Army May Bear Brunt of Budget Cuts, Cheney Hints

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, providing the first public signal of the Bush Administration’s priorities in an age of shrinking defense budgets, said Friday that the United States must preserve its naval supremacy and modernize its strategic nuclear weapons. Implicitly, that could put the burden of budget cutting primarily on the Army.

Declaring that the role of U.S. ground forces in Europe is “up for grabs,” Cheney suggested in an interview with The Times that the task of maintaining ground forces on the continent could be left to the NATO allies.

He called his comments “a reflection of the strategic situation: We are the major maritime power, just like the Soviets are a major land-based power.”

Cheney’s remarks came a day after President Bush, in an interview with a group of foreign reporters, said the United States will consider reducing its troop strength abroad.

“There’s a rapidity of change around the world . . . “ Bush said. “I’m not suggesting that forevermore we’ll have the same level of troops anywhere--standing army, Europe, Korea, anywhere else.”

Bush added that the United States is “certainly . . . not going to take unilateral action” in withdrawing troops or equipment from the soil of such longstanding allies. The transcript of the interview was released Friday.

Cheney, who also stressed that the United States would not act unilaterally in revising the NATO balance, said one possible future for NATO would give Washington’s North Atlantic allies the principal role in defending European soil, while the United States would boost naval and air forces in the alliance.

“Should the U.S., as some have suggested, take on a role that emphasizes more heavily the U.S. obligation in the naval area and in air supremacy and places a greater emphasis with our allies in terms of the ground combat role in Europe?” posed Cheney. “All of those issues it seems to me are up for grabs.”

At a later point in the interview, he said: “The U.S. is now and will want to continue to be the pre-eminent naval power in the world,” even as cuts are made in the overall defense budget. In addition, he said that “we’re going to want to preserve our strategic nuclear capability,” adding finally that the preservation of adequate conventional forces would be another demand.

Cheney’s views are consistent with those of many lawmakers and defense analysts, who have said that as budgets shrink and the Soviet military threat to Western Europe diminishes, the United States may plot a return to an American reliance on highly mobile naval forces, which are useful in Third World brush fires, and on nuclear systems, which are relatively inexpensive to build and operate.

At the same time, analysts have widely predicted that the United States would scale back the large and costly land armies it has maintained in Europe since the onset of the Cold War--the same prospect raised by the President.

The defense secretary’s comments came as the Pentagon entered a third week of what he called a “fascinating” period of budget review. The contingency plans ordered by Cheney on Nov. 13 anticipate as much as $200 billion being cut from the Pentagon’s budget blueprint for the next four years.

By ordering the sweeping budget review, Cheney said Friday he hopes he can convince his former colleagues on Capitol Hill that he should have the key role in shaping the future of U.S. military forces.

After the Thanksgiving break, Cheney--dressed in a sport shirt and sweater--met with leaders of the military services for the third day on Friday to discuss what changes they would make if the Pentagon were to continue the budgetary slide of the last five years. One senior Pentagon official present at those deliberations said that they have become a “straight, sober assessment” of military needs in a time of fiscal retrenchment.

They have also become the forum in which some of the nation’s most fundamental assumptions have been opened to question.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin L. Powell, has warned Cheney and others in those meetings that in accepting future cuts, American leaders must define the point at which the United States would relinquish its superpower status, according to one participant.

While Cheney appeared to concede Powell’s point, he suggested that dire foreboding is unwarranted.

“There is an irreducible minimum of defense capability that the United States is going to require, no matter what happens in the Soviet Union,” Cheney said. “We are a superpower, and we’re always going to want to have the capacity to deploy military force to safeguard American interests and to preserve our capacity to influence events in the world.”

At the same time, however, Cheney cautioned that he is “still a great skeptic” on the future of Soviet reform efforts. In directing the preparation of the new budget, he conceded that he has relented to congressional and public pressure in hopes that the concessions would secure him a principal role in shaping the new military order.

“I still think vigilance is the order of the day,” Cheney said. “I still think we have to be very cautious about assuming that Mr. (Mikhail S.) Gorbachev will be successful, or assuming that his successors will be more like him than like conventional Soviet leaders--Brezhnev, Khrushchev, Stalin, etc.”

Last April, the low-key Cheney made headlines and staked his position as one the Bush Administration’s most hawkish voices on Soviet issues when he predicted that Gorbachev would fail in his reform efforts and be ousted.

On Friday, Cheney made clear that his own views on Gorbachev’s prospects would be clearly expressed in the defense budgets he will send to Congress in the coming years.

“If we get a fundamental shift in Soviet policy, we have to make sure that we have protected our (research and development) base,” Cheney said. Calling U.S. technological advantages over the Soviet Union “absolutely crucial,” Cheney added: “You’ve got to structure your investment strategy accordingly.”

That strategy may become most evident in the Pentagon’s future budget requests for the Strategic Defense Initiative, commonly known as “Star Wars.” The program has been kept in a separate budget account, and contingency plans for deep cuts have not been ordered.

Cheney said that “no part of the budget is exempt” from cuts, but he added that the “Star Wars” program must continue to investigate a wide range of defensive technologies at least until 1994, when the President is scheduled to make a decision on whether to deploy a missile shield.

On another high-technology program that has drawn fire from congressional critics, Cheney signaled support for the Air Force’s planned purchase of 132 B-2 intercontinental bombers--at $500 million apiece. But he cautioned that Congress has ordered the Pentagon to review the purchase in an effort to reduce the cost of the program, and that Defense Department analysts are complying.

While those priorities are likely to draw controversy on Capitol Hill, Cheney said he hopes that his realism in facing budget pressures will win him the confidence of lawmakers.

“If we simply say, ‘heck no, we’re not willing to get a dime out of the defense budget,’ you lose your credibility with the Congress and with the public,” he said.

“That’s not the way I like to operate,” said Cheney, who has won high marks from lawmakers for his pragmatic approach to dealing with them.

Cheney’s willingness to deal with Congress on that footing, as well as his desire to review the division of labor within the NATO alliance, is expected to win him wide support from defense experts on Capitol Hill.

“It would be a mistake for NATO not to look at increased specializations as we come down to lower levels,” said Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We should not try to do everything.”

On Friday, Cheney called Congress “a major player” in the forthcoming debate over the relationship between U.S. forces and strategy.

At the same time, he said lawmakers “probably” will be the principal obstacle to his efforts to recast the U.S. armed forces into a smaller military force that remains as ready to fight as it is today.

“There will be a temptation . . . for Congress not to adopt a coherent overall strategy of how you spread fewer dollars across significant requirements,” he said. “Rather there will be those in Congress who will make decisions based upon interests back in their district.

“If Congress makes the decisions primarily upon their impact back home rather than what our strategic requirements might be, then we’re going to end up with less capable forces,” Cheney said.

That is a lesson that Cheney, a former Wyoming congressman, has already learned.

In his first budget submission, he tried to cancel a Marine aircraft program called the tilt-rotor Osprey. The move drew an army of lobbyists and lawmakers whose districts stood to benefit from the program, and they succeeded in keeping the program alive--at least for another year.

“I would hope we would now shift the debate to what it should have been and what it never has been: ‘What do we need for national security?’ ” said Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

But, Schroeder added, those larger considerations often are squeezed out by congressional concerns over more immediate issues--for example, job losses back home.

“Defense bills become public works bills,” she said.

That reality has not changed, noted Rep. Vic Fazio (D-Sacramento), a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee. “Members who have weapons systems, major suppliers in their districts can feel immediate job losses,” he said. “Despite all the rhetoric, we’re not really prepared for economic conversion.”

And in spite of Cheney’s efforts, some members of Congress, including even some in Bush’s party, made it clear that they are not about to relinquish the last word on the shape of the defense budget to the Pentagon.

“I’d be very surprised if this (the budget cutting proposal) is anything more than an exercise,” Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M) said.

Staff writers David Lauter and Paul Houston contributed to this story.