IRDISP-RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR DISARMAMENT, DEVELOPMENT AND PEACE

ABSTRACT: Fine that there is the arms race, but what has Italy to do with it? Aren't the U.S. and the Soviet Union the promoters of such race? It is true that the two superpowers are the chief responsibles for the arms race. The chief ones but not the only ones. Italy has its share of responsibility as well. A smaller share, but not a negligible one. In absolute numbers, Italy's military spending in 1985 was the eighth of the world. As regards the number of men at arms, it is among the first fifteen countries. And the Italians are in the first six positions among the world exporters of armaments. The weight of the military sector on the whole of the Italian economy is still rather limited: The spending accounts for 2.7% of the gross domestic product; arms represent 2.7% of the wealth produced by the industry, and 2.3% of the exports. Moreover, the military threats to the security of Italy are less serious than those which many other international actors have to face - including many of our allies. Therefore,

Italy is in a situation that offers many opportunities to contain the spending, experiment conversions to civilian uses of the military productions, and promote a realistic security policy aimed to achieve détente.

Unfortunately, these opportunities are dropped. In fact, there has been a tendency to expansion over the last decade which must be urgently stopped. As of the mid-seventies, Italy has become one of the major exporters of weapons systems, and its military spending exceeds the annual growth rates decided at the NATO level. That same period marks the rise of the supporters of a "new military role" for Italy in the Mediterranean. The "White Paper" presented by the Minister of Defense Spadolini in winter 84-85 summarizes and pinpoints these developments, obviously from the point of view of a person who supports them and hopes that they will continue. This book on the contrary highlights the doubts, the questions, the alternative proposals compared to what has been to this moment a monologue carried out by the establishment.

("ITALY AND THE ARMS RACE" - A counter-White Paper of defense - edited by Marco De Andreis and Paolo Miggiano - Preface by Roberto Cicciomessere - Franco Angeli Libri, 1987, Milan)

6. THE EVOLUTION OF THE REGULATIONS OF PARLIAMENTARY CONTROL ON THE PURCHASES OF THE MINISTRY OF DEFENSE

Enea Cerquetti

1. Introduction

In July-August 1982 Parliament was working on the conversion of decree-law n. 428 of July 10 1982, which gave the high commissioner for civil protection the opportunity of carrying out all measures and contractual procedures for the maintenance of the helicopters of the Army mobilized to extinguish fires in the woods, and this not through the ordinary procedure but on the basis of the experience of the extraordinary commissioner in earthquake-affected areas. The mechanism was the following:

1. the state officials' faculty of carrying out contractual acts within certain amount limits was extended to the colonels and brigadiers but only for the purpose of carrying out the maintenance of the air means to put out fires;

2. the Minister for civil protection was accustomed to spending - generally speaking and not just for these purposes - by skipping all prior opinions and taking heed only of the judgment of a technical committee which had already been tested for interventions in earthquake-affected areas;

3. all previous acts would be subjected to the a posteriori control of the Court of Accounts, obtaining for this purpose an automatic registration procedure.

We have been assured by the Hon. Zamberletti that the system devised by the government and extended by Parliament in terms of ordinarity of extraordinary regulations, has worked effectively. But was it legitimate, then, to consider the entire technical-administrative area of the Defence as a "disaster" area, giving some minister with no competence on the subject the task and powers to solve all problems?

Or would it not have been legitimate, instead, to extend the assigning of powers such as the ones mentioned above also to the Minister of Defence, allowing his to use his own scarcely used powers as well as those? Urgency and need can always justify derogations of "full powers" or "necessary powers" such as the ones analysed. Nonetheless, the legislative orientation of the parliamentary committees of Defence, in the VIII and IX legislature, was and still is extremely cautious, also because of the impossibility of ruthlessly applying a regulation based only on indiscriminate "derogations" to an administration which alone buys half the assets and services of the State.

Let us therefore see the cautious while substantial innovations introduced in the meanwhile, and let us also trace the tendency and possibilities for future development.

2. Evolution of the regulations contained in the "promotional" bills

The regulations provided by the promotional bills have been partly determined by the innovations recently introduced. Therefore, we need to make an in-depth analysis of these and draw some guidelines.

The typical model was that of bill n. 57 of 1975 for the Navy, which used the following mechanisms (art. 1 and 4):

1. establishing a maximum limit of expense to carry out a modernization program structured in stages with various amounts over a period of ten years;

2. "Notification" of the program (in accordance with the resources) to Parliament, within six months;

3. Forwarding to Parliament of an annual report on the progress of the implementation as well as on the agencies, companies and enterprises involved.

These mechanisms allowed to introduce a form of parliamentary control, albeit a posteriori. More interesting are the criteria of articles 2 and 3, with their procedural estimates:

4. the Ministry is entitled to resort to a "private" negotiation with agencies, companies and enterprises "which have a particular competence and the suitable technical means, and are worthy of trust";

5. The agency, company or corporation that obtains the procurement may resort to specialized companies "for the production, supply and installation of special types of machinery". In other words, it may act as prime contractor also of "on stream" contracts. albeit by signing special contracts to be submitted to the prior clearance of the Ministry of Defence;

6. As regards projects and contracts, the regulations applied are the ones contained in art. 2 of bill n. 825 of 1973 on airports, i.e.:

- up to 300 million, regardless of the conditions of obtainment, i.e. also through a private negotiation, the projects and contracts are passed by the competent administration, without the necessary opinions provided for by the current regulations;

- over 300 million, in place of the requested opinion, calls for the opinion of a special committee, specially redesigned for the Navy's promotional bill;

7. during the execution, the administration may update and modify the technical prescriptions and time requirements of the contracts with a record signed by the parties under art. 119 of decree n. 827 of May 23, 1924 (whereby "Variations or additions cannot be carried out unless they are authorized by the authority charged with approving the contract"), whereas if the expenses increase an additional act needs to be signed.

As we saw, point 4 has not always been used with full assumption of responsibilities, as in the case of minesweepers.

Moreover, the contents of art. 5 have never been fully applied to th extent of explicitly recognizing a "a prime contractor company of an "on stream" contract.

As far as point 6 is concerned, a maximum of 300 million was accepted, already devaluated in 1975 and no longer revaluated, owing perhaps to the confidence in the working capabilities of the "Committee" which, according to the text, excluded even the Higher council of the armed forces. The law on airports, for example, envisioned a specificity other than that of the military programs, and in order to reduce the time requirements decided by the Court of Accounts and by the Council of State, unwillingly produced a change in the structure of the armed forces in that it weakened the functions of the higher council. It would have been necessary instead to distinguish between "programs" to be submitted to the higher council and projects and contracts to carry out the programs, to be enacted through the shortcut of gathering all parties involved around a single table by virtue of a direct contact, and not by an endless sequel of letters.

Point 7 was equally ambiguous, because it did not specify the subject of the preventive opinions which the authority which made the contract was to obtain on the variations legitimated by a record or introduced with an additional act and which, owing to the vagueness and vastness of variations, could cause mechanisms of major modification of the initial object of the contract and of the relative costs.

Lastly, it should be remarked that the promotional bill for the Navy renounced recalling other useful measures provided by the bill on airports, such as the following two:

a. art. 5 laid down that, after hearing the committee, also in derogation of the current regulations, it was possible to "entrust the planning and direction of the works to the licensed companies and to professionals". This meant giving up the idea of exploring a smaller degree of mingling between Navalcostarmi and the peripheral organs of control on the one hand, and "industrial" services of the contracting companies on the other, through the planning offices and the directors of the works specially appointed for each program and also with forces external to the military system. A limitation which - imitated in the laws relative to the armed forces, while these lacked a planning tradition and a body of technicians comparable to that of the Navy - later created huger difficulties, especially for the Army;

b. art. 7, which established that "For the records relatives to the execution of the works and of the supplies as listed in the previous articles, the control on the legitimacy is carried out subsequently", was ignored, oddly enough.

It is well-known that facilitations such as these, added to the previous ones, have not saved the plan of the bill on airports from huge delays, due not only to the need to re-finance the program (bill n. 493 of 1975 and n. 299 of 1979). In the subsequent debate on the bill for the reform of the control on air traffic, the decisions taken on the tasks of the special company highlighted the "regulatory" requirements rather than the procedural ones, necessary to solve the problems. Art. 2 of bill n.299 of 1979, however, specifies that the whole set of procedural facilitations provided by bill n. 825 of 1973 for extraordinary programs in the airports financed by it, were prolonged by about two and a half years also to the other programs, financed with ordinary funds of the Ministry of Transport and Defence, for airports and flight assistance.

In other words, mention was made of transforming the regulations for extraordinary programs into permanent rules, and applicable also to the ordinary ones. This was the path followed for the promotional bills, as we will see later.

So far for the blueprint of the "naval bill", which was not entirely developed on the model of the bill for airports. The subsequent bill, n.38 of 1977 for the Air Force, was based on the previous one, except with some further details:

a. point 1 - fixing a maximum expense for ten years - was completed with a mechanism of yearly reassessment through a budget bill (art. 2, comma 3) and the minister was authorized to take pluriennial commitments under article 49 of the decree n. 2440 of 1923 for extraordinary expenses such as the ones financed with a special bill. Nonetheless, the new approach placed the program to be achieved in front of the decision of a maximum expense, even if the program was generically outlined and thus was only slightly more binding than the provisions of point 2 of the naval bill;

b. point 3 was completed with the restriction that the yearly report for Parliament was to contain "opinions and controls" on the projects and contracts, in addition to the sole description of the progress of the program;

c. point 4 (on the private negotiation) was ignored for obscure reasons, considering the importance of such dispositions, whereas point six (the creation of a special commission on the model of the "Navy") contained an important derogation with respect to what the naval bill had taken from the bill on the airports: for the administration of the Air Force, the opinion was no longer "conform", but only "compulsory while not binding".

Let us now have a look at bill N. 372 of 1977 for the Army. Obviously it tended to copy that of the Air Force in the part relative to the establishment of the allocation of funds for programs to be carried out over a ten-year period, with a yearly reassessment mechanism through a budget bill, linked, nonetheless, not only to "the state of progress of the single programs" but also to the "needs of interforce military planning orientation"; it was an ambiguous specification, but one that nonetheless determined the possibility of re-financing and devaluating and for variants relative to the old programs to be established as either substitutional or additional.

At the point relative to parliamentary controls (art. 3, last comma) the obligation of forwarding a copy of the records of the commissions to Parliament before they became executive or before the authorized contracts were signed was added.

Apart from this, nothing had changed with respect to the other additional derogations already obtained by the Air Force on the Navy. Generally speaking, therefore, a progressive disentanglement from the initial rules can be noticed, especially in relation to the limits of expense and the nature of the opinions expressed by the commission for the armed force programs in exchange for a little more parliamentary information; a sort of "do ut des" which had its own acceptable logic even if, as we denounced many times, it lead far from the initial expense appropriations.

Moreover, a disparity of regulations can be noticed for each of the three armed forces, as well as, obviously, among the extraordinary and ordinary programs of each.

Lastly, we need to remark the case of bill N. 497 of 1978 on housing for military personnel. While issued after the bills on the "Air Force" and "Army", it copied the model of the "Navy" for the absence of burden rise indexation. As to the stepping up of the procedures, this was also supplied by the usual commission (art. 23), but the obligations of parliamentary information were reduced to the single annual report. Only with bill n. 47 of 1981 (i.e. the budget bill) was the delivery of the records according to the model followed for the Army (art. 3) imposed. An attempt was made to uniform some aspects of the four provisions mentioned, even though the most important attempts have been carried out through the budget bills.

3. The evolution of the regulations of the promotional bills through the budget bills

The exhaustive description contained in the previous paragraph makes it easier to identify the nature and limits of the subsequent evolutions, sought through the budget bills.

For the fiscal year 1980, the government suggested to unify the expenditure chapters for the modernization of the armed forces, unifying the extraordinary appropriations (sought with promotional bills and structured by the financial bill) with the ordinary ones (established with table 12 on the basis of the opportunity given to the administration to equip itself with all it needed to operate its offices, with royal decrees n. 1628 of 1926 and 443 of 1927 and thanks to the "reassessment" estimates established with the bills for the Air Force and Army).

This unification allowed to introduce the indexation of the funds for the Navy "according to the requirements".

Such indication, which the minorities understood perfectly well, caused a negotiation on the question of parliamentary control in the Chamber in order to include an extension of the procedures allowed by the committees of the three promotional bills to all the expenses of the three new chapters for modernization (4011, 4031 and 4051): on the one hand, this would have made the procedure quicker and on the other Parliament would have finally been informed also on the ordinary budget programs.

The Court of Accounts, criticizing the manoeuvre, indicated such chapters as uncontrollable accumulations of expense shares for uncontrolled programs, but failed to remark two developments within the action of the administration and of Parliament:

a: the administration was forced to readjust the Commission-Supreme Council relations created by the new measures, achieving an internal structure that would safeguard the Council;

b. Parliament was finally free to clearly judge the ordinary budget programs which the Court, for its part, had never indicated in its own reports.

On the other hand, the following year, ie. with the budget bill for 1981, the system based on the quest for a procedural unification between the two type of program (extraordinary and ordinary in the financing) was perfected with the introduction of a greater uniformity of the degrees of parliamentary control, by extending the most penetrating obligations already imposed on the Army (art. 70, which now corresponds to 14). In addition to this, it was decided that the "Army Committee" would deal with the modernization of the Carabinieri and that the committee for staff accommodation would deal with modernizing all infrastructures of the three armed forces. Lastly, it was added that the four committees "carry out their powers also in the revision of contracts that have already been authorized". Art. 70 of the budget bill for 1981 has therefore remained a milestone in the unification and extension of the new procedures, and has been literally copied in 1982 and in 1983 and in all subsequent years, also because o

f the worsened parliamentary relations which was the result of indiscriminate obstructionist practices.

Even if a posteriori, therefore, parliamentary control on the modernization of defense can be said to be guarantied. Hence the battle to obtain a preventive control.

4. Further developments of evolution of the regulations for the supplies of the Defence

Now we can touch briefly on the legislative texts that are still being developed by the Senate or the Chamber, and which shed light on the degree of attention of the parliamentarians on the problems of regulatory evolution and of the need for further innovations.

The procedural estimates of the bill "``Programmi di ricerca e sviluppo - AM-X, EH-101, CATRIN - in materia di costruzioni aeronautiche e di telecomunicazioni'' are part of the evolutional line of the promotional bills.

Apart from any judgment on the contents of the programs, the introduction of the latter to the parliamentary authorization in the shape of a legislative act made up for the previous use of application with sole administrative acts in the context of the so-called ordinary budget. This represented in itself a parliamentary success, because it allowed to affirm, albeit formally, the right to intervene before the stage of supply, linking the determinations on the development to the ones following the production. At any rate, while the decision on the production is incomplete and compulsory if the contents of the development stage has been determined, it is equally evident that it is hard to establish a development stage that does not take into account any reference to a subsequent stage of production.

Today the government is not introducing a bill for the production stage, which has nonetheless begun. The structure of this bill resembles that of the original bill for the Navy, without indexation but completed with norms of parliamentary control for the Army.

Two news:

1. the committees of the promotional bills, charged with assessing the contracts for these programs, are integrated by other subjects: a representative of the Ministry for scientific research, a state lawyer and a person who was paradoxically "unknown" to the committees - the Secretary-general of the Minister of Defense, national director of armaments (art. 2, comma 3), so called despite there is no legislative act under way. This last presence is an important fact considering the umbilical cord which persists between directorates general and staffs and the fragility, therefore, of the coordination of the Defense Secretary-general within the technical-administrative area; the government, instigated by the staffs of the armed forces, has given the limited interpretation that the committees are thus integrated only for those three programs;

2. comma 2 of art. 2, at the suggestion of Parliament, first introduced the hypothesis of applying the contractual and payment norms of the public works and, provided they were more favourable to the aims of the administration, also for typically industrial manufactures, for which the regulation on the supply of objects and not services should have applied, without therefore, for instance, the fundamental mechanisms and powers-duties of the direction of the works, the mechanisms of payment on the progress of work, and so on. It seems all this has been unheeded. We are therefore faced to anticipation, albeit cautious and limited, of regulatory innovations (director of armaments) and regulatory-procedural (recognition of a nature of purchase of industrial services as part of the defense-industry relation), which advance towards a direction several times urged during the sessions of the committee of inquiry, and which the Minister refuses to accept. At the Chamber defense committee, still in the legislative sta

ge, in the 8th legislature the progress of the bill n. 2491-Chamber was concluded: ``Modificazioni al decreto del Presidente della Repubblica 18 novembre 1965, n. 1478, concernente la riorganizzazione degli Uffici centrali del Ministero della difesa'', which had already been approved by Senate on 9 November 1981. The text introduced regulatory simplifications in the context of the directorates-general and of the latter's competences: the direction of the motorization and combustibles that deals with fuel, combustibles and lubricants, was to disappear. Every armed force and the commission would have purchased these products independently: the direction of land armaments would have also dealt with the means of the Engineer Corps and would have incorporated functions relative to wheeled and armoured vehicles already carried out by the dissolved direction of motorization and combustibles. Nonetheless, such scheme, accepted unanimously, was added by parliamentary initiative an art. 8-bis which contained further i

nnovations. It was voted unanimously by way of principle by the commission in legislative seat and forwarded for examination to the constitutional and budget affairs committee, which endorsed it. The only thing that remained was fulfilling the final vote and then returning the bill to the Senate. The early end of the 8th legislature caused all this to fail.

The text read as follows:

Comma One - "For commissions of weapons and means for military use and for the supplies of the Defense, the technical Directorates-General are authorized, through a ministerial decree of the ministry of defense, to apply regulations under law n.1. of 3 January 1978 and following modifications, also for that which concerns industrial processing and supplies as well as for the relative maintenance, research and development services provided the activities take place on the national territory or are under the control of international consortia created for the requirements of the defense and provided the choice of these procedures is judged beneficial for the administration".

The text reaffirmed, in a more detailed way, the application of the regulations on public works, previously introduced with a parliamentary amendment in the draft bill on AM-X.

Comma two and three - "The Directorates-General carry out the contractual activity relative to the renewal and modernization of the means and assets of the Defense, on the basis of programs passed with a lw, and on which the Minister of Defense has asked for the opinion of the competent parliamentary committees".

"The contractual activity relative to the (ordinary and extraordinary) maintenance and the resupply of the means and assets of the Defense must be forwarded to the competent parliamentary committees according to general agreements in relation to the shares to be allocated on the special chapters of the estimate expenditure of the Ministry of Defense".

For the first time there was a formulation of the fundamental principles of parliamentary control on the supplies of assets and services of the Defense, consistently with the principles so far affirmed.

Comma four - "The regulations under art. 70 of bill n. 164 of 23 April 1981, are applied also the fiscal years following 1981".

The aim was to make permanent the regulations illustrated and provided for by art. 70 of the budget bill for 1981, i.e. for the objections raised by the Court of Accounts.

Comma five - "The defense Secretary-General, in his capacity as national director of armaments, in the context of the duties assigned to him, must:

- oversee and coordinate the activities of competence of the directorates-general in the field of supplies;

- monitor the progress of the programs outlines by the Staffs, especially as regards the ones that call for expenses abroad, industrial compensations and national participations, assessing the financial, technical and social fallout;

- identifying the corrective actions and necessary modifications of the priorities in the implementation of the above mentioned programmes, to be submitted to the competent bodies".

The aim was to lay down with a bill the position of national director of armaments, which is not entirely legitimately identified with a ministerial decree of evident formal temporary nature.

Comma six - "The regulations contained in art. 13 of the decree of the President of the Republic n. 748 of 30 June 1972 can be applied to the general officers and colonels of the armed forces and of the other armed Corps of the State, in charge of military bodies provided with administrative autonomy limited to the period in which they hold this position".

This settled the uncertainties in interpreting the laws on the attribution of leadership functions to candidates for peripheral bodies of the armed forces and provided with administrative autonomy. The benefits of the law on leadership would thus extend also to the periphery.

Nonetheless, it was a highly relevant "package" of reforms, long due in the light of the experience carried out by our Commission.

Lastly, the Chamber discussed bill n. 2268:

"Competence in issuing regulations in the subject under the regulations for the works of the Military Genius, passed with royal decree n. 365 of 17 March 1932".

Once the general discussion in the commission was finished, the need emerged, endorsed also by an opinion by the committee for constitutional affairs, to tackle the question raised in a limited way by the bill.

The minister asked to update the limits of the regulations, but why then:

- not affirm the revision of all regulations of the directorates-general, and not just of the Engineer Corps;

- not affirm the revision also of the regulatory instruments used by the directions, i.e. the chapters of general and special expenses?

The communist party suggested an entirely substitute amendment to affirm these competences of revision to the Council of Ministers, to determined the forms of acquisition of the parliamentary opinions and of consultation of the industrial associations on the subject, as well as to indicate a series of principles on which to adjust the regulations: the inflation rates verified by Istat every year, for the limits of amount; the innovations and simplifications of the procedural norms already obtained by the Defense or of the general ones and of other public sectors, for derogations of acceleration of the contractual activities; the specific nature of the defense-industry relation, according to the various types of supplies and the "Mil requirements", but to be applied sensibly according to the nee regulations to protect secrecy. In other words; in this case too there was a legislative opportunity to carry out important developments, which was cut short by early elections.

5. Further evident developments in other sectors of the public administration or generally thereof

Equally interesting in our point of view are other procedural regulations, obtained in the recent past by other administrations either in general or for specific activities. For instance the need to ask the research offices of the Chamber and Senate an excerpt of the innovations relative to the decision-making process, to the choice of the contractor and the contractual procedures in te following sectors:

- flight-assistance company;

- supplies to judicial offices;

- building of facilities of competence of the Ministry of Justice;

- programs for the modernization of the means of the police forces;

- ten-year plan for streets and highways;

- state railway;

- naval constructions of the Ministry of Merchant Marine;

- enhancement of the services of the fire brigade;

- companies of the Minister of Post and Telecommunications;

- legislation for emergency in case of calamities and disasters.

This legislative experience can also produce an improved dimension of the whole of the proposals that should allow further breakthroughs with respect to the acquisitions described in the previous paragraphs, which have tried to analyse the activity of our ordinary parliamentary committees on the subject studied by the commission of inquiry before the latter concluded its work.

But let us come to the 9th Legislature, starting from the end. To date (Spring '86), the Chamber approved a governmental draft bill on the contractual procedures of the state administrations on the subject of research and development, and the purchase of "high technology products".

Originally the text of the bill had been published in the report of the committee of inquiry on military supplies, as the object of desire of the secretary of defense, but on which the agreement of the ministers seemed impossible to achieve. Subsequently the text was introduced as a bill as part of the act Chamber 1197 of the 9th Legislature "Provisions for the technical-administrative area of the Defense" (Alberini, Cerquetti, Di Re, Zamberletti). I had imposed the bill on the colleauges of the Christian Democratic Party as the counter-party of the concession of the legislative seat in the commission to the bill on AM-X, EH-101, CATRIN. The bill, unanimously voted, contained all that of urgent had been judged necessary by the committee of inquiry, and, in the second part, reproduced in full the second part of the Chamber Act 2941 of the 8th Legislature, which was previously commented and entirely reproduced in the previous chapter.

At the Senate, the "Alberini proposal" was temporarily sunk by the jealousies running in the committee for constitutional affairs of the other Ministries. In any case, it served the purpose of obtaining the consent of the ministers on a bill identical to the first title of th3 "Alberini bill" and which, as we said, arrived at the Senate for a final approval. This will need to disengage the rest of the bill and this place the defense committee in the position of expressing themselves on all programs of the Defense, thus aligning our country with the more evolved ones of the Nato area. On the other hand, during the 9th legislature, parliamentary information increased, for two reasons:

- Minister Spadolini accepted the communist proposal of producing a "Defense White Paper" every three years. The same minister, moreover, decided to produce a yearly addendum to the "White Paper" when discussing the budget;

- Parliament formally entered the Atlantic Assembly, NATO's consultive parliamentary organ; hence a fundamental channel of timely information on all that is going on in the Alliance's military planning has been opened, an opportunity which was not as effective through the participation of the WEU assembly, because it was limited to the Six-party Europe.

In the same 9th legislature, lastly, a small breakthrough has been made int he direction of parliamentary information with a small bill that reorganized the contents of the Gazzetta Ufficiale: it establishes that the texts of the international agreements signed in simplified form should also be published. In the past these became secret, With respect to the suggestions of the Bozzi Commission in relation to art. 80 of the Constitution, it is small thing but significant.

In conclusion we can say that all that has been considered so far dates back to evolutions concerning the three promotional bills: the process could be considered concluded the day that the "Alberini bill" and the text on the control of arms trade were passed, which are are currently being developed by the Chamber, which move in the same direction in terms of parliamentary control.

A new prospect could instead be opened by the developments inherent to the redefinition of the decision-making process on Defense, contained in a proposal of the Communist Party (Cerquetti ed altri: ``Norme sulla organizzazione, preparazione e impiego delle forze armate'') and in a draft bill proposed by Spadolini on the leadership of the Defense. Regretfully it is hard to take a new path while the previous process is not yet concluded.