Defensive About Defense

By Evan Thomas

The President's speech had all the trappings of a major offensive, but in fact he was fighting a rearguard defense. When Ronald Reagan took to the airwaves last week to beseech the nation to continue backing his massive defense buildup, the rumbles of discord threatened to drown out his ardent pleas and shift the public attention from funding the Pentagon to reforming it.

All those horror stories of waste by the Pentagon and fraud by defense contractors--the $400 hammers, the $600 toilet covers--have taken a toll on the national consensus for reversing what Reagan has called the "decade of neglect" that sapped U.S. military strength in the 1970s. For the first time since Reagan launched his $1.5 trillion defense buildup five years ago, polls show sharply declining support for increased military spending. In Congress, deficit cutters in both parties are arguing that the Pentagon cannot be exempted from the budget ax. And two days after the President spoke last week, a commission appointed by Reagan himself issued a report arguing that unless the Pentagon undergoes major structural changes, more dollars for defense may simply be frittered away.

Reagan's speech showed yet again his unwavering commitment to what he called his "highest duty as President"--building and maintaining a strong national defense. Strength is the only way to make the Soviets negotiate arms reductions and "cease bullying" smaller nations, the President insisted. "Tonight, the security program that you and I launched to restore America's strength is in jeopardy," he said, "threatened by those who would quit before the job is done." He spoke of the arms-control talks now under way in Geneva. "Just as we are sitting down at the bargaining table with the Soviet Union," Reagan pleaded, "let's not throw America's trump card away."

The President's rhetoric was hardly new. He used the same "bargaining chip" argument to win funding for the controversial MX missile. Increasingly, however, Congressmen are fixated on the bottom line. Though Reagan spoke of seeking only "modest 3% annual growth," in fact his budget request for 1987 calls for a hike of at least 12% over 1986 spending, from $278.4 billion to $311.6 billion. Furthermore, the Congressional Budget Office calculated that the President's defense budget underestimates its true cost by $14.5 billion. Most Congressmen believe that in the end the President will be lucky to hold next year's defense spending at this year's level, and some warn of defense cuts of up to $50 billion. In his televised response to the President's address, House Democratic Majority Leader Jim Wright argued that limiting defense spending would be necessary since budget deficits "themselves pose a danger to our national security." Even some members of the President's own party were moved more by the exigencies of red ink than by the Soviet threat. "It's my feeling that the President's appeal will not fly," stated G.O.P. Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa.

When scandals over weapons procurement began to shake public support for the President's defense buildup, the White House created a commission last summer to recommend management reforms. But it soon became clear that the commission, chaired by David Packard, multimillionaire businessman (Hewlett- Packard) and former Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Nixon Administration, would affirm that billions of defense dollars had in fact been wasted.

Worried that the report would appear just as the President was launching his campaign for more defense spending, White House and Defense Department officials scrambled to try to keep the Packard commission from undercutting the President's defense budget crusade. Indeed, a draft by Commission Member James Woolsey, who was Navy Under Secretary during the Carter Administration, vividly depicted Pentagon shortcomings. One passage, for instance, compared stewardship of the Pentagon to the story of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the master magician's young helper who learned how to start the magic but not how to stop it. But at the insistence of Reagan loyalists on the commission, the language was "dulled up" to sound more like a typical presidential commission's findings. Meanwhile, Reagan's speechwriters pre-emptively embraced the commission's findings with some hedged language. "Wherever the commission's recommendations point the way to greater executive effectiveness, I will implement them," Reagan stated, "even if they run counter to the will of entrenched bureaucracies and special interests." Allowed one White House aide: "The Packard commission is a train we either jump on or get run over by."

Even toned down, the 23-page Packard commission report is in spots bluntly critical of the way the Pentagon and Congress shape defense budgets. "There is no rational system," the report states, for reaching "coherent and enduring agreement on national military strategy." With some exceptions, "weapons systems take too long and cost too much to produce." Fraud and dishonesty are not principally to blame, says the report; rather, "the truly costly problems are those of overcomplicated organization and rigid procedure."

The report outlines a number of steps to cut through red tape and simplify and centralize decision making:

To aid long-term planning and avoid the chronic instability created by annual appropriations, it calls on Congress to pass two-year defense budgets.

To ride herd on the overlapping and fractured weapons-buying bureaucracy, the commission would create a "Procurement Czar," formally known as the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition.

To cut down on confusing lines of command, the commission would strengthen the role of the ten theater commanders who actually control the troops in the field by making them report to the Secretary of Defense through the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The theater commands are now unified in name only. For example, the Commander-in-Chief Pacific (CINCPAC), who happens to be a Navy admiral, lacks the authority to choose his Air Force subordinate, who in practice is far more beholden to the Chief of the Air Force.

To reduce interservice rivalry in strategy and budget decisions, the commission would reform the Joint Chiefs of Staff and strengthen the role of the Chairman. The Joint Chiefs are the uniformed heads of the four services and are supposed to advise the President and Secretary of Defense on military needs. Under the existing system, the Chiefs are torn between looking out for their own services and shaping a coherent national-defense strategy, while the Chairman has an impressive title but no staff or real authority. The Packard commission would make him the President's principal uniformed adviser in fact as well as name, and put the JCS staff of 1,200 officers and civilians under his authority. Most important, the Chairman would be charged with arbitrating disputes among the individual service Chiefs.

This call for reforming the JCS is perhaps the most significant, and will no doubt be the most controversial, of the Packard commission's recommendations. Former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger has testified before Congress that the Chiefs resolve differences by "log rolling and back scratching." Retired Army General David Jones, a former Chairman of the JCS, has stated, "The corporate advice provided by the JCS is not crisp, timely, very useful or very influential." At budget-writing time, the Joint Chiefs usually present a wish list to the Secretary of Defense and fight for every dime. More often than not, say critics, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger's response has been to give each service pretty much what it wants.

Congress is currently wrestling with various proposals to reform the JCS structure. The House last fall passed a bill to strengthen the role of the Chairman, and the Senate Armed Services Committee is about to do likewise, despite howls of protest from the current service Chiefs. The Navy, traditionally the most independent of the services, is making an all-out blitz to block the legislation, which would "make a hash of our defense structure," according to outspoken Navy Secretary John Lehman. Nonetheless, Weinberger has signaled that he will not oppose the legislation, and passage of some version seems likely.

Clarion calls for Pentagon reform have been heard before. Since World War II, at least 35 groups have been impaneled to study the Pentagon. "Few of these countless proposals and recommendations have been taken seriously, and an even smaller number have actually been adopted," noted a Senate Armed Services Committee study on defense organization last fall. Needless to say, merely rearranging boxes on an organization chart hardly guarantees success. Still, even among the Pentagon's staunchest allies, a search for meaningful reform is under way. Increasingly, the question is becoming not just whether to spend more on defense, but how to spend the money more wisely.

With reporting by Barrett Seaman and Bruce van Voorst/Washington