Reagan Hits Attempts to Cut Defense : Cost of Weakness Too High, President Tells Annapolis Graduates

President Reagan, battling congressional demands for deeper cuts in the Pentagon budget, gave a rousing send-off to the graduates at the U.S. Naval Academy today and warned them that “it is too costly for America not to be prepared.”

Reagan, speaking at the academy’s commencement exercises, put in a plug for strong defense systems and the need for top-notch leadership in the nation’s military as vital elements of national security.

He warned the graduates that they will have to guard, as he has, against attempts to clip military expenditures.

“You will hear during your career . . . that maintaining the military at peak readiness, keeping our forces trained and supplied with the best weapons and equipment, is too costly,” Reagan said. “I say it is too costly for America not to be prepared.”

“It is strength, not weakness, resolve, not vacillation, that will keep the peace,” the President told the class of 1,032 midshipmen.

‘Will Not Happen Again’

Reagan told the graduates that “many good men” gave their lives in World War II because of “America’s unwillingness to prepare in the 1930s.”

He vowed: “Let me promise you, as long as I am President, that will not happen again.”

Reagan argued that U.S. military might has been “an immensely positive force in the world” and that many nations in Europe “owe their freedom . . . to the protection of the United States military.”

The President warned the graduates that the Soviet Union has “raced forward with the largest peacetime military expansion in history.”

His Administration has tried to combat that by funding “top-of-the-line weapons systems,” building a 600-ship Navy by the end of the decade and cutting out waste and inefficiency, he said.

‘We’re Finding the Waste’

“That’s why you hear stories about outrageously expensive hammers or bolts,” Reagan said. “We’re finding the waste and cutting it out.”

The President’s remarks came as his plans for increases in military spending have run into a congressional roadblock, with the Republican-run Senate approving a budget plan to slash his Pentagon request and allow only for inflation. A key House committee, meanwhile, has voted to freeze military spending at current levels.

In his speech, Reagan, who served in the Army during World War II in a movie unit in Culver City, Calif., reminisced about playing the part of a naval officer in the film “Hellcats of the Navy,”