Battle Over Defense Cuts May Be Nearing a Climax

Successful congressional candidate Martin T. Meehan spent much of his time on the hustings this year calling for “massive” reductions in defense spending.

“We need . . . to have the money it takes to make the economy more competitive,” the Massachusetts Democrat said.

Now, as a congressman-elect, Meehan is getting ready to take aim--and fire. As one of his first actions in the 103rd Congress, he plans to introduce a detailed plan to slash an extra $218 billion in Pentagon spending over five years--some $28.51 billion of it next year alone.

The Lowell, Mass., lawyer isn’t counting on immediate action on his own proposal, but he is confident that he can use it to help prod House leaders to make deeper cuts. “It’s not enough to say that we can’t cut any more in defense spending because of worry about jobs,” he warns.

Meehan isn’t the only member of Congress who has the defense budget in his sights. Gordon Adams, director of the Defense Budget Project, estimates that more than half of the 110 newly elected lawmakers share those views--along with a substantial number of incumbents. Some of them, anxious to find a way to provide an economic lift at home, campaigned hard on the issue this fall.

The upshot may be that after fits and starts in the last few years, the long-anticipated battle over how much the nation can afford to pay for its military may finally be at hand.

Last year’s congressional budget agreement--marked by caution on the part of House and Senate leaders--forestalled any raid on the defense budget before now. But the budget accord’s restrictions expire with this fiscal year, and an incoming Congress with a lot of new faces has a lot on its mind beyond the jobs in one embattled industry.

“This is a real watershed moment,” said Adams, whose Washington-based organization monitors defense spending. “The opportunity to remake the entire national security agenda from top to bottom” will be before the new Congress and President. “Every single national security issue is as open as it hasn’t been since the late 1940s.”

Much will depend on how the new Clinton Administration chooses to identify the chief threats to American security in the post-Cold War world.

“There must be a concept for the use of American military forces and how they fit in with our overall role in the world under a President Clinton,” said Robert Ellsworth, a former defense policy-maker.

Clinton himself has been ambiguous. During a news conference Wednesday, the President-elect promised to “make sure we still have the strongest and most appropriate defense forces to meet the missions of this nation at the end of the Cold War.”

A day later, however, he was talking about a “still very strong” but “different” defense Establishment--one that would require less to maintain, making more funds available for deficit reduction and domestic programs.

As a result, defense experts are advising Clinton to protect his defense flanks by moving quickly to decide just what kind of a role he wants the armed forces to play and standing firm behind a military budget plan that is designed to provide it.

“If it’s just a question of cutting or not cutting, then it’s a disaster whichever he does,” Ellsworth said. If Clinton has a firm overall plan, he said, “then you have a powerful psychological tool” to withstand efforts to alter it.

On the surface, Clinton’s defense-spending numbers may not look all that different from those President Bush proposed. The Arkansas governor wants to cut about $12 billion a year more than Bush out of a $270-billion Pentagon budget and rejuggle some key programs.

He also has promised to revive production of the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft and the Seawolf submarine. And he wants to slow the shrinkage of the nation’s defense industrial base and launch a program to help retrain defense workers who have been thrown out of jobs.

The President-elect has proposed accomplishing these changes essentially by further trimming troop levels, cutting Navy ship strength and increasing the military’s reliance on reserves--instead of active-duty personnel--and high-technology weapons.

He would cut U.S. troop strength by another 200,000 over the next five years, about a third of it from Europe, reduce the number of aircraft carriers to 10 from the current 12 and eliminate the space-based portion of the Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as “Star Wars.”

The idea would be to use the savings from the cuts “to allow you to keep spending more on hardware, which again produces jobs,” said Harold Brown, who was defense secretary during the Jimmy Carter Administration.

Martin Binkin, a Brookings Institution defense expert, added that under Bush “many of these things would have been cut anyway.”

But analysts warn that although the numbers may be similar, there still are some dramatic decisions to be made on fundamental issues, such as the shape and mix of the U.S. military, and overlap in the roles of the various services.

And they say Clinton may run into difficulty from conflicting forces in Congress, between lawmakers who want to slash defense spending more deeply and others, mainly those with defense industries in their districts, who want to go more slowly.

Despite the campaign rhetoric from candidates like Meehan, a congressional assault on defense spending isn’t a sure thing. If the economy continues to drag, lawmakers once again may prove wary about exacerbating the job outlook in the defense industry by cutting back too sharply. Or they may give the new President-elect his way--for a while.

But experts say the situation has changed enough that the temptations are apt to increase. With the budget restrictions expiring, “there’s going to be a considerable push in Congress to cut military spending,” Brown said.

Ellsworth asserts that Clinton’s biggest challenge in handling defense issues next year will be “to try to establish a defense posture that will make sense without being totally hamstrung by pork barrel politics.”

“There are no more hawks and no more doves,” Ellsworth said, “just people with defense industries in their districts and those without.”

Jim Thomson, president of the RAND Corp., said: “It’s an impossible situation. There’s general pressure in Congress to cut faster, but on specifics, everything is protected. It will take incredibly strong leadership to make that work.”

What worries both Democratic and Republican defense experts is that so far the President-elect has not enunciated the basic foreign policy framework he will need to map out a military plan for the future and reshape the armed forces to fit it.

Although Clinton has hinted that he is more likely to use force than did Bush over issues of “morality,” such as “ethnic-cleansing” in Bosnia, he has not established any firm guidelines.

While some experts say Clinton most likely will have some leeway to hammer out his framework, they warn that he may be forced to act more quickly if new provocations crop up to test his resolve.

James Woolsey, who was secretary of the Navy in the Carter Administration, predicts that “if history is any guide, there will be some foreign policy crisis to test him in his first year.” And that, in turn, could make or break his reputation as commander in chief.

Analysts warn that Clinton could be hobbled further by mounting resentment within the military to his expected decisions to change restrictions on women and homosexuals in the armed services.

“If he follows through on his campaign promises, that could create an awful lot of resistance in the Pentagon that could spill over into other areas,” said Lawrence Korb, who was undersecretary of defense in the Ronald Reagan Administration.