Our nation must also be wary of weapons procurement programs that do not deliver effective weapons systems. My favorite example is the F-22A Raptor, a Mach 2+ stealth fighter which is more than capable of sneaking up on and shooting down any aircraft in the world--in clear weather. If there is rain, snow, hail, sand, or anything else in the air, the F-22A is kept on the ground to protect its vulnerable anti-radar skin. It also requires almost two hours of maintenance for every hour that it is in the air, and goes through spare parts at a prodigious rate. Meanwhile, the F-15 Eagle keeps flying, and (as far as I know) not one has been brought down by hostile aircraft in its thirty-plus year career.
"Peace, love, and understanding they tell me:
Is there no place for them today?
They say we must fight to keep our freedom
But Lord knows there's got to be a better way"
"War," Edwin Starr;
War and Peace, 1970.
One of the greatest dangers we face today as a nation is a populace without the education or interest in developing and applying the science and engineering skills we need for our future. The overemphasis on business administration in our colleges and universities represents a brain drain that will take a generation for us to recover from fully.
Much of this has to do with the de-emphasis on research and development in modern American corporations, as a way to improve the bottom line. When corporations--like General Electric under Jack Welch--cut R&D for higher dividends, it is like a man who loses weight by cutting off his arm. Yes, he weighs less, but he is still fat.
The American educational system is turning out technicians, not broadly educated, adaptable, thinking citizens. Much of this can be laid at the feet of Frederick Winslow Taylor and his concept of Scientific Management. It was an idea that was adopted by such disparate organizations as the Harvard Business School, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany. It is a system that emphasizes efficiency at the cost of creativity, imagination, morality or any other form of positive societal values.
It is also a system that is absolutely contrary to the ideals of the Founders and Framers of our nation, requiring as it does a complete submission of our individuality in the name of efficiency and profit. (For more on this, I would suggest reading John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards, an excoriation of the technocracy, including its responsibility for Vietnam and other disasters. If you want to really scare yourself, read the first few chapters of L. Fletcher Prouty's JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy at the same time, and see the two authors' premises heterodyne into a grotesque whole that explains much of what is wrong with our country today. )
In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower spelled out the costs of continually escalating military expenditures, in what has come to be known as his "Cross of Iron" speech:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities; It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population; It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals; It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people."
President Eisenhower's costs vastly underestimate what monetary costs are accrued in the creation and production of our modern weapons systems today. The F-22A I mentioned costs approximately $230 million dollars per plane, one of the reasons that production of the F-22A was ended. A new F-15C would cost some $40-45 million per aircraft.
Efficiency is a good thing, but it should not be the only determining factor in running a business, a society or a nation. By itself, efficiency is a dehumanizing element in the long term good of human beings, in that it establishes two tiers in society: those who are deemed efficient, and those who are not.
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