Law May Force 10% Cut in Active-Duty Troops : Budget: President Bush and Congress can’t agree on a deficit-reduction package. Lawmakers say Gramm-Rudman cuts will damage national security.

Automatic spending cuts now favored by the Bush Administration would force the armed services to reduce active-duty troop levels by 170,000 to 230,000 men and women--as much as 10% of U.S. fighting forces, Pentagon officials told Congress Wednesday.

Senior military officials and angry lawmakers agreed that the reductions would return American armed forces to the manpower levels--and possibly the combat-readiness levels--of the post-Vietnam War era, which Republican leaders have called the “decade of neglect.”

“This is the highest-stakes poker game I’ve ever witnessed,” said Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.).

The troop cuts will be averted, however, if Congress and the President reach a compromise deficit-reduction bill aimed at narrowing the budget gap through a mixture of spending cuts and revenue increases.

But Bush and congressional leaders currently are at loggerheads on the issue, and Bush last week called the across-the-board budget cuts mandated by the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction law “a necessary discipline in the absence of more satisfactory action” by Congress.

Calling such statements “puzzling,” Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, warned that the cuts would be “very damaging” to the nation’s security.

On Wednesday, Bush called senior Senate Republicans to the White House to pitch the case for allowing the automatic budget reductions to proceed. Congressional sources said the lawmakers were told that the impact on the Pentagon would be “minimal” and could be mitigated by the passage of later spending measures.

Democratic and Republican members of the Senate panel argued that the cuts would be devastating to the morale of servicemen and women, as well as to the U.S. negotiating position in East-West talks aimed at reducing conventional forces in Europe.

But Republicans and Democrats could not agree on whether Congress or the White House is to blame for allowing the across-the-board reductions to take effect.

“Congress and the President are now engaged in a game of chicken, and the President is driving his automobile full-speed toward the one Congress is riding,” said Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.). “But the people inside are real and the national security is at stake.”

The threatened troop cuts are part of a potential $16.1-billion package of budget reductions triggered by the Gramm-Rudman law on Oct. 15, with $8 billion sliced equally from defense and domestic spending programs. Under the automatic cuts, the Pentagon is being forced to scale back spending 4.3% below last year’s level.

“This is deadly serious,” said Sean O’Keefe, the Pentagon’s comptroller. O’Keefe referred to the across-the-board “sequester” of funds dictated by the Gramm-Rudman law as “a sword of Damocles” designed to force budget compromises. “It wasn’t supposed to happen,” he said.

O’Keefe, flanked by the vice chiefs of each of the military services, said that the budget cuts could require the dissolution of a rapidly deployable Army division, a Navy aircraft carrier along with all its escort ships and air wing, a Marine Corps infantry regiment, a wing of F-15 and F-16 fighter planes and two squadrons of transport planes.

Some 40,000 men and women are needed to fill those units and, roughly 130,000 more troops are needed to support them.

The deficit-reduction act would require a cut of $3.4 billion from the Pentagon’s personnel budget.

The Army would be forced to drop 62,000 active-duty soldiers and 69,000 National Guardsmen and reservists from its rolls, according to Gen. Robert W. RisCassi, vice chief of staff of the Army.

Adm. Leon A. Edney, vice chief of naval operations, said that the Navy would have to reduce its active-duty forces by 76,500 and its reserve forces by 6,500.

The Marine Corps would be cut by 11,000 active-duty soldiers and 850 reservists, according to Gen. Joseph J. Went, assistant Marine Corps Commandant.

Gen. Monroe W. Hatch Jr., the Air Force’s vice chief of staff, told the panel that his service would need to reduce its forces by 80,000 active-duty personnel and by as many as 13,000 Guardsmen and reservists.

“We’ll be suffering this problem for a hell of a long time,” said O’Keefe, referring to the loss of trained soldiers, sailors and airmen. “It’ll be a generational thing.”

But O’Keefe and the general officers fell in line behind the Administration, telling lawmakers that the Pentagon is ready and able to make the cuts. But their statements were met with disbelief from Democratic senators, including Nunn, who reminded O’Keefe that Bush and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney had fought harder when smaller cuts were proposed earlier this year.

Bush and Cheney decided last month to waive the right to exempt personnel from the across-the-board cuts, according to Pentagon officials. O’Keefe defended that decision, noting that exempting military personnel from the budget reductions would have left in place a large but poorly equipped and poorly trained force.

“If everybody stays in place, you can’t accomplish the mission itself,” because training and modernization budgets would be cut so deeply to compensate.

O’Keefe said that Congress could mitigate the military impact of the Gramm-Rudman cuts by allowing the Defense Department to shuffle as much as $6 billion among different spending accounts.