Cheney Urges NATO to Boost Defense Spending

BRUSSELS —  A week after President Bush held out the prospect of defusing Soviet power in Eastern Europe by negotiation, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney exhorted NATO defense ministers Thursday to increase their military spending.

In a successful bid to maintain the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s so-called “3% commitment,” Cheney argued that an allied pledge to boost defense budgets would keep pressure on the Soviets in negotiations, as well as on the U.S. Congress and the European public.

As the alliance’s 16 defense ministers met to discuss common military concerns, several budget-wary allies had proposed that it scrap the spending goal, which for four years has existed only on paper.

In a biannual ritual that has lasted more than a decade, the NATO allies have vowed to increase their defense budgets by 3% a year, excluding the effects of inflation. No country has consistently achieved that goal.

As of this year, even the U.S. defense budget has shrunk in real terms for four years running. Cheney’s own proposed budget for next year would shrink by 1%.

That has led even some of the Pentagon’s senior officers to suggest that the 3% commitment has lost its credibility and that it should be replaced with more realistic goals.

But senior officials said that in the wake of last week’s NATO summit, the allies agreed that the spending commitment should not be scrapped.

“It sends the wrong signal . . . . If anything, we ought to be doing more,” said a senior defense official.

At the same time, the United States brought its allies welcome relief from another onerous burden. Gen. John R. Galvin, supreme allied commander of European forces, outlined a plan to scale back the size and scope of future European military exercises.

The exercises have become a sensitive political issue throughout Western Europe, where the maneuvers of U.S. and allied forces regularly wreak havoc with civilian life and property.

Galvin’s plan, which officials said was “greeted with considerable enthusiasm” by European allies, would increase the use of computer simulation and of small-scale exercises in which commanders only engage in mock battles.

Earlier this year, NATO scaled back Reforger, the largest of its annual maneuvers in West Germany.

Meanwhile, Cheney began what he called “the spade work” of intra-alliance negotiations, aimed at drafting a conventional arms control accord that would scale back the East-West military face-off in Europe within a year.

But he warned it is “far too early for us to talk about how to divide up cuts” suggested by President Bush’s proposal to reduce forces on both the U.S. and Soviet sides to 275,000 troops, with accompanying trims in tanks, artillery and other conventional weapons, as well as a 15% cut in combat aircraft.

“It’s important for NATO . . . to make certain we don’t start suddenly focusing on ways to make our reductions, rather than maintain our vigilance,” Cheney said.