SECTION 6 - SUBSTITUTES FOR THE FUNCTIONS OF WAR
By now it should be clear that the most detailed and comprehensive master plan
for a transition to world peace will remain academic if it fails to deal
forthrightly with the problem of the critical nonmilitary functions of war. The
social needs they serve are essential; if the war system no longer exists to meet
them, substitute institutions will have to be established for the purpose. These
surrogates must be "realistic," which is to say of a scope and nature that can be
conceived and implemented in the context of present-day social capabilities.
This is not the truism it may appear to be; the requirements of radical social
change often reveal the distinction between a most conservative projection and
a wildly utopian scheme to be fine indeed.
In this section we will consider some possible substitutes for these functions.
Only in rare instances have they been put forth for the purposes which concern
us here, but we see no reason to limit ourselves to proposals that address
themselves explicitly to the problem as we have outlined it. We will disregard
the ostensible, or military, functions of war; it is a premise of this study that the
transition to peace implies absolutely that they will no longer exist in any
relevant sense. We will also disregard the noncritical functions exemplified at
the end of the preceding section.
ECONOMIC
Economic surrogates for war must meet two principal criteria. They must be
"wasteful," in the common sense of the word, and they must operate outside the
normal supply-demand system. A corollary that should be obvious is that the
magnitude of the waste must be sufficient to meet the needs of a particular
society. An economy as advanced and complex as our own requires the planned
average annual destruction of not less than 10 percent of gross national product
if it is effectively to fulfill its stabilizing function. When the mass of a balance
wheel is inadequate to the power it is intended to control, its effect can be self-
defeating, as with a runaway locomotive. The analogy, though crude, is
especially apt for the American economy, as our record of cyclical depressions
shows. All have taken place during periods of grossly inadequate military
spending.
Those few economic conversion programs which by implication acknowledge
the nonmilitary economic function of war (at least to some extent) tend to
assume that so-called social-welfare expenditures will fill the vacuum created
by the disappearance of military spending. When one considers the backlog of
un- finished business---proposed but still unexecuted---in this field, the
By now it should be clear that the most detailed and comprehensive master plan
for a transition to world peace will remain academic if it fails to deal
forthrightly with the problem of the critical nonmilitary functions of war. The
social needs they serve are essential; if the war system no longer exists to meet
them, substitute institutions will have to be established for the purpose. These
surrogates must be "realistic," which is to say of a scope and nature that can be
conceived and implemented in the context of present-day social capabilities.
This is not the truism it may appear to be; the requirements of radical social
change often reveal the distinction between a most conservative projection and
a wildly utopian scheme to be fine indeed.
In this section we will consider some possible substitutes for these functions.
Only in rare instances have they been put forth for the purposes which concern
us here, but we see no reason to limit ourselves to proposals that address
themselves explicitly to the problem as we have outlined it. We will disregard
the ostensible, or military, functions of war; it is a premise of this study that the
transition to peace implies absolutely that they will no longer exist in any
relevant sense. We will also disregard the noncritical functions exemplified at
the end of the preceding section.
ECONOMIC
Economic surrogates for war must meet two principal criteria. They must be
"wasteful," in the common sense of the word, and they must operate outside the
normal supply-demand system. A corollary that should be obvious is that the
magnitude of the waste must be sufficient to meet the needs of a particular
society. An economy as advanced and complex as our own requires the planned
average annual destruction of not less than 10 percent of gross national product
if it is effectively to fulfill its stabilizing function. When the mass of a balance
wheel is inadequate to the power it is intended to control, its effect can be self-
defeating, as with a runaway locomotive. The analogy, though crude, is
especially apt for the American economy, as our record of cyclical depressions
shows. All have taken place during periods of grossly inadequate military
spending.
Those few economic conversion programs which by implication acknowledge
the nonmilitary economic function of war (at least to some extent) tend to
assume that so-called social-welfare expenditures will fill the vacuum created
by the disappearance of military spending. When one considers the backlog of
un- finished business---proposed but still unexecuted---in this field, the
