The Pentagon's Goal-Line Stand

For the Defense Department, this was supposed to be the year of the long knives. Even Pentagon friends like Barry Goldwater and Armed Services Committee Chairman John Stennis were talking about ways to economize on defense spending, particularly on the $21.9 billion requested for new weapons systems. But when the fight over the procurement portion of the 1974 budget ended last week, the Defense Department emerged surprisingly unscathed.

The Senate not only rejected proposed cuts in money for the new Trident missile-firing submarine, a new Army tank and a nuclear aircraft carrier, but added $495,500,000 for the Navy's F-14 fighter plane and $296 million for higher military pensions. In addition, it narrowly defeated a huge cut in U.S. forces stationed overseas.

In part, the Pentagon victory was engineered in the White House; President Nixon had threatened to veto anything below $79 billion for fiscal 1974. But most of the success was the result of the Defense Department's own efforts.

The tactics included a formidable strike force of top brass led by Admirals Elmo Zumwalt, Chief of Naval Operations, and Hyman Rickover, retired naval nuclear-power expert, who met personally with almost every Senator on one item or another up for grabs. New Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger did his part with Congressmen. Using charts, he noted that the outlay requested for fiscal 1974 was the lowest percentage of the gross national product since the end of the Korean War, plummeting from 12% to 5.9%. Expressed in constant 1958 dollars, Pentagon spending has dropped (see chart).

This year the Pentagon had asked for $1.3 billion less in its procurement budget than last year. Nonetheless, in the first go-rounds last summer, the House of Representatives stunned the Defense Department by trimming $950 million from the procurement budget; then the Senate Armed Services Committee recommended cuts of an even greater $1.5 billion.

Hall Patrol. In the crunch last week, the Armed Forces and their Senate allies, who were led by Washington Democrat Henry ("Scoop") Jackson, mounted a remarkable goal-line stand. Their toughest test was Majority Leader Mike Mansfield's amendment to cut the 471,000 U.S. land-based troops stationed abroad by 40% over the next three years. To nearly everyone's surprise, the Senate, in a technical vote on the language of the amendment, approved the measure by a vote of 49 to 46. It was five hours later before the actual vote on the amendment itself took place, and the Pentagon lobbyists used the interval to full and frenzied advantage.

Schlesinger patrolled the halls, buttonholing Senators to argue that such a drastic cut would weaken NATO and undercut negotiations with the Russians for mutual troop reduction in Europe. It would also save the U.S. little money because the forces would only be brought back to America, not demobilized. Similar arguments were raised by General Andrew J. Goodpaster Jr., who is the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and just happened to be in Washington, in telephone calls to key Senators. On the final vote, in which four Senators changed their votes, the Mansfield amendment was defeated, 51 to 44. A day later the Senators compromised by voting to reduce U.S. troops stationed abroad by 23% over the next two years.

Votes on other amendments went more smoothly, though some involved intensive lobbying beforehand. The chief items:

TRIDENT. The original program called for putting the first Tridents in the water in 1980 at a cost of $1,350,000,000 each, but the Navy asked to move the launch up to 1978 after the Soviets began deploying their advanced Delta submarines. The Armed Services Committee approved the Navy's request for $1.5 billion for Trident in fiscal 1974 over the objections of New Hampshire Senator Thomas McIntyre, chairman of the subcommittee on research and development. To avoid cost overruns, he proposed sticking to the target date of 1980, which would cut the appropriation for 1974 by $885.4 million. But proponents argued that the Trident would serve as an important U.S. bargaining chip at the SALT II negotiations on arms limitation and managed to scuttle the McIntyre amendment, 49 to 47.

F14 FIGHTER. Since the Navy was still negotiating a final contract for the carrier-based F-14 with Grumman Corp., the Armed Services Committee cut the 1974 request for the fighter to $197.6 million. Last Monday, however, the Navy and Grumman announced that they had reached agreement, and the Senate voted 66 to 26 to authorize $693 million to permit the Navy to buy 50 of the planes.

In the end, the Senators approved a procurement budget of $21 billion, only $900 million less than the Pentagon had requested. The total military budget, however, is still a long way from final approval. The Senate will not vote on the total request of $85 billion until the end of the month; the Senate Appropriations Committee has yet to consider it, and the cuts made by the Senate could be rejected by the House. But it seemed unlikely -- despite the few close calls -- that the military's critics would be able to gut the Pentagon budget after last week's unexpectedly strong show of force.

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