Defense Secretary William Cohen discusses the Pentagon's fiscal 2000 budget, including more spending on weapons and high-tech aircraft, on Monday. (AP) Related Links Full Coverage: The President's Budget White House Economist Answers Your Questions

By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 2, 1999; Page A6

With the Pentagon and Congress locked in a contest over who can increase military pay more, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen warned lawmakers yesterday against raising expectations that could prove unaffordable or require shortchanging other defense initiatives.

The remarks came at a news conference detailing President Clinton's plan to boost defense spending and foreshadowed a political battle over how much will be enough to repair signs of eroding military readiness, and who will be able to claim credit for redressing defense shortfalls in next year's elections.

President Clinton's budget plan calls for the first multiyear increase in defense spending in 15 years, proposing an additional $112 billion over the next six years to improve benefits for troops, alleviate spare parts shortages, finance ongoing operations in Bosnia and the Persian Gulf, and produce a new generation of weaponry, including a system for shielding the United States against ballistic missile attack.

A centerpiece of the plan includes the biggest pay hike for troops since 1982 and a restoration of pension benefits cut in 1986, all part of an effort to stem a mounting exodus of people from military ranks. Clinton proposed a 4.4 percent across-the-board pay increase.

But Congress is already moving to up the bidding. The Senate Armed Services Committee last week passed a bill offering a 4.8 percent raise, plus education benefits and special help for the poorest service members not in the administration's proposal. To underscore the priority they give the measure, panel members took the unusual step of separating it from the larger defense authorization bill so that it can reach the Senate floor as soon as the impeachment trial ends.

Cohen said preliminary estimates show the Senate plan would cost $7 billion more than the administration's proposal through 2005. While the Senate bill had bipartisan backing, Cohen questioned whether enough votes existed outside the defense panel to ensure passage and worried that failure to fund the committee's higher figures would undercut whatever morale boost could come from Clinton's more modest proposal.

"Number one, don't take it out of the rest of the budget and thereby have another readiness deficiency or some other problem," Cohen urged lawmakers. "And please pay for it. . . . If we find ourselves with expectations being raised much higher and then not delivered, [the president's plan] will not have the kind of impact that we are hoping it will have."

The battle over defense spending is not likely to be limited to military pay. As sizable a boost as Clinton is proposing, it falls $36 billion short of what the military service chiefs told Congress last autumn was necessary to fund all their requirements.

Cohen yesterday reiterated that the administration's plan adequately addresses the military's "most pressing needs." But Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, issued a statement calling it inadequate.

"It is my intent and expectation that the committee and the Congress will support a total defense funding figure closer to that identified by the Joint Chiefs and higher than the president's proposed level," Warner said.

Any move to push defense spending even higher promises to aggravate already sharp political differences between the administration and Congress over how to reconcile larger projected budget surpluses with such other priorities as shoring up Social Security and Medicare, boosting education and granting tax breaks.

The $267.2 billion in defense budget authority that Clinton is proposing for 2000 represents a $12.6 billion increase in real purchasing power over what the administration had planned to spend on defense next year. But only $4.1 billion constitutes new money. The rest reflects savings from lower-than-anticipated inflation and fuel costs and other economic adjustments. Longer term, however, $84 billion of the proposed $112 billion six-year increase would be drawn from projected budget surpluses, officials said.

The 2000 budget plan provides $53 billion to buy more modern weapons, an increase of 6 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars from the $49 billion budgeted for 1999. This represents the second year in a row in which the administration has requested a real increase in funding for procurement and an 18 percent increase from fiscal 1997, when the Pentagon's procurement budget bottomed out.

But some critics have faulted the Pentagon for continuing to focus purchases on the kinds of forces suitable for large-scale conventional battles -- tactical fighter jets, aircraft carriers, heavy artillery -- rather than on more innovative technologies aimed at the nonconventional threats that U.S. forces are more likely to confront in the future.

Clinton's plan also seeks authority for two more rounds of base closures -- in 2001 and 2005 -- to generate $3 billion a year in savings, a proposal that has generated strong congressional opposition when put forward the past two years.