House Panel Says Soviet Threat Is Dead : Defense: Pentagon spending plan doesn’t ‘jibe with reality,’ congressman says. He repeats a call for cuts in the military budget.

A key House Armed Services Committee panel, divided along party lines, concluded Sunday that the threat to the United States and NATO by Soviet conventional forces “is greatly diminished and cannot be revived.” The assessment prompted Chairman Les Aspin (D-Wis.) to reiterate calls for selective cuts in the U.S. defense budget.

The report said that President Bush’s $306.9-billion defense request for next year assumes that the Soviet threat could be restored. Such assumptions, Aspin said in a statement, “don’t jibe with reality anymore. Many of the changes are irreversible, and that means we can cut selectively without jeopardizing our security.”

But the conclusion was dismissed as far too optimistic by Rep. William L. Dickinson (R-Ala.), the committee’s ranking Republican.

“Endorsing this report is tantamount to believing that the Soviet Union is already militarily impotent and not a global power to be reckoned with.

“Such a view is more wishful thinking than a reflection of reality,” he said

Aspin did not estimate the size of the cuts that he believes could be made on the basis of the report. In the past, however, he has advocated a cut of 20% spread over five years.

The report itself, issued by the committee’s defense policy panel, did not explicitly call for budget cuts. But it did say that the debate over its conclusions “will determine what we do in the fiscal year 1991 defense budget.”

“The worst thing we can do is spend too little on defense,” the panel said. “The next worst thing we can do is spend too much.”

The conclusions were endorsed by all 17 Democratic members of the panel led by Aspin, who is chairman of both the committee and the panel. All 15 Republican members dissented.

Throughout its report, the panel appeared to lean heavily on many of the assessments of CIA Director William H. Webster, who has been much more optimistic about the irreversibility of the declining Soviet threat than Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.

The panel said that “the likelihood of a bolt-out-of-the-blue Soviet strategic attack has always been small,” since any Soviet nuclear attack on the United States would trigger a terrifying retaliation.

“The most likely scenario leading to nuclear war has always been escalation from a conflict in Europe,” the panel said, adding that, with the breakup of the Warsaw Pact, the possibility of this risk has declined.

The report said 50% to 60% of U.S. defense spending still goes to maintaining the ability to mobilize 10 divisions in 10 days against a Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe.

The panel also concluded that:

* The Soviet conventional threat elsewhere has also declined, “although not as precipitously as in Europe” and “large-scale Soviet military interventions outside of Soviet territory seem beyond the Red Army’s powers, no matter who rules in Moscow.”

* “While the Soviet Union continues to modernize its strategic forces, the risk of nuclear war has receded.”

* Soviet military spending is clearly on the decline. “The growing economic crisis in the Soviet Union raises serious doubt that Soviets can maintain its current pace of weapons modernization and adds significant uncertainty about what the Soviet threat will look like in the future.”