Leaders to Call for Hike in Defense Budget

In a new acknowledgment of the rising threats to U.S. military readiness, leaders are expected today to press President Clinton for increases in Pentagon budgets that have been declining for 13 years.

Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and the Joint Chiefs of Staff will argue in a meeting with Clinton that the $250-billion defense budget may need annual supplements of up to $15 billion for several years unless major weapon programs can be cut or overseas deployments curtailed, U.S. officials said Monday.

These arguments represent a marked change in tune for the Pentagon leadership, which has contended that the military could get by on the flat budgets that are called for under Congress’ balanced budget agreement.

But there have been increasing complaints that tight budgets were hurting efforts to recruit and keep military personnel, threatening major procurement programs and causing shortages of spare parts.

Meanwhile, it has become increasingly clear that the Pentagon would not be saving as much money as it had hoped by closing unneeded bases, streamlining the defense bureaucracies and implementing other efficiencies.

“The uniformed folks at the Pentagon are now viewing all this as a lot more serious,” said one Senate aide. “They see a train wreck coming.”

One senior defense official said the leadership has recognized for some time that it was going to be difficult to meet all the military’s goals for readiness and weapons modernization. But new data have shown the budget strains becoming “more permanent and more pervasive,” he said.

He said the most urgent concerns were compensation and quality-of-life issues for military personnel. Their pay, medical and retirement benefits recently have eroded, even as deployments have become more frequent and career opportunities in the booming civilian economy have appeared more attractive.

“The worst thing that can happen to a military force is to lose its talent,” he said.

This official said that the Joint Chiefs do not plan to press Clinton to adopt any specific spending program. Instead, the official said, they want to explain to him candidly the factors that are likely to require either increases in spending or reductions in operations or new weapons purchases.

Pentagon officials have repeatedly argued that frontline U.S. forces are fully prepared, though they have acknowledged shortages of equipment and personnel in forces that would be deployed later in any crisis. Now, however, officials say it is harder to keep these shortcomings from spilling over to the troops at the “tip of the spear.”

The Pentagon has requested small budget increases for several years, but the trend has generally been to reduce outlays since annual military spending peaked in 1985 during the Reagan administration’s defense buildup.

The leadership’s new concerns were first disclosed Monday in the Wall Street Journal.

Congress is barred from spending more for the military under the balanced budget agreement. It can draw on money from the new budget surplus--an expected $60 billion to $80 billion.

But there are already powerful demands in Congress to use that money for other purposes. Democrats want to use it to prop up the Social Security system. Republicans have been talking about huge tax cuts.

Some analysts predicted that the military will find it difficult to win congressional approval for anything like the sums they would like, but it does have some powerful advocates.

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), chairman of the Budget Committee, have urged higher military spending.