Military Future Similar But Smaller

The Quadrennial Defense Review that will be released today was supposed to be a blueprint for revolution that anticipates the war-fighting needs of the next century and offers a plan to meet them.

But if advanced reports are accurate, the next generation military proposed in the review strongly resembles the Cold War military of the past, only smaller.

Under the proposal, which has slowly leaked out over the last week: No programs will be scrapped, and America’s military strategy - having the resources necessary to fight two regional wars simultaneously - will not be altered. The Air Force is expected to lose 1 active duty wing, which means 27,000 people will lose their jobs. The F-22 Raptor program - which is now managed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio - will be reduced by 99 planes, to 339 The Joint Strike Fighter will be reduced by 300 to 1,700 The Army would lose 15,000 soldiers, the Marines 1,800 and the Navy would drop 18,000 troops.

While the Navy would lose almost half of the 1,000 F/A-18 fighters it had wanted, it will pick up 200 more Joint Strike Fighters than it requested.

It’s too early to tell what impact, if any, these cuts will have on Wright-Patterson, but the Air Force’s “crown jewel” is not likely to be threatened even by proposed base closings, experts say.

“That will not be a problem for a place like Wright-Patt,” said Phil Odeen, chairman of the National Defense Panel which will critique the defense review. Odeen is chief executive officer of BDM International, Inc., an informationtechnology company with offices in the Miami Valley Research Park.

Critics already have dismissed the Defense Review as just modest budget cutting, but others contend that it was foolish to expect anything more from a defense secretary who has been in office just four months.

“There was just no way they would do anything big,” said Lawrence Korb a former assistant secretary of defense who now studies military issues for the Brookings Institution.

These numbers may be slightly different when the report is made public, but most experts agree the thrust of the budget trimming will remain intact. While they say no service is hurt badly, the Air Force takes a big share of the cuts by enduring losses in personnel and key weapons programs.

“Yeah, it is puzzling,” said Michael Vickers of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank. “Talk to Air Force officers and they don’t understand why they’re not doing much better compared with everybody else.”

Defense Secretary William Cohen hasn’t confirmed any of those details but he is defending the work in the Defense Review as a “good first step,” which is not the “fundamental stock-taking” other defense officials promised at the start.

“I believe the defense department has really done a very good job of looking at the world as it is, trying to examine the threats that are here now, midterm and long term,” Cohen said Friday.

He said the United States must keep troops in the Asia-Pacific region and in Europe in order to influence allies and adversaries.

And all the while modernizing equipment and holding the budget at today’s level of $250 billion a year. To do that, the Defense Review carves out about $3 billion a year from the massive tactical air programs that include the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor and Joint Strike Fighter, and the Navy’s F/A-18 fighter.

These planes are to replace a generation of air fighters that began controlling battle air space in the early 1970s. But some defense experts outside the Pentagon say the treatment of the tactical air programs in the Defense Review represents everything that’s wrong with the review as a whole.

They say hot new air fighters are simply a shiny new link to the past.

“We’re modernizing weapons systems that were designed for the Cold War,” said retired Vice Admiral John Shanahan, director of the Center for Defense Information. “We’re going to modernize a Cold War force.”

Shanahan is part of a large group outside the Pentagon that believes the U.S. must undertake a radical departure from military convention to prepare for the future of warfare.

That future will involve terrorism, long range missile attacks and weapons of mass destruction, such as nuclear and chemical weapons.

“Now how do you use an F-22 in dealing with these kinds of threats?” Shanahan said.

And Korb of the Brookings Institute, who once taught political science at the University of Dayton, also sees problems in the emphasis on tactical air.

He said it’s contradictory for the Pentagon to purchase both the stealthy and innovative F-22 at $71 million each, and the Navy’s overhauled F-15, the suped-up F/A-18 at about $61 million a copy.

“If the Navy’s right then the Air Force is spending too much money, and if the Air Force is right than the Navy is buying outmoded technology,” Korb said. “These are the questions that the QDR needed to answer.

“But they’re hard.”