Budget, Policy Questions : National Security Success Imposes New Dilemmas

With a combination of luck and design, Ronald Reagan has built a legacy in the field of national security so striking that it is the standard against which his successor almost certainly will be judged.

He will leave the White House with the United States militarily stronger and more assertive in the world, and with breakthrough achievements with the Soviet Union unmatched by any President.

Paradoxically, however, his policies have also sown the seeds of national security problems that seem certain to plague his successors--and the nation--for years to come.

The Administration can argue, credibly, that it has made the world a safer place for America. In terms of pure military strength, Reagan’s $2-trillion defense buildup has produced U.S. forces that are by and large more combat-ready, are equipped with more modern weapons and are more sustainable in the field than they were when he took office in 1981.

More than that, the Administration--after launching the defense buildup it considered indispensable for successful dealings with Moscow--has negotiated down the dimensions of the threat from the world’s other superpower:

The U.S.-Soviet treaty eliminating medium-range missile forces was negotiated largely on U.S. terms, providing for Soviet elimination of four times more warheads than the United States will give up and creating the first system of on-site arms inspection in the history of the Cold War. Moreover, as Reagan leaves office, agreement to slash long-range nuclear weapons by half is a foreseeable next step in the now-well-rooted process of arms negotiations.

So dramatic has the progress on arms control been under Reagan that “all future arms control treaties must have intrusive verification provisions, including on-site inspection, despite its drawbacks to us and the fact that it has been oversold,” says Jack Mendelsohn, deputy director of the private Arms Control Assn. here. “They must also cut, not just cap, weapon levels.”

Nor are the security benefits of less confrontational, less threatening relations with Moscow confined to arms control. Soviet expansionism in the world has come to a halt and, in Afghanistan at least, may be shrinking--in significant part because Reagan’s policies helped raise the cost of Third World adventures for the Kremlin.

Even in Europe, where Soviet and North Atlantic alliance forces have stood jostling each other at nuclear swords point--and negotiating fruitlessly over ways to reduce the danger of Armageddon--for more than four decades, there is now a serious possibility of reducing even the two sides’ conventional forces.

Can Claim Policy Works

With some justification, says Stanford Prof. Condoleezza Rice, the United States may now claim that its post-World War II defense policy of containing Soviet expansion “has worked long enough to force fundamental change in the Soviet Union and in its foreign policies as well.” Reagan’s successor must now “manage the victory of containment,” she said.

By establishing new terms of U.S.-Soviet cooperation, Rice adds, Reagan has linked “arms control and military modernization in a way that they have never been before. It is incumbent on the next President to maintain that linkage.”

“If detente was the U.S. strategy for managing the emergence of Soviet power in the 1970s,” says Arnold Horelick, a senior Soviet affairs expert at the RAND Corp. and former CIA analyst, “then the correlation of geopolitical forces is now so reversed that the task today is to manage the relative decline of the Soviet Union.”

Paradoxically, Reagan has gained these achievements in ways that may make it harder--not easier--for his successors to carry them forward.

Pursues Ambitious Goals

For one thing, the Administration has pursued overly ambitious security goals in some areas without adequate regard for the larger consequences of its decisions. The 600-ship Navy, for example, will not only impose enormous cost burdens on the future, but also threatens to cause serious distortions in overall defense spending priorities.

Moreover, the results of Reagan’s policies have sometimes been ambiguous: Faith in high technology, for example, has been shaken by problems in a number of ultrasophisticated weapons systems--and by the uneven performance of U.S. warships dealing with foreign aircraft in the Persian Gulf.

Potentially far more serious, Reagan bears heavy responsibility for a looming budget crisis that will make it extremely difficult for his successor, regardless of party, to sustain the renewed strength that this Administration brought to the nation’s armed forces.

Reagan created overall budget deficits so massive that he leaves the national debt twice as large as it was when he took office. And economists are nearly unanimous in agreeing that the deficit, along with related trade imbalances, must be dealt with even if it requires retrenchments in U.S. security commitments and defense programs.

Ironically, the fact that the Soviets now appear less threatening, thanks in part to Reagan, increases the pressure to hold down spending on military programs. Already, tightening Pentagon budgets pose a threat to the military’s improved readiness.

Postpones Adjustments

“The United States has been living on borrowed time--and borrowed money--for much of the last decade,” says Princeton Prof. Robert Gilpin, thereby postponing “painful adjustments to the new realities in global diplomatic, economic and strategic relationships.”

Some historians may conclude that Reagan’s successes are attributable in large part to luck, particularly to the arrival of a more flexible Soviet leader three years ago: Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s determination to deal aggressively with the Soviet Union’s bankrupt economic and political conditions has been crucial to the improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations. Reagan’s policies were not working discernibly until 1985.

Other historians may give substantial credit--as Reagan himself does--to the Administration’s strategy of “negotiating from a position of strength,” standing fast on U.S. positions, blistering the Soviets publicly for alleged immorality and treaty violations and pursuing the aggressive “Reagan doctrine” of aiding “freedom fighters” around the world.

“It’s unprovable which was more important,” said Thomas L. Hughes, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Whatever produced it, it’s there. His success with the Soviet Union is an unexpected gift from a right-wing Republican President, like (former President Richard M.) Nixon’s opening to China.”

Seven years and $1.9 trillion ago, the Reagan Administration swept into office promising to rescue the nation’s defenses from a “decade of neglect.” Now, the task facing his successor is to cope with the vast and mixed consequences of that rescue.

And many of the difficulties come down to money.

Notes Non-Defense Spending

“It’s a bum rap to say defense has been driving the budget deficits,” insists Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci, noting that for every $1 billion cut from the Pentagon’s budget in recent years, non-defense spending has risen more than $2 billion.

“You are not going to balance the federal budget on the back of the Defense Department,” Carlucci predicts.

True as Carlucci’s protestations may be, a big part of the Reagan legacy in national security is trouble for the defense budget--and trouble from the defense budget for all the rest of the government.

Broadly stated, the problem is that--with about $500 billion in long-term spending commitments--the Administration has created a “bow wave” with which its successors must deal--a task that is likely to be extremely difficult. Large military building programs are relatively less expensive in the early years of planning and development than they are in later years when actual construction and manufacturing--the bow wave--occur. The cheaper years came during Reagan’s presidency, while the expensive years will fall to his successors.

Perhaps the most extreme example is the Navy’s two new aircraft carriers: Congress has authorized a total of $1.4 billion for construction of the Navy’s 14th and 15th carriers. But by the time Reagan leaves office next year, only $13 million of that will have been spent.

A $1.39-billion mortgage on the new carriers thus comes due in the next Administration.

Weapons Spending Grows

Reagan’s weapons purchases have been so great that they now represent 35% to 40% of the Pentagon’s spending each year, according to Joshua M. Epstein, an analyst at the Washington-based Brookings Institution.

Compounding the problem for the next President, another 30% of the Pentagon’s current annual spending is consumed by pay, housing and administration connected with manpower--an area of spending in which future presidents might choose to hold the line but can do little to reduce.

“With as much as 70% of the Pentagon’s yearly expenditures out of the next President’s control, he faces a trade-off,” Epstein says. “If he wants to make big savings and also protect ‘glamour’ programs, then it’s just a matter of arithmetic that the operations and maintenance accounts, which are critical to maintaining the readiness of existing forces, get hit hard.

“You can cut those glamour programs, such as ‘Star Wars,’ parts of the 600-ship Navy and the Midgetman missile,” Epstein adds. “Or you can cut into operations and maintenance. If you want to achieve big savings in a hurry, you can’t have both.”

But which of the many expensive programs now begun should continue to be funded?

“We have eight lanes of cars trying to get through a two-lane tunnel,” one analyst observed.

“There are a lot of camel’s noses under the tent, but none of them has made it all the way in,” says Harvard University’s Albert Carnesale. After all the money spent, adds Carnesale, “you don’t want to come out in the end with only noses.”

Navy Short of Goal

The Navy, for instance, now has 568 ships, 32 short of the 600-ship goal championed by former Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr. In adding 120 new ships to the once-declining force, the Reagan Administration has driven Navy budget authorizations to a total of $582 billion since 1981.

Reagan has also pressed the Navy to build and plan for a new “forward offensive strategy” to strike Soviet naval nuclear forces in their home ports and well-guarded bastions.

While the strategy and the buildup have given the Navy new muscle, some critics say that the fleet is badly designed to perform the roles it will more likely be called upon to play in the years to come: regional operations like the Persian Gulf escort, where the conventionally armed forces operate defensively in the twilight between peace and war.

The new naval strategy is also criticized as one that, if carried out, would quickly push a conventional land war toward a nuclear war.

Citing critical shortages in several classes of missiles, ammunition and of tanks and artillery stored in the Central region of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Gen. Bernard W. Rogers, who retired as supreme allied commander of NATO forces last July, said that NATO’s top military commander would have to seek approval for the use of nuclear weapons within two weeks of a Soviet lunge into Western Europe.

The nation’s strategic nuclear forces, whose modernization the Reagan Administration has emphasized, have benefited from two new intercontinental bomber programs, an accelerated Trident 2 missile submarine program and deployment of the new 10-warhead MX “Peacekeeper” land-based intercontinental missiles.

Congress Funds Weapons

Between fiscal 1981 and 1987, the Administration won Congress’ support for funds to add 100 B-1B bombers, 1,490 bomber-launched cruise missiles and hundreds of stealthy versions of the cruise missiles (the exact number is classified), six Trident submarines and 21 new Trident 2 missiles, and 66 MX missiles, including 50 deployed in silos.

To continue the strategic forces modernization programs would cost $105.8 billion between 1988 and 1992, plus another $36.6 billion for the stealth bomber program.

Despite all this, the Administration has not significantly changed the military balance with the Soviets, who have also continued adding warheads to their missiles.

Nor has it solved a broader problem--the vulnerability of fixed, land-based missiles to increasingly accurate Soviet weapons.

The Army, meanwhile, claims that it is fielding the smartest and best-trained force ever. But service officials say that the Army has completed only one-third of its planned equipment modernization program. Its budget would have to grow by at least 3% annually, after accounting for inflation, for the service to bring its full program to fruition, former Army Chief of Staff Gen. John A. Wickham told Congress last year.

Pointing to the need to “raise the nuclear threshold” in Europe, the Army decided to beef up its conventional forces and adopt a strategy of striking Soviet troop concentrations deep behind the lines of battle with sophisticated non-nuclear weapons that are still under development. But so far, it claims only limited success in developing such capabilities.

As for the President’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative proposal, after $13 billion in spending it remains controversial technically and politically. His stated goal of making nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete” appears more distant than ever, while its enormous cost--up to $770 billion--and highly uncertain efficacy has led even Administration supporters to scale back the Reagan dream.

The next President will decide not whether but by how much, to scale back SDI.