Pentagon Accused of Lacking Strategy in Budget Plans to Meet Spending Cuts

Pentagon planners have begun to craft a budget to meet President Bush’s target of a 2% net reduction in military spending next year, as critics inside and outside the department charged Thursday that the Administration is undertaking large cuts of lasting significance without a strategy to guide them.

The Army, Navy and Air Force have proposed trimming thousands of troops, mothballing scores of ships and grounding hundreds of aircraft over the next four years. But critics contend that the military services have not yet offered a vision of what the overall force will look like in the mid-1990s.

President Bush Wednesday ordered Defense Secretary Dick Cheney to prepare a 1991 defense spending request that would not exceed $293 billion, a decline from this year’s spending level of 2% after accounting for inflation.

The budget was imposed on the services “without any policy guidance . . . or strategy,” said Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. “Even if they come up with a sound strategy behind the cuts, it will look like they cut first and justified it later.”

Added a senior Pentagon official who has observed the budget process for three decades: “This is an Administration without a compass. I’m convinced there’s no strategy or rationale for what they’re doing. . . . It’s a disorderly process.”

This official said that Cheney, a former Wyoming congressman, has bowed to political realities and devised a “pragmatic” spending plan that he can sell in White House budget deliberations and on Capitol Hill.

But the Pentagon official argued that Cheney and his top aides have not taken a serious look at the world of the 1990s--the military challenges the United States will face and what forces the country will need to cope with them.

Instead, Pentagon budgeters are still using the old tricks of stretching out purchases of expensive weapons and pushing current costs into the future, the official charged. “A lot of this is being done with smoke and mirrors,” he said.

Although debates still are raging within the Pentagon on what weapons, ships and aircraft programs will be canceled or stretched out, it is clear that overall troop strength will be cut dramatically over the next four years.

Overall, the services expect to cut 290,000 men and women by 1995, a 13.8% reduction from the current force of 2.1 million:

--The Army has proposed a reduction of 135,000 men and women in uniform, a 17.6% cut from the current force of 764,000.

--The Air Force will reduce manpower by 100,000, a 17.3% cut from the current 575,000.

--The Navy will shrink by 40,000, a 6.9% reduction from today’s 581,000.

--The Marines will reduce their force by 15,000, a 7.7% drop from the current 194,000.

Sources said that Cheney has ordered the services to make the manpower reductions quickly, rather than postposing the heavy cuts until the end of the four-year planning period.

The secretary wants “a heavy down payment” on the troop cuts in fiscal year 1991, which begins in October, 1990, a senior Army planner said.

“We’re going to try to do it in a measured, systematic way,” the official said. But laying off military personnel is costly because of accrued pension benefits and other costs of separating soldiers from the service, he said. Large reductions also pose political problems, because military posts are huge contributors to local economies across the country.

“Depending on how they want to take this down payment, it could be an interesting ball game,” the Army planner said.

Cheney intends to spare the major strategic weapons programs from heavy cuts, Pentagon sources said. Transferring the Air Force’s 10-warhead MX missile to rail cars will proceed on schedule, as will construction of the Navy’s Trident ballistic missile submarine and its D-5 missile.

Speaking at a breakfast with reporters, Air Force Secretary Donald B. Rice said that in plotting its long-term future, his service probably would emphasize airlifting functions and space activities, while conventional forces and strategic weapons would be given second priority.

Those priorities represent “a first cut in trying to rethink this problem,” Rice said.

“Assuming the START (strategic nuclear arms) agreement, I think that’s an area where there will inevitably be a reduced emphasis,” Rice said, referring to strategic modernization.

At the same time, he reiterated the Air Force’s commitment to the B-2 bomber, calling it the service’s “top priority in strategic modernization.”

Rice conceded that the service, bowing to congressional direction, is studying a restructured program that would slow B-2 production so that yearly procurement costs would not reach $8 billion, the level currently projected for the early 1990s.

But he said the Air Force is not actively considering a reduction of its overall goal of building 132 of the long-range bombers, which are projected to cost more than $500 million each.

Rice said that one widely circulated proposal, which would more than halve the planned B-2 force to 60 bombers, “doesn’t save a dime in the next four or five years.” Since that period is the focus of Cheney’s budget-cutting efforts, the Air Force hopes to avoid cuts in the current process.

Similarly, Air Force officials argue that termination of the Midgetman missile program would fail to save money during the years in which Cheney has ordered cuts. Moreover, the move would stir such controversy among the missile’s powerful patrons on Capitol Hill and in the White House that the Air Force is considered unlikely to propose it.

The Air Force’s C-17 transport plane, a $37.5-billion program of Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach, also will be saved in the 1991 budget, sources said. A knowledgeable Pentagon official, however, said that the futuristic airlift program is almost certain to be delayed and scaled back as defense budgets decline.

Aspin told defense contractors in a speech Thursday that if the Administration fails to present a rationale for its defense budget, Congress will impose a strategy of its own--”a pork strategy” to protect bases and jobs in powerful lawmakers’ home districts.

In a letter to President Bush, Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.) proposed the establishment of a White House Commission on Defense and National Security to make recommendations on near-term and long-term military and foreign policy issues. Dicks is a seven-term member of the House and a member of the defense appropriations subcommittee.

“I would hope we can avoid the scenario in which the restructuring of our military is accomplished in such a way that it placates the budgeters and the generals, but which doesn’t address the dramatically changed world situation,” Dicks told Bush.

Staff writers Kevin Davis and William J. Eaton contributed to this story.