Cheney’s Advice to Aspin: Always Plan for Worst

Preparing to leave office after a period of historic change in the American military, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney predicted Monday that his successor will become more conservative as he steps into his new role and cautioned him not to base “long-term national security policy on the assumption that all is well in Moscow.”

In a wide-ranging farewell interview 17 days before leaving office, Cheney said that his successor, Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), who has been a frequent critic of Pentagon spending priorities, is likely to change some of his views once he has experienced the weight of his new responsibilities.

“Becoming secretary of defense forces you, if not to adopt a pessimistic view of the world, at least to always be aware of--or thinking about--how things can go wrong,” said Cheney.

He predicted that some of Aspin’s biggest management headaches at the Pentagon will come from Congress, not the military. Aspin is expected to appear later this week at a confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

On Dec. 22, the day President-elect Bill Clinton nominated Aspin to be his defense secretary, the Wisconsin congressman surprised many observers by noting the challenge posed by “the possibility of the reversal of reforms in the former Soviet Union, with untold consequences.”

Cheney, who in recent years has often been alone in issuing similar warnings, said Monday that he found Aspin’s new focus unsurprising, given Aspin’s prospective new job.

“If there’s anybody in government who ought to be thinking about worst-case scenarios, it’s the person who sits in this job,” Cheney said. “You always have to be conscious in this job of the 30,000 nuclear warheads that are still stockpiled inside the Russian Republic and some of the other republics. It is a sobering responsibility.”

In some of his most partisan comments since the election, Cheney also told a small group of reporters that he will send to Capitol Hill a six-year defense budget plan in the next two weeks.

The plan calls for $1.6 trillion in defense spending from 1993 to 1998 and proposes maintaining a force of 1.6 million active-duty personnel--the so-called “base force” embraced by Cheney and Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Clinton has said that he would cut defense spending by $60 billion during the six-year period and reduce U.S. military forces 200,000 below the Cheney “base force.”

For all the challenges that his successor will face, Cheney forecast that Congress will become a “greater frustration” to Aspin than internal management problems. Cheney, who met with Aspin last week, said that skirmishing within the Pentagon among the military services has been dampened by new laws and increased interservice cooperation.

“The thing that Les will have to guard against is the enormous temptation of all those guys on (Capitol) Hill who will want to cut (defense spending) in a way that is not based on any consideration of maintaining our military capability but really is based on considerations that should not be part of the equation,” said Cheney.

Cheney called the success of political and economic reforms in the former Soviet Union “a huge question mark.” He said he worries that removal last month of Russian acting Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar, who pushed for swift transition to a free-market economy, “is weakening the drive toward economic reform.”

Reviewing the world’s hot spots, Cheney cautioned Clinton against deeper involvement in Yugoslavia without allied support and warned that “it would be a big mistake” for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to misjudge Clinton’s resolve.