Plan to Trim Guard, Reserves Draws Instant Foes in Congress : Military: The proposed cutback of 234,000 troops faces a tough Capitol Hill battle. Strategists predict only a third of the reduction will pass.

The Bush Administration’s new plan to reduce National Guard and reserve forces got a cool reception in Congress on Thursday, suggesting that the Pentagon is unlikely to win approval for slashing anywhere near the 234,000 troops that it wants to cut by late 1997.

Almost as soon as the Defense Department announced the proposed cuts, Rep. G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery (D-Miss.) and other backers of the Guard and reserves on Capitol Hill served notice that they will oppose the planned reductions and mount a major campaign to block them.

Montgomery called them “wrong” and said that he and other opponents will push to maintain the Guard and reserve at current levels, at least through fiscal 1993. He predicted broad support in Congress for heading off the Pentagon’s proposed cutbacks.

In the Senate, Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), chairman of the Senate National Guard Caucus, which lists 69 senators as members, expressed similar views. Aides said that the Senate group plans to launch a full-fledged campaign as early as this week.

There was no immediate indication precisely how far lawmakers might go in tempering the Administration’s planned cuts. Some strategists predict that the two houses will only approve about a third of the suggested reductions, but estimates vary widely.

Congress is facing unusually strong political crosscurrents this year--under pressure on one hand to slash defense spending sharply so that it can rechannel the money to meet domestic needs and simultaneously worried that too steep a cut could hurt the economy.

As a result, one strategist said, combined with the pressures of an election year, the decision of how far to cut the Guard and reserves is “a much tougher issue” than the choice that lawmakers faced last year over the closing of military installations in their districts.

“There’s a wider range of people affected here, both across the country and across the states,” the strategist added.

Significantly, Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), the chairmen of the Senate and House Armed Services committees, both reacted cautiously to the Pentagon’s announcement, saying that they want to study the proposal before voicing their opinions publicly.

However, Aspin’s own plan for cutting defense spending already calls for cuts in Guard and reserve forces of about 200,000 between now and late 1997.

Aspin’s reduction proposal has been incorporated, in principle, into the fiscal 1993 budget resolution recently passed by the House, but its details still have not been approved by the Armed Services or Appropriations panels.

Both the National Guard and reserves have unusually influential lobbying organizations in Washington, buttressed by grass-roots support from thousands of hometown units whose members actively enlist the aid of voters eager to keep their local armories intact.

Bush has tried three times to pare back the Guard and reserves to parallel similar cutbacks in active-duty forces, but each time he has been rebuffed by lawmakers. Last year, the Pentagon proposed cutting 105,000 reservists; it won approval to trim 37,500 instead.

Besides the issue of local pride, lawmakers have said that they are especially reluctant to cut Guard and reserve units this year because of the economic effect on local communities of shutting down armories and reserve training centers.

Montgomery contended Thursday that a National Guard unit composed of 150 soldiers brings $2 million a year to a locality, both in pay and in purchases of equipment--a loss that many communities insist would hurt their economies.

But Paul Taibl, an analyst for the Defense Budget Project, a nonpartisan research organization, said Thursday that, while some local communities would be hurt, the effect nationally was apt to be spotty because reservists are part-timers and pay is not particularly high.

Reaction from the major lobbying organizations was as expected. Gen. Robert F. Ensslin, president of the National Guard Assn., warned that if Congress follows the Pentagon’s recommendations it “would break the Guard.”