Budget Crunch Forcing Cutbacks in ‘Star Wars’

“Star Wars” is coming down to Earth.

President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, squeezed by budget realities, internal Pentagon skepticism and political opposition, is being restructured substantially, according to military and congressional officials. Instead of a vast array of space-based launching sensors, satellites and anti-missile rockets, the program is being redrawn as a much more limited defensive system based largely on land.

Lt. Gen. James A. Abrahamson, director of the SDI program and the Administration’s chief spokesman for strategic defense, insisted in an interview last week that the program’s goal of defending the nation against a Soviet nuclear strike remains intact.

But the Air Force officer’s vision of the defensive shield is far more modest than it was even six months ago. In recent months, Abrahamson has trimmed the program’s ambitious spending plans by billions of dollars, postponed its proposed deployment date by at least two years and delayed planned research on many of its most promising advanced technology projects.

With Republican presidential nominee George Bush questioning SDI’s cost and his Democratic opponent, Michael S. Dukakis, challenging its value, Abrahamson and other Administration “Star Wars” advocates appear to be positioning the program to survive the end of the Reagan era.

By emphasizing ground-based elements, Abrahamson is addressing concerns of congressional Democrats that a defensive system based in space would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. The treaty bars testing and deployment of space-based anti-missile weapons but allows a limited defensive system built around land-based interceptors.

He also has drawn up new cost figures showing that a limited system, including ground and space elements, can be built for about half the earlier estimate of $120 billion.

Abrahamson now no longer speaks of a shield in space to protect America against a rain of Soviet missiles. He describes SDI’s mission as an effort to frustrate Soviet war planners by leaving them uncertain how many weapons would penetrate U.S. defenses.

Among Abrahamson’s colleagues in the Defense Department are many officers, particularly in the Air Force, who believe that SDI will never work and that it is merely siphoning billions of dollars from more valuable projects.

“Star Wars” has spawned “a curious alliance between the resisters of change in the Pentagon and those who resist SDI for political reasons outside,” said retired Army Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham, one of the original champions of space-based strategic defense.

Abrahamson himself, while conceding that SDI will not make the United States invulnerable to Soviet missiles, insists that it retains its value nonetheless.

“The idea that a system is useless unless it’s perfect is ridiculous,” Abrahamson said. What President Reagan requested and what the SDI office is trying to achieve is a “thoroughly reliable” defensive system that can intercept a certain percentage of Soviet weapons, he said. The exact percentage, he noted, is classified.

‘Deterring Attack’

“If it is thoroughly reliable, it will protect the people of this country” by deterring a Soviet attack, he said. “How reliable it is depends on how much money they’re willing to put into it.”

Abrahamson’s more humble approach stems in part from a rigorous Pentagon budget review of the program. Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci told Abrahamson in June that Congress would approve at least $10 billion less for “Star Wars” over the next five years than current Pentagon projections, and that the years beyond that looked even grimmer.

Carlucci sent the general back to the drawing board to see if he could deliver a workable system under those constraints. The implication was that if Abrahamson could not reduce the price tag dramatically, he risked letting the program be killed or sharply curtailed to free its annual budget--now about $4 billion--for other pressing military needs.

Abrahamson is to report back with his new plan next month to the Defense Acquisition Board, chaired by Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition Robert B. Costello and made up of senior officials from the military services. The board reviews progress on military programs and sets the Pentagon’s long-term spending priorities.

Searches for Savings

After Carlucci’s June directive, Abrahamson started looking for savings in his $120-billion plan for the first phase of a strategic defense. Through design changes, technological advances and delays in development of exotic weapons, Abrahamson now contends that he can deliver a defensive system that would meet military requirements for about $60 billion.

The modified program would cut by a third to half the number of space-based rockets designed to shoot down Soviet missiles in the early phase of their flight. Instead of 300 space “garages” housing 10 or more interceptors, there would be 150 to 200.

Nor would each garage contain its own sophisticated sensing, tracking and communications gear. Instead, these functions would be consolidated in a limited number of satellites and ground stations.

Much of the work of the interceptor rockets would be taken over by ground-based missiles designed to hit Soviet warheads in mid-flight.

“We have been making some real progress in bringing down the cost of these space-based interceptors,” Abrahamson said. As an example, he pointed to successful tests of miniature guidance rocket thrusters that would be employed on the new interceptors.

However, because of the program’s long-term budget reductions, the “Star Wars” schedule has been delayed, he said. The deployment decision and date depend on money, laboratory progress and future political decisions, he said.

Budget Causing Delay

“I was quite optimistic until this big chunk was taken out of the budget that the decision date was to have been the first half of the 1990s . . . and it would be four or five years later when you would begin deployment,” he said. “That has moved essentially one to two years to the right.”

That means that--even if all the pieces work as planned, the next two presidents fully support the program and Congress is willing to spend at least $60 billion on it--a partial strategic defense would not be in place before the end of the century.

One congressional official who tracks “Star Wars” closely said that Abrahamson was instructed to redefine the program in a way that is “politically palatable, not politically volatile . . . an interim solution that would guide the program through political waters until next year.”

The result is a “bare-bones” system that will be less capable as a defense against missile attack and more susceptible to Soviet countermeasures, said Ron Tammen, an aide to Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wis.), a foe of SDI.

Abrahamson conceded that the program faces an uncertain future after the Reagan Administration.

Dukakis Backs Research

Dukakis said last week that he is willing to support SDI as a research program costing about $1 billion a year but that he would not allow any testing or deployment that violates the ABM treaty.

Even Bush, although he backs the “Star Wars” concept, said earlier this month that he is not convinced the nation can afford it.

“We’re trying to make sure the program’s progress is understood and that it is packaged very well so that, no matter who comes in, they will be able to hopefully understand it and then make some knowledgeable judgments about where they would like to go,” Abrahamson said.

“It is my hope that this will stop being such a political issue and people will look at the merits and the progress of the research program.”