New budget gamble

The first defense budget the Bush administration has written from scratch is based on the controversial premise that it is better to risk having too few aircraft and ships today in order to free up money to buy new ones for tomorrow. This could well mean that the Navy fleet will fall below 300 ships and that some Air Force, Navy, and Marine pilots will wake up one day to find that there are no aircraft for them to fly.

The impetus for taking this gamble, which many members of Congress are sure to challenge when they study the fiscal 2004 defense budget in the coming weeks, is that the cost of keeping the old stuff ready to fight "is eating us alive," as one admiral put it. All the same, military leaders hate to give up large numbers of weapons, because no ship or airplane-no matter how sophisticated-can be in two places at once.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff looked at this choice between numbers and money and went along with the recommendation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to take scores of weapons, including more than 20 warships, out of service in the coming fiscal year. Rumsfeld's new fiscal 2004 budget also forgoes upgrading a whole series of weapons the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps developed during the Cold War. Canceling incremental improvements on aging weapons in the Army alone, according to Rumsfeld's budget chiefs, will save $300 million on the Army's M-1 tank and $275 million on its Bradley Fighting Vehicle in fiscal 2004, and billions more in future years.

If Congress goes along with this plan to pass over the old in favor of the new, the Pentagon claims, the much-feared "bow wave" that defense analysts have talked about for years will disappear. The bow wave refers to having to pay billions of dollars for new weapons all at once because old ones weren't replaced at a steady rate in earlier years. Under the new budget plan, such a bow wave would be wiped out by the year 2020, according to the Pentagon's moneyman, Comptroller Dov S. Zakheim.

To support this assertion, he reached for a recent Congressional Budget Office report in his office and read aloud a passage that backed him up. But before declaring victory over the bow wave, Rumsfeld, Zakheim, and the rest of their Pentagon team must sell Congress on a plan that could cost jobs in several of the lawmakers' home states.

And the Rumsfeld plan faces other big questions: If the Pentagon scraps lots of old aircraft at once, will it leave the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps with less than they need to patrol the world's hot spots? And will there be enough planes to fill up the spaces on Navy aircraft carriers, including a new $10 billion flattop that Rumsfeld has provided start-up money for in the `04 budget request?

Rummy has also decided to continue buying the new and expensive Air Force F-22 air-superiority fighter, costing upwards of $204 million each, the Navy F/A-18 E and F fighter-bomber at $90 million each, and the technically troubled Marine V-22 Osprey troop-carrying aircraft costing $100 million each. President Bush's campaign rhetoric about skipping generations of weapons, especially ones like the F-22, which was designed for fighting the long-dead Warsaw Pact air forces over Europe, raised expectations that he would cancel one or more of those aircraft as part of "transforming" the armed services for the new threats of the 21st century. This hasn't happened.

"It's the worst of both worlds," said Pentagon tactical aircraft specialist Franklin Spinney of the Rumsfeld plan. Spinney and his allies warn that there will not be enough old planes to run all the missions, and the new ones cost so much that the services can afford to buy only a few of them, resulting in a procurement "death spiral" in which most of the military's planes grow older and older, and thus more dangerous to fly.

Zakheim said the death spiral would be worth worrying about "if we were simply planning to replace the same kinds of planes with the same kinds of planes, or if we were organizing our ships exactly the same way. The argument doesn't hold, once you start talking about really using unmanned aerial vehicles and having them work synergistically with bombers or [troops] on the ground." The argument didn't even conceive of the possibility that the Navy and Marine Corps would combine their air forces under a new agreement in which the Marines would have a squadron of their aircraft and pilots in every one of the Navy's 11 aircraft carrier air wings, Zakheim added.

Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., in his first news conference since becoming chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, served notice that he, too, would attempt to restructure the armed forces-but by addition, not subtraction. He said that as chairman he would try to push the Pentagon's weapons-buying budget up from the current $71.6 billion a year to $90 billion. So the Pentagon's master plan to rob today's Peter to pay tomorrow's Paul is in for some tough questioning on Capitol Hill in the months ahead.