TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/101491/1014103.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.9 KB | 174 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 21

DEFENSE

Much Less Than Meets the Eye


By slashing the nuclear arms arsenal, Bush triggers a debate
over whether the military budget is still too big. But even
drastic cuts would not produce a windfall.

By GEORGE J. CHURCH -- Reported by Michael Duffy and Bruce van
Voorst/Washington


    Stoking a hot debate over the defense budget was
certainly not George Bush's intention when he announced his bold
plans for slashing nuclear arms. But his initiative is already
spurring critics in and out of Congress to ask more insistently
than ever why the nation needs to spend nearly $300 billion a
year, and continue to buy some superexpensive high-tech weapons,
if the worldwide face-off with the Soviet Union is rapidly
becoming a memory. With Mikhail Gorbachev announcing major cuts
in the Soviet nuclear arsenal at week's end to match, and
possibly exceed, the U.S. reductions, and with Democratic
presidential candidates stepping up their campaigns, the
questioning is sure to grow in intensity and decibel level.

    Some preliminary skirmishing got under way last week when
a Senate-House conference committee began considering the $291
billion defense authorization bill for the fiscal year that
began Oct. 1. It immediately became obvious that Bush's
initiative had strengthened the hand of House conferees who want
to cancel the B-2 bomber program after the 15 now on order are
delivered and to put up only a bit more than half the $5.2
billion the Administration requested for the Strategic Defense
Initiative. The Air Force did not help the B-2's cause by
admitting that in a July flight test the Stealth bomber proved
to be embarrassingly unstealthy. Fundamentally, the problem is
that many legislators consider the B-2 and SDI to be anti-Soviet
systems that are rapidly losing whatever justification they ever
had. The lawmakers are not buying Pentagon efforts to portray
both as being useful in a conflict with a country like Iraq.

    More important, Democrats are increasingly talking about
reopening the so-called budget summit agreement of last year.
Congressional Democrats once regarded the agreement as a
triumph, because it forced Bush into abandoning his pledge not
to raise taxes. But they have come to see it instead as an
albatross that they helped hang around their own necks, because
it prevents them from slashing military appropriations further
and using the money to expand domestic social programs. Under
the agreement, cuts in defense, or any other broad category of
spending, below the ceilings already established through fiscal
1993, can only be used to reduce the budget deficit.

    It is far too late for any substantial revision of the
fiscal 1992 budget. Bush's aides predict that the conference
committee will as usual split the difference on the B-2 and SDI.
That would mean ordering a few more bombers and funding a
modest version of the missile shield somewhere between the House
figure of $3.5 billion and the Senate's $4.6 billion. As for the
budget agreement, it has been written into a statute, the Budget
Enforcement Act of 1990. To make sweeping changes would require
passage of a new law, and Bush almost certainly would cast a
veto that his opponents could not override. There is no sign
that the Democrats are willing now to force such a futile
showdown.

    But both sides are bracing themselves for a knockdown
battle beginning in January, when Bush presents his budget plans
for fiscal 1993. Democrats, possibly with some Republican
support, will make determined attempts to kill weapons systems,
lower troop levels, and reduce spending below the cuts the
Administration already plans. They also will look for -- and
maybe invent -- loopholes in the Budget Enforcement Act that
would permit transfer of funds to social programs. For example,
they might try to redefine as "defense" spending some types of
environmental outlays. "There will be a major assault on the
budget agreement," predicts an aide to Secretary of Defense Dick
Cheney. "Word inside the shop is that if all else remains equal,
we're in for a budget free fall."

    One reason is partisan politics. An attack on Bush for
devoting far too much time and effort to foreign policy and too
much money to defense while scandalously neglecting the
nation's multifarious domestic worries -- housing, education,
drug abuse, racial conflict -- is swiftly becoming the dominant
theme of the Democratic presidential campaign. To make a dent
in any of these problems, goes the argument, will require a
major infusion of money, and the defense budget is the best
place to get the bucks.

    In fact, the Democrats are heavily overestimating the
potential savings from such steps as bringing home even more
troops from Western Europe than the 100,000 the Administration
contemplates transferring Stateside. Some polls indicate that
cutting defense may not be quite as popular as the Democrats
think, either. In a TIME/CNN poll by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman,
large majorities of those surveyed wanted to bring U.S. troops
home from Korea (74%) as well as Western Europe (60%). But on
the broader question of whether the nation should "make
large-scale cutbacks in defense spending," they said no by 54%
to 42%. Even so, the idea of switching spending from defense to
domestic programs is one of the few horses the Democrats have,
and they intend to ride it for all it is worth -- and then some.

    Partisanship, though, is far from the whole story. There
is a genuine need to reshape the U.S. armed forces for a
post-cold war world, and a perfectly legitimate question as to
how much spending, how many soldiers and what types of weapons
are required. After dropping 11.3% in just ended fiscal 1991,
the Pentagon budget under the Bush Administration's plans would
go down an average of 3% (after adjustment for inflation) in
each of the following five years. Outlays would drop from around
5% of gross national product now to 3.6%, the lowest figure
since before World War II; the number of men and women in
uniform would shrink from 2 million to 1.6 million.

    Drastic as these cuts seem, Les Aspin, chairman of the
House Armed Services Committee and hardly an enemy of the
Pentagon, argues that they respond only to the dwindling of the
Soviet menace that had occurred by the beginning of this year,
after the 1989 anticommunist revolutions in Eastern Europe and
the subsequent demise of the Warsaw Pact. The plans, says
Aspin, do not take account of the still more pronounced
lessening of the threat that has occurred since the failed coup
in August and the splintering of the Soviet Union that has
followed.

    Such thinking is likely to gain force in the wake of
Gorbachev's Saturday response to Bush's nuclear initiatives. The
Soviet President, who telephoned Bush at Camp David to give him
a 20-minute preview of his proposals, followed the U.S. in
taking strategic bombers off alert and moving their nuclear
weapons into warehouses. Gorbachev also followed Bush in
scrapping tactical nuclear missiles, land based as well as
naval. In addition, he proposed negotiations to reduce the
number of remaining strategic weapons by half, while at the same
time announcing that from now on Soviet mobile missiles would
be kept stationary. The Soviet leader further announced a
one-year moratorium on nuclear tests and called on others to
follow suit.

    Beyond that, the Soviets are even more eager than the
Democratic Party to switch massive resources from the defense
establishment to the civilian economy. Deputy Defense Minister
Pavel Grachev told a parliamentary committee last week that the
armed forces might be cut almost in half, to 2 million to 2.5
million people, by 1994. His boss, Yevgeni Shaposhnikov, later
said firm plans call for mustering out only 700,000 of the
present roughly 4 million. But he added that "further cuts are
not excluded depending on the military-political situation in
the world" -- presumably meaning, in part, what the U.S. does.

    The Bush Administration insists that the dwindling of the
Soviet threat is being at least partly offset by a rising danger
of more regional wars like the Persian Gulf conflict, fought
against countries that are rapidly acquiring tanks, ballistic
missiles, chemical weapons and other modern arms. Thus, it
contends, the fairly drastic cuts it already has scheduled are
the most that can be prudently made. That line might offset the
Democrats' attack well enough to keep the odds heavily in favor
of Bush's re-election. But even that will not end the debate --
far from it. The serious questions about the size, structure and
cost of the U.S. armed forces will not be solved during a year
of heated partisan rhetoric. But they can -- and should -- be
debated not only through Election Day but far beyond.