Shooting the Moon on Defense

By Susan Tifft

The President's military budget draws fire on Capitol Hill

With the press looking on, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger held up a photograph showing a stack of documents 6 ft. 3 in. high: it was the 1984 defense budget, with supporting documents. This year's stack promises to be taller still. Even allowing for inflation, the 1985 budget is the largest submitted by the Pentagon since World War II, including the years of the Korean and Viet Nam wars. It had something for everyone, as the Senate and House Armed Services committees found out last week in sometimes fractious briefings. Said one Senate staffer: "In a $305 billion budget, there can't be any real losers."

Even not counting their first-time allocations for accrued retirement pay, the services put in for eye-popping increases. The Air Force asked for $104.3 billion, an increase of 21%. The Navy claimed $96.7 billion, an 18% boost. The Army, the services' poor boy for the 14th straight year, requested $72 billion, up 15%. With the higher budgets came proposed boosts in enlistments: 15,000 for the Air Force (to 610,000), 10,000 for the Navy (to 575,000), 3,000 for the Marines (to 200,000), and 1,000 for the Army (to 781,000).

The new budget, like those in recent years, called for sharply higher outlays for military hardware and weapons development. The Pentagon wants a go-ahead to spend $107 billion on weapons procurement, up 25% from last year, and $33.9 billion for research, an increase of 26%. The military's operating and maintenance budget increased 14.7% (to $80.9 billion), and personnel expenses inched up a relatively modest 9% (to $67.8 billion).

High on the Pentagon's shopping list were two controversial big-ticket items. Some $8.2 billion was earmarked for 34 new B-1B bombers. The 1985 budget also seeks $5 billion to buy 40 MX missiles. Congress provided $6.2 billion for the MX over the past twelve years, but until fiscal 1984, the money was only for development. Also requested: 48 F-15 fighters (at $22 million apiece), 150 F-16s (at $15.1 million) and 720 M-1 tanks (at $2.1 million). There was a new, high-tech entry: $1.8 billion in seed money for President Reagan's Star Wars plan to develop a space-based system capable of intercepting missiles targeted at the U.S.

Weinberger defended the increases as necessary if the U.S. is to match the military might of the Soviet Union. The Reagan Administration, he said, "has made significant prog ress in restoring the credibility of our forces." Yet, he warned, the Soviets outspent the U.S. on defense by a hefty 40% during the past ten years. When asked about recent CIA and NATO reports indicating that Soviet military spending has been markedly less than many Western analysts had assumed, Weinberger answered, "It's not what the Soviets spend, but what they get for it."

Weinberger offered an incentive for congressional cooperation. "If we are allowed to continue on the path we have set," he said, "we can look forward to a time, only two fiscal years from now, when defense increases can begin to slow dramatically." The Pentagon projects that outlays would rise 9.2% in 1986 and a mere 3.9% in 1989. The military's share of the overall budget, however, would jump from 29% in 1985 to 32% in 1989--still far less than the 50% high of the mid-1950s.

Democrats on Capitol Hill seemed in no mood to go along with the Administration's shoot-the-moon request. At the Senate hearing, Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts pressed Weinberger to say whether the U.S., after Reagan's arms buildup, was really weaker than the U.S.S.R. Snapped Weinberger: "I don't answer yes or no to questions like that." Weinberger's reception at the House Armed Services Committee was equally frosty. Given social-spending cuts, said California Democrat Ronald Dellums, the proposed defense budget represents "a level of obscenity that's extraordinarily difficult to understand." Retorted Weinberger:

"I've never thought of myself as a public pornographer." Democrats for Defense, a group of former senior Pentagon officials, held a press conference to criticize the Administration for pushing "un sustainable spasms of spending." They presented a rough list of cuts that would whittle the defense increase to 5%, largely through the elimination of the most controversial weapons systems: the MX, the B-1B and the Star Wars project. When the Government overloads its budget with high-priced hardware, said Robert Komer, an Under Secretary of Defense in the Carter Administration, it is as if a "family bought so many sports cars it could not afford an iron or a toaster." The debate promises to sharpen this week when maverick Defense Department Analyst Franklin C. ("Chuck") Spinney presents the House Budget Committee with an updated version of his "Plans/Reality Mismatch" study of military cost overruns.

Spinney was denied access to the figures Weinberger used in his testimony, but the current budget projections proved damning enough. Despite Reagan's cost-control reforms, says Spinney, the Pentagon continues to make overly optimistic assumptions about the inflation rate, the amount Congress will actually appropriate for defense, and the cost-saving effects of the "learning curve"--the decrease in the cost of a weapon as it is produced in volume over time. Between 1985 and 1989, for example, the Pentagon assumes the MX will be a full 58% cheaper than it is today. Spinney's all too obvious recommendation: a more conservative budgeting strategy.

By week's end, the question on Capitol Hill was not whether the defense budget would be cut, but how and where. Congressmen, however, have found talking a lot easier than trimming. Last year they shaved only $17 billion off the Administration's $274 billion budget authority request. Commented Alan Greenspan, chief economist under President Ford: "Everybody is terribly anxious to control defense expenditures--in other people's districts."

With reporting by Christopher Redman, BRUCE VAN VOORST