PEACE: CHALLENGE AND OPPORTUNITY : A Menu for Defense Cuts

America’s defense budget is likely to shrink by $50 billion to $100 billion over the next 10 years, and could fall even further without hobbling the Pentagon.

Some military analysts think the budget will be cut to measure, reflecting strategic decisions about possible threats to national security of the next generation that will be different from those of the Cold War, and will require different forces to fend them off. More analysts expect budget cuts to move along paths of least resistance, preserving expensive technologies designed for the next generation of superpower confrontation. The armed forces and Congress usually make common cause in shielding high-technology systems and the jobs they support.

Whatever the pattern of cuts, they probably will start at least by holding the Pentagon budget level at about $300 billion for a number of years and force the Pentagon to swallow annual inflation. This is about what President Bush is proposing for the next fiscal year, ending in October, 1991, and would mean annual reductions of between $10 billion and $15 billion.

Reductions also will be real and not illusory, making them quite different from Defense Secretary Dick Cheney’s much-discussed and misunderstood cut of $180 billion. Cheney’s dollar numbers represent the amount that it would take to buy everything in the Pentagon’s last five-year plan, a plan that no longer applies to a world in which communism has collapsed in Europe.

All proposals for defense-budget cuts start with the assumption that the Pentagon could carry out its missions without loss of needed firepower at lower budget figures. A survey of analysts led Fortune magazine to conclude last July that the Pentagon could be ready to meet any likely threat 10 years from now with a budget one-third smaller than the present level of $300 billion a year. A study for the Brookings Institution in Washington last month concluded that the Pentagon could get by on even less by then, about $160 billion. Most of these analyses assume a swing in emphasis from a mission of slugging it out in a ground and nuclear war over Europe to smaller regional conflicts in which Americans would be forced to intervene to defend allies.

The figures did not fall out of some ivory tower. What distinguishes them from Pentagon estimates is that they are antiseptic proposals, untainted by interservice rivalries and the real world of defense logrolling between the White House and Congress. For precisely that reason the Brookings analysis, for instance, is being taken quite seriously in Washington circles. These alternative defense budgets cannot and should not be dismissed from the defense budget debate just because they float into the exercise from the outside. The Brookings study was done by William W. Kaufman, who started analyzing strategy and forces for the nuclear era at the RAND Corp. in 1950, served with six secretaries of defense and began writing alternative defense budgets after he left the Pentagon. He knows his field in such detail that he can brief at any length on how his version of U.S. forces would perform using only notes on a single 3x5 card. He was one of the analysts that Fortune surveyed. So was Lawrence Korb, a sub-cabinet officer in Ronald Reagan’s Pentagon.

Fortune’s survey would reduce the defense budget to about $200 billion, taking the biggest single chunk from the Army to reflect the diminished threat of a major war in Europe. Reports that the Army’s plans to turn itself into a global flying squad to put down regional conflicts are drawing Marine Corps opposition (on the ground that it already has that mission) is just a hint of the domestic battles that defense cuts will bring.

Nuclear forces would be negotiated down from 13,000 to 4,000 weapons for an annual savings of $15 billion. Kaufman’s analysis calls for the same number of nuclear weapons on the premise that there are only 2,000 targets worth hitting in the Soviet Union and that two weapons for each is enough.

Kaufman’s lower budget would also include conventional arms reductions in addition to cuts in expensive weapons programs. He would cancel the Navy’s Trident II submarine, the C-17 combat cargo plane, the single-warhead Midgetman missile and plans to put 10-warhead MX missiles on railroad flatcars to make them mobile.

Gross budget figures do not help defense industries or defense workers much when they are trying to figure out how peace in Europe will affect them personally. That requires detailed information on what kinds of troops and what kinds of weapons systems will be cut, the kind of information the Pentagfon still has not produced. But gross figures can be useful in trying to analyze the overall effect on a region with as big a share of the defense contracting budget as Southern California.