Soviet military relief act

Rep. Les Aspin, Wisconsin Democrat, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, recently introduced a new argument in his campaign to reduce the U.S. defense budget and delete funds for sophis-ticated American weapon systems. He said that he was "deeply skeptical" that the Soviet economy can support large, new generations of high-tech fighter aircraft and air-defense weapons.

Given the severe economic crisis facing the Soviet Union, such an assessment seems, on its face, to be reasonable. What Mr. Aspin may not fully appreciate, however, is that there is one way in which Moscow can nonetheless continue, as he put it last month, "to keep up its end of the high-tech arms race" – and do so on the cheap: Instead of paying the staggering costs involved in developing the necessary strategic technologies indigenously, all the Soviets need do is obtain them from the West.

One example illustrates just how efficient a solution this can be to the present Soviet problem. In the mid-1980s, for an investment of roughly $18 million, the Soviet Union illegally acquired sophisticated machine tools from Toshiba. These have been used to manufacture extremely quiet propellers for the Kremlin’s submarines, imposing what has conservatively been estimated to be a $10 billion degradation in U.S. anti-submarine warfare capabilities. Not surprisingly, Moscow has long sought repeal of Western laws and regulations that inhibit its access to technologies that would do for the Soviet defense industrial base writ large what Toshiba did for its submarine programs.

Unfortunately, the House of Representatives is scheduled tomorrow to begin consideration of legislation that would go a long way toward this Soviet goal. HR 4653, titled "The Export Facilitation Act of 1990," is largely the work of Rep. Sam Gejdenson, Connecticut Democrat, the new chairman of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Economic Policy and Trade. If Mr. Gejdenson has his way, the existing statutory basis for denying militarily relevant high technology to the Soviet Union and other proscribed destinations will be decimated.

This ill-conceived legislation would provide the greatest U.S. taxpayer relief to an industry since the onset of the savings-and-loan crisis. The primary beneficiary, however, would not be American exporters – as this bill’s sponsors intend. Instead, it would be the Soviet defense sector and those of other, potentially hostile powers. Consequently, perhaps a more apt title for this bill would be "The Soviet Military Relief Act of 1990." Consider just a few of the astounding, and potentially quite dangerous, provisions of HR 4653:

• The bill would sharply reduce the present role of the secretary of defense in technology security decisions. For example, it would limit Defense Department review of licenses for export of goods and technology only to: (1) the Soviet Union, (2) those Eastern European countries that do not qualify for favorable treatment and (3) controlled countries where the end-use is said to be other than for "civil" purposes. In this manner, the president would be statutorily denied the benefit of his secretary of defense’s counsel on all technology issues falling outside of the designated areas.

 

What is more, since the Gejdenson proposal grants the secretary of commerce exclusive right to determine what is or is not a "civil end-use," the breadth of the areas removed from Defense Department review can be expanded at will. This approach also guarantees a burgeoning of the number of ostensible "civil" end-users for militarily relevant technologies.

• Under this legislation, all present national-security controls on goods and technology would be terminated as of Sept. 30, 1992, except for those applied to so-called controlled country destinations. This would dramatically interfere with the president’s ability to exercise discretion over the transfer of strategic technologies to destinations like Iraq, Libya and Iran.

 

The secretary of commerce could then reinstate controls on an item only after he has determined that its transfer would make a "significant contribution" to the "military potential" of a country that would prove detrimental to the United States and after his assessment has been published in the Federal Register. This provision is fraught with difficulties and ambiguities, not the least of which is the wholly inappropriate delegation to the secretary of commerce of the task of determining which technologies have military potential and what constitutes a significant contribution to such potential.

• The Gejdenson legislation would also represent yet another reward to Beijing for its repressive policies by authorizing distribution licenses for exporters to the People’s Republic of China. A distribution license enables an exporter to obtain one license to cover a series of shipments to a broad range of distributors – rather than be obliged to seek individual validated licenses for each sale.

 

Despite Soviet economic warfare against the Baltics, it would grant a similar concession to Moscow – where, if anything the potential for dangerous abuse of this authorization to effect strategic technology diversions is even greater than in the PRC.

• Mr. Gejdenson’s legislation would also require the secretary of commerce to establish indexing procedures so as to raise automatically the performance levels on goods or technologies subject to licensing requirements. Those items that no longer meet the higher performance thresholds would be decontrolled. In other words, under this bill, no matter how much damage the transfer of a given technology – for example, advanced supercomputers – might do to Western security, it would automatically become decontrolled if, as is virtually certain to be the case, further technical advances have subsequently been made in the field.
• HR 4653 would also allow any goods or technology – whether controlled or not – to be taken by a U.S. exporter to a trade show or for demonstration purposes in any country as long as (1) the U.S. exporter retains title to that good and (2) the U.S. exporter takes the good or technology out of the country when the trade show is over. This would amount to an invitation to circumvent the few export-control arrangements the legislation would allow to remain; at the very least, it would greatly facilitate the compromise of sensitive technologies.

A number of members of the House of Representatives have lately become aware of the serious violence that the Gejdenson bill could do to American security interests. In particular, leading members of the Intelligence and Armed Services Committees expressed serious misgivings about the bill’s implications for U.S. equities in their areas of jurisdiction when the House Rules Committee met two weeks ago to schedule floor action on HR 4653. Every American taxpayer should hope they will be successful in keeping this legislation from, in effect, breathing new life into the military threat we face.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is the director of the Center for Security Policy.