Pentagon Cuts Likely to Skip S.D. Bases

San Diego will not be dramatically affected by the Pentagon budget cuts scheduled to be announced Monday, a high-ranking local Navy official said Thursday.

“When the American people demand that you spend less on military, you are going to have to shut something down, and San Diego is too big to shut down,” said Rear Adm. John W. Adams, commander of San Diego Naval Base.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney will announce the Pentagon’s 1991 fiscal blueprint, which will include base closings, Monday, said Navy spokesman Lt. Greg Smith in Washington.

San Diego, however, will escape many of the cuts, Adams predicted.

“If there are base closures, it is my personal opinion that San Diego will not be among them and could possibly benefit, because, if you close home ports, ships will have to go somewhere, and San Diego is a pretty logical place for them to come,” Adams said after an address to the San Diego Press Club.

Other military experts agreed that the number of ships based in San Diego could increase under the new budget.

“There is a chance that San Diego and Norfolk could even see increases in manpower and numbers of ships, simply because, if we pull ships out of small, scattered ports, we may bring them to large, efficiently run harbors,” said Ron Fraser, a retired Navy commander and senior analyst with the Center for Defense Information in Washington. San Diego and Norfolk, Va., are two of the Navy’s major installations.

The Bush Administration is expected to shrink the Pentagon budget, after accounting for inflation, by at least 2% a year for the next five years. Since 1985, the Pentagon’s Pentagon budget has decreased by 2% a year, after accounting for inflation.

And traditionally, more than half the budget has been devoted to protecting Western Europe. But some lawmakers, pointing to dramatic changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, say the United States faces fewer threats and have called for larger cuts in defense spending. It is not yet known how those cuts will affect the Navy, Army and Air Force.

But Fraser and others expect that the Navy will not be hit nearly as hard as the Army and Air Force.

“I would expect Congress to be easy on the Navy because, during peacetime, the Navy has far greater utility than the Army and Air Force. You can steam ships around the seas with far greater freedom than you can fly airplanes or station troops,” Fraser said. “The Air Force and Army will get winnowed back a lot faster.”

The Navy now spends more than $9 billion annually in San Diego, from Defense Department contracts to payroll, local officials say. In fact, payroll--$4.4 billion yearly--makes up about half that amount.

In San Diego, which is host to about one-third of all Navy employees, there are about 175,000 Navy civilian and military personnel. Of those, 100,000 are sailors, 40,000 are Marines and the rest are civilians. This figure, Adams predicted, is not likely to change dramatically--even if more ships are based in San Diego.