By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 17, 1997; Page A07

Warning Congress against resisting his most politically sensitive proposals for defense cuts, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen yesterday challenged lawmakers to put aside parochial interests and support the closure of more military bases and reductions in the Army National Guard.

He defended the cost-saving moves as necessary to step up purchases of new weapons and equipment after years of declining military procurement.

"I'll put it to the Congress and say: . . . Would you rather protect bases or put modern equipment in the hands of soldiers?" Cohen told reporters, ahead of the formal release Monday of a major Pentagon review of military strategy and capabilities. "Would you rather protect your facilities or protect the forces?"

Cohen indicated he was bracing for a fight given the economic benefits that many political districts draw from hosting military bases and reserve units.

"I expect to hit a firestorm when I go up next week" to testify on the plan, Cohen said. "I don't have any misapprehensions about that. I know what's coming. But I will present what I believe to be the best choices, and then we'll have to work together."

The results of the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review, which have been widely reported over the past week, reflect months of intensive internal study and represent the first major test of Cohen's four-month-old leadership of the Defense Department. Originally intended to provide the framework for defense planning in President Clinton's second term, Cohen yesterday characterized the review more as a starting point for further debate.

"This is not a one-year, one-shot proposition," he said at a lunch with defense reporters. "This is something that will have to evolve."

Cohen said the United States had run out of easy choices for sustaining a modern military with global obligations and forecast a year or more of tough political argument before a new consensus can be reached on how to allocate U.S. defense dollars.

The secretary's proposal for two more rounds of base closings in 1999 and 2001, along with a decision to slash Army reservists, already has stirred outcries in Congress of too much, too soon. At the same time, other critics have faulted the revised Pentagon blueprint for not going far enough in reorganizing outdated military structures, canceling new weapons programs conceived during the Cold War and preparing U.S. forces better for likely new kinds of 21st century warfare.

According to a near-final draft of the plan, which was still being revised yesterday, Cohen has decided to cut the active-duty military by 60,000 persons, on top of the 30,000 drop already scheduled between now and 2003. The current level is 1.45 million.

The reductions represent only a modest decrease compared with the loss of more than 600,000 active-duty personnel since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and the military services have found ways of absorbing the new cuts without sacrificing major combat units.

The Army, due to give up 15,000 soldiers, will keep its 10 divisions. The Navy, losing 18,000 sailors, will keep its 12 carrier battle groups (although minus about 15 surface ships). The Air Force, surrendering 27,000 airmen, gets to hold onto the equivalent of 20 tactical aircraft wings (although formally minus one wing of general-purpose fighters). And the Marines, cut by 1,800, still will have three division-sized expeditionary units.

Plans also call for a 55,000 decrease in reservists, 45,000 of whom are to come from the Army's 575,000. The number of civilians who work in the military services and defense agencies, previously planned to drop from 800,000 to 720,000 by 2003, will decline another 80,000.

Cohen further has decided to sustain plans to buy three new types of jet fighters – the Air Force's F-22, the Navy's F/A-18E/F and the services' Joint Strike Fighter – although projected orders will be trimmed for the Air Force and Navy planes. Purchases of the Marine Corps' MV-22 "tilt-rotor" helicopter also will be reduced, but deliveries will be accelerated. At the same time, the $2 billion budgeted for developing a national missile defense system will be doubled to expand testing, and an additional $1 billion will go toward countering the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

Defense officials have justified preserving the combat force at about its current size to retain the capability to fight two regional wars nearly at once and still meet the growing demands of post-Cold War peace operations. Some defense experts have questioned the continued need for the two-war requirement, since the two most likely U.S. opponents – Iraq and North Korea – constitute a diminishing military threat. But the final report on the Quadrennial Defense Review says maintaining the requirement is essential to deterring opportunism and ensuring the credibility of America's national security strategy.

"If the United States was to forgo its ability to defeat aggression in more than one theater at a time, our standing as a global power, as the security partner of choice and the leader of the international community, would be called into question," the report says.

At the same time, the report forecasts that demands on U.S. forces to participate in peacekeeping operations, humanitarian assistance efforts and other noncombat missions – dubbed "small-scale contingencies" – are likely to "remain high over the next 15 to 20 years" and "pose the most frequent challenge for U.S. forces through 2015."

As a result, the report adds, "the ability to transition between peacetime operations and war-fighting remains a fundamental requirement for virtually every unit in the U.S. military. United States forces must be multimission capable."

With annual defense spending likely to remain at most around the current $250 billion level, the notion that the United States could continue to afford as large a force as it has and still pay for a stepped-up modernization program has struck many defense experts as unrealistic. The Pentagon report acknowledges the failure in recent years of meeting planned increases in the procurement account, which has been stuck at around $40 billion. The report says funds originally budgeted for modernization have been siphoned away to cover contingency operations and higher-than-expected depot and property maintenance costs, as well as to compensate for lower-than-expected savings from various cost-reduction initiatives.

Military leaders have estimated about $60 billion a year is needed to replace aging planes, ships, tanks and other equipment. Without the proposed cuts, the report estimates a shortfall of $10 billion to $12 billion in procurement by the turn of the century.

The report reaffirms the goal of reaching the $60 billion target by 2001. The new reductions would contribute an estimated $6 billion to $7 billion toward closing the projected gap, defense officials said yesterday.

Cohen plans to try to narrow the gap further by taking another look in coming months at the extensive network of defense agencies that fall under the defense secretary's office and have ballooned in recent years.

The bulk of the trims offered by the recent review came out of what defense officials call the support "tail" rather than combat "tooth" of the force – logistics support, personnel services, headquarters functions and so on. About 60 percent of the people employed by the Defense Department perform such infrastructure functions, even after a work force reduction of 28 percent since 1989.

A further reduction down to 33 percent by 2003 had been planned before the review. The newly proposed cuts would constitute a further loss of 109,000 civilian and military personnel, the report says, and bring the total reduction to infrastructure employment to 39 percent.

But central to these plans is congressional permission to close more military bases.

Cohen told reporters he was sensitive to the political pain of base closings, having experienced it personally as a Republican senator from Maine.

But he said the military chiefs have urged more closures. He expressed confidence that congressional anger over what some members saw as Clinton's politicization of the base-closing process in 1995 – when the president moved to protect jobs at Air Force depots in California and Texas by arranging to shift operations to the private sector – could be addressed by legally barring such moves in the future.