President Bush wants to spend $750,000 a minute on national defense in the coming fiscal year, even though the active-duty force will be only two-thirds the size of the force that President Reagan financed for the same amount of money 20 years ago. And despite all this new money, so few new weapons will come out of factory doors that old planes and ships will have to keep flying and sailing long past their retirement age. Generals and admirals are not happy. So how come we're spending more and seemingly getting less? "That's a very good question," responded Dov S. Zakheim, the rabbinical chief financial officer of the Defense Department. For one thing, he said, the active-duty military force will in a sense be taxed heavily to pay for the retired force, just as the working children of Baby Boomers will be taxed heavily to pay for their parents' Social Security. "When you have a [military] medical system which increases by 12 percent a year, you are doubling your medical costs every six years," Zakheim said. "When you pay for [military] pharmaceuticals at the rate of 15 percent growth a year, you'll double your pharmaceutical costs in less than five years." On top of such ballooning health costs for military members and retirees (who were given generous benefit increases in recent years by successive Congresses and presidential administrations) are a number of other people programs that do nothing directly to take a hill, destroy a tank, sink a ship, or capture a terrorist. Military pay is one such expense. It keeps going up, as presidents and Congresses make good on the promise of former Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird, who wanted to make toting a rifle in the all-volunteer military as remunerative as filing papers in an office as a civilian. (Laird ran the Pentagon from 1969-73.) Bush is asking Congress to give everybody in uniform at least a 4.1 percent pay raise in fiscal 2003, with many in specialized jobs to get an extra 2 percent. Health, pay, and other people programs eat up almost one-third of the Pentagon's discretionary budget. This is more than twice the amount spent on developing tomorrow's weapons (which gets 14.2 percent of the discretionary budget) and far more than the 18.1 percent spent on buying today's aircraft, ships, tanks, and smart bombs. People programs for the military have become as sacrosanct to Congress as Social Security. Also, the kind of wonder weapons and high-tech communications gear that starred in Afghanistan have a long and difficult birth. These weapons and gear often take more than 10 years to go from the drawing board to the battlefield. They also cost more than their simpler predecessors, because the Pentagon puts quality over quantity. Zakheim cited "bandwidth" as one such new, high-tech money eater. " 'Bandwidth' itself is a buzz word" now heard all around the Pentagon, he said. It's an umbrella term for the ability to deploy sophisticated electronics to enable satellites, planes, ships, soldiers and even individual weapons to talk to each other as if they were on a telephone party line. Add to all of the above the siphoning-off of money for homeland defense, including missile defense, and you have other billions in the fiscal 2003 budget that won't go to weaponry that shoots at the enemy on distant battlefields. Given all these demands, a president can keep military spending within reason only by cutting something old to buy something new. This requires making unpopular choices, such as killing off Cold War weapons championed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their allies in Congress. As a candidate and as a newly inaugurated president, Bush sounded as if he were up to this challenge. He promised to reform the Pentagon, possibly skipping a whole generation of weapons to build something really new rather than tinker with the old. But his new defense budget--the first one he can call his very own because he had time to build it from the ground up--is not the brand-new, 21st-century blueprint for the American military that Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had promised. Instead, at the core, it is pretty much Clinton's 20th-century blueprint put on speed in the form of extra billions of dollars. Compare the first defense budget of President Reagan and Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, which they inherited from President Carter and overhauled, with the one that Bush and Rumsfeld inherited from Clinton but waited until 2003 to overhaul: It's deja vu all over again (in Yogi Berra's immortal words). Like Bush and Rumsfeld, Reagan and Weinberger heaped new money on old programs, and they ended up in their very first budget year in fiscal 1982 spending $380 billion, in equivalent fiscal 2002 dollars. Even allowing for inflation between fiscal 2002 and 2003, this amount is remarkably close to the $379 billion Bush is requesting for the coming fiscal year. Reagan's fiscal 1982 budget financed the activities and equipment of an active-duty force of 2.1 million men and women. Bush intends to spend a like amount on a force of 1.4 million troops, about one-third smaller than the one deployed in 1982. Also, Reagan's fiscal 1982 procurement account--the one that paid for new planes, ships, tanks, and munitions--was $106 billion in fiscal 2002 dollars, compared with Bush's request for $68.7 billion in his new budget. This is why you will hear flag officers telling Congress in the coming weeks that this giant defense budget still is not big enough to modernize America's armed forces. Yet, if you divide the $396 billion Bush wants for national defense this coming year--a total that includes the cost of Energy Department nuclear warheads and other defense items outside the Pentagon's budget--by 365, you come up with the amount that taxpayers shell out a day: $1.08 billion, equal to $750,000 a minute. Just as Weinberger went from the nickname "Cap the Knife" as the penny-pinching Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary to "Cap the Ladle" in Herblock cartoons ridiculing his high defense budgets, so are the rising defense budgets projected by Bush apt to change Rumsfeld's public image from a reformer to a conformer. Rumsfeld's call for the armed forces to field lighter, faster, and more-deployable forces instead of clinging to the "legacy" systems remaining from the Cold War rings hollow next to the dollars Bush wants to spend on such big-ticket items as these:
- Crusader self-propelled howitzer. At 80 tons, 40 for the gun vehicle and 40 for the trailer, this weapon, designed to obliterate Soviet divisions attacking NATO forces in Europe, is one that many Pentagon insiders and outside analysts predicted that Rumsfeld would kill. But the Cold War Crusader is alive and well in Bush's defense budget. It is slated to get $475 million in the coming year, only slightly less than Clinton provided.
- Army Comanche helicopter. The Army has been trying to come up with a new and winning helicopter nearly as long as the Chicago Cubs have been trying to come up with a new and winning baseball team. Despite criticism that the Comanche is too much Cold War and too much money, Bush is asking Congress to increase funding for the copter from $781 million in fiscal 2002 to $910 million in fiscal 2003.
- Navy Virginia-class attack submarine. Envisioned originally as a deadlier killer of Soviet submarines than previous models, the Virginia has had to cope with the advent of a kinder, gentler Russia. So the Navy is downplaying its submarine-hunting role. It's emphasizing instead the ability of this $2.5 billion boat to lie off hostile shores, eavesdrop on enemy communications, and fire Tomahawk cruise missiles at land targets. The new Pentagon budget book lists anti-submarine warfare last in describing what this chameleon of a weapon can do. Bush, like Clinton before him, is seeking $2.5 billion to build another of these subs.
- Tactical aircraft. Before and during the Clinton years, a number of congressional leaders--including then-Chairman Sam Nunn, D-Ga., of the Senate Armed Services Committee--questioned the wisdom of trying to pay for three new fighter-bomber programs at once for three different aviation arms: Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. Bush takes up where Clinton left off by seeking $3.5 billion for the tri-service Joint Strike Fighter, a program that some commentators said was on Bush's chopping block; $5.2 billion for the Air Force F-22 air superiority fighter; and $3.3 billion for the Navy F/A-18 E and F fighter-bomber.