Serious problems in store for proposed military cuts - proposed $10.8 billion reduction in defense spending - Column

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 8, 1993 | by Frank Gaffney, Jr.

The Clinton administration has dropped the second shoe on the U.S. military. First the president tried to impose his decision to legitimize open homosexuality in the armed forces after only token consultations with military leaders. Then, on Feb. 3, Defense Secretary Les Aspin gave the services less than a week to come up with a further $10.8 billion in cuts in defense spending.

As before, there was in the more recent episode apparently no opportunity afforded the Joint Chiefs of Staff to comment on the wisdom or impact of such hastily imposed and draconian cuts - cuts made all the more devastating by the fact that they came on top of dramatic reductions effected during the Bush administration. As before, the only discussion is supposed to be about how best to implement the president's decision.

While the president and his new team may not want to be bothered by the facts, there are a number of serious problems with this new pronunciamento that must be considered by responsible policymakers:

* Woolsey's Threat Assessment: In his confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, new CIA Director James Woolsey warned that the threats the United States will face in the post-cold War world are likely to be less predictable but potentially more dangerous than those of the past.

There is no evident connection between this accurate depiction of the challenges likely to face American interests - at least some of which may require military responses - and the further dismantling of the U.S. armed forces upon which President Clinton has embarked.

* The Meat-Ax Treatment: Clearly, some military capabilities are going to be more urgently required than others in the emerging geostrategic environment. And yet, the Clinton defense cuts follow the past practice of more or less equally distributing the reductions, with each of the services having to take a hit of $2.5 billion to $3 billion.

This approach is all the more bizarre in light of the widespread belief that a reordering is long overdue of the "roles and missions" assigned to the various elements of the armed forces. In all likelihood, such a reordering would require a redistribution not only of duties but of resources; it is, therefore, logically a step that should precede any further budget cuts.

* Wiping Out Deployable Strategic Defenses: The Aspin plan calls for cutting roughly 40 percent ($2.5 billion) from the fiscal 1994 budget for strategic defenses. As a practical matter, such a reduction will be tantamount to killing the program, particularly if Congress - as it has done time and again - proceeds to make further, substantial reductions in the Strategic Defense Initiative account. The effect will be to continue to deny the United States any protection against long-range missile attacks and to provide only limited theater defenses.

* Return of the "Hollow Military": The bulk of the money that will be ponied up by the services will come from the accounts that are used up most rapidly, i.e., those that pay for operations and maintenance, or O&M. These funds directly affect the readiness and morale of the armed forces. Sharp reductions in O&M funds mean less training, fewer flying and steaming hours and shortfalls in spare parts. They are particularly troublesome when they are compounded by cuts in personnel and force structure - cuts that add to the arduousness of military life for those who continue to serve and that aggravate the wear and tear on deployed equipment.

The combined effect of such steps would be to hollow out the military in a manner reminiscent of the condition the armed forces were in during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. It will take years, and immense quantities of tax dollars, to restore U.S. power projection capabilities to the level of readiness and effectiveness demonstrated so impressively in their first post-Cold War conflict - Operation Desert Storm.

* Attrition in the Defense Industrial Base: A further repercussion of the Clinton defense cuts will be to exacerbate the already far-advanced liquidation of much of the industrial infrastructure needed to support a modern U.S. military. At the low levels of expenditure envisioned for research and development and procurement of weapons and related equipment, real - and relatively immutable - choke points will be built into the nation's future capacity to produce war-fighting materiel, should the need arise.

Time after time in this century, the United States has tried to cash in a "peace dividend" when an immediate threat to the nation's security was perceived to have dissipated. Each time the nation overdid it; too much military capability was liquidated too fast and with too little regard for the abiding dangers and attendant necessity for strong U.S. armed forces. In the wake of these cyclical episodes, one thing became clear: Whatever short-run savings were achieved paled in comparison with the immense outlays required to compensate for such cuts and to reconstitute industrial capacity and force structure that had been imprudently liquidated.