Defense Boondoggles Survive Cuts

When you heard that the Senate had voted to spend $1.5 billion to buy another Seawolf submarine, you doubtless said to yourself, “The Seawolf - isn’t that the gigantic submarine built to keep the Soviet Union from conquering the Free World?”

Then, unless I miss my guess, you said, “Sure it is, but hasn’t the Soviet Union gone with the wind?”

If you are careful like me, you thought to yourself, “I’d better check on that.” And after doing just that, you probably shouted: “By George, I thought so! The Cold War is over, the Soviet Union is kaput and the Free World is safe at last.”

You went to bed feeling terrific, didn’t you? Maybe you had a nightcap before turning in. “Just a little toddy to celebrate the end of the Cold War,” you probably said to a spouse.

Then you woke up at 3:30 a.m. and sat right up in bed. Remember what you wanted to yell? “Why are we spending $1.5 billion on a submarine to fight a defunct menace?”

For weeks, you’d been reading about budget-cutting. Cut spending for life’s losers. Cut this, cut that. Cut, cut, cut. Cutting was chic. Great - as long as they weren’t cutting you. Great! So why buy a $1.5 billion submarine for a war that is over and has been won?

So you woke a sleeping spouse, saying, “I’m going to break down and cry.” You probably babbled a little: “Superfluous sub. Defunct Soviet menace. One-and-one-half billion dollars.”

And that calm spousal voice answered, “If you’d read the newspapers, darling, all would be clear, for you would know that Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., has said the Seawolf submarine ‘will ensure continued undersea superiority, a position the United States cannot give up.”’

Talk about making one thing perfectly clear! How right the senator is. The United States must never yield undersea superiority to anyone.

Suppose Moammar Gadhafi or Saddam Hussein or some ayatollah, some Captain Nemo in a tarboosh, was out there in the deep at this very moment with a submarine right out of Jules Verne. We already have two Seawolf subs to stop him, but this third one with the $1.5 billion price tag - hah, Gadhafi! - you’ll think long and hard now, my friend.

After this, you probably slept like $1.5 billion.

I’m not sure, though, that you’re as humane as I am. Maybe you didn’t wake up the next morning as clearheaded and warmhearted as I did. With night’s fog lifted from my brain, I clearly saw that the $1.5 billion Seawolf vote was not about submarines at all. It was about keeping working people from losing their jobs.

Building unnecessary submarines provides work for thousands of people in Connecticut and Rhode Island. Stop the Seawolf and all those families will suffer. Like a lot of Pentagon spending these days, the Seawolf is a government make-work project.

During the Depression, when Washington spent heavily to make jobs that might save families from despair, conservatives denounced this sort of thing as “boondoggling.” It is the very essence of the bighearted old New Deal in its assumption that government ought to try to help victims of its economic policies.

My question next morning, however, as I silently applauded the Senate’s decision, was whether $1.5 billion couldn’t buy us something more useful than a submarine.

For instance: I had just cut my hand trying to open a cardboard milk carton with a butcher knife. You know those milk cartons. “To open,” they always say, “push up here.” Sometimes, they open when pushed up there, but often they don’t, so you have to go in with cold steel and fingernails.

Surely, an industry that can build those magnificent submarines can provide America with an easy-to-open cardboard milk container.

Another obvious need: My car has developed a sound suggesting the entire bottom is about to fall off, but the source of the noise is a mystery. These great New England submarine builders, so wise in the art of sound detection, easily should be able to design and build a mysterious-car-noise detector which would fit into an auto dashboard and instantly point to the exact location of any untoward sound.

Thousands of such useful industrial miracles ought to be rolling out of refitted defense plants, where ingenuity and skill now are being frittered away in boondoggles.

Is the government afraid that if it doesn’t kill, America can’t make it anymore?

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