Army Proposes 25% Reduction in Troop Level

The Army would cut one in four uniformed troops by 1997 and kill or reduce 34 of its procurement programs under a plan approved last week, according to a Pentagon official.

In the first of the Army’s long-term reduction decisions, Army Secretary Michael P. W. Stone and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Carl E. Vuono on Wednesday approved the recommendation for Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. The plan would cut the active-duty Army from its present level of 764,000 to 580,000 and Reserve and National Guard forces from 776,000 to 645,000, the official said. He added that the procurement programs included major weapons systems, but he declined to be specific.

The Times reported last month that all of the military services, as part of a personnel proposal being drafted to reduce their rolls by 38,000 men and women in 1991 and by almost 300,000 over the next five years, sought congressional permission to force officers out of the ranks if they will not go willingly.

The Army’s troop and procurement decisions are the largest part of the recommendations Cheney has ordered the service to provide by April 30 for the 1992-97 Defense Department spending plan that will be submitted to Congress later this year or next year.

By cutting troop numbers, Army leaders hope to preserve funding for training and other operational accounts that have helped attract better recruits to the all-volunteer Army and to keep soldiers at a relatively high state of readiness for combat.

“What Army there will be has to be able to fight,” said one official, echoing Vuono’s official credo that “the growing complexity of the international environment will demand that the Army of the future be versatile, deployable and lethal.”

The decision would preserve funding for major weapons programs, such as a replacement for the Abrams main battle tank, which Cheney has said will be canceled after the last of the nearly 8,000 tanks are delivered to the Army in 1993. Both Vuono and Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have taken the position that the Army of the future will need heavily armored tanks with big armor-piercing guns even if the Soviet tank threat in Europe recedes.

Wednesday’s decision is not the last word for the 1992-97 spending plan that Cheney will review this summer. Cheney has left to the services the job of shaping their future and has been unwilling to tell them how many forces they can expect to have in Europe over the next five years or how to adjust their assumptions about “warning time” in Europe against the backdrop of dramatic changes in Eastern Europe that have diminished the traditional threat of Soviet attack.

Congress also may demand deeper cuts than the Army has presented under fiscal “targets” set by Cheney that reduce the overall defense budget by about 2% a year after accounting for inflation.

Democratic congressional leaders, along with some influential Republicans, have asserted that a 2% decline is merely a continuation of the trend that existed before the collapse of the Warsaw Pact threat in Eastern Europe. Many of the leaders are pushing for a reduction of 3% to 5% a year to achieve a “peace dividend” that could be applied to domestic programs and deficit reduction.

Some lawmakers have called for cutbacks or even outright cancellation of high-cost weapons programs, such as the $530-million B-2 Stealth bomber. But savings can’t be gleaned as quickly from long-term weapons programs as they can from personnel accounts because weaponry costs are stretched over a period of many years.

So that leaves the manpower-intensive Army, with the largest segment of the nation’s 2.1 million-member military force, as the biggest target for possible budget savings.

“It’s painful,” said one senior Pentagon planner who is knowledgeable about the Army’s proposal. “It took some gut-wrenching decisions. But at least we have a plan.”

Another source, who also spoke privately, said the proposal was forced upon the service by “fiscal reality,” even as he expressed concerns about pressures to go beyond the 580,000 level.

“That would bring us pretty close to a dysfunctional Army,” he said, given the national security requirement for a “trained and ready” force.

The senior official did not say how much savings were being projected from the manpower cut. It is difficult to project near-term savings from force reductions because of the possibility that severance pay may be allocated to more senior servicemen and women.

Army officials said that the fiscal constraints that forced the decision to cut one-quarter of its troops were not unexpected. They also provided no details on how the cuts would fall among the ranks of enlisted personnel, noncommissioned officers and officers.

But the Army officials said there was disenchantment over the lack of policy guidance from Cheney’s office to help define the roles and mission for tomorrow’s Army.

Cheney, in “fiscal guidance” documents obtained by the Washington Post, told the Army that its current budget of about $74 billion a year would shrink to $73 billion in 1993 and then flatten out at about $76 billion until 1997.

By comparison, the last five-year defense plan prepared during the last year of the Ronald Reagan Administration called for an Army budget of $94 billion in 1994.

Thus, the Army has not only been forced to cut billions of dollars in “wish-list” spending it had relegated to future budgets in the Reagan era, but it must now adjust to the modestly declining budgets Cheney has forecast.

“In the absence of other orders, we’re going to do it ourselves,” one Army official said.