Right Way and Wrong Way to Cut Defense : Pressures mount to pare Pentagon budget even more

There are worse things that can be done to defense budgets than load them up with yet more money to fund dubious programs like the Strategic Defense Initiative and the B-2 bomber, as Congress has just chosen to do with the current budget. That may be foolish and wasteful, but it does not imperil the nation’s security. Far worse would be to make spending cuts that would inevitably weaken the military’s ability to respond quickly to the kind of challenges that coming years are most likely to bring. More than foolish, such an approach to budget-cutting would well endanger national security.

POLITICS FEARED: Does that mean it won’t be done? Not at all. The rumblings coming from Congress are unmistakable: Money is short, domestic needs cry out and there’s a lot more to be wrung out of defense spending in the next few years than the Pentagon admits. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and his aides fear that some on Capitol Hill may even be thinking about whacking an extra $50 billion out of the budget in the next five or six years, beyond the 12% reduction Cheney has proposed. What invariably takes the biggest hits when Congress swings a meat-ax at the defense budget? Certainly not politically appealing items like redundant military bases or job-creating projects like plants that continue to produce weapons and equipment the military no longer wants. The traditional targets for sweeping funding cuts are such things as training, maintenance, conventional munitions and spare parts. These are not among the more glamorous components of the defense budget, but it is absolutely necessary that they be adequately funded if the armed forces are to be ready to react to emergencies.

The Pentagon, fearing the worst, is preemptively working on its own proposed list of further cuts. To no one’s surprise--this is how the game is played in Washington--the Pentagon is putting its cost-cutting emphasis on base closings and sweeping personnel cuts, including in National Guard and reserve units, beyond the 25% reduction in personnel that is already scheduled by 1996. In other words, precisely on those things that vote-conscious members of Congress most highly value.

DEFINITION NEEDED: Before things get out of hand, the Pentagon and Congress’ leaders and top defense experts ought to sit down together to devise a credible approach to possible future defense cuts. The first imperative is to define what security threats this country will most likely face in the years ahead, on the Korean peninsula, in the Persian Gulf, wherever. For it is these threats that should most properly determine the missions of the armed forces, what their size should be and how they are equipped. Simply put, it is the nature of the threats that are most likely to be encountered that should dictate what the armed forces are and at what level they should be funded.

As always, there must be realistic restraints on what will be spent. As always, the budget, in the end a political document, will reflect trade-offs and compromises. What the budget should not reflect is the kind of willful disregard of world political and security realities that characterized American military spending in the 1920 and ‘30s and that left us so initially unprepared for the war challenges of the early 1940s. Congress and the Pentagon both should remember the lessons of our history as they ponder future defense budgets.