Aspin Calls for Cutbacks Beyond 25% for Military

A key congressional leader called Monday for cutting and reorganizing American military forces after the “disappearance” of the Soviet threat that has been the basis on which U.S. forces were molded for four decades.

Rep. Les Aspin, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said the Bush Administration should not stop at the 25% cutback ordered after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. With the demise of the Soviet Union, further reductions in the defense budget--which totaled $291 billion this fiscal year--are militarily in order and politically necessary, he said.

“Today is the opening gambit in trying to figure out where we go from here in national security,” he told the Atlantic Council, an organization of prominent citizens interested in U.S. foreign policy.

“The Persian Gulf crisis and war highlighted the most important threats of the new era--the spread of nuclear weapons, terrorism and regional powers,” he said. “This is the principal basis upon which the new American force should be sized and shaped.”

But, in the first of three reports that he is preparing on “the new security environment,” Aspin acknowledged that the absence of the Soviet threat of old makes it very difficult to decide what forces to retain, what new forces to create and how much to spend on them.

He also said:

* Future U.S. ground, sea and air forces should be sized and modeled on the forces that defeated Iraq in the Gulf War. This prototype should be the basic building block, he said, to be expanded “in multiples” to create a force that could simultaneously handle other potential threats as well.

* The Soviet Union’s demise has caused “a revolutionary change in the way we think about nuclear weapons.” The existence of such weapons is “no longer in U.S. interests,” he said.

Aspin, in response to questions, admitted that the United States must “hedge its bets on what’s going on in the (former) Soviet Union. Our numbers should be based on their numbers,” he said, indicating the continued need for a nuclear balance in long-range weapons with the new Commonwealth of Independent States.