THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, October 14, 1994 TAG: 9410140587
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long : 109 lines
Having deposed an outlaw government in Haiti and faced down a new Iraqi threat to Kuwait, the Pentagon turned its attention Thursday to domestic political wars.
With less than four weeks left before midterm congressional elections, Deputy Defense Secretary John M. Deutch met with reporters to challenge Republican claims that Clinton administration budget cuts have left America with a ``hollow'' military.
American forces ``are ready, as ready as they've ever been,'' he said; they have demonstrated that, he said, by responding quickly and professionally to potentially deadly confrontations in the Caribbean and the Persian Gulf.
Despite what it considers stunning successes of late, the military establishment's ability to respond to multiple crises has been the target of a torrent of criticism. GOP candidates - Virginia U.S. Senate hopeful Oliver L. North most prominent among them - insist that President Clinton has so weakened the military that, in North's words, ``despots like Saddam Hussein feel comfortable threatening this country.''
North's claim, and a Democratic counterattack this week that featured Vice President Al Gore, has moved a national debate over the sufficiency of America's military to the forefront of the bitter Virginia race.
Though independent analysts (and even some Republicans) suggest that he may have overstated the case, North clearly views the issue of Clinton's military stewardship - and incumbent Democrat Charles S. Robb's support for it - as a winner. North has attacked Robb not only for backing Clinton's military budgets but for supporting the president's now-abandoned effort to liberalize the Pentagon's policy on service by homosexuals.
North said this week that he would restore $13 billion cut by Clinton from military budgets projected during the Bush administration. And while calling for a stronger military, the former Marine lieutenant colonel has accused Clinton of being too quick to use American force. Returning Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power ``is not worth a single drop of American blood,'' North often tells audiences, for example.
Robb, among the relatively few senators in either party who openly backed Clinton on Haiti, also was among the few Democrats to support Bush in the use of force to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991.
Robb has voted for some military spending cuts, as have such Republican stalwarts as Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole, but the Democrat has argued throughout 1994 that defense spending should go no lower.
Indeed, in the spring, Robb led an unsuccessful fight against a budget resolution that proposed unspecified additional cuts to the military; ``national defense has been stretched as far as it can,'' he said then. Though the resolution passed, the services essentially escaped further cuts this year.
As he often has been during the Senate campaign, independent J. Marshall Coleman is in the middle. He agrees with North that defense has been cut too much but casts the reductions as a threat to future readiness rather than criticizing the military's current state.
Coleman charged in August that Clinton ``has programmed the American military to become a hollow force, and our adversaries know it.'' But this week, he savaged North over the GOP nominee's suggestion that U.S. forces couldn't block a new Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and over North's statement that ``Bill Clinton is not my commander-in-chief.''
``North's comments about Iraq are ill-timed and risk undercutting American troops on their way to a potential confrontation,'' Coleman said.
None of the Virginia candidates, and indeed none of the administration's military critics nationally, are talking about specific weapons systems or troop levels.
Instead, the debate generally focuses on whether the administration is spending enough - roughly $240 billion per year - to meet its stated goal of maintaining sufficient manpower and weaponry to fight two major regional wars simultaneously.
Deutch asserted Thursday that the answer is yes.
While conceding that it is possible to envision a scenario under which Iraq and South Korea ``on a particular day'' could in concert launch attacks that would severely strain American forces, Deutch said ``any reasonable interpretation suggests . . . we are able to deal with two major regional contingencies.''
Civilian and some uniformed leaders at the Pentagon have been surprised in recent days at how questions about the military's readiness have arisen even as troops have been showing their mettle in Haiti and Kuwait.
In preparing to invade Haiti, Deutch reminded reporters Thursday, the Army and Navy combined in unprecedented fashion. Then, when a last-minute deal was struck to avoid violence, troops and their commanders smoothly shifted plans and occupied the country without losing a single soldier to hostile fire.
In the Middle East, meanwhile, the administration argues that its foresight and strength has permitted a faster and tougher response than President Bush could make when Saddam took over Kuwait in 1990.
Then, the Pentagon needed months to assemble and equip about 500,000 troops to liberate the emirate. In the current crisis, equipment left in Kuwait and on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia after the gulf war has been quickly moved into position and thousands of troops have been or are being flown in to Kuwait to head off the Iraqis.
In all that, ``there's been no indication of any hollowness'' in American forces or their training, Gen. John Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said earlier this week.
Others are not so sure. In an appearance this week on ABC-TV's ``Nightline,'' recently retired Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Hoar argued that ``we are in serious trouble. We are underfunded and I'm not sure we have a good solution to that problem right now.''
Deutch said he and Defense Secretary William Perry will press for overall defense spending increases next year to close a $20 billion gap between currently projected spending and what they believe is needed to maintain a two-war capability. Critics, Coleman and North among them, contend that the real gap is far larger.
KEYWORDS: U.S. SENATE RACE VIRGINIA CANDIDATES CAMPAIGNING
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