Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (8 page)

The new president was ready to put our money where his mouth was; he was anxious to expend enormous pots of the national resources to improve our war-making capabilities. And it was an easy sell at first. He’d run on cutting taxes, gutting welfare programs, and spending big on the military. By the time his first budget came up for a vote, Ronald Reagan was also riding a wave of public popularity, largely on the strength of having survived a near-fatal assassination attempt with remarkable grace, at least according to the information released by the White House public relations officers. His personal approval rating in the country was more than 70 percent. So Congress—its members could read a poll—overwhelmingly passed Reagan’s initial defense appropriation request, which clocked in at a nearly 20 percent increase. In something as huge as the Pentagon budget, a 5 percent increase would have been enough to rattle desks all over Washington; 10 percent was almost unimaginable; getting up toward 20 percent was fantasy talk. That kind of enormous one-year jump was unprecedented—at least it was without our troops actively fighting on a battlefield somewhere. And that play-money request from Reagan came with a promise of more: the administration’s announced strategy was to
double
the defense budget in five years.

By the time that first massive defense appropriation passed, coupled with the largest tax cuts in American history, Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, was already trying to flag to the president a new threat. The projected annual budget deficit had ballooned to $62 billion, Stockman advised, and—at current
taxing and spending levels—was sure to hit $112 billion within five years. The yearly deficit, which had generally hovered around 2 percent of GDP in the postwar years, would jump to unprecedented peacetime levels, as much as 4 or 5 percent. When Stockman suggested that the country’s financial situation would benefit from a small reduction to the planned increase of the annual defense budget in the coming years, Reagan would have none of it. “When I was asked during the campaign about what I would do if it came down to a choice between defense and deficits,” he explained to Stockman, “I always said national security had to come first, and the people applauded every time.”

Reagan had plenty of politically astute advisers on his team who knew that they could not count on the president’s personal popularity for the long haul. And they knew they could not count on Americans to forever turn a blind eye to exploding budget deficits. Key to managing public expectations and acceptance of this massive defense spending spree was to manage the public’s perception of the need for it.

The more or less paranoid contention that America was a nation under existential threat was the propulsive force of the Reagan presidency. The threat that Reagan exalted above all others—the Enemy—remained an important and lasting mental bedfellow for the president, even as other things faded for him. Just a year after he left office, while reluctantly testifying at the federal criminal trial of one of his former staff members, Reagan could no longer place the name of the man who served him for more than three years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (“Oh dear. I have to ask for your help here. His name is very familiar”) or recognize the leader of the Nicaraguan military group he’d pledged to support “body and soul.” He could
not recall the specifics of a single meeting with the defendant, Adm. John Poindexter, with whom he’d met one-on-one every day for nearly a year. He had virtually no recollection of signing the momentous presidential finding that could have led to his impeachment in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Looking back now, it is sadly apparent that this was not simply a legal tactic but a physical manifestation of the Alzheimer’s disease that had already begun to eat away his mind. When attorneys presented him with transcripts of his speeches and press statements, Reagan beheld them with the delight of first discovery. But in the middle of this arduous and, as he admitted, confusing day and a half of back-and-forth with lawyers, in an instant of unexpected and shocking clarity, Reagan offered an unsolicited reminder to these young attorneys of just what he’d been up against as president: “We only had to heed the words of Lenin, which was what was guiding them, when Lenin said that the Soviet Union would take Eastern Europe, it would organize the hordes of Asia and then it would move on Latin America. And, once having taken that, it wouldn’t have to take the last bastion of capitalism, the United States. The United States would fall into their outstretched hand like overripe fruit. Well, history reveals that the Soviet Union followed that policy.” It was a stirring moment in an otherwise sad and dreary courtroom exercise, when the ex-president let loose with his eloquent little peroration and showed a flash of the ol’ Gipper. He could still remember his best lines. And deliver them too.

Never mind that Lenin didn’t ever say or write this. Reagan likely got the quote from
The Blue Book of the John Birch Society
, circa 1958, which had cribbed it from the fanciful US Senate testimony of a youngish Russian exile by the name of Nicholas Goncharoff, who was just three years old when Lenin died. The fake Lenin quote in the original Goncharoff-Bircher
rendering did not in fact mention Latin America, but Reagan was never shy about ad-libbing an update here, an improvement there. His point was, when he walked into the Oval Office, the Soviet Union, “the evil empire” bent on world domination, was out to enslave the citizens of the United States. And the Soviets had fellow travelers lurking right here on our own continent: the Cuban strongman Fidel Castro and a growing contingent of Marxist revolutionaries who were working hard to make Communist satellites of El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua. There was a Bolshevik in every
baño
.

When Team Reagan started down the road to military buildup, its ideological and quasi-intellectual backup came from the post–World War II phenomenon of the permanent national security hawk nest, the out-of-power roost for ex-military, ex-intelligence, ex-Capitol Hill, defense industry, academic, and self-proclaimed experts on threats to the United States and how (inevitably) those threats were being ignored by the naïve government apparatchiks these restless hawks were eager to replace. The Think Tanks and Very Important Committees of the permanent national security peanut gallery are now so mature and entrenched that almost no one thinks they’re creepy anymore, and national security liberals have simply decided it’s best to add their own voices to them rather than criticize them. But like we lefties learned in trying (and failing) to add a liberal network to the all-right-wing, decades-old medium of political talk radio, the permanent defense gadfly world can’t really grow a liberal wing. It’s an inherently hawkish enterprise. Where’s the inherent urgency in arguing that the threats aren’t as bad as the hype, that military power is being overused, that the defense budget could safely and wisely be scaled back, that maybe this
next war doesn’t need us? The only audience for defense wonkery is defense enthusiasts, and they’re not paying the price of admission to hear that defense is overrated.

Even before President Carter was losing the nation’s attention with his talk of “a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world,” the oh-no-you-don’t defense-igentsia’s alternate position was being proclaimed by a cabal of academics, military officials, and businessmen (a director of the defense contractor Boeing, for instance), who liked to meet for lunch over the starched white tablecloths of Washington’s exclusive Metropolitan Club; they called themselves the Committee on the Present Danger. Among the committee members were the rabid anti-communists Paul “Missile Gap” Nitze, who was well known for his frightening and incorrect assertions in the 1950s that the Soviets had achieved superiority in offensive nuclear missiles; Gen. Daniel O. Graham, Reagan’s go-to guy on Panama and godfather of the Star Wars defense shield; James R. Schlesinger, who was at that moment eloquently and vociferously sick and tired of the nation’s neurotic hand-wringing; and historian Richard Pipes, who liked to bash his lefty academic colleagues while using his Harvard faculty credentials as proof of his own intellectual bona fides. The mélange of suit-and-tie warriors fancied themselves latter-day Paul Reveres, and in the spring of 1976, in the cosseted world of the Metropolitan Club, they began scripting the dire warning that the Russians were coming, the Russians were coming—that the Soviet Union had
surpassed
the West in both nuclear and conventional force capabilities. The Russians were building their strategic (aka offensive) capabilities, they said, toward not just starting and not just fighting, but starting and fighting and
winning
a nuclear war. And there was nobody in the United States intelligence apparatus clever enough to understand it, not like the Present Danger luncheoneers.

The Committee on the Present Danger might have finished its career as a forgotten lot of kooks if it weren’t for Ronald Reagan. The first thing he did for them was to prove that you could get real political traction with their kind of scare tactics. “The evidence mounts that we are Number Two in a world where it’s dangerous, if not fatal, to be second best,” Reagan had said on the campaign trail, on his way to nearly upsetting sitting president Gerald Ford in the primaries. When Reagan began roughing up Ford in that election season, Ford’s new CIA head decided he could provide the president some political cover from the tough-talking right by acquiescing to the Present Danger luncheoneers’ demand to participate in the government’s official top secret estimate of Soviet military and political strength. “Let ’er fly!” Director George H. W. Bush wrote, inviting this group of “outside experts” (they would be called Team B) to look over the shoulder of his agency analysts and come up with a parallel assessment of the Soviet threat.

From the start, Team B was much more interested in the political and public relations benefits of participating in the National Intelligence Estimate than in the final product itself. When Team B looked at the intelligence data, it was sure to misread it, and not by a matter of slight degree. Team B wildly overhyped the flight range of the Soviets’ Backfire bomber, rendering it a threat to America’s East Coast when in fact it had a proven combat radius that left it about three thousand miles short. Their estimate of future production numbers of the bomber was off by more than 100 percent. They asserted, falsely, that the Soviets were working furiously on laser-beam weapons that were nearing deployment. Because the United States had developed acoustic devices for tracking nuclear subs, Team B assumed the Soviets had them too. When it was unable to find a whit of evidence that the Russians had developed these acoustic devices, Team B simply
invented for the Soviets “non-acoustic” devices. As Anne Hessing Cahn, a former Defense Department official who wrote a book about the Team B fiasco, noted: “They’re saying, ‘We can’t find any evidence that they’re doing it the way everyone thinks they’re doing it, so they must be doing it a different way. We don’t know what that different way is, but they must be doing it.’ ”

The obfuscations and make-believe continued for fifty-five breathless pages. The Team B report incorrectly asserted that Soviet military spending, especially on new nuclear weapons, was on a steady upward trajectory. Team B was so wrong about the Soviets, so invested in hyperinflating the Soviet threat, that they even claimed that the USSR was exempt from the basic guns-versus-butter tradeoff that everyone learns on day one of macroeconomics class. In Team B’s imaginings, the Soviets were so all-powerful that they didn’t have to trade off anything. “Soviet strategic forces have yet to reflect any constraining effect of civil economy competition, and are unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future,” wrote Team B, conjuring a world in which the Soviets could build all the tanks and tractors they wanted, without limit. In this, Team B simply brushed aside the settled historical fact that the Politburo could hardly keep its own people fed. “The spectacle,” noted an official CIA analysis in 1964, “of the USSR, after boastful claims and plans a few years ago, coming to the West hat in hand to buy wheat and ask for long-term credits … These phenomena are not passing difficulties, nor are they merely consequences of misfortune. The source is deeper, and the problem will not soon go away.” In fact, at the time Team B imagined for the Soviets an impossible sustained upward arc, Soviet military expenditures were flat or even falling.

Team B further asserted, with no hard evidence, that the Soviet Union had “hardened” its command-and-control structure to permit the Communists to win a nuclear war against the
United States, and was training its citizenry in a civil defense system that would ensure the survival of a large enough cohort of its population to maintain a viable nation after that war. Team B was apparently unaware of the joke among Muscovites about Soviet civil defense:

“What do you do in the event of a nuclear attack?”

“Wrap yourself in a white sheet and crawl slowly to the cemetery.”

“Why slowly?”

“To avoid causing a panic.”

In Team B’s defense, not that many ordinary Russians made it to the Metropolitan Club for lunch in those days.

The umbrella assertion made by Team B—and the most inflammatory—was that the previous National Intelligence Estimates “substantially misperceived the motivations behind Soviet strategic programs, and thereby tended consistently to underestimate their intensity, scope, and implicit threat.” Soviet military leaders weren’t simply trying to defend their territory and their people; they were readying a First Strike option, and the US intelligence community had missed it. What led to this “grave and dangerous flaw” in threat assessment, according to Team B, was an overreliance on hard technical facts, and a lamentable tendency to downplay “the large body of soft data.” This “soft” data, the ideological leader of Team B, Richard Pipes, would later say, included “his deep knowledge of the Russian soul.”

Historian Pipes had not lived for any extended time in Eastern Europe since his family fled Poland at the beginning of World War II when he was still a teenager, and his area of expertise in Russian history stopped somewhere around 1923. America’s self-proclaimed Kremlinologist never claimed any real sources of information inside the Kremlin. But that didn’t mean he was shy about explaining “the grand strategy” of the Soviet leaders circa
1976; neither was he shy about parsing their psyches without a license. The Soviet Union, according to Pipes, was more than ever hell-bent on world domination. The old aristocracy sympathetic to the West had been killed off long ago; the people in charge were descended from a mindless and bitter peasantry, and they were wielding a lot more than pitchforks these days.