Rumsfeld Dons Budget Battle Gear

With contentious debate building over whether to fund the Pentagon’s request for $343 billion in military spending in 2002 despite a shrinking federal surplus, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told lawmakers Wednesday he will fight any effort to trim the military slice of the pie.

“There is no question but the Department of Defense needs every nickel of this budget,” Rumsfeld told the Senate Appropriations subcommittee about the Pentagon request for fiscal 2002, which includes $8.3 billion to develop a hugely controversial missile defense program.

Senate and House leaders have said approval of the additional Pentagon funds--the largest proposed increase since President Reagan was in power--is endangered by the dwindling federal surplus. But the Bush administration argues the increase is desperately needed to begin to fund the top-to-bottom reworking of the military that President Bush has said he wants to be a legacy of his time in office.

Despite its size, the budget is considered fairly modest in scope. It does not include funding for the nuts and bolts of the “transformation” Bush has promised. Administration officials say major changes will have to wait until 2003 at least, after Rumsfeld unveils his long-awaited review of the military that will set the size and shape of the armed forces, provide a template for future budgets and help determine the fate of an array of billion-dollar programs.

But the budget on the table is key to the administration’s plans to rechart the military in two respects: The requested 57% increase to the budget for missile defense would allow the Pentagon to jump-start research and deployment of the defense system that could force a pullout of the landmark Antiballistic Missile Treaty.

And if this, the first defense budget of the new administration, is significantly whittled down, it would signal a lack of support for major changes to the armed forces in coming years.

The fate of the budget is “a test of the power of this president and his secretary,” said Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), the ranking minority member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “It’s a clear indicator of the extent to which the secretary can make major decisions on transforming the military.”

As Rumsfeld testified Wednesday, the question of to what extent Congress will fund the missile defense program was emerging as a pivotal issue. Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin said that the committee will authorize the full Pentagon budget request, pending action by Senate appropriators.

But Levin is expected to try to divert some of the $8.3-billion request for missile defense to conventional weapon systems in an attempt to rein in any projects that would violate the 1972 ABM treaty. The treaty prohibits any nationwide antiballistic missile shield.

The Bush administration argues that the U.S. must set aside the ABM treaty so it can deploy as yet unproved defenses to fend off a relatively small number of missiles carrying nuclear, biological or chemical warheads that might be launched by a hostile regime.

Much of the debate will center on Bush’s request for $584 million to begin building test facilities at Ft. Greely, in eastern Alaska. Bush administration officials say the antimissile interceptors it wants to deploy could provide a rudimentary defense as early as 2004 against a missile launched from North Korea.

Democratic critics blast the project as a backdoor deployment that would violate the treaty for the sake of satisfying missile defense advocates before the 2004 election. With the missile defense system still largely untested, military analysts are skeptical that such a rapid deployment is possible at all.

“The value of these tests, it seems to me, is not high, and the information which could be obtained could be in all likelihood be obtained elsewhere,” Levin said in an interview. “They are not tests that are, it seems to me, of great importance to this program. They are add-ons, and I do not think we should be rushing to violate this treaty with tests that are of marginal value, if any.”

Levin said administration officials have failed to say which of the missile tests they plan would violate the treaty.

“We’ve tried a hundred different ways to get them to tell us whether specific activities are in violation of the treaty,” Levin said. “It does make a difference to a lot of people as to whether they are being asked to vote for something that would violate a treaty. It has major implications. That’s obvious to everybody. And right now we can’t get critical information.”

Challenging the missile defense budget has been politically risky since 1983, when Reagan launched the push for a high-tech defense capable of seeking out and destroying missiles in space. Critics of the program then (they called it “Star Wars”) were often labeled weak on national security.

But with the Pentagon, and every other agency, in a budget vise, Democrats have been emboldened to try to slice some money from missile defense to fund other widely popular Pentagon programs.

In a speech Tuesday, Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), the ranking minority member of the House Armed Services Committee, urged the Department of Defense and Congress to place a higher priority on acquiring transport aircraft and long-range bombers.

The budget crunch is bad news for the Pentagon, which needs to replace aging weapon systems. The longer the military puts off modernizing its weapon systems, which each year siphon more money from the overall military budget, the harder it will be to transform a force that was designed during the Cold War.

The Pentagon is also struggling in the budget to improve military pay, housing, medical benefits and infrastructure. The budget includes $4.1 billion for pay and housing and $2 billion for the military’s rising health care costs. It also includes $8 billion for spare parts, repairs, the flying time of aircraft and other expenses needed to keep the services ready for action, and $3.6 billion to modernize communications and other systems.

In all, the defense budget request is 10.3% more than the $311.3 billion provided so far this year--a far larger increase than Bush has sought for other domestic programs. It includes $18.4 billion added in June.

Sen. Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, insisted there is enough room in the 2002 budget to fund Bush’s request without dipping into Social Security reserves. However, he was assuming that the education budget would not increase as much as Democrats would like.

He argued that the Pentagon should not have to tailor its budgetary needs to the whims of the economic cycle:

“They told us the bottom line. And the only thing that’s changed is an economic assumption, in the last five months an economic assumption has come down. And some people now expect Defense to march to the dance of the lower growth numbers,” Domenici said.

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Times staff writer Janet Hook contributed to this story.