ARMS TRADE RESOURCE CENTER

CURRENT UPDATES: APRIL 20, 1999

Later this week Bill travels to Washington to release our new Welfare for Weapons Dealers 1999: The Hidden Costs of NATO Expansion. In this email update we try to tease out some of the connections between the NATO expansion and its misguided search for a mission in Kosovo. As each day the news out of Kosovo gets worse and we move closer to the possibility of ground war, we hope that the analysis and resources you'll find below will be helpful in your own work to make some sense out of the mess our country is engaged in. Please send us your feedback, and let us know how you were able to utilize this information in op-eds, letters to Congress, and other activist work. Please call us if you have any questions, or would like help getting your hands on other information. Call us at 212-229-5808 ext. 112, or email at berrigaf@newschool.edu.

In this update:
Kosovo
Kosovo Resource
Nato Expansion

KOSOVO:
After three weeks of bombing, the United States stands at the forefront of an air war in Kosovo which is inflicting great suffering without accomplishing its objectives. Cluster bombs, an indiscriminate weapon, may have been used in the April 15th bombing of a column of Albanian refugees which killed 82 people. Paul Watson, an LA Times reporter on the ground in Kosovo, found fins and bomb remnants, and spoke with witnesses who described the explosion as having come from the sky. While the Pentagon claims that 1000 lbs bombs were used in the unfortunate accident, Watson's reporting seems to contradict this assertion. Jane's Defense Weekly reported earlier this month that the Pentagon wanted to use new CPU-97 cluster bombs, designed with heat seeking sensors, in Kosovo. To read Paul Watson's account on the cluster bombs and his dispatches from Kosovo, please see www.latimes.com/dispatch.

Analysis of the costs of the air war and the estimated price tag of a ground war, prolonged humanitarian and military involvement in the region suggest an even greater need to re-evaluate the wisdom of our current course and seek alternative diplomatic, multi-lateral solutions.

The Center for Budget and Strategic Assessment estimates that each cruise missile fired in Kosovo costs a million dollars, and that DoD is spending between $20-65 million a day bombing the region, (www.csbahome.com). In the last three weeks, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the U.S. has spent $600 million on the bombing campaign.

The CBO has projected that a sustained air campaign through next March could cost $3 billion. Adding peace keeping efforts through FY 2000 raises the price tag to $4 billion.

Sending in U.S. ground troops, says Dan Crippen, CBO director, Awould increase the mission's price tag by $300 million per month for each increment of 27,000 troops deployed and by more than $1 billion a month to sustain the air campaign. Under these estimates, 50,000 ground troops deployed over a year could cost an additional $19 billion.

Michael O'Hanlon from the Brookings Institute estimates that a prolonged, full scale ground war could cost the United States between $10-30 billion.

These numbers, while staggering by themselves, take on a different cast when compared to the meager sums which were devoted to diplomatic, multi-lateral efforts before the bombing campaign began.

The Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a United Nations body which works to find non-military and diplomatic solutions to conflicts throughout the former Soviet Union, has a yearly budget of $40 million- as much as NATO spends to bomb Belgrade for one day.

The OSCE, was (even on this shoe-string) helping to foster and strengthen civil society throughout the former Yugoslavia, as it struggled towards democratization and ethnic reconciliation. Now, State Department funds earmarked for the OSCE will probably be cut to help cover the $4 billion in supplemental DoD funding for the war in Kosovo. For more information please see Tomas Valasek's Diplomacy vs. Bombs: Congress' Wrong Turn www.cdi.org/issues/Europe/kosovo.html

The United States could pay off its UN debt of more than $1.5 billion for less than the price of one B-2 bomber, a gesture which would simultaneously articulate our commitment to international cooperation and provide the UN with desperately needed resources to be a more effective vehicle for change.

Unfortunately, our foreign policy-makers have grown accustomed to using force as a response to every problem. As Curt Weldon (R-PA) recently pointed out, Kosovo is the United States' 33rd troop deployment in eight years. In the 40 years which preceded, U.S. troops were deployed all of ten times.

Bill Hartung is working on a cover story for The Nation magazine which critiques our current Abomb then negotiate strategy, and lays out a strategy for Kosovo built upon the strength of the UN and grounded in a long term vision for cooperative international peace building. Look out for it on www.thenation.com

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KOSOVO RESOURCE
To keep up with new developments in Kosovo, we have found the following two sites very helpful, offering a different chorus of voices, and timbre of analysis than mainstream media pundits.
Global Beat Syndicate: www.nyu.edu/globalbeat
Mother Jones: www.motherjones.com/total_coverage/kosovo/forum/kosovo.html

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NATO EXPANSION:
NATO is in the spotlight these days- what with fighting a war, turning 50, and opening its doors to three new members all at the same time.

While Washington is getting spruced up for NATO's birthday celebration, the lobbyists for NATO expansion have traded hats and have become the party planners. The Host Committee, in charge of the details of these celebration events, is made up of an A-list of weapons manufacturers which each shelled out $250,000 for the honor of membership.

And have they planned a party!! Glittery gala banquets, cocktail receptions, luncheons, and invitation-only events at the embassies of the new NATO allies. The Host Committee includes familiar names like George David, CEO of United Technologies Corporation, which owns Sikorsky, Christopher Hansen, from Boeing, and Michael Bonsignore from Honeywell, along with a handful of phone companies just so nothing looks suspicious.

These industry leaders are not shelling out all this money just because they like to throw a party, but because they view the black tie events as networking extravaganza's where they can wine and dine the new NATO allies and cozy up to generals from around the world. Indeed, after lobbying so hard for NATO expansion last year, industry plans on reaping the rewards of their labors. The lobbying effort to expand NATO was spearheaded by Bruce Jackson, Director of Strategic Planning for Lockheed Martin, who claimed he lobbies as a hobby. The U.S. Committee to Expand NATO was made up of a group of business and political leaders which claimed to be bi-partisan, but included members of Bob Dole's presidential campaign staff, and set up shop in the offices of the American Enterprise Institute.

The CEO's of major arms manufacturers have a lot to celebrate as they shake the dust out of their tuxedo's this week. Analysts have estimated that the expansion of NATO will be worth $10 billion in fighter aircraft sales alone. And the war in Kosovo provides many money-making opportunities.

Mr. Jackson wrote an op-ed in RollCall, which commanded Congress in the bellicose language of a football coach to win in Kosovo. "There is no uncertainty about Kosovo. We know exactly what we have to do. We must win... We are in a fight to the death for what we and our 18 allies believe in."

Of course, Mr. Jackson himself is in no danger of dying in the war in Kosovo, but his company will make a healthy profit when the Pentagon stocks Lockheed Martin systems like the F-16 and F-22 fighters and the Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS) after the war. Boeing and Raytheon (Tomahawk missiles) will also make money on the war.

It looks like Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary are learning to play the hedging game, seeing which weapons manufacturer will give them the biggest weapons system with the most accessories for the least amount of money. When the Polish Defense Minister visited the U.S. in January, he met with United Technologies, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin. At their meeting, Boeing executives offered Poland a hefty arms package, including Hellfire missiles and electronics upgrades on their helicopters, in order to convince them to lease surplus F-18s (built by Boeing's McDonnell Douglas division) rather than Lockheed Martin's F-16s. While the lease arrangement is worth next to nothing to Boeing or Lockheed, they are bending over backwards because whichever company's aircraft is leased will have an inside track on an eventual sale of new combat aircraft to Poland.

For an in-depth analysis of costs of NATO expansion, please see William D. Hartung's, Welfare for Weapons Dealers 1998: The Hidden Costs of NATO Expansion ,@ at www.worldpolicy.org/arms/natocost.html. We are currently working on an update of this report which we will be e-mailing to you next week sometime, you can also view it on the Global Beat syndicate, www.nyu.edu/globalbeat

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