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Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual opinions of staff writers
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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1971

NIGHT EDITOR: SARA FITZGERALD

Improving city transportation

WHETHER MOST PEOPLE are aware
of it or not, problems of parking
and transportation have reached critical
porportions here in Ann Arbor.
Significant population growth and a
general rise in affluence in the area have
resulted in a drastic increase in per cap-
ita automobiles-creating a host of prob-
lems which the city must solve quickly.
One has only to drive through the city
during normal hours to feel the effect of
too many cars, manifested in severe traf-
fic congestion and insufficient parking
places.
And at an ever-increasing number of
intersections in the city, pedestrians vir-
tually take their lives into their hands
every time they cross the street. Those
who do not own automobiles - and un-
fortunately they are as a rule low-income
persons - suffer right along with every-
one else as the city fails to provide enough
convenient and efficient public trans-
portation.
But city officials say, while they are
studying many plans, and implementing
others to help solve the problems, a tight
financial situation may hinder their pro-
gress.
To an extent this is true. Because Ann
Arbor is receiving some $750,000 less from
the University than it did last year, due
to pressure from the state legislature on
thie University's appropriation across-the-
boards cuts in virtually all city programs
must be expected.
AND YET, while it is clear the city will
have less money in its coffers this
year to do witl1 as it wishes, it would
have a lot less if it managed to lessen the
number of cars in the city - which
casts a dubious shadow on the city's good
intentions.
The large role that parking meter re-
venues and parking fines play in the
city's total revenues seems to indicate a
disparity. Last year, for example, the
revenues from meters and from parking
violations constituted over 10 per cet
of the total city revenues. This can be
matched against a comparable figure of
about two per cent of Detroit's budget.
In fact, Detroit, though over 20 times
larger in population than Ann Arbor, ha
barely three times the parking meters and
issues barely twice the parking tickets as
its smaller counterpart.
What this means, besides pointing out
the gravity of the city's parking situation
In sheer numbers, is that it might not be
clearly in the city's best interests to strive
Editorial Staff
ROBERT KRAFTOWITZ
Editor
JIM BEATTIE DAVE CHUD WIN
Executive Editor Managing Editor
STEVE KOPPMAN .. Editorial Page Editor
RICK PERLOFF Associate Editorial Page Editor
PAT MAHONEY ... Assistant Editorial Page Editor
LYNN WEINER .. Associate Managing Editor
LARRY LEMPERT . .. . Associate Managing Editor
ANITA CRONE Arts Editor
JIM IRWIN Associate Art Editors
ROBERT CONROW ................... Books Editor
JANET FREY..... ............. .Personnel Director
JIM JUDKI . ...........Photography Editor
NIGHT EDITORS: Rose Sue Berstein, Lindsay
Chaney, Mark Dillen, Sara Fitzgerald, Tammy
Jacobs, Alan Lenhoff, Hester Pulling, Carla Rapo-
port, Robert Schreiner, W.E. Schrock, Geri Sprung

to lower the number of cars that circulate
around the city, because that would mean
a significant drop in revenues.
City officials undoubtedly see the con-
flict between lessening the number of cars
and maintaining revenues at their current
level. They must make a choice, and the
most advantageous to everyone is un-
doubtedly the former.
A chief answer to parking and trans-
portation problems is increased modes of
public transportation.
THE CITY HAS an obligation to its resi-
dents to provide inexpensive, con-
venient mass transportation - a far cry
from what it presently offers. Alternative
transportation to the automobile must be
made attractive enough to deter people
from buying additional cars, and hope-
fully to make it possible for those with
more than one car to sell the excess.
The city's current attempt to revital-
ize the sagging mainline bus system by
broadening its service area and increas-
ing the frequency of its runs is a first
step. Also, the talked-about merger with
the bus system of the Ann Arbor School
Board would enable the city to attain
greater efficiency by fully utilizing avail-
able buses.
The present Dial-A-Ride system, albeit
a laudable effort by the city, must be
expanded as soon as possible. Moreover,
state or federal funds must be obtained in
order to substantially lower its present
cost of $1 per round-trip.
BUT WHILE OFFERING alternative
forms of transportation may lower
the number of cars in the city, the most
effective action the city could take would
be to forcibly curtail traffic, at least in
the downtown and central campus area.
Mayor Robert Harris has revealed the
city is studying proposals to permanent.
ly close several of its main streets to traf-
fic and to change them into malls which
could be connetced by shuttlebuses. The
city should seriously consider a plan
along these lines, as it would eliminate
parking and traffic problems, significant-
ly lower air pollution, and generally make
the area a more pleasant place to live
and shop.
The University can cooperate with the
city by opening up its several parking
structures ,to all citizens, thus providing
immediate additional parking space. In
addition, faculty and staff parking lots
should be eliminated, since they discrim-
inate against students, parttime s t a f f
and other residents, and cost so relatively
little through subsidizaion that faculty
and staff are encouraged needlessly to
drive.
Students can help in the short term
by leaving their cars with their families
and using alternative forms of transpor-
tation such as bicycles.
It will takesthe cooperation of every-
one in Ann Arbor, whether transient stu-
dent or permanent resident, to' help al-
leviate the growing parking and trans-
portation problems facing the city. But
it is chiefly 'up to city officials to take
substantive policy steps toward drastically
reducing the flow of cars through the
city.
-ROBERT SCHREINER

By RICHARD ENGLAND
We are on the threshold of
an entirely new battlefield
concept . . . The revolution I
envision for the future comes
not from the helicopter alone,
but from systems that hereto-
fore have been unknown.-
General William Westmore-
land, U.S. Army Chief of
Staff, October 14; 1969
DESPITE A TORRENT of presi-
dential rhetoric about "wind-
ing down the war" it has become
apparent that the American gov-
ernment is uninterested in a ne-
gotiated withdrawal from Indo-
china and that it is still commit-
ted to the maintenance of a client
regime in Saigon.
The failure of the American
delegation in Paris to respond in
good faith to the seven-point
peace proposal of the Provisional
Revolutionary Government (P.R.
G.) is one obvious bit of evidence,
Recent research reports on the
"e c o n o m i c reconstruction" of
South Vietnam commissioned by
the State Department, Institute
for Defense Analyses (I.D.A.), and
Asian Development Bank provide
additional insights into Nixon's
"game plan." According to Jacques
Decornoy, of Le Monde, "the one
premise basic to all these re-
search projects is that South Viet
Nam will in the future be a state
separate from the North, and in-
tegrated in the free world's econo-
my." Japanese businessmen have
already begun to flock to Saigon
in search of "new investment
possibilities."
These developments are ob-
viously incompatible with the po-

place civilians who are or might
become political supporters of one
of the Indochinese national liber-
ation movements. Fred Branfman,
who has interviewed numerous
refugees, Pathet Lao defectors,
and Western observers, has con-
cluded that the bombing of Lao-
tian villages has occurred des-
pite the fact that "guerrilla sol-
diers avoided the villages, neither
bivouacking in them nor storing
arms and ammunition ii them. All
say that the vast majority of the
casualties from the bombing were
civilian and not military, as the
soldiers were out in the forest . .."
IT APPEARS THAT the inten-
sified air assault on Indochina is
part of an American strategy .to
use refugee flows and forced ur-
banization in order to remove
civilians from the political orbit
of the national liberation move-
ments. The best estimates are that
between January, 1969, and Au-
gust, 1971. about 1.5 million re-
fugees were "generated" in South.
Vietnam and perhaps 2 million
more in Laos and Cambodia.
The political impact of intensified
bombing has probably been, how-
ever, to increase popular opposi-
tion to the Americans and their
"allies."
One Pathet Lao defector has
reported that "before, maybe 20-
30 per cent of the young men
would volunteer to join the Pathet
Lao army. But by 1969, 90 percent
and more wanted to join. No-
body really understood what the
Pathet Lao meant by American
Imperialism before the planes
came."

tiown, 1
of allied ground troops has been
to draw "enemy" fire and there-
by fix the location of "enemy"
units, but not to engage in-offen-
sive ground combat. Detection has
normally been followed primarily
by air and artillery, not infantry,
assaults. General Westmoreland,
the former U.S. commander in
Vietnam, has estimated that "ar-
tillery and tactical air forces in-
flict over two-thirds of the enemy
casualties . .
THE SIGNIFICANCE of this
distinction is that American mili-
tary planners do not expect ARVN
troops to be fine combat soldiers:
the ARVN units are simply sup-
posed to be competent enough to
defend themselves until tactical
air support can relieve them. The
amazing lesson of the Laotian in-
vasion of 1971 is that the ARVN
may not be sufficiently competent
to defend themselves even with
American air support.
If this is so, the national liber -
ation forces of Indochina may at
some point be able to impose a
sudden, morale-crushing defeat
on the ARVN .which would be
followed by its total collapse, not
unlike the collapse of Chian- Kai-
Shek's armies in China during
1949. Antiwar groups in the United
States should be prepared for a
military development of this sort:
depending on the noular reac-
tion within the United States, an
ARVN collapse and the ensuing
political crisis in Saizon could
lead either to a complete Ameri-
can disengagement from Indo-
china or to a desperate "salvage
operation" by the Pentagon.

the

I

war

01

MW

Helicopter brings fuel to Khe Sanh

ual and photographic reconnais-
sance.
These types of detection have
had several serious drawbacks,
however. First, visual and photo-
graphic reconnaissance cannot
penetrate Oriental monsoons and
jungle canopies. In an attempt to
overcome the latter of these prob-
lems, the U.S. military defoliat-
ed over 5.7 million acres of South
Vietnamese countryside between
1962 and 1970. Second, the ex-
tensive use of helicopters for aer-
ial reconnaissance and the ferry-
ing of ground troops who are es-
sentially engaged in detection
missions has been rather costly
to the Pentagon. By March, 1971,
over 4300 helicopters had been
lost to hostile and nonhostile
causes in the Indochina war: the
monetary value of thesebaircraft
was approximately $1.3 billion.
IT IS BECAUSE of these limi-
tations that the Pentagon has
sponsored an intensive research
program during recent years
which is now resulting in an all-
weather, all-terrain reconnais-
sance capability. In the words of
General Westmoreland, "we learn-
ed that Vietnam posed a prob-
lem even naoe difficult than mo-
bility. The enemy we face in Viet-
nam is naturally elusive and cun-
ning in his use of the dense jun-
gle for concealment. As a result,
in the earlytdays of the American
commitment we found ourselves
with an abundance of firepower
and mobility. But we were limited
in our ability to locate the enemy."
To solve this problem, the U.S.
Army set up a program in July,
1969, called Surveillance, Target
Acquisition and Night Observ-
ation (STANO).
The STANO project was given
a fiscal 1970 budget of $14 million
and charged withdeveloping elec-
tronic sensors which could be tied
to computerized intelligence-eval-
uation and fire-control systems.
These research efforts have al-
ready been fairly successful, and
the Army is currently testing
various prototypes in its Mobile
Army Sensor Systems, Test, Eval-
uation, and Review (MASSTER)
project, at Fort Hood, Texas.
The Army expects that the bud-
get of the MASSTER testing pro-
ject will exceed $60 million over
a five-year period. According to
Lieutenant General A.W. Betts,
chief of Army research and de-
velopment, "this is a high-prior-
ity segment of the (total re-
search) effort. Already there is a
great deal of money involved.
In May, 1970, the Army un-
veiled several of its newly devel-
oped sensing devices at a Fort
Hood press conference: they in-
clude a "seismic intrusion de-
tector," which is supposed to pick
up the audible movements of a

ARVN troops leave a village of ter failing to capture it.

person walking at 100 feet and
"chemical sniffers," which are de-
signed to detect the odors of
truck exhausts and camp fires,
BUT THESE ARE only the sen-
sing devices. The communications
system which links the aerial and
ground sensors to tactical air and
artillery units is known as Auto-
matic Data System for the Army
in the Field (ADSAF). The ma-
jor component of the ADSAF sys-
tem, which consists of a central
computer with interlinked com-
puters at each firepower base, is
scheduled to go into production in
January, 1972. Meanwhile, the Ar-
my is organizing its new TRICAP
Division, which will engage in
"test and experimentation" exer-
cises at Fort Hood.
There are several bits of evi-
dence which suggest that the
"electronic battlefield" concept is
already being tested on the peo-
ple of Indochina. According to one
press report, "the' United States
has increased aerial reconnais-
sance and monitoring by electri-
cal sensors along a 230-mile
stretch of the Cambodian border."
And following a recent battle be-
tween ARVN and North Vietna-
mese troops in the Cambodian
border region, the Saigon com-
mander boasted. that "allied ra-
dar and other electronic detect-
ing devices confirmed reports that
the North Vietnamese had with-
drawn eastward and northeast-
ward from the main battle area."
It is probably notcoincidental
that American B-52 bombers
flew six bombing strikes in the
same region the following day.
The military and political im-
plications of these technological
developments are awesome, to say
the least. The Pentagon and the
White House apparently believe
that they will be able to continue
the war in Indochina indefinitely
because of reductions in U.S. cas-
ualties and aircraft losses. They
may even be counting onincreas-,
ed efficiency in the use of ord-
nance in order to reduce the
monetary costs of the war.
All of this suggests that the
antiwar movement will becom-
mitting a grave political error if
it continues to focus its demands
Gn the withdrawal of American
troops;: we need to demand an
end to the genocidal bombing of
Indochina and an end to all sup-
port for the Saigon dictatorship.
It is also important for antiwar
groups to agitate against Nixon's
domestic assault on wages, which
is one device he is using to shore
up the international financial po-
sition of the American Empire.
THE IMPLICATIONS of these
technical innovations for the In-
dochinese and other Third World
peoples are even more momen-
tous. Admittedly, even if the au-
tomated battlefield concept were
fully operational today, the Amer-
ican government would be unable
to realize its military goal of a
fully "pacified" South Vietnam.
The political and military mobili-
zation of the Vietnamese people
by the National Liberation Front
has proceeded too far for that.
But electronic sensors and com-
puterized fire control may soon
make the Indochinese country-
side too perilous for all but the
smallest guerrilla units. As a re-
sult, the N.L.F. and other Indo-
chinese liberation movements may
be forced to shift their military
attacks and political organizing
from a predominately rural to a
primarily urban setting. In other
words, the defeat of American
imnerialism in Indochina may
well come in the slums of Saigon,
rather than in the peasant vil-
laaos of the Mekone Delta.
The future significance of the
automated battlefield is that the
initiation of wars of national lib-
eration based in the countryside
will become increasingly hazard-
ous. As a conseruene, the suc-

cessful insurgent movements of
the 1970's are likely to be urban-
baspd, perhaps on the model of
the Uruguayan Tupamaros.
THE ELECTORAL strategy pur-
sued by Salvador Allpnde's coa-

4.

4i

litical program of the P.R.G. and
indeed are predicated on an even-
tual military defeat of the na-
tional liberation forces of Indo-
china. In the cautious words of
the IDA report, "the best plan-
ning assumption seems to be a
military stalemate or withering
away of the war, a process that
can last for a decade or more." In
the face of American combat
troop withdrawals, this premise
might seem totally unfounded.
After all, only one U.S. Army com-
bat division is scheduled to re-
main in South Vietnam by the
end of 1971. However, it has al-
ready become clear that Nixon is
attempting to undercut domestic
political opposition to the war by
reducing American troop levels,
draft calls, and casualty rates
while simultaneously continuing a
war of attrition in Indochina with
intensified bombing and relative-
ly more South Vietnamese, or
ARVN, casualties. The impact of
"Vietnamization" is evident in
the data on military deaths in
Indochina: between 1967 and 1970,
annual ARVN deaths rose from
12,700 to 23,300 whereas the num-
ber of Americans killed dropped
from 9,400 to 4,200 per year.

An obvious weakness in this re-
vised American strategy is the in-
creased reliance on ARVN ground
forces. ARVN officers are noted
for their venality and military
mediocrity whereas their enlisted
men generally suffer from poor
motivation and discipline. One
presumes that the military equip-
ment turned over to the ARVN by
departing American troops will
not be sufficient to make up for
this lack of fighting spirit. But at
the same time it would be a mis-
take to think that the function
of the ARVN replacements is to
pursue and eradicate guerrilla
units. Ever since the American
buildup in 1965, a major function

What has not yet been ade-
quately recognized is that the
Pentagon has already begun to
implement an ambitious program
in Southeast Asia which is de-
signed to reduce the military im-
portance of both American and
ARVN ground forces. The basic
thrust of this program is the de-
velopment and deployment of
electronic sensing devices which
can substitute for ground forces
in the detection of "enemy"
troops and supply convoys,
A related concept has already
been tactically operational for
some time: helicopters and fight-
er bombers have been used very
extensively in Indochina for vis-


Letters to the editor

__t__ _ __ _ __ _ __ .r'.

ONE REASON for the willing-
ness of Pentagon planners to re-
turn to their pre-1965 reliance on
"colonial" troops is that Ameri-
can airpower over Indochina is
now far stronger than seven .years
ago. The construction of gigantic
tactical airfields at Korat and
Udorn in Thailand and the exist-
ing strategic bomber bases on
Okinawa have given the U.S.
military a fantastic bombing ca-
pacity over Indochina.
And Nixon is using that capa-
city.
By the end of 1971, the U.S.
bombing tonnage dropped on In-
dochina during the past three,
years will have exceeded the ton-
nage during the last four years
of Lyndon Johnson's administra-
tion. This intensification of the
air war has een nartriculrl

Homecoming
To The Daily:
WE ARE ADDRESSING this as
an open letter to President Flem-
ing, Donald Canham, athlethic
director and George Cavender, co-
ordinator of bands.
As you know, the theme of the
University of Michigan's home-
coming parade this year is "Let's
Work Together to Bring All the
Troops Home Now"..
In conjunction with this; the
Vietnam Veterans Against the
War and other anti-war groups
are requesting that the theme of
the Halftime of the Homecoming
game on October 30, 1971 be
"Bring All the Troops Home
Now, Let's Have a Real Home-
coming This Year".
The Vietnam Veterans are re-
questing permission to carry out
an anti-war show during the half-
time. A petition is currently be-
ing circulated on campus for sig-
natures. In addition to numerous
student signatures, 50 members of
the Varsity football team of the
University have already signed

Ann Arbor Coalition to End the
War; Vietnam Veterans Against
the War;- Peoples Coalition for
Peace and Justice; Student Mo-
bilization Committee; Human
Rights - Radical Independent
Party; Janet Klaver, Torry
Harburg and Pat Edsall-Wom-
en Uniting to End the War;
David Houseman, for the Inter-
faith Council for Peace; Com-
mittee of Concerned Asian
Scholars; Issho-Yigong; The
Ecology Center; Young Voters
Pledge; Young Workers Liber-
ation League; Peace Works;
Friends of Bangla Desh; Mich-
igan Council to Repeal the
Draft; Women's International
League for Peace and Freedom;
SGC; BSU Steering Committee.
Affirmative action
To The Daily:
TO CLARIFY the impression
evidently engendered by the re-
marks attributed to me in your
article of October 21, I believe
that the report of Cluster No. 1
indicates an initial failure of the

Scholarly arrogance
To The Daily:
IN HIS REVIEW "The Langu-
age of Scholarly Arrogance"a(The
Daily, October 2), James Romano
says that "psychologizing is a
poor method of literary criticism."
Quite so, yet this is what he ad-
mittedly does with George Steiner.
What is more, The Daily publishes
it, Book Reviews are byunature
imperfect and often unfair, but
Romano adds a new element: in-
coherence. What he means by
"scholarly arrogance" escapes me,
unless it be the audacity to seek
out difficult theories in science
and linguistics and use them in
literary criticism. Your reviewer
is hopelessly out of his element.
What is more, a remark like
"Steiner would condition us in
this way" is preposterous if not
paranoid. And again, would any
serious critic say of another critic,
"An i n t e r e s t i n g observation,
though Celine may not have
thought ahnt it that wav"9 And