Senate Keeps 2 Battleships Afloat : Military: Lawmakers seize on the Iraqi invasion to save the vessels from mothballs. Two others are to be decommissioned as part of the defense bill.

One day after using Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait to help save the high-tech B-2 bomber, senators invoked the crisis again Friday to stave off the mothballing of two World War II-vintage battleships.

During rancorous debate over whether to fund the ships in a $289-billion defense bill, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a former Navy fighter pilot, said it would be “incredible” if Congress moved “to dismantle the very equipment that will help us counter activities of a madman who threatens the economic structure of the world.”

Battleships, McCain declared admiringly, have “16-inch guns that hurl projectiles the size of Cadillacs 17 miles.”

In a spirited rejoinder, Sen. Dale Bumpers (D-Ark.) said the shells of “the old rust buckets” actually were only “the size of Toyotas” and had missed their targets by half a mile in a bombardment of Lebanon.

In any case, Bumpers added, the Navy has silenced the ships’ guns because it is “afraid they’ll blow up” since the battleship Iowa explosion that killed 47 sailors last year.

“If you want to steam into the Persian Gulf” to initiate military action against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Bumpers shouted, “for God’s sake do it with something that works.”

As requested by President Bush, the Senate bill calls for mothballing two of four battleships now in operation, saving $1.1 billion over five years. The two to be decommissioned are the Iowa and the New Jersey, leaving the Missouri and Wisconsin in service.

Bumpers originally sought to sideline the other two also, but, to pick up votes for an amendment he offered, he reduced that to only one. He still lost, 55 to 44.

Several senators besides McCain argued that battleships--which aided Pacific island campaigns in World War II and figured in Cold War maneuvers--could play a valuable new role in responding to Third World flare-ups such as Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

But some senators appeared to have political pork in mind as they opposed the Bumpers amendment. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-Tex.) said a new port for the Wisconsin in Corpus Christi was “95% completed” at a cost of $160 million.

“It is on the Gulf of Mexico, not far from a number of Third World countries in Central and South America,” he noted.

In pressing to finish the defense bill before going on its August recess, the Senate scuttled an attempt to allow military personnel stationed overseas to obtain abortions at military hospitals.

Sen. Timothy E. Wirth (D-Colo.) withdrew the amendment after failing, on a 58-41 roll call, to garner the 60 votes required to block a filibuster by anti-abortion senators.

Wirth sought to overturn a 1988 Pentagon directive that prohibits abortions in overseas military hospitals even if the patient pays the bill.

Wirth said the policy is “discriminatory and grossly unfair” because it forces women to seek abortions at off-base facilities that are often inconvenient and unsafe.

Sen. Gordon J. Humphrey (R-N.H.), asserting it is “wrong for government to be involved in abortion,” warned that Bush would veto the defense bill if it contained the amendment.

The Senate also voted 59 to 40 to kill a proposal to pull 80,000 troops out of Europe in coming months, instead of the 50,000 already called for in the bill.

Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) argued that the larger pullout was compelled by severe fiscal problems and by the dramatically reduced threat of an invasion of Western Europe. He said his amendment would save more than $1 billion annually.

“The West Germans are paying to keep Soviet troops in East Germany at the very time we are paying to keep our troops in West Germany to protect against Soviet troops in East Germany,” Conrad said. “That makes no sense.”

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), although acknowledging that troop levels in Europe should be dropped from the current 311,000 to as little as 75,000 within five years, argued that most of the immediate cuts should result from talks with the Soviets on mutual reductions.

One important reason, he said, is that any agreement will provide means of verifying that the pullouts actually take place.

The Senate refused by a 67-32 vote to raise to 4.1% a 3.5% military pay increase in the bill. Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) said the change was needed to keep up with inflation. Over the last seven years, he said, inflation has outpaced military pay by 12.6%.

The amendment was rejected after Nunn read a letter from Defense Secretary Dick Cheney warning that the extra pay increase probably would have to be financed by additional cuts in personnel.

The Senate also rejected, 51 to 48, a move co-sponsored by California Republican Sen. Pete Wilson to use $100 million in unspent Defense Department funds for treating drug-addicted women and their children, known as “crack babies.”