Cheney’s Holding Action

President Bush’s honeymoon was short, but Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney got none at all in his first few weeks at work. He was overruled by Bush on his first major weapons decision and he will be overtaken on his first budget. But he can both get even and get ahead if he can explain to the White House and to American taxpayers generally what the Pentagon’s mission is in this changing world and what the mission will cost. No other defense secretary has done that. Few have tried.

Cheney’s first budget is a holding action. It does not cut spending by enough--particularly in research on “Star Wars”--and it does not come any closer than past budgets to drawing a direct connection between money the Pentagon proposes to spend and the reason for spending it. As in the past, it fails to describe in some intellectual, strategic and tactical detail the dangers that make the expenditure so crucial.

Cheney submitted the budget when he did to meet a procedural deadline, one that happened to occur before, and perhaps long before, the Bush Administration had finished its exhaustive review of national goals and strategies, foreign and domestic, on which it says it will base decisions about national security policy.

As a result, the Cheney budget would invest money in both a railroad-based system of MX missiles with 10 warheads each--something that the Soviet Union would bend every effort to monitor--and a single-warhead, truck-mounted Midgetman missile--something that the Soviets could ignore because it could not be used in a surprise attack. That compelling feature of the Midgetman, which makes it less provocative than bigger missiles, is based on the fact that only 300 or so are planned, far too few to knock out enough Soviet missiles so that they could not fire back in retaliation.

Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wisc.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, says that the partisan politics in Congress mean that the Pentagon cannot get either missile unless Republicans and Democrats can each vote for both. It is possible that the country could get along without either if it worked hard at negotiating away the existence of both large and small mobile missiles during future sessions of START arms control talks in Geneva.

On that subject, Aspin, whose political judgments are in part molded by experience as a serious analyst at the Pentagon years ago, says that the Bush White House has been entirely too timid about the utility of arms-control agreements in its reappraisal of the world.

Aspin is right about that. It does not make sense to base major Pentagon budget decisions on the threat posed by some nuclear weapon if the threat could be made negligible by stronger arms-control agreements and new procedures for verifying that neither superpower was secretly rearming.

Congress should consider the Pentagon budget a rough draft and put off serious consideration of it until the White House review of America’s long-range military strategy is completed. If the second draft of the Pentagon budget comes no closer to reality than the first, it should write its own. Our impression is that Richard B. Cheney is too smart to let that happen.