THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 31, 1996 TAG: 9603310173
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long : 183 lines
A looming collision between two bipartisan efforts in Congress - to increase defense spending and to balance the federal budget by 2002 - is sparking a quiet move on Capitol Hill to rethink the shape and strategy of America's war machine.
In little-noticed speeches and sparsely-attended hearings, a smattering of independent analysts, lawmakers and military leaders have begun suggesting that the nation either doesn't need or can't afford the large, technologically advanced force the Pentagon wants to maintain.
Some of the analysts urge a slowdown in the military's drive for new, higher-performance planes and ships and for computer-guided bombs and missiles. Others question the nation's military strategy, which calls for maintaining a large enough force to fight and win two ``nearly simultaneous'' regional wars.
``The changing realities of the post-Cold War world require that we undertake another effort to reshape our strategy and force plans,'' Arizona Sen. John McCain, a former Navy pilot, said in a Senate floor speech this month.
McCain expressed hope that his call for a smaller force of combat-ready troops would help frame a debate over defense spending. But there is little evidence that either major party wants an election-year discussion of the economic realities of the two-war strategy.
Centerpiece of the Clinton administration's defense planning since the Pentagon completed a ``bottom-up review'' of forces in 1993, the two-war plan is behind the insistence of military leaders that they must maintain a uniformed force of about 1.5 million soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.
The strategy also drives the Navy's insistence on keeping a fleet of 12 aircraft carriers and the Army's determination not to fall below 10 combat-ready divisions, along with a push in all the services to provide the troops with an increasingly sophisticated and expensive assortment of weapons.
McCain is virtually alone among Republicans in publicly questioning the plan. The party's congressional leaders generally mention it only while assailing Clinton for failing - in their view - to budget enough money to make it work.
Rep. Floyd Spence, a South Carolina Republican who heads the House National Security Committee, put it this way at a committee meeting: At $243 billion, the administration's 1997 defense plan ``cannot even be described as a `treading water' budget - it is under water and sinking fast.''
With the exception of a relative handful of liberals, congressional Democrats have taken a similar view.
Bipartisan majorities in both houses last year added $7 billion to the administration's military budget, most of it for new weapons; the early discussions this year suggest a ``plus-up'' of perhaps $13 billion is in the offing.
Even that won't be enough, according to senior uniformed leaders. Gen. John Shalikashvili, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wants annual outlays of $60 billion for weapons purchases alone. That's $21 billion more than the Pentagon's 1997 request and a level the Clinton administration doesn't expect to reach until 2001, the year the president would leave office if he's re-elected this fall.
``Unfortunately, the defense debate has been sort of reduced to a hairy-chested exercise in manhood,'' says David Evans, director of national defense programs for Business Executives for National Security, a Washington group that monitors defense spending.
Driven by the profit-seeking impulses of defense contractors, many of whom also are key campaign contributors, the congressional discussion ``is focused on the dollars going in as opposed to the adequacy of the forces coming out,'' Evans suggests.
Evans is among a number of critics who fault Congress and the military bureaucracy for a seemingly insatiable appetite for increasingly sophisticated and precise weapons.
The reason? Those high-tech marvels - from cruise missiles that can be targeted not just to hit a particular building but to go in a specific window of that building, to new generations of radar-evading fighter jets and super-quiet submarines - are breathtakingly expensive.
In a paper now circulating privately in the Pentagon, Franklin C. Spinney, a Defense Department analyst, uses cost projections for new Air Force fighter jets to illustrate the fiscal problems looming for all the services.
Those projections call for the Air Force to spend $68.6 billion on 792 new fighters between 2003 and 2012. Even accounting for inflation, that's 36 percent more than the service spent on well over twice as many new aircraft (1,800) during the peak decade of Cold War spending.
The Air Force will spend so much more to get so much less, Spinney wrote, because the cost of each plane has more than tripled.
And as it buys fewer new planes, the Air Force must keep those already in its inventory longer to avoid dramatically shrinking its overall total. The service projects that the average age of its fighters will go from 9.6 years now to 19.2 years in 2006. That means some planes in the fleet will be 40 to 42 years old.
``No one really knows how much it will cost or how difficult it will be to operate and maintain our fighter forces'' at those ages, Spinney's paper suggested. ``One thing is sure, however - given the complexity of modern fighter aircraft, the care and feeding of this force will be much more difficult than operating and maintaining a fleet of several thousand equivalently-aged Chevrolets.''
Navy officials, in their budget presentations to Congress this year, have outlined a similar long-term problem with ship purchases. They project buying about seven ships a year. At that rate, ships commissioned today will have to stay in service for 50 years to maintain the fleet of 346 called for in the bottom-up review.
``What we're facing,'' says Evans, of the business executives' group, ``is the specter of a smaller, older military, saddled with more obsolescent equipment that costs more to maintain . . . Very few people are looking at the longer-term consequences of the short-term decisions being made to increase acquisition funding.''
The Pentagon's official position is that the procurement dollars needed tomorrow can be ``found'' within the constraints of projected defense budgets. The money, according to Defense Secretary William J. Perry, will come from closing excess military bases, turning more activities - such as running bases - over to the private sector, and implementing acquisition reforms that let the military use off-the-shelf electronics systems rather than specially-designed components.
Perry cites the Air Force's new C-17 cargo plane as an example of the benefits of acquisition reform. A competitive bid process and a multi-year purchase commitment have cut the projected cost of the program by $5.3 billion, he told congressional committees this month.
But outside analysts are less confident that privatization, acquisition reform and other management improvements will save the kind of money needed to sustain and equip U.S. forces.
``A little realism would drive us to try and improve on what we have here'' rather than replace it, said retired Vice Adm. Jack Shanahan, director of the Center for Defense Information, a think tank that has pushed for lower defense budgets.
Shanahan suggested that the nation ``needs to stop buying new platforms and (instead) maintain and improve existing platforms. You could do that for considerably less money'' than needed for new weapons, he said.
Others, including some in the military, argue that the precision and sophistication of its new weapons permit the Pentagon to save money by lowering force levels below those called for in the bottom-up review.
Marine Gen. John Sheehan, head of the Norfolk-based U.S. Atlantic Command, urged senators this month to look at the growth in the military's bureaucracy. While the military has been closing bases and cutting troop levels in the 1990s, he said, headquarters staffs and defense agencies have continued to grow.
Adm. William Owens, who was vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until his retirement at the end of February, told senators the day before his departure that ``I am an advocate of not giving us (in the military) more money.''
Instead, he said, the military should increase its reliance on systems like the Predator, a small, unmanned plane that flies at 30,000 feet to survey unfriendly territory and transmits television pictures to its operators.
The Predator ``could very easily in the future replace a number of manned aircraft that do similar kinds of things,'' Owens said, and it costs less than $2 million per copy. That's about 5 percent of the price tag for a new fighter.
Sen. McCain suggested in his mid-March speech that the military consider planning for a force able to fight and win one regional war, rather than two, at a time, while maintaining ``the capability to inflict unacceptable damage'' on a possible second foe.
The force he contemplates would rely more on America's allies to defend themselves and U.S. interests in their areas. And the services, McCain added, should shift to a three-tiered system of readiness, spending enough to keep only a relatively small portion of their overall force ready to fight immediately.
Perry's budget is predicated on keeping virtually all U.S. combat forces at a high level of readiness.
Unlike many of his fellow Republicans, McCain is willing to eliminate some new weapons as either unneeded or too expensive. Though he lost a fight last year to block construction of a third and last Seawolf-class attack submarine, McCain suggests the Navy scale back plans to build 30 subs in a new class.
``We can't afford to throw money at the problem anymore,'' Andrew Krepinevich, director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan defense-monitoring group, told the Los Angeles Times this month.
Evans agreed. Congressmen and others pushing for spending increases are ``like the crew aboard the Titanic,'' he said. ``They're manning the bilge pumps and pumping faster without really sending any damage control parties down to find out how big a hole is in the hull.'' ILLUSTRATION: Graphics
POST-COLD WAR HOT SPOTS ARE SCATTERED OVER THE GLOBE:
THE ABILITY TO FIGHT TWO WARS SIMULTANEOUSLY
THE WORLD'S MILITARY GIANT - AT WHAT PRICE?
[For complete graphics, please see microfilm]
KEYWORDS: MILITARY BUDGET by CNB