Commentary : National Security Recipe: Substitute Butter for $30 Billion in Guns

It’s October in a presidential election year, and the candidates for President and vice president speak often of their commitment to strong national security. But to most Americans--including many of America’s mayors--the candidates speak a foreign language. They talk of national security only in the narrowest terms. They speak of Trident submarines, MX missiles and “Star Wars.” They equate massive, even wasteful, military spending with national security.

Mayors worry about national security too. But to us, national security means more than weapons. It means strong families and strong neighborhoods in economically vibrant communities. It means good-paying jobs in modern industries that are competitive in the global marketplace. It means health care and education, child care and transportation worthy of our citizens. It means decent, affordable housing for every American.

Measured in these terms, our national security has been breached. The enemy is an uncontrolled arms race that has, since 1947, consumed $10 trillion in American wealth--a figure that defies comprehension. Beginning with President Truman--and led and supported by every president and every Congress since--our national politicians have built an entrenched warfare state, in the process relentlessly draining our cities of the tax dollars and the intellectual resources essential to urban progress.

Now, in 1988, here is what it has all come to: America’s share of the global arms race is $300 billion a year--one-third of our entire national treasury. As a mayor, I can tell you that the true price of these twisted federal priorities is painfully evident in cities and towns across our country, where oceans and lakes are poisoned and dying, where streets and bridges crumble, where we struggle to meet a 1980s traffic crisis with 1950s transportation technology, where factories rust, where our schoolchildren lapse into ignorance, where displaced farm families seek refuge and where homelessness, hunger, poverty and drug addiction are on the rise.

In June, 1987, I wrote a National Priorities Resolution that my colleagues in the U.S. Conference of Mayors unanimously adopted. That resolution called on the President and Congress to redress the imbalance between military and domestic spending. But more than words, the resolution pledged the resources to study the economic impacts on the nation and on individual cities of a transfer of $30 billion per year, for five years, from military outlays to programs of proven effectiveness in our cities and towns.

The study was released Oct. 6. It shows that a $30-billion transfer from the Pentagon would actually strengthen the nation’s security by dramatically improving life in America’s cities and towns.

* This $30-billion shift would free at least $5 billion each year, so that over the next five years we could renovate or build nearly 1 million homes.

* It would provide $12 billion per year to aid education. That would mean we could hire 387,000 new teachers, teachers’ aides and support staff for our schools.

* It would release $3 billion a year, allowing us in just two years to purchase 8,900 buses, 188 locomotives and rail cars, leaving nearly $1 billion more for transit planning and operations.

* Each year we could shift $2 billion to public health projects. We could hire 30,000 additional public health care personnel and still have more than $1 billion left to build and improve public health care facilities and fund vital health services. An added 320,000 pregnant women could receive the health care their unborn babies need. Every child in the country could be immunized against childhood diseases.

* We could allocate $8 billion a year to social services of proven effectiveness. We could open 500,000 places in Head Start programs, feed 2.5 million senior citizens and help volunteers reach 3 million more seniors otherwise in need. We could earmark $3 billion every year for the training of workers displaced over the past 10 years.

Would a $30-billion transfer harm the military? Not if David A. Stockman is correct. It was Stockman, President Reagan’s first director of the Office of Management and Budget, who pointed out as early as 1981 that the Pentagon was awash in fraud and abuse that accounted for as much as $30 billion each year. More recently, Robert Costello, the Pentagon’s director of procurement, noted that 30% of the Pentagon’s $150-billion procurement budget is wasted every year.

Make no mistake about it: $30 billion transferred from military spending to urban programs would at last give us, as mayors, the resources we need to create cities that are vibrant and healthy. Every $1 billion shifted from the Pentagon to America’s cities creates 6,600 more jobs than we have today. For 197,500 Americans, that means economic independence and dignity that no welfare program can provide.

By any objective standard, isn’t that a more secure America?

This call for a $30-billion cut in Pentagon spending might sound strange coming as it does from the mayor of a city uncomfortably dependent on military contracts. But in urging the study--and now having its results in hand--I’m struck by two conclusions: First, in Orange County, we can manage the short-term dislocations caused by cuts in military spending. In Irvine, the national shift of $30 billion from military to urban programs would lead to a net loss of 72 jobs--jobs we could and would replace with careful conversion planning.

But there’s a second conclusion about which I’m just as certain. Irvine’s 100,000 citizens live in a new, planned city. During our 17 years as a municipality, we’ve learned that if planning means anything, it means investing in the future.

A historic break with the past--cutting military spending and transferring the funds to domestic programs--means that we will be putting our money where it belongs: in schools and teachers for our children, in health care systems, in affordable housing for young families, in programs of social support for seniors and disabled citizens and in a modern transportation system that Southern California so desperately needs. In short, we will build better communities and better lives today, while at the same time preparing America for the 21st Century.

Larry Agran is mayor of Irvine.