By Guy Gugliotta and Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, April 20, 1999; Page A15

Senators and House members returned from a weekend visit to the Balkans deeply moved by the plight of the Kosovo refugees and convinced that NATO's air war against an entrenched Yugoslav enemy may last for months. They pledged to meet President Clinton's emergency funding request, and Republicans vowed to go considerably beyond it.

The White House budget office yesterday formally submitted a $6 billion request, of which $5.1 billion will be used for continued air operations and war material through Sept. 30, and the rest to cope with hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees from the Serbian province of Kosovo.

But GOP leaders anxious to augment defense spending yesterday renewed calls for the bill to go substantially beyond Kosovo-related needs to make up for what House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Texas) called "six years of neglect" by the Clinton administration. "Even $10 billion would be insufficient," Armey said in a letter to House colleagues.

Other estimates of military needs have ranged as high as $23 billion. In fact, however, one senator suggested that $8 billion to $9 billion – "staying below double digits – might be all that the country could tolerate without the GOP being perceived as "piling on." The expanded bill could include a military pay raise, enhanced retirement benefits and replenishment of assets taken from other parts of the world to fund the Balkans conflict.

Regardless of the amount of the bill, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) warned it "cannot be short-sighted – it cannot simply replace bullets for bullets and bombs for bombs spent in Kosovo. The Kosovo crisis has exposed how our national security is now in real danger."

Any emergency funding bill, if it not offset by cutting other programs, would be financed from this year's anticipated $111 billion budget surplus, all of which is money from the Social Security trust fund.

Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) warned Republicans against adding too much, saying "if we overburden this vehicle, it . . . will stop." Excessive add-ons, he suggested, could cause Democrats to recommend a veto.

Despite the simmering partisan funding quarrel, there appeared to be little disagreement among the 21 senators and House members who traveled to the Balkans about the seriousness of the war and the desperate plight of the refugees.

"If you were a parent, you couldn't see this without reacting emotionally," said House Appropriations Committee Chairman C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.). Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, he added, "should be terribly ashamed of himself."

Lawmakers agreed the air campaign would not end in the near future. "This is going to last longer than anybody is thinking, and we better get used to the idea," said Sen. Fred D. Thompson (R-Tenn.).

Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he now believes the air campaign "will take many months," while Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) predicted "two to five months."

And even then, Rep. Henry Bonilla (R-Tex.) said, "there seems to be a consensus, or a fear" among Balkan officials "that Milosevic will never give up. That's the realistic picture we got."

Office of Management and Budget Director Jacob Lew said yesterday that so far the Defense Department has incurred nearly $1 billion in Kosovo-related military expenses – $698 million on munitions, and $287 million on operational expenses. There have been additional expenses for humanitarian aid, a total he said is not yet available.

Both the Senate and House Appropriations Committees will hold hearings on the presidential funding request this week. Stevens said he hoped to have the bill debated and passed in both houses of Congress by April 30.

Senate Armed Services Committee member Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), said he was "a little astonished" at the lack of planning for a ground campaign and would not vote to send ground troops until the administration spells out "the mission and [its definition of] success."

But Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), a senior appropriator, said that a ground campaign might be inevitable. "I don't think anybody has the sense you can overcome an entrenched, dug-in force simply by bombing," Hoyer said.

Staff writer Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.