Pentagon Holds Ground Against Budget Attack

In the sand hills of North Carolina, where spring comes early and is quickly followed by the oppressive heat and humidity of a Southern summer, the relief of air conditioning did not arrive for the soldiers of Ft. Bragg until the middle of May, three weeks later than normal. The total savings: several hundred thousand dollars, a paltry part of the base’s multimillion-dollar annual budget.

In just such penny-pinching ways has the Gramm-Rudman law--the budget-balancing monster that the Defense Department once seemed to fear as much as any new Soviet weapon--assaulted military bases across the nation.

Buildup Intact

Although fully 4.9% was sliced in March from most Pentagon budget accounts, the guts of President Reagan’s military buildup apparently emerged intact after its first encounter with Gramm-Rudman. The bayonets and bullets, beans and bombs are still in the supply system for the soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen.

California Rep. Leon E. Panetta (D-Monterey), who helped write the final version of the Gramm-Rudman law, said military commanders have found that its impact has been moderate so far. “There is some pain,” he said, “but I don’t think anyone would say it has seriously affected readiness.”

Instead, Gramm-Rudman has proved to be a nuisance to the Pentagon after five years of steady budget growth under Reagan. And, since the Defense Department has come under attack for wasting huge sums of money on everything from the failed Sgt. York anti-aircraft gun to overpriced toilet covers, Congress has enlisted the military budget in its campaign to slash the enormous federal deficit.

But so far, said Gordon Adams, director of a private research organization called the Defense Budget Project, the Gramm-Rudman cuts have been barely perceptible in the enormous Defense Department budget.

“My impression is it was pretty easy for the department to absorb it,” he said. “Maybe not a piece of cake, but a fortune cookie--not a real problem.”

Pentagon budget officers agree that the services made the necessary reductions without sacrificing their readiness to fight. But they are unanimous in their concern that any additional cutbacks in future years would begin to erode the military’s ability to defend the country.

Gen. James F. McCall, director of the Army budget, said: “When the observation is made that it seems like the Army and Department of Defense inhaled a 5% cut without staggering to its knees, the answer is: ‘Yeah, it can take a good left hook.’ But if you keep hitting it, you will quickly bring it to its knees.

“What we’ve got to fear most of all, and what the nation should fear most of all . . . would be the repetition of Gramm-Rudman in its current form.”

Sets Annual Targets

The Gramm-Rudman law, enacted last December, sets annual deficit targets that decline to zero in 1991. If the budget veers off target, the law requires cuts in most government spending programs, with defense and domestic spending bearing equal shares.

Under this formula, Gramm-Rudman forced $5.1 billion worth of cuts from the Pentagon’s $263.9-billion budget for fiscal 1986, which ends this Sept. 30. The cuts could be much greater next year if Congress and Reagan cannot break their deadlock over how to bring the deficit down--and if the Supreme Court, in a ruling expected in the next few weeks, upholds the Gramm-Rudman law in a challenge to its constitutionality.

Because the fiscal 1986 cuts took effect on March 1, they covered only seven months of the fiscal year. And the Defense Department was able to shield a substantial chunk of its budget--virtually all funds to pay salaries plus the budgets of some high-priority items such as Reagan’s space-based Strategic Defense Initiative--from the cuts. That meant an across-the-board reduction of 4.9% from the rest of the Pentagon’s 1986 budget.

The Pentagon exacted the largest cuts--totaling $2.9 billion--from funds devoted to operations and maintenance. Thus, here at Ft. Bragg as at most military installations, Gramm-Rudman’s impact is likely to start at the barracks, not the battlefield.

In the finance office, for example, 28 of 156 positions are being eliminated by attrition. That means longer lines for soldiers cashing checks and delays in paying bills for contractors’ work at the post--which results in a loss of discounts for prompt payments.

Limits Pill Variety

And the Womack Army Hospital, which distributes several types of birth control pills, may limit the variety in the future. “Under Gramm-Rudman, you don’t extend yourself,” said Col. Walter E. Rose, the hospital’s deputy commander for administration.

But Ft. Bragg is home to the 82nd Airborne Division, whose 16,000 members proudly think of themselves as the first to fight in an international conflict, and senior officers insist that Gramm-Rudman will have no impact on the 82nd Airborne’s central mission--to be ready for combat deployment within 18 hours, to fight and to win.

“We’re still mission-ready,” said Capt. Ken Smith, a spokesman for the post.

This is not to say that Gramm-Rudman has had no impact at all beyond the air conditioning, the finance office and the base hospital. For example, Capt. William K. Klimack had to tell the 165 soldiers and five officers of Alpha Company that, contrary to original plans, they would not be allowed to parachute into central Alaska last March in a four-week winter training exercise.

“There are very few people in the unit who know how to fight in a winter environment,” Klimack said. Because the company has undergone no cold-weather exercises for five years, he said, time-consuming training would be required “if we were called to deploy to a cold weather region.”

Not Seriously Weakened

Klimack was not suggesting, however, that Alpha Company was seriously weakened--and Rose, the hospital administrator, said he expected nothing less. “I don’t think these folks in green uniforms will admit we can’t do something until our backs are to the wall and there’s blood running down the hall,” he said.

Beyond Ft. Bragg, unforeseen circumstances have eased Gramm-Rudman’s budgetary pressures on the Army. The requirement to reduce the annual operation of helicopters by 75,000 hours to a total of 1,836,000 was made less burdensome when the Apache and Blackhawk helicopters were grounded in the spring for safety checks after a series of accidents. That contributed 21,251 hours to the goal and saved about $8.1 million.

And some cuts amounted to nothing more than reductions from scheduled increases. Because Congress approved an increase of about 25% in Army ammunition purchases in 1986, for example, the 4.9% Gramm-Rudman cut still left the Army with a substantially larger ammunition budget than it had in 1985.

Other cuts appear more significant. McCall, the Army budget officer, said that 20 hours were being shaved from the 850 hours of scheduled operation for each Army tank. “Going to 830 is not a sufficiently large cut to change the readiness rates,” McCall said, but it will reduce “the opportunity for excellence in training.”

Air Force Cuts

What is true of the Army is also generally true of the other services. Col. John Finan, an Air Force budget officer, said the Air Force tried to concentrate its Gramm-Rudman cuts on maintenance and base improvements, although it also had to cut flying hours by 1%, or 22,000 hours.

At the Navy, Vice Adm. D. L. Cooper, director of program planning, warned that deferred maintenance might one day take its toll of the Navy’s ability to fight. During the Reagan Administration, he said, the Navy restored its ammunition supplies and eliminated its backlog of 19 ships that were awaiting overhaul. But now Gramm-Rudman has forced the Navy to delay refurbishing two aging nuclear submarines and to cut into the maintenance of on-shore facilities.

“These are the types of things that don’t get anybody’s attention except us,” Cooper said. “Out in the outside, people say: ‘Oh, so you didn’t put that roof on this year. Or you didn’t fix that pier. The pilings, you say, are going bad, but they can last another couple of years.’ Yeah, they’ll last for a couple of years . . . but it’s a very, very dumb way to take care of the things the taxpayers have already paid for.”

But Cooper added: “We can’t show that we’re going to jump off the end of the earth. We are in good shape coming into 1986--the best shape we’ve ever been in.”