Defense: Much Less Than Meets the Eye

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Stoking a hot debate over the defense budget was certainly not George Bush's intention when he announced his bold plans for slashing nuclear arms. But his initiative is already spurring critics in and out of Congress to ask more insistently than ever why the nation needs to spend nearly $300 billion a year, and continue to buy some superexpensive high-tech weapons, if the worldwide face-off with the Soviet Union is rapidly becoming a memory. With Mikhail Gorbachev announcing major cuts in the Soviet nuclear arsenal at week's end to match, and possibly exceed, the U.S. reductions, and with Democratic presidential candidates stepping up their campaigns, the questioning is sure to grow in intensity and decibel level.

Some preliminary skirmishing got under way last week when a Senate-House conference committee began considering the $291 billion defense authorization bill for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. It immediately became obvious that Bush's initiative had strengthened the hand of House conferees who want to cancel the B-2 bomber program after the 15 now on order are delivered and to put up only a bit more than half the $5.2 billion the Administration requested for the Strategic Defense Initiative. The Air Force did not help the B-2's cause by admitting that in a July flight test the Stealth bomber proved to be embarrassingly unstealthy. Fundamentally, the problem is that many legislators consider the B-2 and SDI to be anti-Soviet systems that are rapidly losing whatever justification they ever had. The lawmakers are not buying Pentagon efforts to portray both as being useful in a conflict with a country like Iraq.

More important, Democrats are increasingly talking about reopening the so- called budget summit agreement of last year. Congressional Democrats once regarded the agreement as a triumph, because it forced Bush into abandoning his pledge not to raise taxes. But they have come to see it instead as an albatross that they helped hang around their own necks, because it prevents them from slashing military appropriations further and using the money to expand domestic social programs. Under the agreement, cuts in defense, or any other broad category of spending, below the ceilings already established through fiscal 1993, can only be used to reduce the budget deficit.

It is far too late for any substantial revision of the fiscal 1992 budget. Bush's aides predict that the conference committee will as usual split the difference on the B-2 and SDI. That would mean ordering a few more bombers and funding a modest version of the missile shield somewhere between the House figure of $3.5 billion and the Senate's $4.6 billion. As for the budget agreement, it has been written into a statute, the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990. To make sweeping changes would require passage of a new law, and Bush almost certainly would cast a veto that his opponents could not override. There is no sign that the Democrats are willing now to force such a futile showdown.

But both sides are bracing themselves for a knockdown battle beginning in January, when Bush presents his budget plans for fiscal 1993. Democrats, possibly with some Republican support, will make determined attempts to kill weapons systems, lower troop levels, and reduce spending below the cuts the Administration already plans. They also will look for -- and maybe invent -- loopholes in the Budget Enforcement Act that would permit transfer of funds to social programs. For example, they might try to redefine as "defense" spending some types of environmental outlays. "There will be a major assault on the budget agreement," predicts an aide to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. "Word inside the shop is that if all else remains equal, we're in for a budget free fall."

One reason is partisan politics. An attack on Bush for devoting far too much time and effort to foreign policy and too much money to defense while scandalously neglecting the nation's multifarious domestic worries -- housing, education, drug abuse, racial conflict -- is swiftly becoming the dominant theme of the Democratic presidential campaign. To make a dent in any of these problems, goes the argument, will require a major infusion of money, and the defense budget is the best place to get the bucks.

In fact, the Democrats are heavily overestimating the potential savings from such steps as bringing home even more troops from Western Europe than the 100,000 the Administration contemplates transferring Stateside. Some polls indicate that cutting defense may not be quite as popular as the Democrats think, either. In a TIME/CNN poll by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, large majorities of those surveyed wanted to bring U.S. troops home from Korea (74%) as well as Western Europe (60%). But on the broader question of whether the nation should "make large-scale cutbacks in defense spending," they said no by 54% to 42%. Even so, the idea of switching spending from defense to domestic programs is one of the few horses the Democrats have, and they intend to ride it for all it is worth -- and then some.

Partisanship, though, is far from the whole story. There is a genuine need to reshape the U.S. armed forces for a post-cold war world, and a perfectly legitimate question as to how much spending, how many soldiers and what types of weapons are required. After dropping 11.3% in just ended fiscal 1991, the Pentagon budget under the Bush Administration's plans would go down an average of 3% (after adjustment for inflation) in each of the following five years. Outlays would drop from around 5% of gross national product now to 3.6%, the lowest figure since before World War II; the number of men and women in uniform would shrink from 2 million to 1.6 million.

Drastic as these cuts seem, Les Aspin, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and hardly an enemy of the Pentagon, argues that they respond only to the dwindling of the Soviet menace that had occurred by the beginning of this year, after the 1989 anticommunist revolutions in Eastern Europe and the subsequent demise of the Warsaw Pact. The plans, says Aspin, do not take account of the still more pronounced lessening of the threat that has occurred since the failed coup in August and the splintering of the Soviet Union that has followed.

Such thinking is likely to gain force in the wake of Gorbachev's Saturday response to Bush's nuclear initiatives. The Soviet President, who telephoned Bush at Camp David to give him a 20-minute preview of his proposals, followed the U.S. in taking strategic bombers off alert and moving their nuclear weapons into warehouses. Gorbachev also followed Bush in scrapping tactical nuclear missiles, land based as well as naval. In addition, he proposed negotiations to reduce the number of remaining strategic weapons by half, while at the same time announcing that from now on Soviet mobile missiles would be kept stationary. The Soviet leader further announced a one-year moratorium on nuclear tests and called on others to follow suit.

Beyond that, the Soviets are even more eager than the Democratic Party to switch massive resources from the defense establishment to the civilian economy. Deputy Defense Minister Pavel Grachev told a parliamentary committee last week that the armed forces might be cut almost in half, to 2 million to 2.5 million people, by 1994. His boss, Yevgeni Shaposhnikov, later said firm plans call for mustering out only 700,000 of the present roughly 4 million. But he added that "further cuts are not excluded depending on the military- political situation in the world" -- presumably meaning, in part, what the U.S. does.

The Bush Administration insists that the dwindling of the Soviet threat is being at least partly offset by a rising danger of more regional wars like the Persian Gulf conflict, fought against countries that are rapidly acquiring tanks, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons and other modern arms. Thus, it contends, the fairly drastic cuts it already has scheduled are the most that can be prudently made. That line might offset the Democrats' attack well enough to keep the odds heavily in favor of Bush's re-election. But even that will not end the debate -- far from it. The serious questions about the size, structure and cost of the U.S. armed forces will not be solved during a year of heated partisan rhetoric. But they can -- and should -- be debated not only through Election Day but far beyond.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Nigel Holmes

[TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: Defense Budget Project; Jonathan Dean}]CAPTION: THE 1992 DEFENSE BUDGET IS $291 BILLION

With reporting by Michael Duffy and Bruce van Voorst/Washington