In his State of the Union address, George Bush stressed the importance of the death of ”imperial communism,” which created such dread and demanded such sacrifice from the American people.
To judge from the administration`s defense budget, it isn`t so much the American people who need reminding as the president.
His Pentagon spending program is scaled down considerably from what was planned a year ago or three years ago. Despite the immense changes in the world environment, though, neither our military budget nor our military vision would change very much if Bush has his way.
Prudence was the right watchword in the early Gorbachev years, when it wasn`t clear whether the Cold War was truly at an end. But what looked like prudence a few years ago looks like an insufficient attention to reality today. It is a prescription for a spending burden considerably heavier than American taxpayers should have to bear.
Bush says he wants to cut $50 billion from the Pentagon budget over five years. Unfortunately, he`s talking about cuts from previously projected increases, not from current spending. Under that approach, Pentagon spending would remain more or less fixed in nominal dollars, meaning any reductions would result from erosion by inflation. Defense spending in 1997 would be about $290 billion, the same as in 1993.
The administration says that would mean real spending would shrink by 4 percent a year, cutting expenditures to the level they were in the early 1960s. True enough-but why should spending in 1997 be as high as it was when the U.S.-Soviet competition was at its peak? How long do we need a huge force in Western Europe or a navy big enough to annihilate the old Soviet navy?
The truth is that with the Soviet Union gone and its successor states`
embracing partnership with the West, there is no formidable military threat to U.S. interests anywhere. The real danger is most likely to come from a Third World despot trying to acquire the bomb-the kind of situation where tanks and attack submarines may not be of any use.
Of course downsizing presents challenges. The trick is to cut the size of the military without impairing its ability to perform its essential tasks-and to do it without throwing too many service personnel onto a civilian economy that at the moment is in no condition to absorb them.
But the transition shouldn`t be as hard as the abrupt demobilization required at the end of a shooting war. And most of the reductions should take place after the long-expected recovery is under way.
”This deep, and no deeper,” Bush warned Congress about his defense cuts. But it`s clear that his Pentagon plans should be taken as a beginning, not an end.
