Joint Chiefs Held Trying to Scuttle Plan Backed by Bush

In the closing days of the Reagan Administration, the Joint Chiefs of Staff are surreptitiously trying to cripple or kill a military planning program that has been embraced by President-elect George Bush as the foundation of his defense strategy, according to Pentagon sources and internal Defense Department documents obtained by The Times.

Pentagon officials said that the military chiefs object to the “competitive strategies” program as unwarranted meddling in their traditional weapons-buying and planning functions and are trying to scuttle it before Bush takes office.

Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs, recently acknowledged that the top brass have problems with competitive strategies because it weakens the military services’ ability to select and buy their own weapons.

“The problem is taking that concept and applying it in a real way. That’s where the arguments start, where the vested interests are,” Crowe said in response to a question at a meeting last week of the World Affairs Council of Washington.

He denied, however, that military officers are trying to sink the program. “That is simply not true,” he said. “We subscribe to it.”

The dispute reflects longstanding tensions among the military and civilian leaders at the Pentagon and provides a preview of the intense defense budget battle that can be expected to erupt early in the Bush Administration.

Competitive strategies is a concept developed by civilian Pentagon officials to try to bring common sense to decisions about military strategy and weapons purchases. The concept, which stresses tight central management, is likely to be the centerpiece of Bush’s approach to defense policy if it survives the chiefs’ onslaught, Bush advisers said.

The military chiefs always have jealously guarded their right to draw up war plans and to choose the appropriate weapons to conduct them. Competitive strategies threatens that autonomy by giving civilian Defense Department officials a scheme for predicting how the next war will be fought and what weapons will be needed.

They also can serve as a filter through which proposed weapons systems will have to pass as the Pentagon goes through the painful process of trying to slash spending by an estimated $300 billion over the next five years. The Pentagon budget has always been the subject of a fierce tug-of-war between the military services and the civilians in the defense secretary’s office.

The chiefs’ opposition to competitive strategies “raises the fundamental question of whether these guys are going to go along with whoever comes in as secretary of defense,” said a Defense Department official familiar with the dispute. “Will they cooperate in procurement reform, strategic planning, budget cuts?”

By attempting to block competitive strategies, this official contended, “they’ve thrown down the gauntlet” to the civilian leadership of the Pentagon.

The concept of competitive strategies was born nearly two years ago as a review of U.S. military strengths and weaknesses, compared to those of the Soviet Union. It tried, through complex war games and intelligence studies, to identify American technology and weapons that pose the greatest threat to the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies.

As recently as the end of October, Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci strongly endorsed the program and directed that extensive further studies be done.

But in an abrupt reversal--reportedly prompted by intense opposition from the Joint Chiefs of Staff--Carlucci essentially halted all work on competitive strategies Nov. 30.

In a memorandum to the competitive strategies office, William H. Taft IV, Carlucci’s chief deputy, ordered earlier studies reviewed to determine their “reliability and validity.”

Taft also blocked the inclusion of “black,” or secret, military programs in the competitive strategies study, saying that it would require special clearances for too many civilians, most of whom will be leaving the Pentagon on Jan. 20 anyway.

“Competitive strategies is an internal Department of Defense initiative,” Taft wrote. “Broadening its scope or applicability without the benefit of completed internal staff work, inter-agency coordination, or considering international sensitivities could be counterproductive.”

“That’s a quintessential bureaucratic ploy” to scuttle a program, said a competitive strategies advocate outside the Pentagon. “The chiefs are saying, ‘Don’t push us, Mr. Bush, you’re not President yet.’ They want to slow it down and see if they’re really serious in the next Administration.”

In the chiefs’ defense, one senior military official said: “The Joint Chiefs feel they have a very sophisticated system called the Joint Strategic Planning System, which was instituted recently and does a damn good job of doing what the competitive strategies initiative sets out to do--setting priorities and identifying high-leverage programs.”

He said that the war game on which many of the conclusions of competitive strategies are based was flawed because it assumed a larger-than-realistic growth of the defense budget. Most military planners now assume that the Pentagon budget will be essentially flat for the next several years to help balance the federal budget.

In an interview with The Times last week, Crowe said that he recognized the value of competitive strategies but that others in the military object because the concept threatens pet weapons programs.

In an era of shrinking military budgets, the Pentagon cannot embrace one system for evaluating weapons and strategy and ignore all others. “We only have so much money,” he said. “We can’t afford to make mistakes.”

Staff writer Melissa Healy contributed to this story.