Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, April 10, 1990                   TAG: 9004100641
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A/3   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: WALTER R. MEARS ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

CHENEY STANDS FIRM FOR CAUTIOUS DEFENSE CUTS

"He said it was the only thing standing between us and the Russians," House Speaker Thomas Foley kidded Cheney at a formal dinner 10 days ago.

Cheney is the administration's ranking budget hawk these days; he's being needled and challenged on all fronts. He makes a logical, tightly reasoned case for a slow and cautious reduction in defense spending, but the pressure is intense to cut more, faster. The cutback case is made with matching logic, and with the advantage of representing change in a time of dramatic world change.

"The minute Dick Cheney walked through the Pentagon door he ordered all the clocks set back 10 years," joked Foley, a friend and a House colleague before Cheney joined the Cabinet.

"No matter what you've heard, I'm not a relic of the Cold War . . ."Cheney joked back. "But . . . somebody in this town has to worry about what we're going to do when Stalin dies."

There are serious numbers behind all that, beginning with the $295 billion defense budget the administration seeks for the year beginning Oct. 1. That's more dollars than this year, but it represents a 2.6 percent reduction in inflation-adjusted spending.

Cheney recommends 2 percent cuts in each of the following four budget years.

Democratic leaders, and now two Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, say those reductions don't go deep enough. Sens. William Cohen of Maine and John McCain of Arizona said Thursday that the defense budget can be cut by twice as much as the administration is proposing, to save at least $50 billion more over the next five years.

Foley said their proposal will not pre-empt Democratic demands for sharper defense budget cuts. He said it shows the administration does not have wide support for the spending levels Cheney is advocating.

"The administration is really quite isolated in this," the speaker said Friday.

Cheney has been arguing his side of the case in congressional testimony, speeches and Pentagon statements. He put it all together in an address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors last Wednesday, saying the administration "has moved aggressively" to change defense proposals to fit changing times.

"But as secretary of defense, I have to focus on Soviet capabilities," he said. "Intentions can change overnight. Capabilities take much longer to alter."

Cheney said those capabilities include the world's largest standing army, and a strategic nuclear force even now being modernized.

So, he said, the administration is proceeding cautiously and prudently, with a five-year defense plan that would cut spending by some $231 billion, putting the defense share of the budget and the gross national product at the lowest levels since before World War II.

Even in the best of international circumstances, Cheney said, if the United States is to remain a leading world power, it must maintain offensive and defensive strategic forces; a system of military alliances; troops deployed abroad, fewer in number but still there; naval superiority; flexible forces to react to varying contingencies; and an industrial base to produce high-technology weapons.

Cheney said people who talk about cutting defense spending by half over the next 10 years "would give us the defense budget of a second-class power - the budget of an America in decline.

"Far from becoming less of a force in the world, America is going to be taking on greater global responsibilities in the years ahead," he said. "No other nation will be capable of our kind of global reach.

"Security threats were not invented by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and threats will remain long after that party's gone out of business," he said. "As a result, the world will still be a dangerous place, a place that will continueto benefit from - and indeed require - the stabilizing influence of the American military."

That, in brief, is the case advanced by the administration's point man on the defense budget. The counter-arguments are being sounded in Congress. The battle over defense spending is just beginning.