What Would a Fighter Jet Buy 60 Years After Eisenhower’s Speech?
By JOHN ISMAY
April 16, 2013
Shortly after the death of Joseph Stalin, President Dwight D. Eisenhower believed a rare opportunity existed to reset United States-Soviet relations, and he announced it to the world 60 years ago Tuesday in his 1953 Chance for Peace speech.
With a new Soviet premier taking office, and newly inaugurated himself, President Dwight D. Eisenhower believed that Stalin’s demise presented an opening to end the rapidly accelerating arms race between the two countries. Eisenhower directed his speechwriters to develop an address that clearly conveyed that desire to his Russian counterpart.
Eschewing the tired condemnations of the Soviet Union that had dominated recent presidential speeches, Eisenhower challenged his staff to present a new Pax Americana focusing on the idea of a future peace that unified Germany, removed occupying forces in Austria and talked in human terms of what both sides lost when spending so much of their wealth on armaments.
For this address, the president gave clear direction to the speechwriter Emmet Hughes.
“Here is what I would like it to say:
That jet plane over your head costs three-quarters of a million dollars. That is more than a man earning $10,000 every year is going to make in a lifetime. What world can afford this sort of thing for long?”
At that time, Korean War spending had reached its height. United States defense spending accounted for 14.2 percent of gross domestic product.
Eisenhower deliberately avoided giving this address to the United Nations because he did not want other delegates to immediately chop his words apart. Instead, he decided to deliver his message to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Mr. Hughes and Paul Nitze collaborated on a new draft that included this section, perhaps the most remembered part of the address:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms
is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half-million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
Unfortunately, there is no solid evidence as to how Mr. Hughes and Mr. Nitze came up with those figures. Historians at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kan., could not determine how the numbers were assessed. But a quick spot check of one commodity does give some confidence that the quantities were not completely pulled out of a hat.
A look at an earlier draft of the speech shows that the “fighter jet” cited would buy 170,000 bushels of wheat, versus a half-million as stated in the final version. With wheat running about $2 a bushel then, a quick search of United States Air Force aircraft of the time shows that the earlier draft might have referred to the F-86 Sabre, which cost $211,111 at the time. However, the higher figure in the final draft might have referred to the new F-84F Thunderstreak, which cost $769,330.
With some idea that the speechwriters might have been using reliable data, it is worth seeing what a modern heavy bomber, a fighter jet and a destroyer would buy 60 years later.
Modern Bomber
Introduced in 1951, the B-47 Stratojet is probably the aircraft the president referred to as “a modern bomber.” It cost $2,440,000 then. The most expensive bomber in use today is the B-2 Spirit, also known as the Stealth Bomber. Its price, adjusted for inflation, comes to $1,461,500,000.
The first item Eisenhower listed was a “modern brick school.” The National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities places the national average for a 600-student elementary school at $14,800,000. A single B-2 would buy 99 of these schools.
Next on the list was electric power plants. Figures from the United States Energy Information Agency show that one megawatt of electricity will power 749 homes. That means about 80 megawatts are needed to meet Eisenhower’s goal of delivering current to 60,000 homes. Constructing an 85-megawatt conventional combustion turbine power plant today costs $78,800,000. The B-2 would today buy 19 of these power plants after considering inflation.
Determining the cost of a hospital is difficult because of a wide array of variables, but Eisenhower left a clue in his early drafts by referring to a 400-bed facility. Given that, we can determine a national average for constructing, not equipping, a hospital of that size today would easily cost $231,000,000, according to the American Hospital Association. We could buy six of these hospitals with a B-2.
Building roadways is similarly subject to varied factors in cost. One thing that officials at the Federal Highway Administration ruled out right away was the president’s choice of material. According to them, no one builds roads out of concrete anymore. With so many variables, I chose to price out two lanes rural interstate over flat terrain. Were the father of the Interstate Highway System to buy 50 miles of that roadway today, it would cost $222,400. The Air Force’s current premier bomber would buy more than 328,500 miles of that kind of road.
Fighter Jet
A half-million bushels of wheat might have been enough to buy a fighter jet in Eisenhower’s day, but that is not quite the case at present. Trading at roughly $7 a bushel today on the commodities markets, that half-million bushels costs $3,500,000 in 2013. Looking at the data on today’s fighters, that much money would buy only spare parts at best.
On the high end of today’s fighters, the F-22 Raptor has a range of prices depending if you choose unit cost or lifecycle cost. Officials at the Air Force’s public affairs office put the price at $214,000,000 per plane. That would buy more than 29,500,000 bushels of wheat today.
Destroyer
According to the National Association of Realtors, the national median price for a single family home (each houses four people) is $173,600, as of February 2013. Building enough of them to house 8,000 people would cost $347,200,000. Or put a different way, about a quarter of the cost of the Navy’s current Flight IIA DDG-51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. The money spent on a single DDG, roughly $1.5 billion, would put durable roofs over the heads of more than 34,000 Americans. The proposed “Flight III” Burkes have an estimated delivery cost of $3 billion to $4 billion apiece. Or another way, it is enough to rebuild all the homes in New Jersey damaged by Hurricane Sandy.
Conclusion
Are there any parallels to present day? Osama bin Laden has been dispatched, but was he the same kind of existential threat that Stalin embodied? Are any politicians looking at the terrorist leader’s demise as an opportunity for the United States to take a different path? Is it time for an American president to give a new speech?
In this comparison of the past 60 years, one important data point not yet discussed is the current total defense spending. For all the debate over the size of the defense budget, it represents 4.3 percent of G.D.P. Compared with spending in 1953, that is three times smaller — relative to the gross domestic product — than what Eisenhower dealt with.
But while defense spending as a percentage of the G.D.P. has shrunk, the cost of each military item Eisenhower cited has grown enormously even after accounting for inflation.
As a former five-star general, Eisenhower had a keen appreciation for military thinking and strategy, and he often pushed back on requests made by his admirals and generals. This included proposals for new weapons systems.
In light of the continuing sequestration fight, the minutes of one National Security Council meeting in 1960, the last year of Eisenhower’s administration, give an idea of what he might have thought of the current morass:
“He believed it was the duty of military officers to get along with less if at all possible. He realized it was also the duty of military officers to ensure the military safety of the U.S., but he believed that no absolute assurance on this point could ever be given.”
What Eisenhower shows us today is that while we cannot completely assure safety given any amount of spending, we can definitively show what that spending could otherwise accomplish. And that is valuable.
John Ismay is a former United States Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer and a member of Columbia Journalism School’s Class of 2014. Follow him on Twitter (@johnismay) and on his blog.
