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Technology Transfer: Building a Better Beast
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12215 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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2 / 1987 |
2,650 Words |
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Thomas Gulick
Thomas Gulick is a Washington, D.C.-based free-lance
journalist and policy analyst on foreign affairs. |
Like the man-eating monsters in the science-fiction movie Aliens, the appetite of the Soviet military-industrial complex, demanding greater and greater quantities of Western technology to survive, grows more ravenous with each passing year. The Soviet drive for technological parity with the West has been fed for nearly 70 years on a gourmet diet of electronic morsels that the West, especially the United States, has allowed to slip through its fingers.
An important Pentagon study released in February 1985 estimates that long-term transfers of U.S. military end-use or "dual-use" technologies (commercial technologies that have military applications) to the Soviet Union may cost the U.S. taxpayer between $20-$50 billion per year in accelerating U.S. defense spending. This, the Pentagon concludes, could be the cost of neutralizing new Soviet military technology that actually originated here in the United States.
It is difficult if not impossible, as the Defense Department (DOD) discovered, to determine the exact costs of U.S. technology losses to the Soviets - mainly because so many of these transfers are illegal, covert (some probably are never detected), and are carried out though a vast Soviet intelligence and espionage network. For example, according to Dr.Stephen Bryen, deputy undersecretary for trade security policy at the Defense Department, the Soviet Union employs a staff of more than 100,000 people just to translate Western technical documents. This project is worth $10 billion in scientific research savings to the Soviets, says Bryen, and "allows them to focus their research on military technology we cannot at the moment address."
"In short," says Bryen, "they no longer have to spend time and effort in reinventing the wheel. They have the freedom to develop technologies which pose real challenges for us - new types of cruise missiles, new types of strategic missiles, new types of submarines, and so forth." In addition to this, intelligence estimates put the number of Soviet KGB agents working on high-tech espionage at about 2,000 personnel - enough agents to overwhelm the available FBI, CIA, and U.S. Customs agents that can be mobilized to stop the theft.
In its 1985 study, "Assessing the Effect of Technology Transfer on U.S. /Western Security," the Pentagon drew more disturbing conclusions on the potential losses of key U.S. strategic technologies during 1983-84. The study is based on 79 actual cases of highly strategic, U.S. military-adaptable technologies, including computerized data-management systems,
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