Defense Nominee Will Need the Right Stuff

President Clinton’s choice to replace Les Aspin as secretary of defense will need three things that Aspin, for all his strategic knowledge and Washington experience, never quite acquired, former officials said Wednesday: credibility with the uniformed services, management skill to carry out deep budget cuts and the political discipline to avoid public gaffes.

Officials said that Clinton’s selection--which could be announced as early as today--would be a strong executive more than a visionary defense intellectual in the Aspin mold.

What Clinton needs, one senior adviser said, is someone who is already “good about making decisions.”

The betting in Washington, which began only minutes after Aspin’s resignation was announced, focused on CIA chief R. James Woolsey, former CIA Deputy Chief Bobby Ray Inman and Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Perry.

Woolsey and Perry are conservative Democrats with experience as defense managers. Woolsey, 52, a Tulsa-born Washington lawyer, served as undersecretary of the Navy in the Jimmy Carter Administration and as an arms control negotiator under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. As CIA director, he has spent much of his time working to preserve the nation’s estimated $28-billion intelligence budget.

Perry, 66, a Pennsylvania-born mathematician, was undersecretary of defense for research and engineering in the Carter Administration, a venture capitalist in San Francisco and a professor at Stanford University before he became Aspin’s second-in-command this year.

Inman, 62, a Texas-born retired admiral, spent 30 years in the Navy and served as director of the National Security Agency, which runs the intelligence community’s massive electronic eavesdropping effort, during the Carter Administration. He was deputy director of Central Intelligence under Reagan’s controversial CIA chief, William J. Casey, and retired in 1982 after a series of internal disagreements.

Other names mentioned--by former officials who admitted that they had little direct knowledge of Clinton’s thinking--include Martin Marietta Corp. Chairman Norman K. Augustine and Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.).

Whoever Clinton chooses will face a difficult task.

“It’s a tough job,” said former Asst. Secretary of Defense Lawrence J. Korb. “The job description is to tell the Pentagon that it has to get along with less money, get along with different kinds of people and learn to fight in tough situations like Somalia.

“Clinton needs somebody with both managerial and political skills, somebody who’s in sympathy with what he wants to do on issues like gays in the military and tight budgets and . . . somebody credible with the military,” Korb said.

The budget battle is already under way. One of Aspin’s last major actions was his warning to Clinton last month that the Pentagon’s budget over the next five years is $50-billion short of what is needed to carry out its missions. Aspin bluntly told the President that the Administration’s current budget would endanger the military’s ability to fight two regional wars in quick succession, a key aim of current strategy.

Whether the Pentagon gets that $50 billion or not, the new defense secretary must guide the nation’s massive defense Establishment into new missions under new spending limits--a daunting mission for any manager.

And he must win the confidence and support of the uniformed military services to complete the task.

“One of the first things Aspin had to do was tell the officers they weren’t going to get a pay raise,” noted Korb. “That kind of got him off on the wrong foot.”

“The folks at the Pentagon never took to him, which was part of his problem,” a Clinton adviser acknowledged.

Among the possible successors, both Woolsey and Perry appear to fit most of those qualifications.

Woolsey “is much more organized” than Aspin, one senior official said. “He cares more about management and budget.”

And Perry, who is already in the Pentagon, “gets along well with the key players,” a former senior official said.

Several members of Congress suggested that retired Army Gen. Colin L. Powell, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until September, would be a good choice. But the law prohibits military officers from serving as defense secretary until they have been retired for at least 10 years.

Some senators suggested loyally that Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, might make a good candidate. But Nunn has been a persistent thorn in Clinton’s side over issues from the defense budget to gays in the military and Administration officials said that they found it impossible to imagine the President turning to him.