WHY THE PENTAGON GETS A FREE RIDE

By Mark Thompson/Washington

It was as if the Berlin Wall had never come down. Last week the House National Security Committee force-fed the Pentagon $553 million to start building more B-2 bombers, whose original mission was to wage nuclear war against the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the Senate endorsed a budget blueprint, including a $1.5 billion payment on the Navy's third Seawolf attack submarine, which was created to track and destroy the Soviet navy, and is now rusting at pier side. And the Army's first rah-66 Comanche helicopter-designed to defeat Moscow's Hokum helicopter-rolled out of a Connecticut factory attended by bunting, a military band and a real, befeathered Comanche chief.

As anxious advocates for the poor and elderly fight to stave off budget cuts, the Pentagon seems immune. 0ne would never know it, however, from the rhetoric wielded on behalf of Pentagon spending. "You couldn't fight Desert Storm today," House Speaker Newt Gingrich told TIME, despite Pentagon assertions that the U.S. military is now primed to fight two such wars at once. "We're going to get people killed if we downsize much more."

In fact, defense spending today is lapping close to its level during the cold war. The Pentagon proposes to spend 92-c- for every cold war dollar, once adjusted for inflation. The House committee last week recommended a $267 billion defense budget for next year, $9.5 billion more than Clinton is seeking. The Senate approved a budget resolution that mirrored Clinton's defense request, and the final figure will probably split the difference and provide around $270 billion. But even Clinton's sum is more, after adjusting for inflation, than the U.S. military spent annually in the mid-'50s and mid-'70s.

Even on its post-cold war diet, the U.S. military costs nearly as much as the rest of the world's armies put together. "There's no other country that has the requirements we're confronted with," says Defense Secretary William Perry. "Unless we're willing to back off those requirements and go into an isolationist stance, we will have a uniquely high military budget."

But this high? Pulling back the curtain on the Pentagon's battle plan discloses a patchwork of arbitrary decisions and inflated threats. In 1993 the Administration concluded that the U.S. military needed enough forces to win two "major regional contingencies," each akin to the Persian Gulf War, at the same time. But there is growing sentiment in defense circles that the nation's two-war strategy is wrong, at least in light of expected funding levels. "The two-war strategy is just a marketing device to justify a high budget," says Pentagon cost analyst Franklin Spinney. A study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, concludes that projected spending is "incapable of meeting" the two-war requirement.

Some defense experts, including the most recently retired member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, argue that the two-war plan should be jettisoned for a smaller military able to prevail in a single, major conflict while deterring would-be foes from starting a second. "We should walk away from the two-war strategy," says retired Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill McPeak. "Neither our historical experience nor our common sense leads us to think we need to do this. We've had to fight three major regional contingencies in the past 45 years," the former four-star general says, referring to Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. "One comes along every 15 years or so -- two have never come along simultaneously."

Even before leaving the Pentagon, McPeak pointed out the excess in his own bailiwick, the U.S. Air Force. While the Air Force is the world's largest, with 3,200 planes, the U.S. Navy's warplane fleet of 1,900 ranks as No. 3, after China's 2,800, he pointed out. Not a single one of the U.S.'s currently likely foes has more than about half the number of planes that the U.S Navy alone has. McPeak maintains that the costly demands to outfit and train some 1.5 million troops for two wars is bleeding dry the military's readiness and weapons-buying accounts. "If you come down to 1 million troops," McPeak says, "you can do one war, be ready to do it and be modernized to do it." Scaling back to such a force would permit the Army to cut its 10 divisions to six and the Marines its three divisions to two, according to some defense experts. Air Force fighters could fall from nearly 1,000 to 400, and the Navy's carrier fleet could shrink from 12 to 10. Lawrence Korb, a top Pentagon official during the Reagan years, agrees with McPeak's estimate that scaling back to a force for "one war plus deterrence" could save about $50 billion annually, or about 20% of the defense budget.

McPeak dismisses the gospel of his former fellow Joint Chieftains, who insist that retreating from a two-war strategy would tempt troublemakers once U.S. troops were pinned down in the first conflict. "Not true," he insists. "If the adversary sees the U.S. keeping its commitment somewhere, it deters the second. Nobody in the world is anxious to fight the U.S. if they judge that we are serious." McPeak acknowledges that the Clinton Administration's shaky relations with the military make it unlikely that this Administration would push to replace the two-war strategy with a more modest pledge, although the Pentagon's civilian leaders quietly suggested it two years ago. "They got their shins kicked," says McPeak. "It has to be a hard-line guy who says, 'This is silly.'"

But perhaps the strongest pressure for maintaining a well-equipped military is economic: defense spending amounts to a domestic-jobs program. Congressman Floyd Spence, who chairs the National Security Committee and hails from a South Carolina district bristling with military facilities, proposed in February that Congress boost Pentagon spending $125 billion more than Clinton had proposed for the next five years. But Spence ran into spending slasher John Kasich, chairman of the House Budget Committee. A frustrated Spence even accused Kasich of "siding with people who want to destroy our nation's defense." Kasich prevailed, but knows his own limits. He will fight proposed spending for the B-2 but will leave it to others to stop the Seawolf.

The current Air Force chief, General Ronald Fogleman, has recently gone for rides on Russian warplanes and cites their impressive performance to justify the Air Force's new F-22 fighter, which costs $150 million per plane. He concedes that the F-22 could be downed by budget-balancing lawmakers, but he refuses to declare that it's time to retreat from the two-war doctrine. "I'd like to be like General McPeak," he says, "and wait until I retire before I espouse my opinion on that." ^1