Cheney Labels as ‘Hogwash’ Complaints About His Defense Budget Cuts Strategy

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney angrily dismissed as “hogwash” Friday congressional criticism that he is radically cutting the defense budget without a strategy.

He said the complaints come from politicians who have “never supported a strong national defense” and who are looking to lard the pork barrel with billions of dollars in savings from the military budget.

Until Friday, Cheney had been silent before a rising chorus of criticism that he has been too slow to respond to a dramatically eased Soviet military threat and that he was making critical spending choices without a coherent plan to support them.

His remarks raised the volume of what is certain to be a rancorous debate over how fast and how deep to cut the Pentagon budget in a period of easing superpower tensions. Cheney said he would not be swayed from pursuing defense cuts “cautiously and prudently.”

In a speech in Washington before a Princeton University student group, Cheney excoriated “irresponsible” critics who suggest “there is some kind of big peace dividend here to be cashed in and to buy all the goodies everybody on Capitol Hill can think about buying.”

Cheney, in six terms as a Republican congressman from Wyoming, earned a reputation for shrewd back-room politics, a blunt tongue and unwavering conservatism on national security matters.

“There are those on Capitol Hill who’ve argued in recent days that there’s no strategy, we don’t have strategy for how we should proceed or how we should allocate resources or what kind of defense posture we should have,” Cheney said. “Hogwash. It’s simply not true.”

On Friday afternoon, Cheney submitted to the White House the outlines of his Pentagon budget recommendations for the 1991 fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, 1990.

Under an agreement reached last week, total spending for the year will be $292.2 billion, a 2% decline from the current fiscal year. Spending for individual programs has not been disclosed, because President Bush has not yet agreed to support specific budget numbers.

But Cheney said he would recommend an increase in the most politically explosive program within the defense budget--the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or “Star Wars.” Pentagon sources said SDI program officials had submitted a request for $4.6 billion in Defense Department spending for the program, a $1-billion increase over current funding.

Lawmakers have sharply cut Administration requests for “Star Wars” funding in each of the past six years, and congressional leaders indicated this week that Congress would not approve any increase in “Star Wars” spending.

But Cheney said after his speech, “I’m a big advocate of SDI . . . I think it’s probably more important in the future than it’s been in the past. Unfortunately, Congress has not supported it as aggressively as we would like.”

Cheney denied a published report that the Air Force would ground its fleet of flying command posts, called the “Looking Glass” aircraft, next year as part of budget-cutting efforts.

Although the Air Force had proposed to discontinue round-the-clock flights of the aircraft in a preliminary budget recommendation, “I don’t believe we’ll go forward with it,” Cheney said, noting that the Air Force would use the planes “as we have in the past.”

The flying command post carries a general of the Strategic Air Command and supporting staff to issue battle orders in case of a nuclear war that kills or disables the President and other command authorities.

Officials familiar with details of the budget request said Cheney had cut deeply into manpower and weapons procurement accounts. Research and development funds fared relatively well because of Cheney’s strong belief in investing for the future, officials said.

In his speech, Cheney insisted that cuts will not be made “willy-nilly” to suit the whims “of a few members of Congress who have always had projects they wanted to fund. They’ve never supported a strong national defense, and now they are prepared to find ways to cut money out of the defense budget and go spend it on domestic programs.”

Cheney was responding in particular to comments over the past 10 days from Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), chairmen of the Senate and House Armed Services committees.

In a speech a week ago, Aspin charged that Cheney was proposing large Pentagon spending cuts with lasting significance without a military strategy reflecting a changed world. As a result, Aspin said, Congress will demand even greater cuts and reorder Cheney’s budget to fund local projects of no military value.

“Without a sound basis for the reductions, the budget is in free-fall,” the Wisconsin lawmaker said.

Nunn accused Cheney of presenting budget plans that are “misleading and out-of-synch” because they don’t reflect current intelligence about the revolutionary changes sweeping Eastern Europe.

“These cuts are not based on a current threat assessment, they’re not based on up-to-date intelligence. The budget is misleading,” Nunn said at a hearing of his committee on Monday.

Nunn has never been accused of being soft on defense and Aspin almost lost his chairmanship for supporting former President Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup.