Bush could make major changes at Pentagon

George W. Bush could make major changes at the Pentagon if he capitalizes on three realities and two early opportunities. The first reality is that executive power simply is greater in national defense than in many other areas. The second is that partisan divisions over the military are small right now, and a consensus exists to spend more money. The third is Dick Cheney.

Cheney, Bush's choice for Vice President, isn't just a blast from a past Bush administration. The former Defense Secretary is also the most prominent of an army of reform-minded military experts who backed the younger Bush. It was their influence that led Bush to promise during the campaign to take on the arcane issue of restructuring U.S. forces into a more agile, Information Age military. And if Cheney continues his penchant for making the hard decisions quickly, something might actually happen at the Pentagon in coming months. Remember: As the elder Bush's Defense Secretary, Cheney slashed one top-dollar weapons program and canceled two others, most prominently the Navy's A-12 bomber.

Two early tests will show whether the new Administration is serious about military reform. The first opportunity is the fiscal 2002 budget, said David S.C. Chu, a RAND analyst who worked for Cheney in the Pentagon. The second opportunity, he said, will be the Quadrennial Defense Review, the key planning document that the military draws up every four years to update the national military strategy. Although both the budget, which is due to Congress in February, and the QDR, due in September, have already been extensively drafted by the bureaucracy, "that doesn't mean that, at the level of the Secretary of Defense and the President, you can't begin to make major changes," Chu noted, citing Cheney's cuts. "I would challenge the supposition that he can only sort of tinker at the margin and make a few symbolic changes. Not true."

Adding extra dollars to selected programs in the budget would be both administratively practical and politically popular, and something Bush could do right away. But watch where those dollars go. If the money were added to big-ticket weapons, such as the Air Force's F-22 superfighter, it would signal a more-of-the-same approach. On the other hand, if additional cash was put toward the Army's controversial "transformation" effort to enable the Army to deploy troops and equipment overseas faster, or for the Joint Forces Command's experiments to make the military services operate more smoothly together, it would signify a down payment on change.

A Bush Administration's next test would be the Quadrennial Defense Review. Critics, including some Bush aides, call the legally mandated QDR a sterile exercise, in which rival Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine bureaucracies bicker over the budgets for their existing pet programs without ever considering a vision for comprehensive change. The bureaucrats' preparations for this review are already well under way: As early as this spring, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Henry Shelton, felt compelled to tell the services to slow down and leave some leeway for the next Administration.

"What's under way is an effort by the bureaucracy [to] work out a united front that requires a higher defense budget and satisfies everybody's parochial requests," said former Defense official James Blaker, of the Science Applications International Corp. If Bush is serious about reform, Blaker said, "he either has to ignore the QDR or try to challenge it. You will probably see a really great fight inside the Pentagon."

With what is likely to be an experienced national security team, Bush should have the confidence, and the credentials, to challenge the defense establishment without being criticized as being soft on defense or being forced to back down. As former Reagan Defense official Lawrence J. Korb told National Journal, "Dick Cheney and Colin Powell are not going to be intimidated by the Pentagon."