MORE ON THE SOVIET DEFENSE ‘CONVERSION’ SCAM: WASHINGTON POST‘S HOAGLAND SECONDS CENTER CONCERNS

In an article entitled "The Other Cold War Goes On," published in today’s Washington Post, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Jim Hoagland powerfully reinforced warnings issued by the Center for Security Policy in recent weeks concerning aid to an unreformed Soviet military industrial complex.

For example, testimony provided by Center director Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. before the House Armed Services Committee on 30 July emphasized that:

"…If there is one area of the system by which the USSR has been governed which remains essentially unchanged by glasnost, perestroika, the putative end of the Cold War, democratic elections, interest in free market reforms or economic crisis in the Soviet Union, it is Moscow center’s defense industrial establishment."

 

Hoagland, citing Soviet informed sources, remarks: "Defense conversion was supposed to strip down Soviet military potential while building up consumer-goods production. It was to be a twofer. Thus far it is doing neither." (Emphasis added.)

Like the Center, Hoagland is appalled by the fact that "Western officials voice support for [the] wrongheaded and dangerous notion" that a fundamentally unrestructured Soviet military-industrial complex can be the engine for domestic production of consumer-oriented goods. More striking still are quotes attributed to Andrei Kortunov, head of the foreign policy department at the USA and Canada Institute:

"…Letting individual plants produce consumer items changes nothing if the military simply adds a production line for civilian goods. The end result is that the military gets more resources than it had before and no structural change is made. Until the structural change is made and these enterprises are removed from the military command system, conversion won’t really help." (Emphasis added.)

 

The Center for Security Policy agrees with Hoagland that, far from "not really helping," Western aid to an unreformed Soviet military industrial establishment could actually be extremely dangerous. In this connection, it urges the Congress and the media to scrutinize with care proposals now being developed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others in the executive branch to assist Soviet defense "conversion." Particular attention should be paid to the commitment President Bush reportedly made to Gorbachev in Moscow that the United States would agree further to liberalize the USSR’s access to militarily relevant high technology.

(Copies of Hoagland’s article and one by Gaffney adapted from his testimony and published last week by Defense News are attached.)