COLUMN ONE : The Battle to Change the Military : The Clinton and Bush defense budgets foresee very different duties for the armed forces. The Pentagon’s role in policing the world and creating jobs at home is at issue.

To Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, the V-22 Osprey is the perfect post-Cold War defense program. The tilt-rotor aircraft could ferry peacekeeping forces to international trouble spots and evacuate civilians from natural disasters. It could give birth to an important new technology, preserving jobs--and the United States’ leading edge--in the critical aerospace industry.

To George Bush, the Osprey represents an Old World Order anachronism that the nation can no longer afford in an era of shrinking defense budgets. For three years, Bush has fought Congress to terminate the program, arguing that its $24-billion cost should be spent instead on firepower better suited to the nation’s changing military needs.

Their contrasting perspectives on the Osprey, which can take off like a helicopter and fly like a plane, illustrate the subtle but significant ways in which Bush and Clinton differ when it comes to crafting a defense policy for the next century.

When they talk about defense budgets and military manpower levels, the differences between Bush and Clinton appear relatively narrow. But look inside their defense budgets--at the underlying views that drive them and the priorities they reflect--and the contrasts between the candidates come into sharper focus.

Their differences involve such fundamental matters as the role the United States should play in policing the world and the role the Defense Department should play in nurturing new technologies and maintaining civilian jobs.

In essence, Bush would make his Defense Department more aggressive in policing the world and less aggressive in furnishing the U.S. commercial market with jobs and new technologies. Clinton’s Defense Department would reverse the emphasis, acting less aggressively to intervene militarily around the world and spending more aggressively to seed the commercial market with defense dollars and technologies.

These distinctions “are differences of degree, not of kind,” said Lawrence Korb, a Brookings Institution defense budget expert who served in the Pentagon during the Ronald Reagan Administration.

Sixty billion dollars--the amount that Clinton would slash from the Bush Administration’s defense spending projections over the next five years--may seem like an apocalyptic number. But taken from a five-year budget that would total $1.42 trillion, it’s more than small change, but less than 5%.

Texas billionaire Ross Perot, whose support among veterans and military personnel appears to be high, has his red pencil hovered over the defense budget, too. He vows to cut $40 billion from the Bush Administration defense budget blueprint over the next five years. Perot has not been specific about how he would make those cuts, aside from saying that he would eliminate “relics from the Cold War, such as the B-2 (Stealth bomber) and the Seawolf submarine.”

“Nothing is more important than the security of our country,” he says in his book, “United We Stand: How We Can Take Back Our Country.” “In the post-Cold War world, however, our well-being depends less on military security than on economic security.”

Perot suggests converting many defense industries to new civilian tasks so that the downsizing could be handled without massive layoffs and disruption. He also advocates requiring our allies, such as Japan and Germany, to bear “their fair share of the defense burden.”

Clinton’s and Bush’s proposals have been more detailed. Clinton’s vision of the nation’s military amounts to 200,000 fewer troops than the force the Bush Administration and Gen. Colin L. Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have identified as the “rock-bottom” smallest force the United States could safely maintain. That clash has sharpened the difference between the two candidates and made the stakes in this debate appear higher than they have been in years.

The Bush campaign has further raised the stakes with dire warnings of the job losses that Clinton’s defense policies would cause. At every campaign stop where defense jobs are a concern, Vice President Dan Quayle has declared that compared to the Bush Administration’s more modest plan of defense cuts, Clinton’s proposals for military cuts would cost a million American defense workers their jobs.

In a year when the nation’s economy is a hotter political topic than the candidates’ world views, those warnings may sway some voters. But experts said it obscures the deeper differences that separate the candidates.

Shaping the World

The Bush Administration has stated it wants to play a key role in shaping the future of regions and of nations where the United States has key interests. And the defense budgets it has proposed have been designed to preserve the nation’s ability to intervene militarily in several major regional conflicts--with or without the approval and participation of allies throughout the world.

As Defense Secretary Dick Cheney noted in a secret defense guidance document earlier this year: “Such capabilities are essential to our ability to lead, and should international support prove sluggish or inadequate, to act independently, as necessary, to protect our critical interests.”

The Bush Administration’s defense plan would use the ready presence of U.S. military forces to maintain a firm hand in shaping the course of international events. Bush’s long-range plan would hold the line at 12 naval aircraft carriers rather than Clinton’s plan for 10, and provides for a slightly larger ground force with a continued major presence abroad--most notably in Europe.

Clinton’s force, by contrast, would be slightly more dependent on the help and goodwill of allies if it is to intervene militarily in crises far from home. No more than 100,000 of Clinton’s 1.4 million-strong military force would be based in Europe. Instead of 12 active-duty Army divisions and six National Guard and Reserve divisions, Clinton’s plan would maintain nine active-duty and six Reserve divisions.

Clinton has promised never to allow a “hollow Army”--one with units whose strength has been sapped by cutbacks and internal reductions. But military experts agree his plan would clearly make it more difficult to send a large U.S. force abroad quickly.

Clinton’s plan would partly compensate for that by increased spending on transport ships and planes designed to speed the movement of U.S. troops abroad. In part, Clinton appears willing to accept a slightly restricted U.S. military posture if the budget savings could be used to strengthen the U.S. economy. In the post-Cold War world, Clinton reasons, a more robust American economy would serve more effectively to exert American influence abroad.

“While military power will continue to be vital to our national security, its utility is declining relative to economic power,” said Clinton in his first comprehensive speech on defense and foreign policy matters last December. “We cannot afford to go on spending too much on firepower and too little on brainpower.”

Clinton’s emphasis on investing in brainpower also is evident in his defense blueprint. The Bush Administration has sought to end some programs, including the Osprey and the Seawolf submarine, arguing that their cost is too great and their military effectiveness too little. Clinton has backed continued support for both programs, largely on account of the benefits they would bring to the civilian economy. Perot agrees with Bush on the Seawolf; he has made no comment on the Osprey.

Clinton has said it is worth spending billions on the Osprey because it is the kind of cutting-edge technology that would both keep crack design teams in place and result in a plane with military as well as civilian uses. Keeping open the production line of the Seawolf would prevent the loss of a unique shipyard and the dispersal of the specially trained worker teams that have no counterpart in the civilian economy. Those assets will be difficult to replace should the United States decide to replace its aging fleet of subs.

Civilian Applications

At the same time, Clinton has proposed establishing a new advanced research agency, like one that has existed in the Pentagon for several decades, to serve as a seedbed for civilian technologies.

The resulting civilian projects--high-speed trains, for instance--would keep teams of defense scientists and engineers together and employed on large-scale civilian projects that would make them available to the Pentagon if a rise in tensions required a buildup.

The Bush Administration, with its free-market orientation, has been wary of using Pentagon funds to help fuel civilian projects. In canceling defense procurement programs and shuttering bases, Cheney has rejected arguments that some programs should be kept alive because they create jobs and benefit the civilian economy.

The fact that the American commercial aircraft industry is vitally interested in the program, for instance, has only hardened Bush’s resistance to building the Osprey with Pentagon funds.

If American entrepreneurs can make money off the hybrid aircraft, Bush Administration officials ask, why they don’t develop and build it themselves, letting the free market work on its own?

Clinton and Bush also differ in the way they interpret changes in the world. In drafting defense budgets, the Bush Administration has remained cautious about the breakdown of the Soviet military.

In maintaining large forces and a welter of sophisticated research and development programs, Cheney’s Pentagon has explicitly argued that it must hedge against the possibility that the U.S. military could face renewed threats from remnants of the Soviet military, as well as other sophisticated regional powers, such as North Korea.

While Clinton sees smaller regional threats requiring the rapid dispatch of relatively small U.S. forces, he has pointedly rejected programs that were conceived and maintained against a Soviet-style military threat. Clinton has proposed adding funds for the construction of rapid transport ships and planes, such as the controversial C-17, that could quickly bring U.S. forces to remote regional conflicts.

Clinton would cut other defense programs that thrived in the Bush Administration on the argument that they respond to a threat that has disappeared and will not, in Clinton’s view, return.

Clinton would put the space-based part of the Bush Administration’s “Star Wars” program on hold, on the argument that such a system would only be necessary against a Soviet-style missile attack. Such a decision would save $15 billion to $20 billion, mostly in later years, according to campaign aides.

B-2 Bomber Issue

Another program conceived in response to the Soviet threat--the B-2 bomber--has been rejected by all three candidates. Clinton and Bush would complete the program with production of four more aircraft, resulting in a force of 20 radar-eluding bombers; Perot has not said whether he would do that.

Clinton has suggested that a shift in emphasis from Soviet to regional threats might prompt other changes in defense procurement. He has said he would order a new look at programs such as a proposed new Stealth fighter jet for the Air Force and a new generation of tanks for the Army. Neither is in production.

Any decision to cancel or scale back such programs, however, is likely to be tempered by Clinton’s professed concern for maintaining American industrial capability in the design and production of systems that might prove critical to future success on the battlefield.

“Clinton’s defense policy points fundamentally to a post-Cold War era: It does not put the Soviet Union or its successors at the center,” said Gordon Adams, director of the Defense Budget Project. “The Bush Administration seems to be backing into the future: Although they’re defining a defense policy that has the post-Cold War label, a lot of the force structure and acquisition strategy were designed for the Cold War.”

Responsibility

But the difference in the two candidates’ visions, added Adams, is only partly generational: It also is very much a function of the two men’s different responsibilities. A campaign for the presidency has the advantage of not being responsible for daily decisions, Adams said.

Unlike Bush, who must bring along a large and resistant bureaucracy if he is to reshape defense policy, Clinton “can step back and look at the changed picture and change parameters accordingly,” he said.

If Clinton is elected, added Adams, he may face some of the same problems that have made Bush cautious in calling for fundamental changes. Until then, Adams said, “he can legitimately articulate a different vision, and you see the elements of that in Clinton’s campaign.”

New Defense Programs: The Candidates’ Views

Here is a look at where the three major presidential candidates stand on key defense programs, including the V-22 O sprey, left, which takes off like a helicopter but flies with the speed of a conventional airplane: Program: V-22 Osprey Contractor: Boeing Helicopter Bell Helicopter/Textron Location: Pennsylvania and Texas Bush: Opposes Clinton: Supports Perot: No position

Program: Seawolf Sub Contractor: Gen. Dynamics Electric boat div. Location: Connecticut Bush: Opposes Clinton: Supports Perot: Opposes

Program: B-2 Stealth bomber Contractor: Northrop Location: Palmdale, Calif. Bush: Opposes but would build four more Clinton: Opposes but would build four more Perot: Opposes; has not commented further

Program: C-17 cargo plane Contractor: McDonnell-Douglas Location: Long Beach, Calif. Bush: Supports Clinton: Supports Perot: No position

Program: ATF Stealth fighter Contractor: Lockheed, Gen. Dynamics, Boeing Location: Marietta, Ga. (many components to be built in Southern California) Bush: Supports Clinton: Supports Perot: No position

Program: Star Wars Contractor: Various Location: Nationwide, with special emphasis on California Bush: Supports space- and ground-based system Clinton: Supports only ground-based system Perot: No position

Source: Los Angeles Times