
          Daddy's Missile: Shaping the South's Pre-war Economy
          By Schlesinger, TomTom Schlesinger
          Vol. 4, No. 4, 1982, pp. 1-2, 23-30
          
          In mid-May 1982, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and
Harvard's Center for Science and International Affairs co-sponsored a
meeting about the dangers of prospective budget cuts. "As other,
non-military, government spending is reduced," wrote the conference
organizers, "and deficits run high, the proposed increases in military
spending are beginning to face resistance. The cuts that may result
may be of the sort that hamper long-term political policies designed
to strengthen the defense industrial base." Convened by Cambridge
lawyer Antonia Chayes, Undersecretary of the Air Force during the
Carter Administration, and featuring representatives from the
Pentagon, academic, corporate and political communities, the Harvard
conference tried to outmaneuver the resistance by breathing life into
a lie.
          Already, that lie--the assertion that America's defense industrial
base is "eroding" and in desperate need of money, deregulation and
other forms of resuscitation in order to be war-ready--had been
promoted relentlessly for the last two years by a bloc of
military-industrial partners. Appreciating Harvard's justly famous
capacity for organizing consensus among elites, the industrial
mobilization lobby humbly described its gathering as an attempt to
"arrive at the boundaries within which reasonable people can be
expected to disagree." 1
          While the American Academy's declaration of war concluded with a
scheduled "sherry and sandwich on the run," the state of North
Carolina was serving barbecue at a related military-industrial
get-together on the campus of North Carolina State University. The
Raleigh conference highlighted Governor Jim Hunt's celebration of
Small Business Week by bringing together contract office-

ers from the
Defense Department and state military installations, buyers from major
defense contractors and a raft of small business owners eager to learn
more about--if not jump into--the only part of the economy that's
expanding. The Raleigh conference also disproved the lie being
fashioned at Harvard that day. Not that the conference's agenda
included truth-telling, it just provided a backdrop for some truth to
out. But first we need to fathom the depth and origins of the lie.
          Since 1979, elements of the Department of Defense and Congress have
portrayed America's defense industries as abandoned by small business
suppliers, desperately short of machine shops and titanium forges,
critically lacking a future supply of engineering talent and skilled
labor, over-reliant on "unpredictable" foreign sources for hard goods
and strategic minerals and generally unable to mobilize. "Industrial
preparedness" issues have been magnified by the Defense Science Board
(a Pentagon-directed team of executives from major war contractors),
the House Armed Services Committee, the Senate Small Business
Committee and mounting publicity from such beacons of corporate
liberalism as Business Week, whose shrill and
misleading "Why We Can't Rearm Fast," published in early 1980, remains
a movement landmark.
          Like all good, heavily invested lies, this one contains some
half-truths. America's military does rely on
U.S. transnationals like Texas Instruments which have exported their
military production facilities at a dizzying pace. Hence the Pentagon
does have a "foreign" producer problem--at least eighty-five percent
of all military semiconductors, for example, are made in Southeast
Asia by the rabidly anti-union Texas Instruments and other U.S. firms
which steadfastly refuse to repatriate their manufacturing
facilities. 2
          The half-truths and genuine whoppers animating the industrial
preparedness movement rest upon the pursuit of more fundamental
questions: prepare for what? mobilize for what? The answer reveals a
shift in American strategic thinking. Throughout most of the 1970's,
military spending was guided by the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War and
lessons gleaned from other recent conflicts. Military scenarists
assumed that the next war would be a short one, with the antagonists
quickly spending their war resources and just as quickly devastating
the other side's In the late 1970's, however, segments of the defense
establishment began to question the "short war" assumption.
          On the day after Christmas in 1979, a Wall Street
Journal essay elaborated: "Because of budget stringencies over
many years, our military stockpiles today could support a major
conventional war for only a couple of months or so. This puts our
planners in a quandary: either they have to assume a short war or
envisage fighting a war without supplies. Understandably they choose
to 'plan a short war.'"
          The writer of that essay was Fred C. Ikle, head of the Arms Control
and Disarmament Agency during the Ford administration and a prominent
member of the Committee for the Present Danger. Today, the Swiss-born
Ikle is Caspar Weinberger's Undersecretary for Policy, one of the
half-dozen most senior positions at the Pentagon. Once in power, Ikle,
Weinberger and company extended their supposition about the industrial
base's inability to refight World War II. They tethered U.S. military
policy to the expectation of protracted conventional war. The
Pentagon's 1970's preparations to fight one-and-a-half wars turned to
a 1980's vision of unparalleled destruction in any number of
theaters. One of the vision's chief effects is making almost any defense industrial base look indequate.
          Some members of the industrial preparedness movement, like Georgia
Representative Newt Gingrich, candidly explained its centrality to
shifting from a "war-deterrence to a war-winning philosophy." But the
Pentagon contends that long-war reindustrialization will actually
deter that war by sending adversaries signals that we have every
contingency covered, including a replay of World War II. DOD's
long-war logic implies a deeper sort of wishful thinking as well. If
superpowers continue committing ever greater portions of their
productive capacity to conventional warfare (where ninety percent of
U.S. military spending currently goes) those powers will feel obliged
to use up that capacity before resorting to nuclear holocaust. In
essence, the long-war hypothesis assumes that each human actor and
technical element in the world's arsenal of fifty thousand nuclear
warheads can be held in "non-escalatory restraint"; that warring
nations will not even turn to nuclear weapons when one side is clearly
winning and the other losing. If money weren't a consideration, one
might lay the motivation of Ikle and his team to simple nostalgia for
U.S. industrialism's "Audie Murphy" phase. "Looking back at those
years," Ikle rhapsodized in the Wall Street Journal,
"it seems we were almost ten feet tall." 3
          With the mutually supporting rationalizations of long war and
industrial "erosion" incorporated into policy and 

public
consciousness, the lobbyists moved to secure goldmine incentives for
DOD's supply-side. Marked by signals like a thirty-one point memo from
Deputy Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci in April 1981, they pushed
such contracting nuggets as multi-year acquisitions, guaranteed return
on investments (twenty percent is a figure bandied about) and training
and automation subsidies.
          All this activity, proceeding though it does from deranged
assumptions, contrasts with the lack of activity on most civilian
economic fronts. That contrast has energized the states to effectively
reinforce DOD's attempts to broaden its constituency and find new
places to spend its bottomless budget. Instead of battling over
federal taxes, General Accounting Office procurement policies or the
arcane of grant formulas, state governments have increasingly shifted
their attention to the only area of federal spending which will grow
in the foreseeable future--military construction, military payroll and
associated funding transfers. Moreover, defense industries have become
the coin of the economic development realm. Events like North
Carolina's procurement conference are set up, said organizer Al
Calloway, the state's assistant director for Business Assistance,
because "last year we knew that by the first quarter of 1982 we'd
actually see trickling down to smaller businesses . . . [here Calloway
paused to reassess his choice of verb] . . . we'd see hard money
coming in from DOD."
          Hard money also brought in three hundred or so curious business
owners to North Carolina State's McKimmon Center to buttonhole defense
prime contractors like Western Electric (which takes in a quarter of
all North Carolina's military contracting dollars) and Teledyne (which
operates the South's biggest titanium forge--in Jesse Helms's hometown
of Monroe). "We've seen machine 

shops come out of the woodwork like
I've never seen before," said Allen Trippeer of the Defense Contract
Administration Services Atlanta office. "They've read in the paper
about DOD getting all this money. There's definitely an increase in
interested contractors."
          If the North Carolina conference is any guide, DOD is busily
compiling waiting lists of suppliers. With economists, nutritionists,
custom glassblowers. flagpole repairmen--and one soul trying to
merchandise a "space device" which detonates land mines from
orbit--prowling contractors' and supply directorates' booths, DOD also
has a willing reserve to meet its most esoteric needs. As Bill Page,
one of Seymour Johnson Air Force Base's contract officers said, "As
far as competition and availability go. for what we need at Seymour
Johnson we don't have any problems. I think there's a good base out
there to supply DOD. Just about every time a small business fails a
new one takes its place."
          Members of Congress and military installation chiefs have all been
throwing procurement conferences for decades. Nor is North Carolina
now alone in the South in intensifying its pressure on businesses and
communities to buy into DOD's brand of support and obligation. Georgia
has made major additions in the past three years to its aerospace
economy, including a Boeing plant in Macon. a United Technologies
facility in Columbus, and Atlanta's Rockwell International plant which
makes the GBU-15 winged bomb. But in 1981, the state joined forces
with the city of Warner Robins and Robins AFB for an industrial
development campaign the intensity of which eclipsed those earlier
efforts.
          The campaign began when Maj. Gen. John Paulk took command of Robins
AFB in 1980. A native of Willacoochee. Ga., Paulk hit the ceiling upon
learning of the relatively small portion of Robins' two billion dollar
boodle which went to in-state contractors. According to Robins
contract officer Bob Beckmann. Paulk relayed his dissatisfaction to
Governor George Busbee and other industrial development
figures. Within months. Beckmann. Georgia Industry and Trade
Department official Emmett Mann, and a leader of (Georgia's state
Chamber of Commerce. Penn Worden, had concocted a statewide series of
meetings on the glories of sub-contracting for Robins. "We kind of
brought the mountain to Mohammed." says Beckmann. Officials of the
Small Business Administration and C&S Bank, Georgia's largest,
pitched in with financing and administrative help. In the space of
twelve months, 1,229 firms signed up to do business with Robins
AFB. In-state procurement for the base rose from thirty-nine million
dollars in fiscal 1980 to seventy-nine million dollars in fiscal
1981.
          Tennessee's Economic and Community Development (E&CD) Office
explicitly targets military contracting at the head of its recruiting
priority list. "Right now I'm on 

top of every defense contract that's
let," says the state's top industrial recruiter, Assistant E&CD
Commissioner Bill Long. Long's research staff combs Commerce 
Business Daily and the Pentagon's Defense Marketing Service 
listings 
for recruiting or expansion opportunities. But, due to their boss's
background, they also go an extra mile.
          Although Long rents out a farm and co-owns a couple of east
Kentucky strip mines, he acquired most of his business experience
during a twenty-eight year stretch in the Marines.
          Long's assignments included three years in the White House honor
guard and duty as the first Marine liaison officer to Congress before
mustering out in the mid-seventies. "I've got contacts," Long
volunteers, "and I'm trying to renew contacts. But it's all above
board. They wouldn't even talk to me if it wasn't. I get the same
information as everyone else. But I might get it a little bit
earlier."
          With his informational edge, Lang says, "we feel we have a good
shot at getting a lot of component parts to weapons systems, so that's
what we're going after. We've gotten into everything from consoles
[for tracking systems--a potential $25 million investment] to radar
systems. I was in Washington last week and met with six
contractors. We have a shot at getting them. We got a letter last
week, 155mm launching tubes for guns. Laser homing devices,
air-delivered clusters of mines, visual tracking systems. We haven't
culled anything out."
          
            II
          
          "Erosion" alarms may not serve the truth but they do serve to
conceal the defense reindustrialization campaign's political
content. Military industries remain alive and well but they sometimes
don't happen to be what or where interested parties want them to
be.
          Jacqueline Mazza's office in the U.S. House of Representatives
Annex Building in Washington is festooned with collaged advertisements
from New York magazine. The wail resembles a graduate
student's efforts to hang on to some sense of humor during the degree
grind. Ray Gillen's cubbyhole, just around the corner, is decorated by
a single photograph of a long-dead South Carolina senator named Burnet
Rhett Maybank. Graduate student analogies come easy because Mazza and
Gillen are as young, friendly and manifestly privileged as the dozens
of other people who work with them at the NortheastMidwest Institute,
an organization which supplies sectional lobbying ammunition to more
than two hundred members of Congress.
          Jackie Mazza spends her time pasting together the "Frostbelt"
lobby's plea for more military bucks. In 1980 she authored The
Unprotected Flank, an Institute book which details how few
defense dollars flow into Northern states relative to their share of
the country's population and tax burden. It also argues, among other
notions, that more American troops should be training in climates that
approximate those of Western Europe--like upper New York State. "A lot
of Congressmen from the North have been anti-defense," she says. "They
wouldn't go near those committees. But they woke up all of a sudden
when their economies were doing poorly."
          Mazza and company have certainly rung the alarms for an awakening
which has made Northern Congressmen with liberal and moderate
credentials a decisive force behind the further militarization of the
U.S. economy. In 1981 she arranged a meeting between Defense Secretary
Weinberger and a Northeast-Midwest delegation that her co-workers
label "historic." "Weinberger as much as said he had to establish a
better regional balance if he wants to keep a defense consensus in
this country," 

Mazza says. The Unprotected Flank joins
the industrial base debate by alleging that defense production has
migrated South to the point of "giving an opponent an 'easy target'
end rendering the U.S. more vulnerable to attack." The Frostbelt
lobby's problem is not just that the defense industrial base is
eroding, but that it is allegedly no longer in the Frostbelt. That's
where Ray Gillen and H.R. 5540 come in.
          Gillen has labored to undo the handiwork of Burnett Rhett Maybank,
a Charleston aristocrat who amended the 1953 Defense Appropriations
Bill to prevent military monies from being targeted for depressed
areas. Routinely protected by Southern seniority, the Maybank
Amendment was added to Defense appropriations bills thereafter. In the
late 1970's it became a focus for the Northeast-Midwest attempts to
load funding formulas in their favor. The "Sunbelt" lobby, including
the Southern Growth Policies Board and the Southern Governors
Association, used armed services committee clout to preserve the
status quo. (A regionalism as equally spurious as that of the
"Frostbelt," Sunbeltology is the self-interested science of connecting
Tuscon's suburbs to Letcher County, Kentucky.)
          The Sunbelters argued that using defense procurements as an "urban
policy tool" would court inflation. Procurement spending annually
amounts to thirty to forty percent of DOD's budget. Jackie Mazza and
the Northeast-Midwest strategists see procurements--as opposed to
military payroll or construction--as the most pragmatic route to
increasing the North's share of the Pentagon's pie. In 1981, after a
four-year battle, the Frostbelt forces finally rounded up enough
non-Frostbelters whose districts included "labor surplus areas," the
current euphemism for areas of high unemployent, and repealed the
Maybank Amendment. The winning coalition enacted a substitute which
allowed the Defense Logistics Agency to make preferential awards to
non-weapons contractors in distressed areas.
          Hard on the heels of this win, Northeast-Midwest partisans began
pushing a vastly more open-ended effort to raise their regions'
defense manufacturing stakes--this year's H.R. 5540. Sixty-one
representatives, nearly all from the North, co-sponsored the bill as a
series of amendments to the Defense Production Act. That Act contains
thirty year's worth of ground rules for America's military manufacture
and serves as a catch-all for other boondoggles enacted in the name of
security, like the Synfuels Corporation.
          H.R. 5540 would dole out fifty billion dollars (fifty billion by
some estimates) in outright loans, loan guarantees and purchase
agreements to the "small and medium-sized" contractors that the
defense establishment has designated at the really "deteriorating"
tier of its supplier base. Fifty billion dollars represents two
hundred Lockheed loans or several dozen Chrysler bailouts. But that's
not all 5540 offers. This is the bill that also defines "colleges,
universities and other institutions of higher education" as
"industrial facilities" in dire need of "updating equipment." The
Frostbelters have designed 5540 to close the American academy's lab
equipment window-of-vulnerability and to "provide incentive for
faculty to remain in academia and encourage students to pursue higher
degrees in a quality environment." Finally, in pursuit of strategic
minerals, 5540 proposes to further militarize America's policies
regarding the natural belt growth coalition than any Twentieth Century
predecessor, ostensibly opposes 5540 as inferior to its brand of
recovery-oriented "free market" military spending. Budget director
David Stockman delivered an official statement of opposition by
defending "the Defense buildup, tax reductions, improved depreciation
schedules. . . and reduction of regulatory burdens" as "broad measures
to strengthen the economy."6 Within a few days 5540 is scheduled to go
to the House floor for a vote. Despite the Administration's public
posture. Staffers from the bill's parent Economic Stabilization
Subcommittee say that its chances "look very good."
          By itself, the distribution of military production dollars can be a
misleading issue--in fact, when pressed, regional lobbyists agree that
procurement is spread pretty evenly. The important question is what do
all these dollars buy? The answer reflects the South's particular
position within the defense industrial base. Again the trouble is
hardly one of "erosion," it's one of too many socks.
          Traditionally, the South has supplied DOD its textiles, tobacco,
coal and food. The South has also supplied ships, C-130 airplanes and
the fruits of the Army Missile Command. But even today Newport News,
Marietta, Pascagoula, and Huntsville remain anomalies on the defense
contracting landscape. Even when subcontracting is counted, most
Southern states sell DOD comparatively little weaponry.
          The Department of Defense estimates procurement spending to be its
fastest fattening budget line.
          Between fiscal 1981 and 1985, procurements are destined to expand
sixteen percent a year in real terms while other military outlays will
increase only five percent per year. From fiscal 1979 through fiscal
1981, the growth in procurement spending was concentrated on
non-weapons purchases. Non-weapons contracts increased eighty-six
percent during that period, twice as much as weapons contracts
(unadjusted dollars). Non-weapons items grew from a quarter to a third
of total procurements during the same years. But as the
Reagan-Weinberger team reinforces choices made by Jimmy Carter and
commences its weapons-buying binge, those procurement ratios will be
reversed. Thus, the Northeast-Midwest Institute's strategy of going
after more Maybank-related spending in the short term and
"geographically-distributed," HR 5540-subsidized weapons spending in
the long term. 7
          As the Southern lobby defended its disproportionate share of
Pentagon outlays, it unwillingly protected its lead in the types of
spending (i.e., non-weapons) which have been more predictable and
stable (both locally and regionally) than the weapons program
roller-coaster. But the fact that traditional Southern defense
industries have been a sub-set of traditional Southern industries has
remained a largely uncounted--or unanalyzed--advantage. Now, it's
being counted less all the time because Southern development partisans
increasingly believe that while their states can't live without their
traditional industries, they can't live by them alone. Just like their
Northern counterparts, these boosters see defense procurement as a
vehicle for nourishing science-and technology-based industrial growth,
hence an economic fix. But clearly, the Yankees got there first.

          "They're calling it 'The Route 128 Boom'," says Sandra Kramer of
the Sunbelt Council, combatively, referring to the electronics
companies circling the Boston area. In 1981, Kramer, formerly the
Southern Growth Policy Board and Southern Governors Association's
chief Washington lobbyist, helped former Alabama Congressman John
Buchanan pull together the Sunbelt Council's 119 congresspeople. In
early 1982, Kramer reflected on the military budget and regional
development. "We were just up in Maine for the holidays," she
said. "The Boston Globe ran a series on how this defense spending is
going to hit them up there. You know they're strong on high tech. And
the South just doesn't have high tech. That's our problem . . . to get
some mental expansion . . . not be the ones always supplying the foot
soldiers but the brains, too."
          What the South does have is Tennessee's Bill Long and a flock of
other state development officials all desperate for jobs, tax base and
quick fixes. Jim Cotham, Long's former boss at Tennessee's Economic
and Community Development Department, says that defense "is a very
large part" of the high tech recruiting campaign he and Governor Lamar
Alexander committed the state to in 1981. The Tennessee efforts led to
plans for a "technology corridor" modeled on North Carolina's Research
Triangle Park and based in Oak Ridge--the granddaddy of nuclear-type
economic development. Florida, which already had the foundation for
high-tech growth that Tennessee lacks, recently granted industrial
development funds to woo the New York-based Moog, Incorporated, to the
St. Petersburg-Clearwater area. There Moog intends to build a
performance control equipment plant to supply the F-15, Trident and
M-60 tank programs.
          
            III
          
          Desperation characterizes the states' and regions' raids on and
imitations of one another and their scramble to hop aboard the next
development train--regardless of destination. And the Reaganites'
apparent belief that pure desperation mobilizes consent better than
5540's blandishments finds its surest measure in people like David
Patterson, who don't think of themselves as consenting at all.
          Patterson, a TVA economist, was one of the Tennessee technology
corridor's earliest proponents and has, with the help of state
Economic and Community Development officials, helped nurse it to its
present stage. Patterson got into the development business from a
background in civil defense. He wrote his dissertation for the Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency, worked for the Institute for Defense
Analysis, and upon arrival in Tennessee, consulted at Oak Ridge on
civil defense "from an economic standpoint."
          "I remember when I was at Indiana when the movie
Dr. Strangelove came out," Patterson says. "I really
went to pieces in that movie. I had just spent a year reading
everything that had been written about the impact of that sort of
thing in preparation for writing a dissertation proposal. Everybody
else in the moviehouse was laughing. I was sitting there shaking."
          "I spent too much time in my life studying the so-called
possibilities of recovery after a nuclear war. I got sort of burnt out
on the area I guess. I learned too much about what it can do--nuclear
war. And you sort of come to a point in your life whenever you get
involved with something like that when you have to decide, ok--I give
up. Or, I've really got to do something. And I couldn't see where
there was anything I could do."
          Being an economist as well as a refugee from the Armageddon wing of
his profession, Patterson has some problems with military spending
increases. "Justifying defense spending on the grounds of its
potential spinoffs is like justifying death because it returns
phosphorus and other needed chemicals to the soil," he says. "Saying
you're going to put money into defense because it'll stimulate the
economy . . . you can do exactly the same thing,
much more effectively by paying half the unemployed to dig holes and
the other half to fill them up. It's exactly the same thing. Because
you're buying nothing."
          If Patterson had his druthers, Tennessee's technology corridor
"would be looking for industries that had potential beyond defense or
in addition to defense because military defense budgets come and
go. In fact, I would be looking to industries that had primarily
civilian-oriented market potential. " At the same time, Patterson is
trapped by the military mobilization imperatives that all South-

environment and international trade. 
4
          HR 5540 takes its stand on regional development by amending the
Defense Production Act's "Declaration of Policy" to read, "It is the
policy of the Congress to encourage the geographical dispersal of the
industrial facilities of the U.S. in the interest of the national
defense and to discourage the concentration of such productive
facilities within limited geographical areas which are vulnerable to
attack by an enemy of the United States."
          Thus 5540 seeks to trap the Pentagon. The bill offers valuable
instruments for industrial constituency building and for reconciling
differences between some national industries, union leaders and balky
members of the financial community. At the same time it confronts the
traditional power of Southern armed services committee chairmen with
its statement of redistribution. Historically, DOD has been loathe to
bite Southern hands that feed it. Richard DeLauer, a TRW executive now
vacationing as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and
Engineering (he was also a member of the Defense Science Board's
"erosion" panel and a featured speaker at the May Harvard gathering),
told Congress in 1981: "National defense is not and never has been
intended as an income distribution mechanism or system providing equal
allocation of funds to states, cities or countries . . . The purpose
and goal of defense spending is to keep the American people alive and
free--and in the process it is possible that defense spending will
necessarily be unevenly distributed geographically." 5
          Moreover, this Administration, less tied to the Frostern
development officials now labor under.
          "You know if we got an opportunity to get a Lockheed plant located
here, we'd probably bust our balls to get it," he acknowledges. "I
don't think we'd do it because it was a defense industry per se. In
fact there'd probably be some people saying, 'Wait a minute, that's a
bummer. Let's spend our efforts on something else.' But others would
say, 'Look, it's a bird in the hand. Get what you can.' And I guess
I'd be in that latter group."
          
            IV
          
          For sheer numbers of questing small business owners, phalanxes of
corporate executives who run 95-507 Programs (federally mandating that
all prime contractors prepare "small business plans"), and for overall
spit, polish and hardware, nobody throws a procurement conference like
the Army Missile Command (MICOM) at Huntsville's Redstone Arsenal. But
then no place is quite like Huntsville, the Southeast's
longest-standing monument to aerospace high-tech and, in fiscal year
1981, the recipient of twenty-seven percent of Alabama's total defense
contracts.
          At the outset of Huntsville's most recent Small Business
Opportunities Day, MICOM's current commander, Major General Robert
L. Moore, upheld the local corporatist-in-uniform tradition by
welcoming his guests as "ladies, gentlemen and fellow businesspeople."
One week after the Harvard and North Carolina conferences,
Huntsville's modernistic Von Braun Civic Center had been transformed
into a Casbah of hardware and hardsell by the six dozen military
supply directorates and prime contractors invited to peddle to
prospective small business partners. Raytheon buyers dispensed bright
red, missile-decorated tote bags. Hughes representatives earnestly
explained cutaways of their aircraft. Nearly every other prominent
name in America's military-industrial supply-side--Lockheed, Martin
Marietta, General Dynamics--hawked away. The conference drew twelve
hundred participants from thirty-six states, lured by fifteen thousand
invitations.
          In the midst of all this anxiety--the small business equivalent of
five thousand unemployed people standing in line for one hundred
jobs--Huntsville's conference also offered glimpses of an eerie
intimacy. Chatting with an equally young bank officer at the local
Chamber of Commerce booth, Tom Stramiello, a Chamber researcher craned
his neck and smiled at the sound of a Hawk missile" firing in the
Raytheon promotional film across the aisle. "That's my daddy's
missile!" Stramiello crowed. The man from People's Bank nodded. The
engineering generation of Stramiello the elder created the
entrepreneural atmosphere in which its sons and daughters now
orbit.
          "It fluctuates," said the banker in response to a question about
Huntsville's contracting cycles, "but overall it's pretty
steady. You'll have a bad month and a good month but it's not like a
bad year and a good year. Bad times aren't long enough to really
damage somebody unless they're kind of fragile to begin with."
          On the other side of the room, Fred Flores, a General Dyanmics
buyer from the West Coast explained that his company had "ample"
machine shop subcontractors. Nor did the assembled small businesses"
lack of diversity trou-

ble General Dynamics: "If they're too unique you
can't use them," Flores said. What about "erosion?" Flores waved his
arm at the Von Braun Center crowd, "If you ask most people in these
booths they'll tell you they've been approached by numerous shops in
desperate need of business."
          Ralph Autery, lead engineer for the new FOG-M (fiber optic guided)
missile, held down one of MICOM's numerous booths across from
Flores. "They wanted to show that we still had the inhouse capability
to do the FOG-M," Autery said of MICOM's command. "We've had other
programs where you buy everything and do all the engineer-assembly and
integration testing and you go out and fire one and it flies good and
some company down the pike that you bought just the airframe from
takes credit for it." MICOM's in-house capacity may also show that
America's missile complex has engineers to spare, not the impending
shortage advertised by the erosion lobby. Does Autery think all this
"deterioration" talk is a little overblown? Autery smiles, "Yeah, we
have a lot of people that're willing to work. Scheduling may be the
problem more than being able to get something."
          Even if the "erosion" hysteria is a bit on the mendacious side, it
ought to create jobs since small businesses will gain and everyone
knows that small business generates most jobs--right? Well, maybe
not. Listen to Bob Ingram, director of MICOM's small business programs
talk about "productivity" and mobilization. "You can ride up and down
the highway and find small businesses that might be doing business
with the government and you say, 'Hey, can you handle any more?' 'Why
absolutely we can handle more. We can have output three hundred
percent of what we're doing right now and wouldn't have to hire
another men.' You'll find that in many instances."
          Does this mean that building up the defense industry's small
business tiers may not boost employment at all? "Very definitely,"
Ingram answers, "Let's take an isolated situation. You got a little
plant here, a man and his wife and three sons are running it. And they
manage to pick up two or three contracts with DOD each year. Total
work is, say, fifty thousand dollars. They have a lathe, they've got
several drills, they've got grinders, welding capacity, this type of
thing. I'm saying that in a lot of these kinds of cases you could pump
$300,000 worth of work in there and they could handle that and never
hire another man."
          Some economic development specialists see an important corollary to
this--one the "erosion" lobby has ignored or downplayed. Military
contracting's ups and downs have left the industry drenched in excess
capacity. Unlike gung-ho gyrene Bill Long of Tennessee's Economic and
Community Development office, Sandy Jordan, Assistant Commissioner of
Georgia's rival Industry and Trade Department, sees military producers
expanding only moderately--despite Georgia's success in luring
aerospace companies. "Most of the companies that are looking for
defense contracts," says Jordan, "have a great deal of plant space,
infrastructure and machinery in place. They're not doing a great deal
of site-searching because of contracts that have been awarded or
anticipated. Because of cutbacks in previous years, they've got the
facilities they need."
          MICOM's Bob Ingram has a very military solution to the issue:
redefine "excess." "We're not saying the (industrial) base has
deteriorated," Ingram claims, "we're saying it should be a broader
base, there should be more redundancy there. Rather than one shop that
manufactures printed circuit boards, there are literally thousands of
them around the country. And we should have them ready, willing and
available to call on in the event we need them."
          But call on for what? The long war? Another scenario? And what
about our nuclear arsenals, poised and aching to be used? "I wouldn't
get into that debate," Ingram laughs. "If it's a total nuclear war,
mox nix on the industrial base. You're not going
to have time to do anything anyway. But if the powers can agree to
say, 'Well, let's shoot at each other with conventional weapons,' then
yeah, you could have a need for it. So that's a matter of
philosophy. And philosophy means discussing something you don't know
anything about, so I steer away from it."
          
            V
          
          Making the defense industrial debate less philosophical requires
that "reasonable people" expand, not narrow, the boundaries of
disagreement. We could start by disagreeing with the belief that a
global war of annihilation will be good for jobs in the region, state
or district. We could move on to scrutinize the extent to which
development decisions drive or simply substitute for military
policy. Or we could examine more useful brands of public works
programs and industrial initiatives than those of 

the
military-industrial community. The harder state governments try to
square the Iron Triangle of Congress, Industry and Pentagon, then the
more accessible the issues become in Raleigh, Nashville and Atlanta
and all the communities affected by our public, but undemocratic,
development bureaucracies.
          A reasonable debate would also encompass the costs--human,
environmental and financial--that military production exacts from
workers and communities who supposedly benefit from Pentagon
spending. A disproportionate share of those costs have been borne by
have-not Southerners such as asbestosis victims in Tidewater shipyards
or uranium-bullet factory workers and their neighbors exposed to
radiation hazards in Appalachian Tennessee. The seemingly benign
notion of "targeting contracts to distressed areas" in practice
frequently means lending DOD's authority to minimum wages, lethal
workplace hazards, union busting and job insecurity.
          The preponderance of non-weapons contracts in the South only hints
at the Pentagon's real domestic power--its unrivalled reach into every
corner of our economic life. The Department of Defense provides
eighteen thousand dollars for a rural sheriff's department to drive
past a Corps of Engineers Dam several times a week in Southwest
Virginia. It furnishes $150,000 to prop up a marginal strip miner in
East Kentucky. It sends along $200,000 to rent recruiter's space in a
failing hotel in a Tennessee town. The military reindustrialization
campaign promises to extend DOD's grass roots power. Unless we
understand the web of Pentagon dependencies, we shouldn't expect to
change the shape of the South's pre-war economy.
          
            Footnotes for Shaping the South's Pre-war 
Economy
            
              "Conference Outline: 
Improving National Security by Strengthening
the Defense Industrial Base," Harvard University Center for Science
and International Affairs, May 10-12, 1982.
            
            
              "Semiconductor Support 
of Military Programs," presented to the
Defense Science Board Task Force on Industrial Preparedness by Jerry
Junkins, vice-president of Texas Instruments, Dec. 19, 1980, Appendix
B, page 8. "The cost to subsidize mandated U.S. production," Junkins
claimed, "might be considerable and more than the military can
afford."
            
            
              "Could We Mobilize 
Industry?" Fred C. Ikle', Wall Street
Journal, Dee. 26, 1979.
            
            
              Congressional Budget 
Office Cost Estimate and Dissenting Views of
Representatives Ed Bethune and Ed Weber on HR 5540 from House Report
97-530, May 17, 1982, pages 26-29, 61-62.
            
            
              Richard DeLauer to 
the House Banking Committee's Subcommittee on
Economic Stabilization. Hearings on "Revitalization and the
U.S. Economy," July 15, 1981, Part 11, page 332.
            
            
              Stockman letter to Representative J. William Stanton, May 5,1982,
in House Report 97530, page 63
            
            
              Procurement spending 
estimates in "Annual Report to Congress, FY
1983," Caspar W. Weinberger, Secretary of Defense. page B-2.,
            
            
              Weapons vs. Non-weapons spending comparisons from "DOD Prime
Conract Awards by Region and State, FY 1979,1980,1981," Department of
Defense, Directorate for Information, Operations and Reports (DIOR),
pages 15-17.
            
          
          
            Tom Schlesinger is a carpenter and freelance writer
living in Tennessee. He currently works with the Highlander Center's
Strategic Minerals and Defense Industry Project.
          
        