Maintaining U.S. Security in an Era of Fiscal Pressure

U S Security i n an Era o f Fiscal Pressure I As the Bush administration and the lOlst Congress settle in, the political mood in Washington is different from the popular ”Don’t Worry, Be Happy” song of last year. The dilemmas that confront Washington will be hard to handle, in particular the defense budget dilemmas. How is the United States to: Robert F. EILsworth -scale back the underfunded defense programs of the 1980s, to the tune of $230-475 billion,’ while continuing to maintain an adequate force structure and to modernize certain conventional and nuclear weapons systems, while limiting defense spending to help balance the budget deficit by middecade , without raising taxes or dipping into the Social Security trust fund? -size and shape the American defense posture for an era when the traditional bases for planning may not be valid, or may not seem valid, given the “new thinking” in Moscow? -deploy adequate forces where we will continue to have vital national interests-in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Persian Gulf, East Asia and the Pacific-without stretching ourselves so thin we lose credibility everywhere? I wish to thank retired Rear Admiral William Wyatt, Joseph Fromm, Christopher Makins, Dr. Robert Nurick, and Dr. Condoleezza Rice for reviewing an early draft of this paper; but none of them bears any responsibility for the form or substance of the paper as here presented. Robert F. Ellsworth is the Vice Chairman of the Council of the London-based International lnstitute for Strategic Studies. He was Deputy Secretary of Defense (1975-77); Ambassador to NATO (1969-71); and a Republican Member of Congress from Kansas (1961-67). He is now based in Washington, where he is a consultant and a director of several corporations with operations throughout the United States and in Europe and Asia. 1. All such estimates have some validity, although they arise from entirely different calculations and serve different political purposes. The $230 billion underfunding estimate represents the amount by which President Bush would have to cut the proposed Weinberger program (over the period 1990-94) if Congress were to increase 1989 defense budget authority by two percent a year in real terms over the next five years. If Congress were instead to reduce real defense spending by, say, three percent annually-as it has over the past three years-the underfunding would be about $475 billion. See William W. Kaufmann, ”A Defense Agenda for Fiscal Years 1990-1994,” in John D. Steinbruner, ed., Restructuring America’s Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1989). International Security, Spring 1989 (Vol. 13, No. 4) 0 1989by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 16 Maintaining U.S. Security I 1 7 -reduce the role (and the numbers) of nuclear weapons without exposing the nation and its allies to the risks of overreliance on conventional forces for deterrence, which would be inherently incredible and destabilizing? These challenges are highly politicized by the subtle, high-stakes crossgames being pursued by the administration and congressional leaders: to coopt each other to help fill in several large, newly discovered fiscal sinkholes and end the eight-year Reagan freeze on innovative social benefit legislation without taking an initiative on taxes, yet maintain a strong defense posture along with existing international commitments. There is an additional, deeper dilemma that the American defense budget process can only influence indirectly, but which will have enormous and pervasive influence on the defense budget, and it cannot be resolved before another five or ten years have elapsed. This is the strategic dilemma of how to guard against a new Soviet military threat come roaring back after a few years' breathing spell, while taking advantage in the meantime of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's intention to replace East-West hostility and global class warfare with global trade, paranoia with openness, military superiority with "reasonable sufficiency,"2 unremitting anti-Western hostility with cooperation on world hunger and the environment, and-above allto replace the nuclear threat to the Soviet Union with the complete elimination of nuclear weapons by the year 2000. It is the cognitive dissonance between the five- or ten-year testing period...