Breaking Out on Defense Issues

When it comes to the national defense, George W. Bush is not your father's Republican. He's not even his own father's Republican. On nuclear weapons, his rhetoric harks back to Ronald Reagan: "Our mutual security need no longer depend on a nuclear balance of terror," the Texas governor declared in a May speech, proposing to balance a defensive anti-missile system with deep cuts in the American offensive arsenal-an offer that recalls Reagan's to Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik in 1986. And on conventional forces, Bush departs altogether from traditional thinking to embrace "a revolution in the technology of war": Instead of investing more money in existing weapons, Bush declared early in his campaign, his administration would emphasize cutting-edge research to "skip a generation" ahead to radically new weapons that will be stealthier, faster, smaller and smarter than today's heavy-metal force.

If Bush lives up to these revolutionary words-an enormous "if" indeed-his willingness to sacrifice current systems, nuclear and conventional alike, to realize a visionary future could turn the defense establishment on its head. Bush has embraced ideas that break out of the box in which generals, admirals, senior civil servants and captains of industry have all lived for the last decade or more. In the words of his senior defense advisor, the Hoover Institution's Condoleeza Rice, Bush would reform the military "more seriously than any president since Harry Truman"-the man who created the Defense Department in the first place. But can Bush pull it off? And does he really want to?

Promoting a strong national defense is normally a no-brainer for Republican candidates. Indeed, as the campaign has heated up, Bush has increasingly and predictably denounced the Clinton-Gore administration for letting military readiness erode, while cautiously fudging on homosexuals in uniform by supporting the current "don't ask, don't tell" compromise. But on other defense issues, Bush has gone beyond the party line-and in so doing, has gotten himself in trouble with some of his natural allies.

The very day of Bush's May address offering to cut the U.S. nuclear arsenal steeply and even unilaterally, top military brass testified against such cuts. "Stability becomes a principal concern as you go lower and lower and lower," said Adm. Richard Mies, who heads the U.S. Strategic Command. "There is a cushion in larger numbers. And there is a tyranny in smaller numbers that reduces stability in certain situations." And just days later, Secretary of Defense William Cohen, a Republican, appeared on "Meet the Press" to denounce the "internal inconsistencies in [Bush's] argument."

Likewise, after Bush spoke on defense in one of his first major speeches of the campaign (at South Carolina's Citadel military academy last September), one defense industry official privately called his ideas "well intended" but "over-simplistic." While Bush's pledge of an additional $20 billion over five years for research on future weapons was welcome, the implication that current technologies now in production might be "skipped over" was not. Industry naturally prefers the bird in hand to the birds in the Bush plan. With budgets and profits just beginning to recover from a decade of post-Cold War downsizing, said another industry official, "the defense business community cannot afford another 'procurement holiday.' "

Nor can the military, argue many observers, because equipment bought during the Reagan administration build-up is wearing out. The Clinton administration itself has pushed hard on "leap ahead technology" of the kind Bush advocates, said one defense official, "but in some cases you get systems aging to the point where it's necessary to replace them with what you've got."

With all these obstacles, real reform will take a personal commitment from the next President. Skeptics do not expect Bush to take on the "iron triangle" of bureaucrats, contractors and Congress over an arcane issue that gets little political mileage with the voting public. Nor do they have much faith in Gore. "They will both claim to be reinventing the Defense Department, but the changes will be incremental," says Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute. "Neither of these candidates is sufficiently engaged in the internal management of the Pentagon to use up substantial political capital on truly fundamental reform."

But Bush advisors insist their candidate is committed to change. "He's really embraced it," says former Reagan official Richard N. Perle. "Some of the ideas obviously originated with his advisors, but he has taken this on from the very earliest discussions.... It squared with his own inclinations and his experience in Austin," a booming high-tech center.

And it is the Austin factor that may explain, as much anything, Bush's surprising stands on defense. He combines a Reaganesque faith in American know-how with the Information Age optimism of the New Economy. In his call at the Citadel to leap ahead to a new model military, he declared, "This revolution perfectly matches the strengths of our country-the skill of our people and the superiority of our technology." And when asked by reporters whether a national anti-missile defense was even feasible, given the failures of Reagan's "Star Wars" experiments, Bush replied that "the world has changed a lot since the eighties. Science is evolving; laser technology is evolving. There's a lot of inventiveness in our society."

Inventiveness may indeed abound, both in America at large and in the Bush campaign specifically. But, as the old saying goes, real reform will be ten percent innovation and ninety percent perspiration. The critical unanswered question is whether Bush's Austin faith in American technology will survive its first encounter with Washington bureaucracy.

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. is a staff correspondent at National Journal. James Kitfield also contributed to this article.