House Supports Arms Cut, Shifts $1 Billion to Gulf

The Democrat-controlled House approved deep slashes in President Bush’s defense budget Wednesday to reflect the diminished Soviet threat. But in a last-minute move it began to confront the new regional threats symbolized by the Persian Gulf crisis.

Just before passing a $283-billion military programs bill, the House shifted nearly $1 billion to address some of the problems revealed by Operation Desert Shield, the massive deployment of U.S. troops to the Middle East.

The amendment offered by Democratic leaders would bolster military sealift, airlift and mine-hunting capabilities, improve defenses against chemical and biological weapons and correct pay inequities for the more than 100,000 troops in the gulf region.

The costs would be offset mainly by an additional $600-million reduction in “Star Wars” anti-missile research and a $348-million cut in DDG-51 destroyer construction.

The bill, approved 256 to 155, primarily along party lines, would cut Bush’s overall spending request by $24 billion in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. Lawmakers brushed off a veto warning by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who protested provisions that would terminate the B-2 bomber program, cut planned “Star Wars” spending by nearly 50% and reduce U.S. troop strength by 130,000.

Budget summit talks between the White House and Congress are expected to produce a defense cut closer to the $18 billion approved by the Senate last month. A House-Senate conference is likely to soften the cuts in “Star Wars” and troop levels and might agree to extend the B-2 program.

Nevertheless, the overall reduction approved by Congress almost certainly will represent a sharp rebuff to Administration arguments that a continuing Soviet nuclear threat and new Third World dangers require much higher spending levels.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Les Aspin (D-Wis.) said the House’s first defense bill of the post-Cold War era “provides for a military still primarily sized and shaped to meet the Soviet threat.” Even so, he said, it “takes the first steps toward buying the right defense for a new era” in which growing cooperation with the Soviet Union is accompanied by emerging regional threats such as Iraq.

“Thanks in part to (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein and (Soviet President) Mikhail Gorbachev, we are beginning to recognize that security problems of the new era require new solutions,” Aspin said.

Republicans attacked the bill, saying it cut too deeply in many areas while spending too much on some job-rich “pork-barrel” programs. For example, the bill continues funding of the V-22 Osprey, a troop-carrying helicopter-airplane that Cheney wants to cancel.

Just before passage, House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said that, despite the threats posed by well-armed dictators like Hussein, “House Democrats are rushing back to the weakness” of the post-Vietnam War defense budgets of the 1970s.

But Republicans were unable to restore funds for the Strategic Defense Initiative, commonly known as “Star Wars.” In fact, the House voted to reduce Bush’s $4.7-billion SDI request to $2.4 billion, even lower than the $3 billion approved by the Armed Services Committee. Moreover, GOP and Democratic conservatives made no effort to restore money sought by Bush to build two B-2 bombers and to deploy the MX intercontinental missile on rail cars.

Immediately after Iraq’s Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait, the typical reaction among lawmakers was: “Oh, my gosh, we’ve got to put more in for defense,” Aspin said.

“The President was using Desert Shield to argue for more spending on the B-2 and SDI,” he said. “But as people began to look at it, what the crisis showed was that the cuts related to the Soviet Union were not undermined by Desert Shield but reinforced by it, because of the Soviets’ cooperation.”

Although the gulf crisis demonstrated a need to allocate funds to improve the nation’s fast sealift capability and address other problems encountered in the military buildup, Aspin said that “we don’t really know yet” the full nature of the new regional threat.

Besides slashing the “Star Wars” budget--and moving to block early deployment of the space-based “brilliant pebbles” anti-missile system--the House made only one other major change in the defense measure: adoption of the Desert Shield amendment offered by Aspin.

Among other things, the amendment would give all U.S. troops deployed in Saudi Arabia “imminent danger pay” of $110 per month. That would help married enlisted personnel whose family budgets have been reduced by $177 per month by the loss of a meal allowance.

The amendment also would require that the billions of dollars being contributed by other nations to help pay for the U.S. deployment be funneled through the congressional appropriations process. The Pentagon wants to control the funds itself, but some lawmakers have protested that relinquishing oversight would enable the Administration to divert funds to other programs that Congress has restrained, such as the B-2 bomber being built by Northrop Corp. in the Los Angeles area.

The amendment also urges the Pentagon to call up combat reserve and National Guard units in addition to the support units already summoned for Desert Shield to test the money-saving concept of mixing combat reserves with active-duty forces.

The Pentagon has resisted using combat reservists because the President now has authority to call up reserves for only 180 days, potentially insufficient time to train and deploy them efficiently. Lawmakers, however, said during the floor debate that they would move to give the President 360-day call-up authority.

All California Republicans voted against the defense bill. The only California Democrats voting against it were Reps. Edward R. Roybal of Los Angeles, Ronald V. Dellums of Berkeley and Don Edwards of San Jose. Reps. Barbara Boxer (D-Greenbrae) and Robert T. Matsui (D-Sacramento) were absent.