Preface. Much of this post is based on Miriam Pemberton’s 2023 book “Six Stops on the National Security Tour”.  Large sections of the book are about why past attempts to cash in on the ending of the cold War since 1991 or even before that didn’t work out. She proposes that military funding should be diverted now to prevent the climate crisis to set up companies to build electric vehicles, wind turbines and more.

Of course, that won’t work! That is what my books and this website go to great lengths to explain.  Renewables are not renewable. They depend on fossil fuels every single step of their life cycle.

But I like the idea of using the military money to do whatever we can now to make life better for future generations.  For starters, let’s stop our endless military engagements as much as possible and use more diplomacy.

Any money that can be pried away from the military to civilian uses needs to go towards a vast retraining of the U.S. workforce towards organic agriculture, fixing broken things, birth control and other “what to do” ideas in the last chapter of my book “Life After Fossil Fuels: A reality check on alternative energy”.

Biden’s infrastructure development plan could help this transition, but hasn’t so far, since it takes years to design, gain approval, and hire people to build or repair dams, bridges, roads and more. So much of this is in the red states too that depend on military projects, and since it isn’t happening yet, they have no reason that they can see to stop voting for Trump.

Here’s my very incomplete summary of Pemberton’s book about why it has been so hard to use the peace dividend from the cold war towards reducing the military budget and doing constructive things with it.

We’ve all been hammered with the message that the government should never favor any industries, that Capitalism is in the Driver’s Seat.  That is patently untrue when it comes to government spending on the military. That is where most of the undesignated part of the budget goes. We’ve become the Military Industrial Complex Eisenhower warned us about.   State planning of the military is the American Way.  And there is a lot of money for the government to redistribute, despite the wealthy and corporations not paying their fair share of taxes.

The U.S. is the wealthiest nation that has ever existed, thanks to our natural resources, especially oil, coal, and natural gas, but also many other minerals, fresh water, fantastic topsoil for agriculture, and timber to name just a few. This immense wealth could have been spent on national health care, education, infrastructure improvements, pandemic preparation, child care, affordable housing, drug addiction treatment, and hundreds of other endeavors that benefit civilians, the environment, and future generations rather than military contractors and arms merchants.

The military budget now is far higher than ever in our history, more than at the height of the Cold War, exceeding the grand total of the next highest 11 nations, most of them allies.

Worse yet, we are one of the Bad Guys!  The U.S. has made 392 military interventions since 1776, accelerating in recent decades. Diplomacy has been replaced with force-first invasions.  Over 70% of Ambassadors used to be seasoned experts in the countries they were assigned to, now 70% are rewarded with these positions for having donated money to political campaigns.   Our invasions usually backfire, waste trillions of dollars, and threaten U.S. long-term interests and security (Toft 2023, GPF 2005). At least 337,000 bombs have been dropped over the past 20 years alone (Benjamin 2022).

If only we could convert swords into plowshares, We have tried. This book is full of examples, I’ve only excerpted a few of them. Pemberton has a chapter into attempts to find a use for the 21 square mile Pine Bluff Arkansas military base where chemical weapons used to be made. Brilliant ideas were brainstormed, a great deal of time and money spent trying to recruit new businesses, but in the end, this area is simply too rural to attract educated and skilled workers.  Nor does it have the electric transmission, internet, road, and other essential infrastructure, or restaurants and homes.

This is a problem at most rural bases that should be closed. Despite massive inflows of military money, the areas they are in are still steeped in poverty and citizens fight fiercely to keep pointless bases open.

Yet the military would like to close bases.  They see it as a good way to save money to use for other projects.

In 1990, Congress took base closure decisions mostly out of politics. Power was given to non-partisan commissions on Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC). In the past 30 years, five BRAC rounds have closed more than 350 installations that saved $14 billion a YEAR.

Once a base appeared on the closure list, the BRAC process created a local committee made up of all community stakeholders to come up with a redevelopment plan, to be funded and assisted by the Pentagon’s Office of Economic Adjustment (OEA).

But bases were too lucrative for congressional members to allow to keep going, and in 2005 they effectively shut BRAC down.  Despite that, every year DoD testifies to its current excess base capacity; more than 1 in 5 could be gotten rid of.  Pentagon officials then talk about what they’d do with the savings and ask Congress to authorize another BRAC round.

Every year, Congress says no. They do this even though studies find that communities whose bases have closed can come back stronger to keep the economy afloat. Such as the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, which closed after the Cold War and now supports more jobs than when it was a military base, in a varied microeconomy of  145 enterprises that include retail, marine manufacturing, a clean energy incubator, an art museum, and a hospital complex.

The last BRAC round of 2005 produced cases like the Brunswick Naval Air Station in Brunswick, Maine. Brunswick’s redevelopers wasted a lot of time and money but eventually turned two million square feet of vacant buildings into a home for 150 businesses employing 2,500 people, branch campuses for Southern Main Community College and the University of Maine, a regional business airport, a technology business incubator, and the former base housing units full to capacity next to new housing under construction.

OEA has identified numerous other cases in which converted bases have ultimately generated more civilian jobs than existed when the base was used for military purposes. They’ve been used for industrial parks, civilian airports, educational institutions, and public parks.

The plentiful examples of successful base conversion tend to cluster in or near urban areas, where land is at a premium.  

But today, municipalities around military bases, urban as well as rural, have organized themselves into an Association of Defense Communities, to stop a new BRAC from happening. They have an energetic and well-populated Defense Communities Caucus in Congress to help them. If the Pentagon ever gets its way and convenes a BRAC, these communities will of course be competing with each other to stay off the list.

Of all the forms of Pentagon waste—gold-plated weapons systems that don’t work; contracts that inflate their costs; redundant, gold-plated healthcare plans that retired generals don’t need—excess base capacity is the one the military brass, at least, agrees should be cut.

Most communities resist, having come to depend on this reliable source of “direct” jobs (employees at the base) and “indirect” ones (supplying the base’s needs, including the dry cleaner and the pizza shop where “direct” employees take their business.) This includes those who traffic mightily in the rhetoric of complaint over the oppressions of federal intervention.

For years, this resistance has worked, blocking a new round of closures and realignments since 2005. And the Army continues to pay half a billion dollars annually to maintain scores of these underused buildings and properties across the country. These facilities quietly deteriorate, and the employment they provide shrinks as fewer and fewer people are needed to do less and less.

And rural bases are much harder to close down.  They are often the only place that has jobs in a region.

Converting a base or military factory to civilian purposes anywhere is really hard to do

Most new businesses fail, since they exist solely to provide profits to their shareholders, every quarter. That’s all that matters.  Profits now. The military has never had to worry about this, the government money keeps flowing in.

Most attempts to divert military money to commercial enterprises has failed because funding wsa too small, or ended too soon.   I can’t emphasize enough how cush the military projects are, funded by massive amounts of money for decades.  There are no customers to please!  Failure is rewarded with even more money, especially now that so few contractors exist they are too big to fail, and low bidders with no experience “discover” they can’t deliver without even more time and money too late into projects to turn over to another bidder.  But that is no problem for the politicians in that district, it just means more money flowing in and even better chances of reelection.

The commercial world is the opposite, and operates almost entirely on fixed-price contracts, in ways totally foreign to military contractors who have no idea how to make commercial projects or scale production up. They might produce just 50 a year. Using standards far greater than what’s needed for civilian products – standards and precision that keep complex equipment operating in battle.

It takes many years to retrain military personnel to do something completely different. They can’t walk away from a job of maintaining siloed missiles to constructing wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles and so on. That is completely outside of their experience, and venturing into the unknown is scary for many. It is also hard to convert abandoned defense plants and buildings to a new purpose.

In addition to closing bases, there is a tremendous amount of loose cash in DoD sofas that could be shaken out by identifying the tremendous waste and corruption.  But the military still doesn’t have an accounting system that can keep track of what is spent and trillions of dollars have disappeared. Constant Congressional, inspector general, and congressional budget office demands for reform have gone nowhere for decades.  Guess it’s not hard to imagine why, I can just hear some general saying “it would be a shame if your home and all your family was killed by a bomb someday”.  Okay, they aren’t gangsters, but then again, what do you call a group stealing trillions of taxpayer dollars?

Even when a new project gets funding, it doesn’t last, so constant new funding needs to be found, but it usually isn’t, meanwhile taking time and money away for fund raising rather than towards the new business.  Military projects are endlessly funded with fat contracts.  A completely opposite model.

Here are a few of many examples from Pemberton’s book:

Clinton promised a dollar-for-dollar reinvestment of defense funds into the civilian economy. This didn’t happen. Between 1993 and 1997 federal funding for the conversion of the military economy amounted to about $16.5 billion—a tiny fraction of the defense dollars cut during the post–Cold War period.

Calls to reverse the post–Cold War cuts to Pentagon spending grew louder. While Colin Powell, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, began pointing to the demise of the Soviet Union to observe that, “We are running out of enemies,” defense hawks began arguing for new military budget increases by invoking the fallback enemy: “It’s a dangerous world out there.” Others leaned on the idea that we might someday have one: We needed to “prevent the emergence of a peer adversary.” On 9/11, they found their enemy, and instead of a police action to find and capture terrorists, they launched two wars, framed as a Global War on Terror (GWOT). Its price tag is estimated at $6.4 trillion, and counting. So much for a Peace Dividend.

By 1995, the ranks of Southern California’s laid-off aerospace workers had swelled to 210,000. While they could sign up for brief outplacement services, only 1 or 2 percent were getting substantial retraining.

The Clinton administration adopted two main strategies to deal with the contraction of the defense industry. First were the programs to help companies, workers, and communities adapt to new markets. In addition to those programs, the administration’s flagship was the Technology Reinvestment Project (TRP). It funded teams of defense and commercial companies plus other partners such as academic and economic development institutions, labor unions and nonprofits, to commercialize defense technologies

The program’s technology policy and incentives privileged “dual-use technology,” that is, technology with both military and civilian applications, which steered contractors away from more decisive moves toward civilian markets.

Pemberton explains how Clinton’s attempt to reform the military contracting did the exact opposite: it created just a few too-big-to-fail contractors.  The administration provided financial help for large contractors to merge with one another. In 1994, Lockheed merged with Martin Marietta to create what remains today the largest military contractor in the world. It immediately set in motion plans to acquire General Dynamics’s rocket division, followed by Rockwell defense and space operations. Also in 1994, Northrop acquired Grumman Aerospace Corporation Northrop Grumman then proceeded to absorb Westinghouse’s defense unit. And so on. In 1997 the last of the major post–Cold War mergers fell into place when Boeing acquired McDonnell Douglas, and a month later the defense sector of Hughes Electronics Corporation. These companies devoured each other, so the clout of the remaining behemoths grew.  And with only one or two contractors left to compete for each major aerospace contract, they became too big to fail, and could use this new leverage to push prices, and profits, higher. And the scramble to acquire or be acquired and to manage the radical requirements of staying in business on fewer contracts, preoccupied the majority of the contractors. It diverted the energies and attention that might have been applied to the alternative: keeping their employees busy by working seriously on adapting their assets to civilian markets.

For 40-plus years the United States had concentrated its talents and treasure around the mission of winning the Cold War. It organized the lion’s share of the federal government’s resources around this goal which, in turn, centered the country’s industrial capacity on military production. This was our de facto industrial policy. The term itself was mostly taboo, equated with un-American Soviet-style five-year plans and with impeding the free market by giving government the license to “pick winners and losers.” Only the Pentagon was allowed to do that.

Much of the Clinton administration’s peace dividend instead went to tax cuts and deficit reduction. The amount of civilian investment was far too small for big contractors to diverge from their profitable military contracts. They also thought that this was a temporary aberration that wouldn’t last, and that turned out to be true, when it did in the late 1990s. They also convinced top public officials that the peace dividend could be spent on expanding arms exports to get rid of what couldn’t be sold to the U.S. government.

Above all contractors strategically donated campaign money to the members with the most influence over the budget and spread subcontracts over as many districts as possible to rope in even more congressmen. Since then money making opportunities (for military leaders and contractors at the top of the food chain) have come by shifting manufacturing overseas or states without unions, lower taxes, and fewer regulations.

Other swords to plowshares writing from the book:

Congress commissioned a small federal agency called the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) to scope out how the United States should adjust to these extraordinary developments on the home front. Before being shut down in 1995 by the new Republican congress, OTA produced two landmark reports. The first, After the Cold War: Living With Lower Defense Spending, looked at the role of federal, state, and local governments in helping workers, communities, and businesses adjust.

The second, Defense Conversion: Redirecting R&D, focused mostly on the three nuclear weapons labs. This report began, “The end of the Cold War frees the Nation to turn more of its energies into building a stronger civilian economy.” It examined ways to strengthen the mechanisms of technology transfer from the labs to create jobs in the private sector, particularly the CRADAs between lab scientists and private companies.

The end of the Cold War offered the country an opening to turn these R&D institutions toward national challenges beyond exercising military power—those that have clear benefits to human welfare but need pre-competitive R&D investment.

From academia, the Project on Regional and Industrial Economics (PRIE) at Rutgers University published a year-long study in 1995, “Coming in from the Cold: The Future of Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories.” The report noted that the Labs’ budget had expanded by 60% during the 1980s, and then declined only 12% after the Cold War ended. Based on two independent assessments by nuclear scientists, it concluded that the deterrent could be maintained while reducing the nuclear weapons work by two-thirds.

One-third, they argued, could be shared by deficit reduction, environmental remediation, dismantlement and an expansion of the non-proliferation mission. And the remaining one-third they recommended dedicating to new non-nuclear missions in energy, environment, health, and transportation.

The challenge would be to focus on missions that were clearly in the public interest, were similar in scale to the nuclear mission, and drew on capabilities the lab was uniquely suited to provide.

The Los Alamos Study Group produced its own study in 1992: “The Conversion of Los Alamos National Laboratory to a Peacetime Mission: Barriers and Opportunities.” They examined the pros and cons of four scenarios: (1) the status quo; (2) shifting the Lab’s research agenda toward the non-proliferation mission, with a smaller budget; (3) the lab would become a “Critical Technologies” lab and turn toward more research on alternative energy sources; (4) it would become a “Disarmament Lab” with a smaller budget devoted to overseeing the downsizing of the stockpile to a number necessary for a deterrent while supporting cooperative global security measures.

Amid talk that Los Alamos’s mission might be obsolete, its employees wondered whether they’d have a job the next year. The editor of the Santa Fe Reporter remembers a “weaponeer” describing the Lab as a charging rhino. Its target is gone, but it has too much momentum to stop, too much poundage for quick turns. Meanwhile, lab workers cling to the back of the beast, not knowing where they will be at the end of the ride.

In 1994 the Secretary of Energy convened a Task Force on Alternative Futures for the DoE National Laboratories, unofficially called the Galvin Report after its chair, the former CEO of Motorola. But in the end the task force members’ conception of alternatives leaned heavily toward the status quo. Their idea of post-Cold War change was to shift the Labs from building and explosively testing new nuclear weapons to “stewarding” the existing stockpile and preventing other countries from acquiring them. The task force mostly side-stepped questions of closures, consolidations, and budgets. And they were mostly skeptical of the Labs’ efforts to help commercialize their technologies, particularly through CRADAs. They did urge the Department of Energy to give higher priority, with “a heightened sense of urgency,” to the cleanup. They admonished the labs not to go scrambling for new missions, but rather to stick with what they were good at, defined as national security, energy, and environmental remediation.

Remarkably (or maybe not, given its corporate leadership), the task force trained its greatest rhetorical enthusiasm on this “bold” idea: “The principal organizational recommendation of this task force is that the laboratories be as close to corporatized as is imaginable.”

One brief section of the report gestures toward a genuinely alternative mission for the labs: The Task Force generally believes that the highest priority research areas by the Department [of Energy] and the laboratories are in the areas of energy efficiency, conservation, renewable energy sources (including photovoltaics, biomass, wind, geothermal and hydrogen) and more efficient recovery of gas and oil resources.

But the labs’ missions have remained largely the same, as their budgets have gradually climbed.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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