A hidden cost of military research: less national security - science and politics

The U.S. Department of Defense is the nation's, maybe even the world's, biggest spender on research and development. It spends about 75 per cent -- that will be $45 billion this fiscal year -- of the money the federal government allocates to R&D. With the Pentagon expected to ask for an even larger share in fiscal 1988, Americans should focus on a question with ruinous implications: How can the U.S. survive economic competition with nations that devote little of their scientific talent and financial resources to military goals? Case in point: Japan, where only two per cent of the government's research and development money is devoted to military projects.

Sure, America must do defense research, and lots of it. But national security doesn't begin and end with keeping the Soviets at bay with the latest high-tech hardware. It also includes inventing and making goods that enable the U.S. to compete successfully in international markets. Increasingly, America isn't coming up with the civilian products needed to attain that goal. If this pattern persists, the country may some day find itself in the absurd position of having a formidable and hugely expensive strategic defense system standing guard over an industrial rust bowl.

Japan, West Germany, and those newcomers to high-tech, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, among them manufacture the world's best and/or lowest-priced cameras and other optical devices, computer chips, consumer electronics goods, advanced industrial equipment, cars, scientific instruments, and on and on down a long list of job-producing, moneymaking products. The U.S. remains pre-eminent in only a few civilian fields -- notably commercial aircraft and high-powered computers. But across the board America is a world beater at developing and building military equipment. Even when the arms industry produces one of its clunkers, it's never for lack of R&D spending.

The old argument is that America, with twice the population of Japan, four times that of West Germany, and a higher per capita income than either, is so much bigger and richer than the compe- tition that it can splurge on military research and still prosper on the civilian front. This argument doesn't hold as much water as it used to, and analysts have identified a number of shortcomings of American industry that have nothing to do with how much the Pentagon spends on research and development; they include: costly capital, short-sighted management, regulatory burdens, adverse exchange rates (at least until recently), predatory lawyers, uncaring workers, and foreign trade barriers. So why zero in on Defense Department R&D spending when so many other ills must be cured? And when private enterprise finances a huge amount of research and development for civilian purposes? If all the government and industry money spent on research and development in the U.S. is bundled together, the military's share works out to a less alarming 30 or so per cent of the total. Beyond that, the National Academy of Engineering recently concluded that America has enough engineers to meet its needs, and that defense spending is an antidote to unemployment among them.

Along with many other observers, I used to buy the comforting notion that, when it came to research, the U.S. could do it all. But the deterioration of American industry drove me to re-examine the question of whether the U.S. is overdosing on military research. The answer: an emphatic yes.

James Melcher, who heads the Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems at MIT and confines his own research to electric power transformers for civilian use, views the Pentagon's growing role in R&D with alarm. He says MIT is ''hooked on military research.''

A few blocks away, in the hangar-like building that houses MIT'sPlasma Fusion Center, researchers and technicians gaze dolefully at the vast, multimillion-dollar fusion mirror machine that they've been building for four years. It's part of a national program to achieve a clean, safe, limitless source of nuclear power. The machine is near completion, but the word from its spon- sor, the U.S. Department of Energy, is that it won't go into operation. As an economy move, the department has drastically cut the money for it. Barton Lane, a theoretical physicist, has worked on the machine from its inception. ''People in fusion energy research are getting out of the field,'' he says. ''They're going into the Strategic Defense Initiative. That's where the jobs are today for these kinds of skills.''

MIT has been an intimate partner of the military since the pioneering days of radar during World War II. But its president, Paul Gray, recently warned that the Pentagon's expanding appetite for R&D is ''cause for concern,'' because it ''may draw talented people, including students and faculty, away from other promising lines of inquiry.''

Are the worries expressed at MIT and in other universities merely the lamentations of oversensitive academics? Listen to Simon Ramo, a founder of TRW Inc., a large defense contractor and an influential Republican. As far back as 1980 he wrote: ''In the past thirty years, had the dollar totals we spent on military research and development been expended instead in those areas of science and technology promising the most economic progress, we would probably be today where we are going to find ourselves technologically in the year 2000.'' Since Ramo wrote that, the cost of research and development programs in the Department of Defense has tripled.