Word: evening
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Whether the Pentagon can afford to pay billions more for manpower when it needs billions just for ammunition is going to be one of the most controversial questions in the defense budget debate. Yet even now, a surprising 600 of every Pentagon dollar goes for personnel costs. The Soviets, by contrast, devote less than 30% of their defense outlays to personnel. How the Kremlin does this is no secret. Because the U.S.S.R. never abolished conscription, 75% of all Soviet males are drafted. (The rest are deferred for the familiar reasons...
...demographic reasons, the manpower squeeze is going to get even tighter. Because of generally declining birth rates since 1960, a decreasing number of Americans will be reaching the minimum military enlistment age of 18 in the 1980s. The Pentagon will have an ever more difficult time getting enough recruits to maintain the armed forces at their present strength of 2 million. In view of this prospect, there has been a revived questioning of the concept of the all-volunteer force, which was started...
...Even if these recommendations are feasible (and accepted), the Pentagon would still have to turn to the federal budget for more money. This would alarm those critics who have argued that defense expenditures are particularly inflationary...
...Even more critical perhaps is another question: Are Americans willing to pay the price? There is, of course, a widespread sense that the U.S. confronts a deadly threat from the Soviets, and that something must be done about it. But deciding what to do will test the nation's confidence and nerve as well as its ability to see issues in a long-term perspective. It will alsa require a challenging self-examination in which the U.S. weighs its role...
...most important measures concern strategic arms, even though such weapons systems take only 7% of the defense budget. As Jones put it, "The strategic balance sets the tone for what goes on in the rest of the world." The Administration has just taken an important step in this area by approving a $33 billion, ten-year program for the MX ICBM. The movable MX is theoretically invulnerable to surprise attack, so when the Pentagon starts deploying the first of these missiles in Utah and Nevada in 1986, the window of vulnerability will begin closing. The U.S. has also been moving...