Bush May Slow ‘Star Wars,’ Reduce Size of Military in Bid to Cut Pentagon Budget

During the first presidential debate, when George Bush was asked how he could improve the nation’s defenses despite tightening military budgets, Bush resorted to a bit of military jargon. He discoursed glowingly about a new Pentagon concept known as “competitive strategies.”

That is a fancy name for a common-sense system that tries to anticipate the military threats of the future and design weapons and strategies to counter them. The concept, which stresses tight central management and planning, is the likely basis of President-elect Bush’s approach to defense policy.

In other words, when it comes to defense, the next Administration will be about competence, not ideology.

As applied by Bush, according to a range of experts, “competitive strategies” will probably mean:

--Postponement or cancellation of some major weapons systems now in the planning stage, including the watering down and stretching out of President Reagan’s “Star Wars” and similar action on the mobile Midgetman missile.

--Reduction of the size of the armed services from the present level of 2 million men and women under arms.

--Stricter regulation of the services by the defense secretary than prevailed under Reagan’s first secretary, Caspar W. Weinberger.

Must Cope With Democrats

Bush’s defense secretary, whoever it is, certainly will need some framework for coping with a massive reduction in the defense budget and with unruly Democrats in Congress who have their own fixed ideas on military planning and purchasing.

“Early on, we’re going to need a summit of Administration and congressional leaders to agree on some basics for ongoing defense discussions,” said former Sen. John Tower (R-Tex.), Bush’s chief defense adviser and a prime contender for the post of defense secretary.

Competitive strategies, with its emphasis on smaller forces, high-tech weaponry and long-range planning, will offer the new Pentagon chief a coherent system for dealing with the looming spending reductions. Over the next five years, by some estimates, $300 billion must be cut from current Pentagon spending plans because of federal budget constraints.

Weapons will have to be scrapped, manpower levels reduced, acquisition rules revised, pay raises deferred and overseas commitments reconsidered, most analysts agree. Bush hopes that the competitive strategies concept will provide a road map for making these tough decisions.

His immediate challenge will be to sell the untested plan both to a hostile Congress and to suspicious military services.

The Bush Administration is likely to move quickly to try to establish decent relations with Congress on defense issues, knowing that without Democratic cooperation the federal budget deficit will worsen and Administration initiatives will be imperiled.

“Defense got highly politicized over the last year; perhaps we can swing that back some,” Tower said in an interview shortly before the election. He said that Bush is not spoiling for an ideological fight on defense but would seek competent, low-profile administrators to run the Pentagon.

Tower indicated that both Democrats and Republicans will lose sacred cows. The mobile single-warhead Midgetman missile, a favorite of congressional Democrats, probably will be postponed or killed, he said.

And Republicans will not get their cherished space-based “Star Wars” anti-missile defense system any time soon. They will have to settle instead for a limited ground-based system and a long-term research program, Tower acknowledged.

Democrats would welcome the scaling back of “Star Wars” as a retreat from the Reagan Administration’s highly political approach to defense.

“Deployment of (‘Star Wars’) always was an ideological issue rather than a real decision,” said Sen. J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.), a leading candidate for Senate majority leader and a key member of the Appropriations Committee. “There’s not a chance in the world that Bush would propose building it now.”

Midgetman will not be built because it is too expensive, Johnston added. As a compromise, he predicted, the Air Force will take the existing 50 silo-based MX missiles out of the ground and mount them on railroad cars.

“At the very least, we ought to get the 50 out of those silos, where they are an attractive target,” he said.

On defense as well as other issues, according to Johnston, Democrats in Congress intend to pursue their own game plan. “The Democrats will certainly set the agenda and we’ll pursue that agenda,” he said. “I hope we’ll get some cooperation out of the White House. We’ve certainly gotten used to paddling our own boat.”

Added a well-informed Republican Senate aide: “The real momentum is on the Democratic side. The Democratic Party is really burned. They are going to try to push George Bush real hard. They will go to work on him in no time.”

Rep. Norman D. Dicks (D-Wash.) said that Bush’s biggest obstacle in Congress on defense issues will not be the Democrats but the right wing of his own party.

Dicks said that he expects Bush to work closely with Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia and Rep. Les Aspin of Wisconsin, the Democratic chairmen of the Senate and House Armed Services committees, to develop compromises--such as the limited “Star Wars” plan--that will infuriate the right wing.

“If he wants to succeed in defense, he’s going to have to reach out to the Democratic moderates,” Dicks said. “When you look at defense policy today, it’s being established by moderate pro-defense Democrats.”

Inside the Pentagon, the new secretary will face what all defense chiefs confront--a virtually unmanageable bureaucracy of 2 million men and women in uniform working for competing military services, a million Defense Department civilians and tens of thousands of contractor firms employing an additional 3.5 million people.

The new secretary will have to move quickly to try to control the far-flung military-industrial complex. He will face problems ranging from a major weapons-buying scandal to the crumbling network of nuclear bomb factories.

“I think the stress has to be on management,” said Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant defense secretary in the Reagan Administration. “Until you can restore the confidence of the American people in the integrity and management of the Department of Defense, it’s going to be pretty hard to do the things you want to do.”

Harold Brown, defense secretary under President Jimmy Carter, added: “I think it would be important to pick someone who can manage, who can get along with Congress, who can face up to the question of when to fight, when not to fight--and I’m talking not only about wars but also about issues and programs.”

Brown said that the next defense secretary would be forced by budget constraints to cut the size of the armed forces. There is no other way, he noted, to save money quickly.

“You’ll have to shrink the force structure,” he said. “The services hate to do that. They would rather keep a skeleton force and get funds (to train and equip it) later on. But force structure shrinkage is inevitable.”

Tower, concurring, said that the Bush Administration is unlikely to sacrifice development of the next generation of weapons just to keep 2 million men and women in uniform. “To make substantial economies in defense, you can’t take it all out of hardware,” he said.

Despite years of efforts to reduce the competition among the military services, the rivalries remain as entrenched as ever. If the new secretary tries to implement the competitive strategies concept, he will quickly come up against service chiefs who see its stress on central decision-making as a threat to their traditional autonomy.

“You’re talking about a new system to devise the service budgets,” said a recently retired senior military officer. “The competitive strategies concept threatens to turn that old process completely on its ear. There is concern (among the service chiefs) that it’s moving awfully fast for political purposes.”

Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Dennis E. Kloske, the Pentagon official who developed competitive strategies, said that the program would, for the first time, impose discipline and rationality on military budgeting and planning.

“What has been typical is inconstancy, lack of continuity and a fragmented vision,” Kloske said in an interview. “We’re trying to bring a vision of where we’re going in the 1990s.”

He confirmed the suspicions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the program calls for tight reins on their planning and acquisition functions, forcing them all through a competitive strategies filter that would be applied by the secretary’s office. This would be a radical departure from the management style of former Defense Secretary Weinberger, who allowed the service chiefs wide latitude to buy weapons and set policy.

Kloske said that competitive strategies would give the next Administration an overall framework for deciding which weapons are needed to meet the Soviet threat of the late 1990s. He said that the Pentagon’s current budget problem was caused in part by a frenzy of undirected spending early in the Reagan Administration, during which the military services ordered dozens of new weapons that they cannot now afford.

Tower bought the competitive strategies program, then sold it to Bush, who was briefed on it by Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci a week before the first presidential campaign debate. Since then, Bush has mentioned it in several speeches, including a lengthy passage in an address in Denver on Oct. 17.

“Competitive strategies is a concept as American as apple pie,” Bush said in Denver. “It’s just plain common sense applied to our military problems. The idea is simply this: We should invest in military systems that play to our strengths, not Soviet strengths.”