Cheney Reveals 1-Year Delay on Stealth Bomber

Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, acknowledging that he had been overruled on one of his first proposals as a member of the Cabinet, Sunday confirmed reports that President Bush has decided to fund both the MX and Midgetman missiles in the 1990 defense budget.

Cheney further disclosed decisions to delay production of the stealth bomber for a year and to scale down former President Ronald Reagan’s coveted “Star Wars” program.

Cheney’s remarks amounted to a preview of the $298.2-billion revised defense budget that Bush will present to Congress on Tuesday, trimmed $10 billion from what was originally requested by Reagan. A former House Republican whip who always voted for spiraling defense budgets, Cheney insisted that the cuts he described come from necessity, not philosophy.

‘I’d Spend More’

“If it were my decision to make today, I’d spend more on defense and have real growth in defense on a steady, stable basis over time,” Cheney told interviewers on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“That’s not an option,” he went on. “The President and the Congress have made a decision that the budget will be cut.”

The President’s rebuff of Cheney’s views came on the Midgetman decision. In line with the prevailing view of the Pentagon, the secretary had recommended that Bush kill the $24-billion Midgetman program, which would place single-warhead Midgetman missiles on trucks, and rely solely on the $5.4-billion MX program, which would take 50 10-warhead MX missiles from their existing silos and place them on flat railroad cars.

But Bush listened instead to pleas from congressional leaders and from Brent Scowcroft, his national security adviser, that he salvage the Midgetman even while going ahead with the MX program. Its proponents believe that the truck-based, smaller Midgetman would be much harder for an enemy to attack than the larger MX missiles. Bush’s decision to fund both will probably forestall any acrimonious battle with Congress over missiles.

MX Program Put First

Referring to the MX program as “the rail garrison system” and the Midgetman program as “the small ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) system, Cheney declared:

“The President basically said: ‘Try to do both.’ But instead of doing both simultaneously, we’ll sequence them. That is, we’ll do rail garrison first, put a little bit of money in the budget next year for the small ICBM, and then, as we get the rail garrison deployed, we’ll start to ramp up on the small ICBM. Eventually, though, we’ll have both systems.”

The secretary’s decision to delay production of the B-2 stealth bomber did not appear to augur well for the future of these planes, which, at a cost of $517 million each, are expected to be undetectable by enemy radar. The plane is produced at Northrop Corp.’s plant in Palmdale, Calif.

Sees Technical Problems

When asked if he would consider killing the program, Cheney replied: “The stealth bomber, in this current go-round, will be delayed a year. We’re going to postpone actually going into full procurement because I’m not comfortable with the program yet. There are a lot of technical problems with it, and it is extremely expensive. And until I have time to review it, which I’ve not yet had, I’m not prepared to make that judgment.”

On the “Star Wars” defense system, or, as the Pentagon and White House prefer to call it, the Strategic Defense Initiative, Cheney said that spending would be cut by $7 billion over the next five years. “Instead of spending $40 billion over the next five years on SDI,” Cheney said, “we’ll spend about $33 billion.” He said that a total of $4.6 billion would be budgeted for SDI in the 1990 fiscal year.

Must Fit Reductions

“SDI is alive and well,” the secretary of defense insisted. “It’s robust. But like everything else, it’s got to fit into a reduced budget.”

Cheney said that the “Star Wars” emphasis in the next two years will be on testing “the new Brilliant Pebbles concept . . . to see if we can in fact go that route.”

The designers of that weapon envision myriad small interceptors in space--the brilliant pebbles--capable of demolishing missiles heading toward the United States.

“If we can (go that route),” said Cheney, “we can save a lot of money with the basic architecture of the system.”

Cuts in Personnel

The secretary also announced reductions in personnel that had been resisted by both the Army and the Navy. Cheney said that the Army would lose 8,000 personnel and the Navy would lose a carrier group.

The loss of a carrier group--an aircraft carrier and its air wing--would amount to a reduction of 4,000 personnel. This cut would mean the early retirement of one of the two oldest aircraft carriers now in the Navy. They are the Coral Sea and the Midway.