Administration Seeks to Temper Military Cuts

The Bush Administration, in moving toward deep cuts in the defense budget, is trying to control a surging mood in Congress to slash military spending because of federal deficit woes and major changes in the Communist bloc, key lawmakers believe.

Members of both parties said they are encouraged that Defense Secretary Dick Cheney apparently wants to deal cooperatively with Congress in making cuts that could fall heavily on overseas troop deployments and new weapons systems.

The lawmakers were reacting to a series of reports that Cheney was pressing the armed services to outline potential cuts totaling $180 billion in their 1992-94 budget plans. Candidates for elimination so far include two aircraft carriers and 200,000 Army personnel.

Despite the prospect of cooperation with Cheney, Democratic congressional leaders said they expect fierce battles among government branches, geographic regions and political parties over the depth and breadth of slashes.

They suggest that President Bush, in seizing the initiative, is seeking to ward off even deeper defense cuts on the one hand and the new taxes advocated by some lawmakers to pay for expanded domestic programs on the other.

“I’m sure Cheney will say that if the Democrats go farther than this, they will bear the burden of premature disarmament,” said Rep. Vic Fazio (D-Sacramento), an influential member of the House Appropriations Committee.

Some legislators also speculated that the unusual public discussion of possible cuts by Pentagon officials was designed in part to create a progressive image for Bush in advance of his shipboard summit next month with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

“I think they’re publicizing this before the summit so they don’t look like the nostalgic hawks they have been, but the modern people that Europe has forced them to be,” Rep. Thomas J. Downey (D-N.Y.) said shortly before Congress adjourned for the year on Wednesday.

Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.) and Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.)--all chairmen of military affairs committees--said they are weighing a slew of reductions as Congress and the Administration gear up for a new round of budget battles beginning in January when Bush submits his request for fiscal 1991.

In interviews, leading Republicans cautioned against unselective, meat-ax reductions.

“I hope this Pentagon exercise forces a rational plan that will inhibit us from doing crazy things,” said Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), senior Republican on the Senate Budget Committee.

Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Bakersfield) said he thought Cheney, a former congressman and White House chief of staff, was ideal for the task.

“He is a consummate politician, not wedded to the military,” said Thomas, a member of the House Budget Committee. “And I think his geopolitical view of the world is the correct one at this time.”

Murtha, chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, echoed the sentiment.

“I have never seen a guy as cooperative as Cheney has been,” Murtha said. “I took 19 programs to him this year (for proposed cuts) and we came to a resolution on all of them. He talked with me last week. We’re talking the same language. We know there is tremendous pressure to cut defense. The mood has changed.”

Expressing the change, Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) said that “obviously, there will be a scaling down of defense expenditures as we see a reduction in the threat that led to their buildup. . . . The defense budget adopted this year will be the last based on circumstances that no longer exist.”

House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) also saw the possibility of “a fundamental reordering of the defense budget.”

Top Republicans, however, sounded dissimilar notes.

House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel (R-Ill.) said: “If we continue to have glasnost . . . and the better feeling” between the United States and the Soviet Union, “it’s natural to ask why so much of our funds is spent for arms.”

However, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) said: “I think the temptation is to reduce defense (spending) more than we should . . . . You can’t base foreign policy on one individual, Mr. Gorbachev, or anyone else.”

Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, suggested that lessening tensions with the Soviets and Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe could result in large pullbacks of U.S. troops, greater reliance on reserves and reductions in airlift and sea-lift forces.

Also vulnerable, he noted, are such new weapons systems as the B-2 Stealth bomber, the Advanced Tactical Fighter, a new Navy submarine and the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.

“If the secretary of defense thinks there is a changing threat--and I am sure there is considerable evidence of that--then you need to take a look at each one of these systems,” Nunn said.

But Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.), another member of the panel, said that “cuts of that magnitude have to be warranted by more evidence than we’ve seen.”

Aspin, head of the House Armed Services Committee, noted that “in the early ‘80s, we had Reagan-driven defense budgets that swelled without thought or plan. For the last five years, we have had deficit-driven budgets that sank by a few percentage points each year as we wrestled with the joys of Gramm-Rudman,” the deficit-reduction law.

“Now,” Aspin continued, “we enter the era of Gorbachev-driven budgets that will need to respond to the changes taking place on the other side of the rapidly rusting Iron Curtain. This will require a dramatic change in mind-set.”

Sources said Aspin is considering substantial troop cuts and a “reoriented” procurement system in which research would proceed on some new weapons systems but production would not begin unless military threats resurged.

House Budget Committee Chairman Leon E. Panetta (D-Monterey) warned that the Administration is playing a “dangerous game” if it calls for defense savings but not new revenues combined with cuts in entitlement programs like Medicare.

Without such a “balance,” he said, “it will become can-you-top-this on defense.”