Debate in Congress Takes a New Tone on Defense Budget : Politics: The Iraqi invasion has blunted momentum in Washington toward making deep cuts in the military.

Iraq’s surprise invasion of Kuwait last Thursday morning has thrown debate over the U.S. defense budget into a cocked hat.

In a single stroke, Saddam Hussein’s foray of tanks and troops has blunted the momentum in Congress toward making deep cuts in the American military establishment and has redrawn the debate about the shape and size of the nation’s future military forces.

It also has raised new questions about how large America’s expected “peace dividend” from the end of the Cold War will be--if it exists at all.

Although the waning of the Soviet Bloc’s military power had spurred hopes for deep troop cuts, defense experts argue that the Iraqi invasion has given the United States a stark reminder that in its desire to reshape the U.S. military to reflect the recent changes in Europe, Washington must not cut the forces needed to project American power through the rest of a troubled world.

On Capitol Hill, the events of recent days also have changed the dynamics of defense budget politics, placing Congress’ budget-cutters on the defensive politically. In the four days since Iraq’s troops marched into Kuwait City, Saddam Hussein’s actions have saved the B-2 on the Senate floor and rescued a pair of Navy battleships from going into mothballs.

How long this mood will last still is unclear. Some longtime proponents of sharper defense cuts are dismayed over what they charge is short-term political expediency. “The problem is that these knee-jerk reactors (on Capitol Hill) are terrified of a 30-second ad saying they’re soft on defense as Saddam Hussein roars across the desert,” says Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).

And while the military services and the Bush Administration are expected to use the events of recent days to help them hold the line against deep defense cuts, many Capitol Hill budget-cutters remain unrepentant.

Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.) contends that the Bush Administration’s latest defense proposals are “a Cold War-response in an era where the Cold War has receded,” and would do little to shift funds to the kinds of threats the United States is facing in the Middle East.

Schroeder predicts that with the House still more than a month away from considering a bill that would cut $24 billion from the Pentagon’s proposed $307-billion budget for next year, “cooler heads” will prevail and lawmakers will vote for deeper cuts when the time comes.

Some private analysts support Schroeder’s assessment. William W. Kaufmann, an adviser to defense secretaries in the 1960s and 1970s, says that the issue is not so much the money as the allocation of it.

“They have put a very wasteful amount of money in strategic forces, where that’s the least of our problems, Kaufmann says. “We’ve been wasting money and we continue to waste it.”

The events in the Middle East, Kaufmann adds, are “totally irrelevant to the B-2 and to the number of Navy ships.”

Several defense experts interviewed Sunday said that Defense Secretary Dick Cheney’s emphasis on modernizing the nation’s long-range nuclear arsenal is especially misguided. They argue that well-armed aggressors such as Iraq will not be discouraged by America’s nuclear muscle.

Instead of buying “big-ticket items that photograph well . . . but don’t do much for the capability of this country,” Leahy said, the defense budget should be making major investments in equipping conventional forces to deploy on a moment’s notice.

Such an approach, other experts agree, would take funds from such high-profile weapons as nuclear missiles and aircraft carriers and transfer them to less-glamorous programs such as the C-17 transport plane and fast sealift ships.

“We have spent more than $1 trillion in the defense buildup over the past decade, and we find that it’s of relatively little utility to us in protecting our vital interests in the Middle East,” said Senate Budget Chairman James Sasser (D-Tenn.), a key architect of proposed congressional defense cuts.

The turmoil in the Middle East “does not preclude a reduction in defense spending,” Sasser added. “But I think that we may be talking about downsizing military expenditures with a reallocation of resources from Europe and NATO to a more flexible response force.”

Creating such a force is the heart of the long-range plans that have been drafted by the Army and the Air Force, the two services that have been most deeply affected by the sudden collapse of the Soviet Bloc’s threat to Europe.

In an effort to tailor themselves to threats of the future, the services have drawn up plans to pare their manpower rolls and to concentrate remaining forces on the kinds of units that can project considerable firepower to distant shores on a moment’s notice.

For the Air Force, that has brought a new emphasis on long-range bombers--including the controversial B-2 stealth aircraft--that are capable of conducting the kinds of punitive air strikes that the Pentagon’s war-planners have offered as an option in Iraq.

The Army, meanwhile, has proposed to restructure its forces by cutting as many as six of its 30 active and reserve divisions, recasting the remaining forces as fast-reaction troops based largely inside the United States.

But both services have asserted that their plans to streamline their organizations require that Congress permit them to trim forces back gradually. Only in that way can they retain their best forces and maintain their readiness, they say.

“We need to have a build-down, not a tear-down” such as that proposed by many lawmakers, one Army planner argues.

Even before last week’s events, lawmakers’ eagerness to cash in on a perceived “peace dividend” had placed some of them on a collision course with the Pentagon’s more cautious approach.

In their respective drafts of the 1991 defense bill, the House and Senate Armed Services committees have sketched strikingly similar visions of where the United States is headed in its military policy--though they proposed to reach that goal at somewhat different speeds.

But both those proposals differed sharply from the Administration’s approach.

Last week, House Armed Services Chairman Les Aspin (D-Wis.) charged that the Pentagon is still conjuring up Cold War-era responses in which U.S. planning was based on the threat of a massive Soviet attack.

By contrast, Aspin asserted that his own panel is beginning to craft “a new response to the new world”--in which drugs, terrorism and Third World contingencies will provide the major challenges for military strategists in the next decade.

Accordingly, the Wisconsin lawmaker’s committee is slashing expensive programs--such as the B-2 bomber and “Star Wars”--which are designed to meet the Soviet threat, while at the same time trying to maintain military readiness and research for future weapons.

Senate Armed Services Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) is steering a middle course--accepting some of the Pentagon’s premises while slowly scaling back, but not killing, major weapons programs.

Nunn has defended his bill as a measured approach to long-term reductions--one that contains numerous hedges against possible reverses in the current favorable trends in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

It also--Nunn asserted pointedly last week--reflects the fact that the world is still a dangerous place with leaders such as Saddam Hussein in it.

In an interview late last week, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was more blunt in his assessment of the work of his colleagues in the lower chamber:

“The House is far, far more--well--crazy,” he said. “Their vision (of the future) is that not only is the Cold War over, but that we may have seen the disappearance of war altogether. I don’t subscribe to that--I don’t think the United States can abdicate its role in the world.”

This week, McCain and others who believe that the House has gone too far got some help from Hussein.

If the House cuts go into effect, Army leaders have told Congress, it would add weeks or months to the Army’s ability to respond to fast-moving events like that in Iraq. On average, the readiness of each of the Army’s divisions would likely drop by a rating--a substantial notch downward--if the manpower cuts the House proposed--68,500 in 1991--go into effect.

“That takes options out of the President’s hands,” the official said. “People are concerned today that we can’t get there fast enough. But if those cuts go through, we would be back to where we were when the Korean War started, sending less trained forces into battle.”

Times staff writer John M. Broder contributed to this report.

MAJOR WEAPONS PROGRAMS

Fiscal 1991 funding requested by Bush Administration and approved by House Armed Services Committee and Senate Armed Services Committee

Millions of dollars

Administration House Senate B-2 Bomber $5,500 $0 $4,500 Rail-Garrison MX 2,200 0* 548 Small ICBM 202 0* 202 SDI (“Star Wars”) 4,500 2,900 3,700 C-17 Transport Plane 1,900 554 300 SSN-21 Submarine 3,500 2,100 150 V-22 Osprey Aircraft 0 403 238

* The House Armed Services Committee denied the Administration funds to proceed with the rail-garrison MX basing scheme or the small mobile ICBM, but left open the possibility of building one of the two missiles or beginning development of a new-generation missile by authorizing $610 million for further study.

PERSONNEL CUTBACKS

Fiscal 1991 military force reductions proposed by Bush Administration, House Armed Services Committee and Senate Armed Services Committee

Administration House Senate Army 16,669 68,500 40,000 Air Force 15,000 36,500 35,000 Navy 5,701 20,000 22,000 Marines 235 4,500 3,000 Total 37,605 129,500 100,000