Pentagon Pressed to Cut Its Budgets

The White House is pressing Pentagon officials to cut tens of billions of dollars from their proposed budgets over the next several years, signaling that the Bush administration’s massive defense buildup in the years following the Sept. 11 attacks is coming to an end.

The White House move to rein in Pentagon spending -- described by defense officials and outside experts monitoring the negotiations -- comes as the nation faces rising budget deficits and growing costs for the Iraq war, currently about $4.4 billion a month.

The Pentagon budget cuts will not affect spending on the war in Iraq and operations in Afghanistan, which are paid through separate emergency allocations.

The Pentagon is preparing a supplemental war budget for 2005 that officials said could total $80 billion, up from $66 billion the previous year.

If the Pentagon’s emergency supplemental budget for 2005 is approved, Congress could end up authorizing nearly $500 billion for the Department of Defense for the fiscal year.

Yet only weeks before President Bush submits his 2006 budget to Congress, the military services are scrambling to find areas that can be cut.

The Air Force and Navy could be hit especially hard, with each branch possibly losing $4 billion to $5 billion in 2006, officials said. The Navy also controls the budget of the Marine Corps.

Although the amount of the reductions has not been decided, officials at the Pentagon and the White House’s Office of Management and Budget last week wrangled over a proposed cut of $60 billion over the next six years, according to a source familiar with the negotiations.

The White House moves were not entirely unexpected.

Defense officials said they had been planning for months for the likelihood that 2006 spending not directly related to the Iraq war could be scaled back.

The Pentagon’s budget for fiscal 2001, which began Oct. 1, 2000, was $310 billion. For fiscal 2002, which was approved before the Sept. 11 attacks, it was $317 billion, and in subsequent years, rose to $355 billion, $368 billion and $416 billion. These figures do not include supplemental appropriations for war-fighting efforts.

In February, the Pentagon estimated it would need $424 billion for 2006 and $445 billion for 2007, not including supplemental funding. Officials say those figures could both end up shrinking by $10 billion and that similar cuts could occur in subsequent years.

The buildup has meant big budget increases for the individual military services.

The Department of the Navy has seen its budget rise 20% over the last three years to roughly $120 billion. The Air Force budget has had a similar increase.

Those days are about to end.

“We’re not going to see the size of budgets that we’ve seen in the past,” said one senior defense official. “We had already planned to tighten our belts this year.”

The budget cutting will not be easy, especially since the military services have spent months pouring over spreadsheets to assess their needs for the next fiscal year.

“There’s a sense that the buildup is really over, and that the cuts could be substantial going forward,” said Andrew Krepinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense think tank in Washington.

“There stand to be some really big, tough choices that have to be made as we face the new budget realities.”

White House officials have not publicly discussed their specific plans for next year’s Pentagon budgets, yet they have been warning that all branches of government will be expected to share the burden of spending restraint.

“The deficit ... is going to require some tough choices on the spending side,” President Bush said Thursday in remarks at the White House’s economic forum. “We’re going to submit a tough budget, and I look forward to working with Congress on the tough budget.”

Bush said the annual growth in discretionary spending not related to defense or domestic secrurity had been reduced from 15% in 2001 to 1% in 2005. But he said more spending discipline was needed to begin confronting the budget deficit.

With several expensive weapons systems in development and production at the Pentagon, the military services may have to reconsider the number of new jets, ships and helicopters that can be purchased over the next several years.

Weapons systems that officials said could be scaled back were the Air Force’s stealth F-22 fighter and the Navy’s planned new fleet of submarines.

Upon becoming Defense secretary in 2001, Donald H. Rumsfeld indicated he would seek cuts in many weapons systems first envisioned during the Cold War. During his tenure, the Army has killed the Crusader heavy artillery system and the Comanche reconnaissance helicopter program.

Yet some critics have charged that the military services have thus far won most budget battles with Rumsfeld and protected their most prized weapons.

But the insurgency in Iraq has forced war planners to keep far more troops in Iraq than they originally had expected, boosting the costs of military operations in the country and pressuring budget analysts at the Pentagon to seek cuts in future weaponry.

“The Iraqi insurgents have managed to do what Don Rumsfeld in four years has not managed to do, which is bring about cutbacks in a lot of these Cold War-era weapons,” said Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a think tank based in Arlington, Va.

Some believe that the belt tightening may actually help Rumsfeld as he prepares for the Pentagon’s 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review, or QDR, a top-to-bottom assessment that will chart the course for U.S. defense spending for the next four years.

Smaller budgets could give Rumsfeld leverage in forcing the military services to make tough decisions about which weapons to keep and which to kill.

“There are hard choices to make, so this could turn into the perfect storm if you really want something significant to come out of this QDR,” Krepinevich said.

Chad Kolton, a spokesman at the Office of Management and Budget, would not comment about the White House move to scale back the Pentagon’s budgets. But Kolton pointed out that the Defense Department had received substantial budget increases for its personnel and weaponry since Bush came to office.

“At this point, the budget is not finished yet. The president still has a lot of decisions to make,” he said.

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Times staff writer Warren Vieth in Washington contributed to this report