Defense Budget Spares Key Weapons Systems : Pentagon: Bush takes the first steps toward scaling back the military. But lawmakers promise to pursue even deeper cuts.

In a defense spending blueprint that takes the first tentative steps toward a restructured military, President Bush on Monday proposed to cut troop levels, cancel numerous but relatively inexpensive weapons programs and close 55 mostly small military facilities, including 10 in California.

Although the Administration portrayed its $295-billion military budget as a painful transition to a new era of constrained defense spending, it spared virtually all of the military services’ major weapons programs from the ax. Key members of Congress promised deeper cuts before the 1991 budget becomes law.

The Administration proposed to go forward with two land-based nuclear missile programs, the B-2 Stealth bomber, the Trident ballistic missile submarine, the “Star Wars” space defense plan and numerous other costly long-term arms programs.

A new list of proposed base closings targeted Ft. Ord near Monterey, the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, Los Angeles Air Force Base (a small facility in El Segundo), El Centro Naval Air Facility as well as three Navy facilities in the San Francisco Bay area. California officials called the closures unwise and politically motivated and vowed to fight them.

Another 45 military facilities in the United States and overseas--most of them small posts and depots--are slated for closure, and eight others will be scaled back, defense officials said.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said that the defense budget responds to the diminishing military threat from the Soviet Union and reflects the intense competition with domestic programs for a share of the Administration’s $1.23-trillion budget.

He said that changes in Eastern Europe allow the first steps toward a much smaller military force than currently maintained. But he qualified that assessment with a warning that the nation should not contemplate a radical revision in basic military strategy.

“There are opportunities out there now that will allow us to make some changes in our deployments, to reduce defense spending over the long haul,” Cheney said. “But it has to be done carefully, it has to be done cautiously, it has to be done deliberately.”

Falls 2.6% Short

The $295-billion budget, while somewhat greater than the $291.4 billion budgeted for the current year, falls 2.6% short of the amount the Pentagon would need to keep up with inflation. The share of federal spending devoted to defense, which peaked at about 27% in 1986, would slip back to 23.7% in 1991.

Cheney’s cautious spending plan disappointed critics in Congress and elsewhere, who had hoped for much deeper military spending cuts from the epochal changes in the Soviet Union and the seeming dissolution of the Warsaw Pact.

“It’s a delaying action,” said Gordon Adams, director of the Defense Budget Project, an independent research organization in Washington. “It accomplishes cuts through some gimmicky, some legerdemain. . . . But there’s no apparent link between a strategic rethinking and the changes in the 1991 budget.”

Congress Lies in Wait

Anti-defense spending clamor is growing also on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers are readying their axes to cut well below the Administration’s proposed spending targets and reap a much larger “peace dividend” from the apparent end of the Cold War.

Cheney responded in a briefing for congressional leaders that “peace is the dividend.” One lawmaker present at the briefing said that Cheney’s remark was met by “snickering.”

Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), the influential chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that he was not convinced that Cheney’s plan adequately responded to the “dramatic and unprecedented changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.”

Nunn said that his committee would closely scrutinize the Administration’s proposal to determine whether Cheney has provided justification for the continued costly deployment of 500,000 U.S. troops overseas.

The 1991 Pentagon budget includes proposals to dissolve two Army divisions and to retire two battleships, two nuclear cruisers, eight nuclear submarines and 11 frigates. It also calls for deactivating 14 B-52 bombers and canceling guidance-system improvements to the Minuteman 2 nuclear missile, which may be scrapped as a result of negotiations with the Soviet Union anyway.

But Cheney wants to continue to spend huge sums on major strategic weapons programs: $5.5 billion for the B-2 bomber, $4.5 billion for “Star Wars,” $3.2 billion for the Trident ballistic-missile submarine and $2.8 billion for basing to put the first of 50 MX missiles on rail cars.

Pentagon officials said that uniformed manpower would shrink by 38,000 men and women in 1991, to a total of 2,039,000. Slated to be disbanded are two Army divisions, the 9th Infantry Division, based at Ft. Lewis, and the 2nd Armored Division at Ft. Hood, Tex.

With the 1991 budget, Cheney also presented a plan for 2% cuts in defense spending for each of the next four years, after adjustment for inflation. That would bring the cumulative reduction in Pentagon spending from 1986 to 1995 to 22.4%.

The cumulative defense budget for the four years from 1991 to 1994 is fully $167 billion smaller than the amount of spending that Bush projected in his military spending plan of last April. That plan envisioned growth of 1% or 2% a year throughout the period, after adjustment for inflation.

Cheney said he expects that the savings can be achieved by successful completion of negotiations with Moscow on reducing conventional and strategic forces, by a new round of mutual arms cuts in Europe, by downsizing U.S. bases at home and overseas and by $39 billion in cost savings from Pentagon management reforms.

The management reforms will mean reductions in force at dozens of military facilities. Edwards Air Force is slated to lose 417 slots and Norton Air Force Base, 75. Defense officials said they hope to achieve the reductions through attrition, not layoffs.

Deep Cuts Predicted

Lawmakers predicted that the plan that emerges from Congress next fall will bear little relation to the Administration’s request. Congress will cut $3 billion to $10 billion from the Administration’s request, congressional officials predicted.

Cheney’s blueprint calls for the closure of 43 U.S. military installations, many of them small storage or headquarters facilities, and 12 U.S. bases overseas, including RAF Greenham Common in Great Britain and Comiso Air Base in Italy, both of which house now-outlawed intermediate-range nuclear missiles.

Another four U.S. bases, including Ft. Knox, Ky., and Ft. Lewis, Wash., were slated for major force reductions. Four additional bases nationwide will lose military and civilian slots to major realignments.

In other major proposals, Cheney is seeking the following:

--Manpower. The armed forces’ personnel rolls would shrink to the level of 1980, just before the Ronald Reagan Administration defense buildup began. At the same time, military personnel would get a 3.5% pay raise in 1991, in line with Cheney’s desire to retain quality troops and maintain morale.

--Drugs. Military counter-narcotics efforts would get a boost of almost $300 million to reach $1.2 billion, as the Pentagon launches new drug-fighting initiatives that would make greater use of Navy ships, Air Force aircraft and the National Guard.

--”Star Wars”. Cheney, who recently said the United States must “continue towards a deployable strategic defense system,” proposes a $900-million increase in funding to a total of $4.5 billion for the controversial anti-missile plan. Research would continue on a range of space- and ground-based lasers while the Pentagon accelerated work on “Brilliant Pebbles”--a swarm of small rockets in space to destroy incoming missiles.

--Navy ships. The Navy proposed to retire two nuclear cruisers--the Truxtun, based in San Diego, and the Bainbridge, based in Norfolk, Va.--as well as the battleships New Jersey, based at the Long Beach Naval Station, and Iowa, at Norfolk, eight nuclear-powered attack submarines and 11 aging destroyers.