Paris, Tuesday, June 6, 2000 For Military's Budget Planners, Clinton Era Is Already History
By Thomas E. Ricks and Roberto Suro Washington Post Service
WASHINGTON - As far as the Joint Chiefs of Staff are concerned, the Clinton administration begins to end this week. U.S. military leaders say they will loyally obey the president's marching orders until the moment he leaves office in January. But when it comes to money matters, they already are targeting the next administration.
Disregarding guidance from President Bill Clinton's appointees at the Pentagon, the chiefs of the military services were to deliver long-term budget requests beginning Monday calling for additional spending of more than $30 billion a year through most of the decade, according to senior defense officials.
In dollar terms, the requests are an unprecedented demand for money by the uniformed services and would require an enormous shift of federal resources. They call for an increase of more than 10 percent over the current defense budget, a rise equal to almost the entire budget for the Education Department.
''The service requests have been unconstrained,'' a civilian Pentagon official said.
But the chiefs are not just looking to the future. Their requests are being written with one eye on the current presidential race. In effect, they are putting big dollar signs on campaign promises made by Governor George W. Bush of Texas and Vice President Al Gore to strengthen the military.
The chiefs are ''putting both candidates on notice'' that the services already feel shortchanged and overworked even before taking on new responsibilities, such as Mr. Bush's proposal for a missile shield and Mr. Gore's notion of ''forward engagement'' in trouble spots, one senior uniformed official said.
''We're going for the big money,'' said an officer on the staff of the Joint Chiefs, adding that his bosses were ''a little bit like kids in the candy store, partly because they see Bush doing well in the polls against a sitting vice president.''
The thousand-page documents that each of the services was to deliver to the Office of the Secretary of Defense starting Monday - Program Objective Memorandums, known as POMs - are normally an obscure bureaucratic exercise that kicks off the Pentagon's internal process of developing the next defense budget.
But this year, the POMs are more than that. With a wrath directed almost as much at Republicans in Congress as at the Democrats in the White House, the chiefs are insisting that they will set dollar figures and dare the civilians to buck them.
''Instead of a budget based on a top-line budget number, the chiefs are demanding a budget based on military strategy,'' a senior uniformed official said.
In recent weeks, Mr. Bush and Mr. Gore have begun sparring over national-security matters. Both candidates support increased defense spending, but neither has said how far he would be willing to go. With their budget wish lists, the service chiefs will put down markers against which the candidates can be judged.
''What the chiefs have identified consistently in their congressional testimony is that despite the gains we've made, there remains a significant shortfall between our validated requirements and the money available in the budgets,'' said Captain Stephen Pietropaoli of the navy, spokesman for the Joint Chiefs.
Pentagon insiders say the Clinton administration, which long has felt vulnerable on military issues, does not believe it can afford a public feud with the chiefs - especially in the midst of Mr. Gore's campaign.
So, these officials say, aides to Defense Secretary William Cohen are seeking only to avoid confrontation and to tamp down the controversy. Their job is made especially difficult because Mr. Cohen and some of his top aides are Republicans and already are seen as politically suspect by some in the White House.
One career bureaucrat in the office of the secretary of defense said privately that he had been offended by the arrogant tone that service officials had used in recent discussions.
''I would never let the services talk to me the way this leadership is letting the services talk to them,'' he said.
As on many other issues, Mr. Gore's position is made more difficult by the need to defend the Clinton administration's record: Defense spending dropped from 20.7 percent of federal outlays in 1992 to 14.8 percent this year.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Gore argues that this post-Cold War reduction was well managed and that over the past two years the administration has recognized the need for modest increases in defense spending.
By contrast, a senior military official said the chiefs' budget demands represented a ''repudiation of bankrupt thinking'' in the White House and in Congress, which have asked the military to conduct a growing number of missions around the world in recent years without paying the full bill.
Since the defense budget bottomed out in 1998, Mr. Clinton and Congress have increased Pentagon spending by nearly $20 billion.
For fiscal 2001, which begins Oct. 1, the president requested $291 billion in budget authority for the Defense Department, an increase of $11 billion over the current year. Nonetheless, the chiefs told Congress in February that even at that level, they would be $16 billion short.
Mr. Bush criticizes Clinton defense policies as seven years wasted ''in inertia and idle talk.''
Mr. Bush proposes a $20 billion increase by 2006 in research and development spending, which currently runs about $38 billion a year, so that the military can ''skip a generation'' of technology.
Building these new weapons ''will require spending more and spending more wisely,'' he has said, without indicating how much he would expect to spend.
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