales, arms sales, has gone--it--it's now the leader. Russia used to be the leader.

Mr. GREIDER: Oh, yeah. I--I'm--I mean, I'm--I'm gonna guess $10 billion, $20 billion, maybe more.

Mr. GREIDER: Taiwan buys F-16s and--and the Middle East allies buy a lot of stuff, Saudis and so forth.

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah.

Mr. GREIDER: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Norman Augustine, the--the CEO of Lockheed Martin, was in Eastern Europe, in Hungary, Poland and other countries, promoting expansion of NATO and telling audiences of policy-makers in those countries, `We wanna sell you the airplanes and--and communications technology, which you will need to become members of--of NATO. And--and we'll make some joint ventures with you so that you can help build some of them.' I mean, this was months before the Congress approved NATO, but the--but the defense companies were actively pushing it. And I'm not arguing that that was the only net motive for--for expanding NATO, but it was really driven by--you got a shrinking market worldwide and everybody, not just the US, has too much capacity in their defense industries, and so they're all fighting quite furiously for the--for customers.

Mr. GREIDER: CEO of Lockheed Martin.

Mr. GREIDER: It's number one, Boeing is number two and I think Raytheon, having swallowed Hughes Electronics, is number three. And that's...

Mr. GREIDER: And there are a couple of--sort of down the ro--the--the--the ladder, you've got General Dynamics and Northrop and a couple of others of substantial size, but those three are now astride basically the whole--the entire industry.

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah.

Mr. GREIDER: I don't know the answer to that.

Mr. GREIDER: I would guess not. I mean--I mean, I know some people thought that would be--would be--I think it would be difficult politics to make that happen bec--just because of the--the rivalries.

Mr. GREIDER: That's a great question. General Eisenhower, who--who led the--the Allied victory in Europe in World War II, was really the only president since World War II who stood up to what he dubbed `the military industrial complex.' He--he was a general, five-star, he was a conservative Republican, and yet, because he had been in the Pentagon himself, he could talk back to admirals and generals. So if you look at the defense budgets through his years, they were quite moderate in their growth rate, even though the Cold War was heating up, compared to all those who followed and preceded.

I think if we had a General Eisenhower right now, he would--he would pull the veil back on a lot of the arguments I'm making. I don't know how he would look at the world today, although he was a real internationalist, but I think he would surely agree that this structure of forces now and the money committed to various weapons systems and w--and the internal starvation going on for certain kinds of functions is wrong. And--and--and it really requires a kind of wholesale rethinking from the bottom up. There--th--you know, there are obvious reasons why that doesn't happen.

The three services are all being squeezed in different ways, and so they're not gonna lead the charge, which might end up with even more defense cuts, right? The political component wants to hang onto jobs and economic activity of bases as long as it can. We--we--we saved real money with a couple of rounds of base closings. Secretary Cohen and President Clinton proposed another round or two. The Congress said no. Now that--in fairness, that's partly because they don't trust Clinton to keep--keep out of it--the politics of it.

Mr. GREIDER: Twice--twice a month. It's every two weeks.

Mr. GREIDER: You're killing me with these numbers. Two billion, I think.

Mr. GREIDER: No, no, two million.

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah, yeah. And it's--they claim a--a sort of pass-along readership, which I think is authentic, of--of two of three times that. Because a lot of the readers are--are very young--college students, for instance--and they'll--it'll move around the dorm and have a long shelf life.

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah.

Mr. GREIDER: Some of them will read it. I'll tell you...

Mr. GREIDER: Oh, yeah. Th--there were three--a series of three by the same title, Fortress America, and this book is based on that. This book is expanding on those series, and I've added some chapters. But the core of this project was Jann Wenner. He's editor and publisher of--of Rolling Stone, and he and I, quite by accident, raised the subject for--as a project at--at the same time, and I--and w--and we didn't quite know what we would find when I tramped around a lot of military bases, but I think we shared the gut feeling that this country is evading this. We're not really asking the big questions about it. Let's--let's see what's there, for starters. And I was gonna focus, because of my reporting background, primarily on the defense industry. And he said, `No, you need to make it much broader than that and really do the services as well, and the future.' And so we wound up with the--with--with the three long--very long pieces, and I--you may have read in the acknowledgments I--I proudly note that I can't think of another popular magazine of that size that would devote those kind of resources to--to--to such a project. Because it's not a secret that the American public isn't up in the front of their chairs on this issue.

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah.

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah. He...

Mr. GREIDER: He did. It took me--it took a lot of work to get an interview with him and he...

Mr. GREIDER: The--the satellites--deals with China, that's right.

Mr. GREIDER: Yeah.

Mr. GREIDER: Right, yeah. And where is Armstrong now? AT&T.

Mr. GREIDER: I went--I wanted to interview Bernard Schwartz because he was the--really, the leader in the consolidation chase. They--this other paradox which I describe is the defense industry collectively figured out how to--how to have rising profits and rising stock prices even as their marketplace--that is, defense procurement--shrunk drastically. And it's a complicated story of how they do th--did that, but that's what happened in the '90s. And--and Schwartz figured it out first and started--instead of--instead of closing factories and shrinking, he started buying other defense companies from Ford and IBM and lots of other defense suppliers. As he did that, he would--he would consolidate the overhead costs and the stock market--Wall Street would see that his bottom line was getting better, not worse, and his stock price went like that. He's--he--in the--he--in the end, he got gobbled up in the consolidation process 'cause Loral's defense business, which was its biggest portion, got picked up by Lockheed Martin for, I think, $9 billion or so. And he, for a time, for briefly, was a kind of co-executive with Norm Augustine, but it didn't work out, so he just ta--he's in the communications business now.

He--it's become scandalous since I interviewed him because he's the largest contributor to the Democratic Party and the accusation--and I frankly don't know if it's fair or not--the accusation is that he--he is--his political influence persuaded the Clinton administration to let him sell this satellite technology to China for its--launching its satellites. Actually, as you know, Hughes and Michael Armstrong were there first, and they were beating up on the Clinton administration for the same permission. I think--I don't--I don't demonize China. I think China is trying to do what anybody would try to do in the industrial race, which is to get as much technology as they can from--especially from us. But the effect of that business had--ha--may have been profound in South Asia, where India says to itself and its diplomats have said this publicly, `The United States is selling this very advanced missile stuff to China. And China, in turn, is selling what we think is nuclear technology to--to our neighbor Pakistan.'

Now--`And this makes us very nervous.' So they set off a--a nuclear test bomb to demonstrate that, you know, `We ain't gonna be intimidated by you guys.' And then Pakistan's--you see what I mean? There's a--the arms business, although the companies like to deny it or shrug it off, it inevitably has these ripples of--of political unrest. You may be selling something to a perfectly innocent and--and trusted ally, but it does something to how all of that nation's neighbors feel about things and may, in turn, lead to more sales and more proliferation.

Mr. GREIDER: Well, I've--if this economic crisis gets over, I wanna try to write a book for Simon & Schuster on the economy beyond--beyond the present era, which I think is coming to an end. You know, if you think of my books I wrote, "Secrets of the Temple," which was published 10, 12 years ago, "How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country," which really, I hope, I think, did demystify the Federal Reserve for ordinary people to understand, and the argument in that book was the bond market and the financial market have really taken control of American politics. That was part of a story which is still unfolding. My last book, "One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism"--I think it's fair to say, was--was mildly prophetic because it described the instabilities and the--and the--the sort of insane dynamics that were leading to our present crisis. I hope my next book will be much more placid and optimistic.

Mr. GREIDER: Thank you.