The Future Is Too High a Price for Maximum Readiness : Pentagon: Service chiefs would compromise fundamental strengths to protect their daily operations. Dick Cheney should discharge a few good men to keep his R&D; budget.

In response to Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s revolution, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney quite sensibly wants the Pentagon to cut its own spending requests rather than leave them to the chaotic swirl of uncoordinated House and Senate committee actions, single-program staff interventions and sundry lobbying intrusions. That was the ill-chosen course taken by his predecessor, Caspar W. Weinberger, whose unrealistic requests--budgetary equivalents of the charge of the Light Brigade--resulted in such wasteful contradictions as Congress voting funds for guns but not for bullets.

Having rejected Weinberger’s budgetary approach, Cheney must now guard against another of his predecessor’s errors: the failure to formulate an overarching defense list of what is to be kept and what is to be cut. Put another way, each military service should not be allowed to dictate its own preferences. Aside from the inevitable incoherence of divergent service priorities, there is a direct conflict of interest between the owners of the defense Establishment (the body politic as represented by Cheney) and its employees, both civil servants and military personnel.

Consider this analogy: If we as the owners of a hotel calculated that no guests would register in the near future, we would still want to replace worn-out furniture and add new facilities. We would not waste money to heat and clean unoccupied rooms, wash unused linens and buy food that would be thrown away at day’s end. We would also strive to retain highly skilled managers, cooks, groundskeepers and so on, while doing away with junior employees who can quickly be rehired when needed. Thus, we would be protecting our future by reducing unneeded day-to-day expenses.

Similarly, the Pentagon should shield its future--research and development, purchase of new-technology equipment, an essential cadre of officers, skilled enlisted personnel--from the budgetary ax. Funds to pay for active-duty, junior enlisted manpower and to maintain the day-to-day “readiness” of the armed forces should be trimmed. These latter categories account for well over 40% of total military outlays, certainly more than the impending defense cuts.

But just as the employees of our hotel would seek to protect their jobs by insisting on the need to keep rooms and restaurants ready for drop-in guests, even if that meant spending less on new furniture and facilities, the armed services are responding to Cheney’s call for order in the budget by protecting their personnel and operations. Research and development funding, purchase of new equipment, some forces and many bases--all can be cut, according to the service chiefs. But headquarters must be fully staffed and maximum readiness maintained across the board.

The Air Force has already published its list. Among other things, it would dispose of 15 bases, disband five fighter wings, slow down the purchase of the B-2 Stealth bomber and cancel new tactical missiles (thereby aggravating the imbalance between modern aircraft and outdated payloads).

To justify their priorities, the services invoke the bitter memories of the 1970s, when budgets greatly underestimated the effects of inflation, forcing them to cut back their purchasing plans every few months. As a result, forces scheduled for training lacked fuel and ammunition, and those supposedly active were actually immobilized by shortages in spare parts and maintenance backlogs. Worse, morale fell dramatically. Many senior enlisted personnel with valuable skills and invaluable experience retired prematurely.

The service chiefs would have us again choose between strategically unnecessary maximum readiness and a return to the demoralized, “hollow” forces of the 1970s. But there is a better alternative: a planned, non-demoralizing reduction in day-to-day readiness spending accomplished by transferring active forces to reserve status. Many officers and skilled enlisted personnel would be kept on active duty to maintain, train and supervise these reserves.

Active air wings underfunded by 25% are thrown into chaos, but the same money will fully pay for Air National Guard wings of high skill and excellent morale. U.S. Army forces transferred to the reserves (not the poorly officered Guard) are amply funded at 50% of their active equivalents, while the savings for Navy ships are somewhere in between.

Actually, each type of force should be treated separately. While strategic-nuclear and rapid-intervention forces such as the Army’s light divisions should be kept fully ready, many other Army, Navy and Air Force units could go to existing reserves. In other cases, an in-between “ready-reserve” status might be appropriate. In all cases, the aim should be to preserve remobilization capacity for an unknown future rather than to disband forces that could not readily be reconstituted if needed.

Just as we would not sacrifice the future of our hotel to pay for cut flowers for every unoccupied room every day, we should not compromise defenses that we might need for an unpredictable future for the sake of across-the-board “readiness” spending that can be reduced far more safely.