Reduced Defense Budget Entails Risk, Carlucci Says

Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci Thursday gave Congress the Reagan Administration’s final defense budget, a pared-down $299.5-billion plan that he said would preserve gains in military readiness and quality but leave “greater risks than we think wise” to the nation’s security.

The fiscal 1989 budget, $33 billion less than the Pentagon said a year ago that it would need, includes a $2.2-billion, 4.3% pay raise for the 2.1 million uniformed members of the armed forces.

But it cuts active troop strength by 36,000, shelves plans for an anti-satellite weapon, freezes development of the Air Force’s small, mobile Midgetman nuclear missile and scraps a mountain of aging ships, helicopters, missiles and submarines.

It leaves the Navy 20 ships short of its long-sought goal of a 600-vessel fleet and slows purchases of the MX missile, which the Administration has called the centerpiece of its drive to bolster the nation’s arsenal of long-range nuclear weapons. Overall, spending for new weapons would drop by 4.3%.

The proposal does seek $4.6 billion--$1 billion more than in the current budget--for the Administration’s most prized military system, the space-based nuclear defense dubbed “Star Wars.” Even that request, however, is more than 25% below the $6.4 billion that the Pentagon said a year ago that it would be seeking.

Reductions in the spending plan for the 12 months beginning next October were required last fall when the White House and Congress struck a deal to curb federal spending and reduce the federal budget deficit.

Carlucci, who began slicing spending immediately after taking the top defense job last Nov. 24, said that he sacrificed some elaborate or politically contentious programs to devote scarce dollars to a trimmer, better-supplied fighting machine.

“We’ve made the hard choices here. We have traded off a smaller force in order to maintain a quality force,” he said. Carlucci said it would be “disastrous,” for example, if lack of pay raises drove experienced military workers into civilian jobs, where he said wages already are an average of 11% higher.

Those priorities drew praise in Congress, where Democrats had waged a seven-year feud with Carlucci’s predecessor, Caspar W. Weinberger, over spending on complex and hugely expensive high-tech weapons systems.

“You have made some very tough choices in preparing this revised budget,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) told Carlucci at a hearing. “But you deserve credit for facing these problems and making tough decisions.”

4th Year of Decline

But Nunn and others warned that the 1989 plan marks the fourth straight year in which military spending in “real” inflation-adjusted dollars would decline--this time, by less than 1%. From 1981 to 1985, spending grew by 50% after inflation but, since then, total spending in real dollars has declined by 11%.

The decline occurred “at a time when our worldwide commitments have in no way diminished,” said Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee. “In fact, in my opinion, (they have) expanded.”

“I’m not going to have to worry about the risk” incurred by the drop, Carlucci said earlier in the day. “Some future defense secretary is going to have to.”

This is the second Pentagon spending plan for fiscal 1989 that Congress has received. The Defense Department originally told lawmakers last year that it would seek $332.5 billion, but the deficit reduction pact agreed to last Nov. 20 forced the Pentagon to reduce that by $33 billion.

Under the terms of the deficit compromise, not more than $294 billion of the $299.5 billion now being requested would actually be spent in fiscal 1989.

By way of comparison, the Pentagon plans this year to spend $285.4 billion of its $291.4-billion authorized budget.

Cutback in Weaponry

The comparatively tight 1989 budget, Carlucci said, will pinch hardest on purchases of new or expanded weapons systems, where Weinberger’s budgets were most lavish. The 4.3% cut in procurement is the “biggest hit” in the 1989 budget, he said.

It will force cancellation of several major weapons systems, including an Army reconnaissance drone, a new generation of Navy combat jets and a new Air Force weapon designed to attack Soviet satellites.

The anti-satellite, or ASAT, weapon was a prized program aimed at matching the Soviet Union’s own rapid development of such capability, including ground-based lasers that can “blind” reconnaissance satellites more than 100 miles overhead.

Congress has consistently refused to provide money to test the Air Force’s ASAT weapon, saying it would violate treaties with the Soviet Union. Carlucci called that decision unwise and said he would willingly cut other Pentagon programs to obtain funds for ASAT testing.

However, “absent the authority to test,” he said Thursday, “I can no longer see the wisdom of putting scarce resources into this program.”

Halting Midgetman

The new budget would also virtually halt the Air Force’s Midgetman missile program, now in the final stages of development. Although the budget would cut the original proposal for the Midgetman by $2 billion, it would provide $200 million for the weapon “to protect the option of the next administration” to revive the program.

The mobile, single-warhead missile--designed to complement the multiwarhead, fixed-base MX--has been touted as a match for the Soviets’ own mobile missile system, which is already deployed.

To offset the loss of the Midgetman, Carlucci would allot funds to finish deployment of 100 B-1B intercontinental nuclear bombers, to bury 50 MX nuclear missiles in Wyoming silos and to develop a system to place future MXs in railroad cars, where they would be transported around the country in times of crisis and thus be harder for the Soviets to find.

Of the 78 existing MXs, 33 already are in silos and the rest are in storage or used for testing. The 1989 budget allows the purchase of 12 more missiles and allots $837 million to develop and begin building the “rail-garrisoned” deployment system.

To Scrap Helicopters

Carlucci’s cutbacks include a 15% reduction in the Army’s air fleet, sending 450 Vietnam-era helicopters to the scrap pile this year, an additional 170 next year and 730 more in the succeeding five years.

The $77.8-billion Army budget request would strengthen non-nuclear land forces with the purchase of 559 M-1 battle tanks and 581 Bradley armored fighting vehicles, as well as new helicopters.

But the Army reportedly chafed at Carlucci’s original orders to cut active duty rosters by 10,000 soldiers as well as an order to find $9 billion in savings in its fiscal 1989 request. Carlucci eventually accepted Army cuts of 8,700 soldiers and $7 billion.

The Navy would retire 16 aging frigates, mothball one nuclear submarine that had been slated for overhaul and replace one active air wing with two reserve wings.

The cutbacks mean an end to the Navy’s goal of building a 600-ship fleet by fiscal 1989. The Navy’s $96.4-billion budget request provides for a force of 580 ships in 1989, including a new Trident nuclear missile-carrying submarine, three destroyers and three attack submarines, one of them the first of its generation.

The Air Force would lose three tactical fighter wings, although one of those wings, at a North Atlantic Treaty Organization base in Spain that is scheduled to be closed, may be replaced. It would also begin phasing out its SR-71 Blackbird long-range reconnaissance jets, the backbone of U.S. photographic and electronic espionage in areas not now covered by satellites.

‘Star Wars’ Funding

The almost $5-billion “Star Wars” budget request would delay by one year, to 1993, the date by which a decision could be made on deploying the first stage of a space defense against incoming nuclear missiles, the Pentagon said. The request includes $300 million that would be spent by the Energy Department, the primary research center for nuclear weapons technology.

Although the Administration’s seven-year, $1.7-trillion defense buildup has added almost 3,300 warheads to the nation’s arsenal of deployed nuclear weapons, many critics have argued that the nation’s non-nuclear defense forces have been short-changed.

In fact, Gen. Bernard Rogers, who retired as supreme allied commander of NATO forces last July, told The Times in a recent interview that all the Pentagon’s spending would forestall by only a single day the decision to use nuclear weapons in Europe during a conventional war.

Citing critical shortages that remain in several classes of missiles and ammunition and of tanks and artillery stored in the central region of NATO, Rogers said that NATO’s top military commander would have to seek approval to use nuclear weapons within two weeks of a Soviet military drive into Western Europe.

Allies Faulted

In large measure, Rogers faults Washington’s European allies, whose unwillingness to significantly increase their military spending has created weak links in NATO’s line of defense. But he criticized the Pentagon’s spending priorities, saying: “We haven’t put it (the spending) in the right places.”

But Carlucci said that the budget cuts “should not affect the forward-deployed strategy,” under which American forces in Europe train to blunt a conventional Soviet advance.

Under the accord between the White House and Congress, the cuts in the Pentagon’s 1989 budget are only the first in a promised round of cuts that the services will make in their five-year spending plans. The services will slice about $40 billion a year from those rough budget plans.

Carlucci warned that that probably will mean further reductions in troop strengths and the closing of some military installations, politically touchy issues with lawmakers whose home districts rely on spending by military personnel.

No base closings are proposed in the 1989 budget request, but Carlucci has set up a working group to consider future shutdowns. The Pentagon’s 1990 budget probably will target several bases, he said.

The Pentagon hopes also to find savings in the cost of running naval convoys of U.S.-flagged vessels in the Persian Gulf. Currently, those operations are estimated to cost the taxpayer about $20 million a month, eating up a chunk of the Navy’s $24.9 billion budget for operations and maintenance.

Imminent reductions in the size of the force, plus free fuel provided by Kuwait, will bring those costs down in the near future, according to Rear Adm. Stephen Loftus, director of the Navy’s fiscal management division.