Guard, Reserves to Lose 234,000 in Cheney Plan : Defense: Stiff opposition is likely as every state is hit. The numbers correspond to trims in active duty forces.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney announced plans Thursday to reduce the nation’s military reserve and National Guard forces by 234,000 in the next five years in cutbacks that will affect hundreds of units in all 50 states.

In an announcement long dreaded by communities fearing the economic effect of such reductions, Cheney and Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the cutbacks would bring the reserves into balance with an active duty force that is being dramatically reduced and reshaped by the end of the Cold War.

Cheney and Powell said that 80% of the affected units were designed to reinforce active-duty troops in the event of a full-scale ground war in Europe against the Soviet army.

“That army is not coming,” Powell said at a midday Pentagon press conference. “The Red Army is gone. The likelihood of a global war, and especially a major war in Europe, has disappeared before our eyes. Therefore it is prudent to reduce the active army. . . . And it is irresponsible not to bring the reserves down” as well.

If approved by Congress--an unlikely prospect given the strong political support that the Guard and reserves enjoy on Capitol Hill--140,000 troops would be cut in the next two years. By the end of 1997, savings would amount to $20 billion.

Although reductions would occur in all states, some would feel the effects more dramatically than others. Among them is California, which would lose 12,775 National Guard and reserve slots, more than any other state.

The plan stirred anger, despair and charges of political motivation in Congress, where members weighed the effect of job losses on an already ailing economy. One lawmaker estimated that a 150-man armory brings $2 million in annual revenue to a community.

Cheney hotly denied that politics had dictated the department’s choice of units to disband. At the same time, the former Wyoming congressman expressed little sympathy for lawmakers who have asked for deep cuts in defense spending but are unwilling to see them made so close to home.

“Congress cannot have it both ways. They cannot tell us to cut the defense budget and then object every time we move to cut the defense budget,” said Cheney. “All I hear from my friends on the Hill is ‘Not in my back yard; don’t close my armory; don’t shut down my production line.’ We can’t operate on that basis.”

Cheney’s comments reflect the defense secretary’s predicament in trying to secure congressional support for the Pentagon’s plan, which faces criticism from two sides. Many independent analysts believe that more Guard and reserve units can safely be disbanded, while others--mainly on Capitol Hill--maintain that the cuts proposed by Cheney are too deep.

“The military logic is impeccable. This is a case of those particular forces being a victim of their success. They simply are not needed,” said Don M. Snider, military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former Army force planner in Europe.

“But that does not mean it’s not without pain. Congress probably will not be able to deal with this issue this year,” Snider said.

He added that Congress and the Administration probably will have to create an impartial commission to recommend Guard and reserve cuts, like the Base Closure Commission, which compiled the list of domestic military bases that were ordered closed last year.

As a result of the congressional outcry, Cheney and Powell struggled Thursday to portray the Pentagon’s plan as one that cuts the National Guard and reserve deeply but not more deeply than their active-duty counterparts.

After cuts are made in both active-duty military units and in Guard and reserve units, the resulting force will be the same mix of full- and part-time service members, Cheney said. Just over one-third of the nation’s military will be made up of citizen-soldiers of the Guard and reserve.

When the proposed deactivations are complete, the Guard and reserve force--at 920,000--will be more than 50,000 troops larger than it was in 1980 at the beginning of the Ronald Reagan Administration buildup. The reserve and Guard now number 1.2 million.

Since the end of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon has sought to increase the role of the Guard and reserves in any large-scale U.S. military conflict. By assigning many key wartime tasks to “weekend warriors,” the Pentagon not only was able to save money but made it impossible for the nation to go to war without a major call-up of such units.

Pentagon leaders reasoned that such a shift would make public support an indispensable part of any political decision to deploy troops abroad.

Cheney said that those units would continue to play a fill-in role for regular armed forces units in the wake of the overall military drawdown.

“The Guard and reserve are a vital part of the force today. They will continue to be a vital part of the force,” said Cheney. “Not only do they play a very important military role, but they also . . . play a role in terms of helping us mobilize public opinion when it is time to go to war.”

The Persian Gulf crisis demonstrated the readiness of special-purpose units, such as water-purification teams and civil affairs units and linguists. But those guardsmen and reservists with combat specialties were widely criticized for having been too slow, too poorly trained and too undisciplined to be useful in a quickly evolving conflict.

Both Cheney and Powell conceded that the performance of Guard and reserve combat units during the Persian Gulf War had been disappointing. The experience has prompted a reassessment of how quickly such units could be trained to face a competent adversary. Powell said that it now takes a year to train a division and three to four months to train the brigades designed to fill out the ranks of active-duty divisions.

Powell said that increased warning time of some future conflicts would make such lengthy training periods feasible. But he said that combat reserve units would be most useful as a hedge against more distant threats, like a revival of a Soviet-style threat.

Powell said that two “cadre-style” reserve Army divisions could be placed on active duty and prepared to fight in the event that “we’ve guessed wrong, (that) things are not going as well as we thought they were going . . . in the land of 11 time zones (the former Soviet Union), and we have to reconstitute a larger force than we have now.”

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