Expenditures on the Military and Crime

excerpted from the book

Against the Conventional Wisdom

by Douglas Dowd

WestviewPress, 1997

Milex: The Political Economy of the Big Stick

The goal accepted by both the White House and the Congress in 1996 was to balance the federal budget by the year 2002. The means of doing so were to include substantial reductions of social expenditures, most notably in the areas affecting children, health care, education, and infrastructure (the more vital "opportunity costs"). Meanwhile, Congress voted to increase milex about 5 percent more than the White House had requested.

Suppose, instead, that milex were cut by 10 percent each of those seven years, working with the fiscal 1997 military budget of $266 billion-greater than the milex of the hot cold war year 1980 (in today's dollars). A rough calculation indicates that after seven years annual milex would be down to about $127 billion annually-more than 50 percent; instead of an aggregate of $1,862 billion, milex would be $1,248 billion over that period (a saving of $614 billion), with a consequent release of $139 billion annually in years to follow. And the magical balancing of the budget would have ensued sometime before fiscal 2003 without slashing needed social expenditures. But then, for all too many who wish to slash social expenditures, budget balance has been the excuse, not the reason.

For decades our milex have exceeded the GDP of all but twelve nations; today our milex are equal to that of the next ten military powers combined (most of them allies), amounting to 40 percent of world milex, three times those of Russia, twice those of Britain, France, Germany, and Japan combined. Meanwhile, with substantial government support, private arms exports (including some to potential enemies), subsidized to the amount of $7.6 billion annually by our government, provide more than half of the world's arms supplies.

Less than half the current Pentagon budget would leave both friends and foes still a distant second to us in milex and weapons technology. Of course approval for such cutbacks either from Congress or the White House now would be difficult, to say the least: Genuine and supposed economic, political, and strategic reasons hold both back from even considering-even mentioning-such a move.

It is almost forgotten that cold war policies met with more skepticism and opposition than support when first aired after World War II. Is it inconceivable that the White House and Congress could provide leadership for a markedly different set of conversion programs, with the advantage of costing less and yielding vital economic and social gains? President Eisenhower had the courage and good sense to speak of what he called a "peace dividend" in the 1950s, before the cold war had metastasized further into more deadly realms. And now the cold war is over-in fact, if not in habits of mind and policy. It remains reasonable to be concerned with military matters in today's unstable world, of course; but it is quite unreasonable to act as though there were still-was there ever?-an enemy justifying John F. Kennedy's "any sacrifice."

Astutely appraising his fellow citizens, LBJ deflected attention from the horrors of the Vietnam war with policies claimed to provide "both guns and butter," setting off a lively debate as to whether both were possible simultaneously. They were, of course, in the Vietnam as in other wars. As is true for most economic arguments, however, it should not be numerical calculations, but qualitative conditions and dynamic consequences, that are defining.

Thus, as only one major example of what is meant by the latter, Seymour Melman, an industrial economist who is an expert on these matters, showed even in the record-setting general prosperity of the 1960s that a main cost of our milex programs was a steady weakening of our overall industrial efficiency, both in itself and in comparison to other nations. That was no surprise given the large percentages (estimated as over 60 percent by Melman) of engineers, scientists, and highly skilled workers working for the military-industrial complex...

The Winners' Table

What are the dimensions of milex? Here, as with other official data, it is necessary to be careful with definitions. Government figures show that from 1947 to 1991 milex totaled $8.7 trillion (in 1992 dollars). If we add in milex for 1992 through 1996, we get to $10-10.2 trillion-a very large sum indeed, but also a very large understatement, by about 50 percent.

As suggested earlier, a reasonable accounting of milex should include the interest on that portion of the national debt stemming from milex-debt incurred for past, current, and future military strength. When conservatively estimated at about 50 percent, that would add about 15 percent, or $1-1.5 trillion, to the official $10+ trillion.

Neither do the official data take any account whatsoever of the military and paramilitary expenditures hidden away in "energy" "foreign aid," "space research," and, among other matters, the military component of covert (and much of the overt) activities of the CIA's top secret budget ($38 billion annually, by conservative estimates)-leaving aside the inanity, dangers, and wastefulness of the recently revealed (by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence) $5.6 billion spent by the CIA for "keeping secret documents secret." That was for 1995 alone and was seen by Representative David Skaggs of the committee as "surely an understatement." Nor does any of this take note of the U.S. Army and CIA "schools" for training those who became or worked with dictators-especially in Latin America.

It was only recently revealed that squirreled away in the Energy Department's budget were $3.9 trillion spent on nuclear weapons by the Army and Navy since 1947 but never before admitted. Now also assume-very conservatively-$10 billion annually in the half century 1947-1996 for the combined military share of foreign aid, space research, and the CIA, that is, about $500 billion; if we add that to the official total plus interest's share, we have something between $15 and $16 trillion. Senator Everett Dirksen (as GOP Senate leader in the 1950s) once quipped, "Add a billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon we're talking big money!" Child's play; were he quipping nowadays, it would have to be "Add a few hundred billion here . . ." For what and to whom does it go?

** Over 130,000 separate firms contract with the Pentagon; 25 of those firms receive about half of all contracts and farm them out to still other thousands of firms-which, along with about 3 million civilian arms-plant workers, over 1 million civilian workers on the Pentagon payroll, and over 1 million reservists (with income supplements), constitute a formidable political support system for milex.

** Profit rates for military production are two to three times those for all production. And why not, given "cost-plus contracts" and virtually assured payments for cost overruns ? The mother of all cost overruns (one hopes) is that for the B-2 ("Stealth") bomber. The original contract, for ten bombers, was obtained at the (itself outrageous) price of $400 million each, $4 billion in toto. By 1990 the price was $870 million; in 1994 it had risen to $2.2 billion each, more than five times the original price, $22 billion in toto. And there is a story lurking behind those figures that deserves the name of institutionalized corruption.

Standard Pentagon contracts allow payment for correction of defects. The first B-2 had 110,000 defects. The second had 80,000. (After a decade, there is still no third.) The payment for the correction of defects would seem to be a strong incentive to make defects, given that contracts are cost-plus. But 110,000 defects? And on the second try, still 80,000? Be that as it may, although the Pentagon declared that ten B-2s were enough-as the original two continue to struggle with their defects-Congress in 1996 appropriated enough for twenty ($44+ billion, at the present going price).

For better or for worse, the B-2 has yet to be used in combat. That may surprise many who followed the Gulf war and learned of the Stealth's combat triumphs. Thereby hangs another sordid tale: The Stealth fighter, the F-117A (at $106 million each), was used, twice, in Panama and in the Gulf war. However, Panama, one of the last places in the world where high-tech stealth was needed, was the occasion for the 117A's low-level bombing, and "collateral damage" to ordinary Panamanians was very high. The target- presumably General Noriega's hideout-was never hit. The F-117's use in the Gulf war was even more problematic; scandalously so, as the excerpt from a July 1996 General Accounting Office (GAO) Report revealed:

"The Pentagon lied about the performance of its most advanced weapons systems, particularly the F-117A Stealth fighter.... For example, the Air Force told Congress that the Stealth fighter had an 80 percent success rate on its bombing runs [as compared with a real rate of 40 percent, and that] commanders defined "success ~ as launching a bomb or missile, not hitting a target. The Report's authors said these lies were told to help persuade Congress and citizens to buy the next generation of weapons: newer, stealthier fighter jets, newer smart bombs and missiles. Perception management . . . made the weapons of Desert Storm look better than they were, as part of a strategy "to justify future weapons spending..." "The better the F-117 looks, the better the B-2 looks. "

The war news never made clear that it was not the B-2, but the F-117, in action. The source of the report was the GAO's Program Evaluation Division. The New York Times story concluded with the terse statement: "The division is being dismantled, destroyed by budget cuts imposed by Congress this year and last. In a few weeks it will disappear." That takes care of those spoilsports.

** In an editorial entitled "The Pentagon Jackpot," the New York Times noted that "The Senate Service Armed Services Committee tossed $1.3 billion into its budget bill to order an LHD-7 amphibious assault ship the Navy does not want. The vessel will be constructed in Mississippi, which is represented by Senator Trent Lott, a committee member and the Republican whip. When Bob Dole resigned as majority leader, Lott succeeded him in the considerably more powerful post.

** And then there is procurement fraud, the current term for the corruption link between the Pentagon and its contractors. In recent years twenty to thirty of the top contractors have been guilty of such fraud; none has been or is expected to be barred from further contracts.

** In the "Defend America Act of 1996," Congress sought to revive Reagan's "Star Wars." The cost was estimated by its sponsors, then-Senator Dole and Representative Gingrich, as one-eighth or less of the $60-70 billion estimate provided by the Congressional Research Service. The act promised to deploy a fully operational national missile defense system-regardless of cost-by 2003. The act was passed by both houses of Congress, over the objections of both the White House and the Pentagon. That this seems a big boondoggle for a few at a time when the many are pushed toward austerity is one matter; that such a program violates the 1972 U.S.-USSR Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is a dangerous something else.

Such reservations are reinforced when we examine the reasoning of Speaker Gingrich, who supported his and Senator Dole's proposal in this way: "One day, mathematically, something bad can happen and you ought to have a minimum screen on a continent-wide basis, and it's doable." Just as "doable," the American Physical Society had opined (in 1987) as "deflecting a bullet in mid-flight by firing one of your own." The society deemed that to be impossible at prevailing levels of technology, adding that "another ten years of research would be required to learn whether it might ever be feasible."

** Then there are innumerable expenditures so outrageous as to be downright funny-so much so that one wonders what, if any, kind of controls there are over the Pentagon's past and present fiscal activities. Intermittently the following kinds of follies have been brought to light: The Pentagon pays $750 for a toilet seat; $2,034 for a 13-cent nut; $1,500 for a screwdriver; $3,100 for a common wrench. And we must assume that countless toilets seats, nuts, screwdrivers, wrenches, and the like were bought at those prices.

All of that would be bad enough if it were only a sad or enraging tale of money, of greed, corruption, waste, and foolishness. It is that. But in addition to the greedy behavior on the part of its principals, there was also much more and worse than financial misfeasance and malfeasance.

Decades of large-scale militarized production required not only a militarized economy but also a society whose attitudes have become significantly militarized, whose responses to complex problems have come increasingly to be military responses. Given the many years of huge milex, it is not surprising that we fought or encouraged and financed (and often trained others to fight) many wars-in Asia and Central America and the lesser-known conflicts in Africa and in the Middle East (such as those in Angola and Afghanistan). Thousands of U.S. soldiers were casualties of those wars, as were millions of others, both military and civilians, in the countries involved.

It is not easy to find justification for all that bloodshed and misery. Strong arguments have been made that most of those wars occurred when and where they did not as a means of defending our country but as a virtually inescapable part of the cold war and its military-industrial complex, whose main participants gained greatly thereby. That position will be seen unconvincing by some and as an understatement by others. In either case, there remain serious questions needing serious answers from us as a nation regarding the questionable ways and means of milex: its money costs, its financial crimes, misdemeanors, and associated corruption, and its larger effects on the social process here and abroad. We return now to some narrower and less complex aspects of milex: What about the losers?

Who Paid and Who Pays?

The "payment" has taken many forms: taxes, distortions in the economy, pressures to curtail or deny needed social expenditures, diverse tendencies toward the shallowing of political discourse and behavior and the contamination of relations between government and business, and, not least, the damages done to those directly involved in warfare. Here we confine our attention to a relatively narrow band of economic matters. First, taxes.

Among the many things about our nation in which we take pride is the high level of our per capita income. Until recently it was the highest in the world. That the GDP ($6+ trillion) into which our population (260+ million) is divided to get that "per capita" includes milex ($400+ billion annually by our calculation) is seldom if ever remarked upon by economists. One cannot, however, eat a hand grenade or mow one's lawn or get to the supermarket with a tank. But, those economists might add, milex stimulate the economy over time and in more than a one-to-one fashion: A dollar of fedex will ultimately result in $2-3 of national income. Probably so.

However, many studies have pointed out that $1 of fedex yields much less in income and jobs from milex than if it were spent on education, infrastructure, or health care-and that in yielding higher incomes it would make higher taxes feasible.

Consider some of the tax data: In California, the average household pays over $3,000 annually in federal income taxes, of which half is for milex (as officially calculated). Comparing taxes paid with milex (and its associated incomes) in their areas, New York City had a net loss of $8 billion, and Chicago and Los Angeles each a net loss of $3 billion; calculated by family, the loss was $3000+ per family-a result common to nineteen of twenty-five major cities. Funds thus diverted from public and private investment also meant a significant loss of jobs in past and present. Some areas must have gained, of course, mostly in the Sunbelt states of the Southeast and Southwest (excluding California), notably Georgia and Texas.

If we look at milex with a different measure-the relative importance of milex in total fedex-we find a major distortion when comparing official with more realistic numbers. Thus, it is officially stated that milex usually count as 25 percent or less of fedex. More accurate measures, such as those earlier calculated, yield a percentage of fedex over 50 percent. That is so even if we neglect to take into account the budgetary sleight of hand of President Johnson in 1966 (mentioned in Chapter 2). The Vietnam war had begun to get out of hand-financially, militarily, and politically. In addition to hiding $10 billion of milex from his own budget chief, Johnson initiated the custom of including Social Security in annual budget calculations-thus automatically reducing the percentage of milex to fedex.

But Social Security always has been and remains outside the realm of fiscal policy. The taxes and expenditures that constitute fiscal policy and determine the dimensions of the federal budget are decided upon by Congress and the White House each fiscal year. Social Security collections and payments go into and out of the Social Security Trust Fund and are independent of the budgetary process. Congress, which legislated Social Security, can of course-and often does-change the terms of its operation, but the Social Security Act placed the trust fund where it remains, outside the realm of fiscal policy. To give it the appearance of being inside that process is to camouflage government operations.

On top of that, despite the deliberately created public impression, Social Security has for many years run a rising surplus (now between $50-75 billion annually); and for those same years a portion of that surplus has been shifted from the trust fund to the Treasury. That means the Treasury need not borrow from the public to that same amount, thus creating the illusion of a smaller annual deficit. The present rate of that legal deception is near $50 billion annually, and rising.

As in many other governmental deceptions, those just noted have been practiced by both parties in the Congress and the White House. It is worth repeating that when the regular surplus of the trust fund becomes instead a deficit (in about twenty years), the Treasury will have to borrow from the public-sell bonds-to "replace" the amounts shifted and raise taxes to pay the interest. Those politicians who regularly deplore the "perilous condition" of Social Security, and the "thievery" of today's elderly from today's young fail to mention their own role in heightening that peril. Corruption makes strange and bipartisan bedfellows.

Waste, and Want Not?

The pressures on political leaders to maintain milex come from both the public and business. Economically, it is of course true that cuts in milex cause problems for enterprises and workers and their communities. The cuts up to now have been disproportionately in milex going to people rather than to corporations: Many bases have been closed and the armed forces reduced, whereas weapons expenditures have been increased. Whether or not that difference was calculated to preserve popular support for milex, that is its effect. Meanwhile lobbyists ensure that the maintenance of milex favors weaponry. There can be no blinking at the fact that "conversion" entails not only physical facilities and supply-demand relationships, but also habits of mind and procedure, including slovenly habits of management and production.

Must we choose between milex and some mix of chaos and stagnation? No, we need not. The intricacies of conversion have for many years been the focus of discussion and study by the relevant parties: engineers, economists, businesses, unions, and civic groups. The literature is both abundant and solid. "Beating swords into ploughshares" is feasible and it would have immense benefits of many kinds over both the short and the long term. There is no question of whether it can be done; it was done after earlier wars, most notably after World War II, when there was a will to do it.

Nevertheless, it is important to recall that the processes of conversion after World War II were much eased by several conditions that contrast sharply with the current situation: (1) World War II brought "over-full employment" (less than 2 percent unemployed, 1943-1945) at home as factories expanded, and 16 million were serving in the armed forces; the last two decades of the cold war, the 1970s and 1980s, were marked by relatively high unemployment (2) Through the combination of rationing, bond sales, price controls, high incomes and high profits, personal and business savings were substantial and growing throughout the war, thus creating an aggregation of "pent-up" demand from both consumers and businesses; savings in the cold war years were in steady decline, and now the levels of business and consumer debt are both worrisomely high. (3) That earlier pent-up demand combined with cold war milex and expanded exports to stretch production facilities, leading to rising business investment and (in particular) consumer durables, along with a boom in construction-residential, commercial, and road (the latter much stimulated by the superhighway program of the 1950s).

When all that coincided with (4), the economic stimuli provided by Truman's Fair Deal and pressures from then-strong unions, there developed a U.S. version of the "social wage" (pensions and health care for a significant share of workers with a program of subsidized public housing). What lay ahead in the 1950s was thus strikingly different from now: two decades of growth that stimulated and supported processes of rapid technological and socioeconomic change. When a different era took hold in the late 1970s it was characterized not by "pent-up" but by sagging (or debt-financed) levels of consumer and business demand; marked more by recession plus inflation ("stagflation") than by easy growth; weighed down by social and political controversies, fears, and the beginnings of political "gridlock," which blocked the processes of beneficial change.

In sum, future reductions of milex require a degree of social concern, imagination, understanding, and intelligent leadership not required for the post-World War II milex increase. There is another, if subtler, difference between the end of World War II and the end of the cold war, as regards conversion. The appropriations for and the granting of military contracts in the cold war era were (and are) done with a shocking casualness. The resulting waste and corruption blot the political economy; they cannot be repeated in this age of heightened sensitivity to fedex (although that sensitivity does not cover milex and crimex). It should be assumed that a substantial process of conversion will not permit either amusing instances such as $750 toilet seats or the larger economic crimes attending the built-in institutionalized fraud of multibillion cost-plus contracts or their connected and predictable processes of corruption between capital, labor, the Pentagon, and Congress.

... It is still believed by many that ordinary working people have a stake in the continuation of the milex status quo, lest a worse fate befall. They might ponder but one example plucked from a large selection: From 1992 to mid-1995, while the CEOs of six of the largest military contractors were cutting 178,000 jobs, their own average compensation more than tripled-from $1.3 million in 1989 to $4.0 million in 1994.'

In the military-industrial complex, as in the rest of the corporate economy, profits and CEOs' incomes are coming to be inversely related to the jobs and incomes of workers: Like a seesaw, the former go up as the latter go down (except that a seesaw normally goes back the other way, which the present process shows no sign of doing). Any conversion program, instead of carrying with it cost-plus contracts and the other thievery of milex, must ensure that its benefits are justly divided between those who pay taxes and those who own the enterprises.

Crimex: Solution or Part of the Problem?

Just as the United States is Number One in milex, so it is in crimex. Ah, but we are such a large country, it may be said. But our leading position is relative, as well as absolute: Average incarceration rates for the United States in 1991 were 426 per 100,000 of population; second was South Africa (mostly blacks, this before its recent conversion to a democracy), with 333; then the Soviet Union with 268. Even Northern Ireland, with its ongoing conflict, had a rate of less than a third of ours: 120. Equally interesting are the figures at the other end of the scale: France, 81; Japan, 45; Netherlands, 40; Philippines, 22. And that was in 1991; the number of our imprisoned had risen 16 percent by 1994.

In 1995, the Justice Department reported that the number in federal and state prisons and local jails rose 6 percent, and that since 1980 the total number under correctional supervision (probation and parole) had "almost tripled, from 1.8 million to 5.4 million, with an average annual rate of growth of 7.4 percent." Those are the very years in which crimex accelerated to their present spectacular rate of increase. An objective analysis might well conclude that the side effects of crimex are exacerbating the disease they presumably seek to cure.

Although it may not have been used consciously, the military-industrial complex has been a model for what has now become the prison-industrial complex. As this is written, forty-four of the fifty states are building new and expanding old prisons; prison construction is the most rapidly rising item in state and local budgets. The money-making aspects of the federal grants for that process have become so obvious that a major weekly subtitled a piece on appropriations for prison construction: "An Anti-crime Program Smells a Lot Like Pork."

Federal grants to states and localities are rising for prisons while they have been falling for social expenditures. That decline is scheduled to continue and accelerate-especially now that federal grants for social entitlements have been changed into "block grants." The latter is a euphemism for increased leeway for the states to use (probably reduced) federal funds as they choose; and the choice is likely to veer away from health, education, and welfare and toward crimex. As with CEOs' salaries and bonuses in relation to jobs and workers' wages, as crimex (or milex) go up, social expenditures must go down. The most spectacular example of that process is in California. Once the state that led all others in its fiscal devotion to higher education, California is now low on the list in terms both of expenditures and achievements: In 1996 crimex edged out expenditures on higher education for the first time.

Measures touted as reducing crime neither begin nor end with prison construction, of course; the latter happens to be the most profitable-as advanced weaponry is among milex. The comparison is quite close in some respects: In the 1980s, California's prison construction (the most costly in the nation) boasted new prisons whose minimum security cells would cost $100,000 each (half for construction costs, half for interest). Then there are the additional costs for food and clothing, guards, and medical care, amounting to $25,000 per year per inmate. Make what you will also of this (still in California): While industrial workers' wages were declining in the 1980s those of prison guards rose from $21,000 in 1982 to $43,000 in 1991-plus pensions, medical care, and the like. Teachers and nurses should be so lucky.

... crime became a lively political issue in the late 1960s, and crimex began their rise soon thereafter. Before long, so too did crime. In 1973, there were 500,000 inmates in U.S. prisons and jails; by 1995 that number had tripled to 1.6 million. In California, the leader in crimex among the states, the number of inmates quintupled in the same years.

It wasn't just prison construction that had increased in that period; so had other supposed remedies: fewer restrictions on police, longer sentences, harsher treatment, twenty-three-hour incarceration, and reinstitution of the death penalty and (in Alabama) of the chain gang and rock busting. Meanwhile, training and education and other rehabilitation efforts were decreased-despite the view of an overwhelming number of prison wardens that "cutting back on amenities" was a mistake. Between 1990 and 1995, the number of prison guards and wardens doubled. In those same years-as both crimex and crime were growing rapidly-violence within the prisons exploded: The number of assaults on guards rose fivefold.

These changes, followed not just by higher costs per prison and per prisoner but also higher rates of recidivism, would be seen as dramatic signs of failure were they to take place in the business world. Instead, none of this having reduced crime, the latest experiment is "three strikes, and you're in for life"-requiring, of course, more prisons, more crimex.

It would be comforting if stupidity were the reason for this rush toward counterproductive policies. The reason is not that benign. As an article in the New Yorker put it: "Politicians are well aware that cutting prisoner education programs will result in higher recidivism rates and contribute to a need for more prisons.... Right-wing politicians consider additional prison construction not a necessary evil but a necessary good." (For "right-wing" it might be more accurate to say "politicians beholden to the prison-industrial complex. ")

All this occurs in an environment of deteriorating socioeconomic conditions: long-term joblessness, double-digit joblessness for the young, deepening racism, drug use, demoralization, and despair. There is almost universal agreement among criminologists and sociologists that neither the prevention of nor the cure for crime will be found principally-if at all-in crimex; in particular, prison wardens almost universally advise that prison work programs reduce violence, help discipline, and reduce the high rate of recidivism; that present tendencies increase violence within and outside the prison walls. They should know, and they can't be seen as "soft on crime."

There is strong, if not unanimous, agreement among criminologists and sociologists that significant reductions in crime could be expected with better education, housing, and job opportunities for all. But such experts can offer only judgments; they cannot afford lobbyists. Their views, if they are ever to prevail, would need widespread political support.

In the immediate future the changes are going in the wrong direction: Using California again as representative, since 1991 prison expenditures have risen by 11 percent as AFDC has gone down by 9 percent and as state university fees have risen by 20 percent to offset the fall in state expenditure. The "correctional" budget, which was $300 million in 1980, had risen over ten times by 1995, to $4 billion; the average monthly AFDC payment (in California) was $630 monthly and falling; the average monthly cost per prison inmate was $2,000, and rising.

If there is a causal connection between desperate social conditions and crime-and there is surely some significant connection-the wrong-headedness of current priorities is quite startling. But practicality is not the only matter: Well over half of all AFDC payments are for the support of children; as these payments fall, along with other patterns of deterioration in the lives of children, fundamental questions as to our society's future are raised.

We Must Do Better

The American Dream has already become a nightmare for the tens of millions whose lives are blighted, dangerous, desperate, without hope. There are more in that plight today than there were twenty years ago; we could, were we to muster the will, find the way to reduce those numbers toward the vanishing point. A sample of what we could do was captured by Melman when after exposing the folly of our weapons programs, he noted that such "valueless military parts of the proposed 1996 to 2002 budgets would save at least $875.7 billion. He added: "With these savings, we could improve America's infrastructure while creating two million-plus jobs-more than enough to offset the jobs lost by ending these military programs. This combined with local advance planning for economic conversion would reduce the fear of lost jobs that manacles communities and their members of Congress to a cold war mindset."

Against the Conventional Wisdom