Armed Services Battle to Deflect Budgetary Ax

What’s the difference between the Marines and the Army? The Marines secure a building by smashing in the door, bursting in and shooting everybody inside. The Army does it by securing a three-year lease on the building with an option to extend.

The joke, the Marines’ way of poking fun at the Army’s bureaucratic approach, was one of the early salvos in a new form of combat between the military services--the struggle to deflect the budgetary ax that is about to fall on the Pentagon.

Throughout much of the 1980s, as the defense budget was growing, camaraderie among the services flourished.

But now that Defense Secretary Dick Cheney is cutting the budget and Congress is preparing to slash still deeper, the Pentagon is a seething caldron of conflict. As the apparent threat from the Soviet Union wanes, the military services are scrambling to redefine their missions--and cutting each other up in the process.

The Navy and Air Force are at each other’s throats. The Marine Corps is mounting a flank attack against the Army. The Army, traditionally above the fray, is fighting back.

In October, an article in the U.S. Naval Institute’s monthly magazine complained that the Air Force, in pushing its top-priority B-2 Stealth bomber as a conventional bomber for use in Third World hot spots, was unfairly moving in on traditional Navy missions.

Two months later, Maj. Roderick W. Coward Jr. of the Marine Corps Reserves urged the Navy to make up with the Air Force and train its fire on bigger targets.

“The Navy and the Air Force should be teamed together versus the Army,” he wrote. “We must ask how we as a nation in a time of increasing federal debt can justify the existence of a large standing Army.”

In Cheney’s inner sanctum of decision-making, officials said the gloves have just begun to come off. “The long-knives environment . . . is starting,” said a senior defense official who asked not to be identified.

He said that “for each of the services, hope still springs eternal that maybe they’re going to be the one that benefits” in the debate about which service has the weapons, tactics and training that best support American military objectives.

The debate will dominate a series of high-level meetings Cheney has initiated to discuss broad strategy questions, defense officials said. Attended by Cheney’s senior policy advisers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the chiefs and secretaries of each of the services, the meetings are designed to produce a strategic underpinning for the force reductions that lie ahead.

“You always have an outbreak of interservice rivalry when peace breaks out,” said Lawrence Korb, a senior Pentagon official in the Ronald Reagan Administration. “In the wake of World War II, it was so vicious that (Defense Secretary James V.) Forrestal had to bring the services down to Palm Springs (Calif.) to impose a truce” in 1948.

One year later, the services’ scramble to salvage a greater share of the nation’s defense dollars shattered Forrestal’s truce and led to one of the most celebrated cases of interservice rivalry, known as the “Admirals’ Revolt.”

Navy Secretary John L. Sullivan resigned in protest after Louis A. Johnson, the new defense secretary, canceled construction of the Navy’s supercarrier United States and approved production of the Air Force’s B-36 intercontinental bomber.

Senior Navy officers alleged financial improprieties in Johnson’s decision and echoed Sullivan’s charge that Johnson had “drastically and arbitrarily restrict(ed) the plans of an armed service without consultation with that service.”

Defense analysts believe that something like the Admirals’ Revolt is almost certain to break out today.

Senior Navy officers, struggling to protect their fleet of aircraft carriers from further cuts, have already begun to take aim at the Air Force’s claims that the B-2 bomber will provide the United States with a unique capability to mount non-nuclear strikes on distant targets from bases on U.S. soil.

“If the Navy plays it right, it could be the Admirals’ Revolt in reverse,” said Norman Friedman, who wrote the article in “Proceedings,” the U.S. Naval Institute’s monthly, that brought the Navy’s complaints about the Air Force’s B-2 to the surface.

“The Air Force has caught on that it might be out of missions,” Friedman said. “During Caspar Weinberger’s tenure, they ran a lot of black (classified) programs and were able to keep their bills secret. As a result, they were able to get away with a lot of things.” Weinberger was Reagan’s first defense secretary.

The Navy’s case against the B-2 bomber has been made easier by the program’s extraordinary $68-billion price tag. That has given naval officers an opening to tell lawmakers and reporters that aircraft carriers have always provided Third World striking power without the expense of overseas bases. At the same time, unlike bombers, they can offer a deterrent “presence” in peacetime as well, Navy officials say.

It is an argument that the Air Force has not taken lying down.

“The Air Force has attributes, looking at a multipolar world, that the Navy doesn’t,” one Air Force analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said in a recent interview. “The Air Force can operate less expensively than the Navy, can get anywhere faster than anyone. Its weapons have tremendous capability to get somewhere quickly and apply precise force with minimum collateral damage.”

The F-117 Stealth fighter is one of the weapons the Air Force would like to protect. In a move that many critics regarded as a competitive ploy, the Air Force eagerly offered a large number of F-117s for use in the Panama invasion.

Cheney rejected the Air Force’s proposal for a larger force but approved sending two of the aircraft to drop two precision-guided bombs, as a diversionary tactic, in a field outside a training headquarters of Manuel A. Noriega loyalists.

The F-117 was originally designed to joust with sophisticated Soviet air defenses. But Air Force officials said that the planes were used in Panama because they had the unique ability to deliver firepower to a military target with pinpoint accuracy from bases in the United States, where the host country’s approval for takeoff is not required.

Many Navy officials are disturbed by the precedent, which breaks aircraft carriers’ virtual monopoly on that role. Until the F-117’s combat debut, presidents and war planners had turned almost exclusively to carriers when they wanted to order surgical strikes from independent bases.

Before the Panama invasion, the Air Force had focused its competitive zeal on its Stealth bomber. After touting the B-2 as being designed for the sensitive task of destroying Soviet mobile missiles with nuclear warheads, Air Force officials last year played up the plane’s potential for conducting conventional war on Third World bad boys such as Libya.

“The Air Force has these two huge programs--the C-17 transport plane and the B-2 bomber--and they realize that at least one if not both are threatened,” said one senior Navy official. “So they figure they’ll go out and try to sink a few carriers to help pay for them.”

Air Force Gen. Robert T. Herres, the retiring vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, raised the stakes of the competition between Air Force bombers and Navy carriers. Speaking to arms control experts in Washington recently, Herres declared that the United States would jeopardize its status as a superpower if it scuttled plans to modernize the manned penetrating bomber force by building the B-2 bomber.

The Navy and the Air Force, preoccupied with taking shots at each other, have largely ignored Coward’s advice to train their fire on the Army instead. But the Marine Corps, a piece of the Navy, has begun trying to take slices out of what the Army regards as its historical mission.

Under the direction of Gen. Alfred M. Gray Jr., its commandant, the Marine Corps in recent years has shifted from its narrow focus on amphibious landings to develop a broader role as an “expeditionary force.” The joke about how the Army secures a building suggests the image the Marines are trying to present.

In response, Army officials, long reluctant to plead their case at the expense of the other services, have begun to fight for their own survival. Alarmed by the Marines’ criticism, Army planners are speaking up in meetings of top Defense Department civilian officials to boast that flexible Army units are trained for a range of combat situations from light to heavy.

In private, Army officials have been quick to point out that the Marines can neither mount large invasions nor sustain operations for long periods. And now the Army has the Panama invasion, described by Army officers as “the largest Army operation since the Vietnam War,” to prove its point.

“You can expect us to do a lot of infighting, which we are doing, you bet,” said one senior Army planner. Several Army officers added that the successes of Panama would strengthen their hand in arguing that the Army’s new emphasis on “fighting light” has made it a force for the future.

Ultimately, many analysts believe that the new outbreak of interservice rivalry may simmer rather than explode. At this early stage, it appears the budget ax will fall most heavily on the most pliant service--the Army--and barely nick the fiercely self-protective Navy and its expeditionary arm, the Marine Corps.