THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, February 7, 1997 TAG: 9702070672
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: 138 lines
Facing long-term projections that essentially freeze their overall spending, the Navy and Air Force signaled Thursday that they will try to pay for expensive new ships and airplanes by continued nibbling at troop levels.
While the Army and Marine Corps will maintain their current strength, the sea and air services plan to eliminate 11,000 and 10,000 uniformed positions, respectively, during 1998, according to budget figures released by the Pentagon. That would represent about 3 percent of each service's uniformed positions.
The Navy plans to cut another 6,000 positions in 1999.
A Navy spokesman said the cuts are in line with force levels set out in a ``bottom-up review'' of all the services in 1993 and will not diminish the Navy's capability. He acknowledged that the Navy is pressing to develop modern machine and computer systems in future ships that could let it cut manpower even further after the turn of the century.
The services save roughly $30,000 for each uniformed position eliminated, Navy officials said, so the loss of 21,000 troops in 1998 will generate about $630 million for the Navy and Air Force to apply elsewhere.
The proposed Navy and Air Force strength reductions are part of a $265 billion defense spending package for 1998 that was released Thursday. Neither service specified where it plans to make the cuts, however.
The budget, and projections for future years released along with it, promises billions of dollars' worth of submarine and aircraft carrier construction contracts to Newport News Shipbuilding. It also calls for more than $150 million worth of construction on and around military bases in Hampton Roads.
For uniformed and civilian defense employees alike, the budget promises a 2.8 percent pay increase during 1998. The Clinton administration said it plans to give uniformed personnel an additional 3 percent increase and civilians another 2 percent in each of the following five years.
Overall, the budget proposal maintains the administration's emphasis on spending for training and maintenance activities designed to keep American forces ready to fight. The Army and Air Force each proposed modest cuts - about one-half hour a month - in operations by tanks and aircraft flight hours, but said computer simulations would be used to avoid any slippage in readiness.
The budget provides only a relatively modest $42.6 billion - less than 17 percent of the total - to buy new weapons. That's an increase over Clinton's 1997 proposal but about $1.5 billion less than Congress actually appropriated for the current year.
Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, who did not take office until after the budget was prepared by his predecessor, William J. Perry, acknowledged that the plan faces an uncertain future on Capitol Hill. Republican lawmakers were quick to denounce it Thursday, complaining that the weapons procurement figures are too low.
Cohen, the only Republican in Clinton's Cabinet, said he agrees that ``we can no longer continue to raid procurement (accounts) to fund operations and maintenance'' activities. But he praised Clinton for shifting more resources from other parts of the federal establishment into defense to keep the procurement fund from slipping further.
With Congress considering a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget and a Clinton proposal to end deficits by 2002, ``it may be that there will not be as much ability or enthusiasm to increase'' defense spending, Cohen suggested.
But U.S. Sen. John W. Warner, Virginia's senior member of Congress and a key player in military debates there, predicted that the procurement numbers will be increased.
Warner said he was ``fairly well pleased'' with the budget's proposals for carrier and submarine building in Newport News. The spending plan calls for $18 million in research during 1998 toward a carrier that Newport News would build beginning in 2002; and it provides $3 billion toward development of a series of submarines to be constructed jointly by Newport News and Electric Boat of Groton, Conn.
The carrier funding is a fraction of the ship's eventual $5 billion price tag. But area lawmakers want to secure at least some money for the ship this year, thinking that will make it easier to win more appropriations in later years.
``I think the most important thing is the commitment'' to the ship by Clinton that its inclusion in the budget implies, said U.S. Rep. Norman Sisisky, D-4th District. Still, ``I'd like more'' than $18 million, he said.
Warner, meanwhile, promised ``to put a stronger placeholder'' for the carrier in the budget as it passes through the Senate. ``They just put my namecard at the table with this $18 million, I'm going to pull up a chair,'' he said.
The budget's submarine program is dramatically different from one Congress approved just last year. It calls for Newport News and Electric Boat to combine their efforts to construct four subs over the next five years at a cost of about $10 billion.
The five-year schedule and the teaming arrangement, which both yards stress has not been finalized, are critical to the Navy's entire shipbuilding program, a senior Navy official told reporters Wednesday. Savings generated by teaming over the long haul, the official said, will allow the service to continue its carrier planning and to keep construction of new amphibious ships and destroyers on schedule.
Officials say that teaming allows each yard to develop particular areas of expertise in the highly complex world of submarine building. It's cheaper for the Navy to pay for that one set of experts, split between the yards, than for two independent groups, service officials argue.
But pinning down the savings is no easy chore. A Navy official said Thursday that with teaming, the four subs will cost about $9.9 billion; a senior Pentagon official who briefed reporters on the budget Wednesday put the price tag at $10.7 billion.
Warner said that if the yards fail to reach a final agreement on teaming, Congress can rearrange the budget to let them work independently. In that event, according to the Navy, the total cost would be $10.4 billion.
Whatever the cost of teaming, Warner's Virginia colleague, Sen. Charles S. Robb, suggested Thursday that lawmakers should look again at whether they might save even more money by giving all the sub work to a single yard.
While many of his colleagues seem to be sold on teaming, ``I tend to frequently be the skunk at the picnic,'' Robb said.
``You can certainly make an argument that half a loaf is better than none and half a submarine is better than none,'' he added, alluding to the risk that Electric Boat might win a competitive bid process against Newport News. But Congress has an obligation to seek the best deal for taxpayers, Robb suggested.
Newport News has said it could substantially underbid Electric Boat's price for the new subs; executives of the Peninsula yard said two years ago that they might save the Navy up to $10 billion on the 30 subs it eventually hopes to build.
Robb said the Navy's proposal to take the bulk of its proposed cuts in manpower from the ranks of enlisted sailors ``would appear to move in precisely the wrong direction. . . . the services already may be top heavy with officers.''
A Navy spokesman said there is less room to reduce officers because of the need to keep service medical facilities fully staffed and the Pentagon's increased emphasis on joint operations with other military branches. A disproportionate number of medical and joint billets require officers, the spokesman said.
Robb said he also wants the entire military establishment to rethink its emphasis on readiness at the expense of weapons procurement. ``We've got to take another look at it,'' he said, with an eye toward permitting a limited number of units to reduce their readiness levels so that more money can be made available for weapons.
The Pentagon has embarked on a ``quadrennial defense review'' to examine such questions and determine just how much military manpower and weaponry the nation needs. ``Everything is on the table'' for that study, Cohen insisted Thursday, and the real fight for higher weapons spending, and lower manpower levels, may come in next year's debates for the 1999 defense budget.
KEYWORDS: DEFENSE BUDGET REDUCTION OF FORCES U.S.NAVY