Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, December 12, 1994 TAG: 9412140022
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The momentum to shell out more than the $1.5 trillion the Pentagon already is planning to spend over the next six years seems nigh unstoppable, which is unfortunate.
This year, the United States will spend more than $270 billion on national defense. That should be enough, considering it is almost as much as the rest of the world combined devotes to military budgets. (The Russians, for example, will make do with less than $20 billion.)
The U.S. military's readiness to fight needs attention. Clinton's defense secretary, William Perry, acknowledged as much when he said last month that three of the army's 12 divisions are well below peak readiness. But a more efficient defense could address this problem while saving on budget-busting items, such as new weapons systems designed to fight the Cold War. Three-fourths of the president's request for an extra $25 billion would go in fact for weapons systems, not readiness.
The cost is not trivial. Under its current rules, Congress must pay for the $25 billion by cutting that amount from domestic programs. While adding only 1 percent to the Pentagon's budget over six years, this diversion will practically gut much of what remains of new spending for education and training, research and development, and other items important to America's economic future, thus to its national security.
Moreover, Clinton is deferring most of the new spending for weapons-buys and upgrades until after the year 2000. That will help keep the federal deficit from growing now, but will help create a massive bulge in defense spending around the end of the century.
That happens to be a time when the deficit, propelled by health-care and other entitlement spending, is expected to be surging again - not even taking into account tax cuts that the new leaders in Congress also want to add to the pot. The scenario seems much less a path toward constitutionally mandated balanced budgets than a replay of debt-swelling Reaganomics.
The effort to throw more money at defense is being launched, too, at a time when the country isn't much inclined to use its military. Republicans opposed the intervention in Haiti. Notwithstanding Clinton's willingness to send troops to help evacuate U.N. forces in Bosnia, and GOP leaders' recent talk about sending ultimatums and bombs to the Serbs, opinion surveys reveal no American eagerness to fight a ground war in the Balkans.
Better than a new round of Pentagon spending increases would be to sustain defense budgets at current levels, but to begin diverting a share of the resources to help revamp United Nations peacekeeping forces. These forces have exceeded their capacity by trying, with inadequate support, to pacify 21 international conflicts since 1988. But their successes, in such places as El Salvador, Cyprus and Cambodia, have drawn less attention than their failures.
If the United States paid its fair share to the world body, demanded more efficiency and reform from the United Nations organizationally, and led a concerted effort to develop well-equipped, well-trained volunteer standing U.N. forces, these could get on with the job of global policing that America, for practical and other reasons, shrinks from taking on.
by CNB