Bush defense budget: Something has to go

It’s been clear for some time that in order to pay for his generous promises to today’s military members plus a national missile defense system, President Bush would have to make some substantial cuts in other areas of military spending.

Indeed, we were curious in November why the military seemed to favor Bush over presidential candidate Al Gore, who promised a substantially larger military budget.

While details of Bush’s new defense budget are sketchy so far, it basically tracks what the Clinton administration had planned to spend, a small increase over this year’s budget.

But he can’t do everything in that budget plus the improved — and well-deserved — pay and benefits he’s promised the troops, plus his — we believe — unwise insistence on plunging into extravagant missile defense spending, without a huge boost in the defense budget.

One mistake Bush is wisely avoiding is the one made by President Reagan, who paired an even bigger tax cut with the huge increase in defense spending that ultimately bled the "evil empire" to death. That mistake led to 18 years of national red ink.

It appears it will be a major responsibility of Bush’s promised "strategic review" to identify the items thought indispensible last year that will be extraneous next year.

And that’s an exercise that, in principle, is badly needed. In practice, the politicization of defense spending (and the resulting fierce resistance to budget trimming) has bordered on the scandalous for decades.

As Bush correctly pointed out in his address Tuesday, spending should be determined by strategy, and not the other way around.

There’s no question that the military budget is replete with weapons systems the Pentagon didn’t even want but was forced to buy by lawmakers trying to boost the fortunes of home-town defense industries. An honest, no-nonsense appraisal of such spending should produce important savings.

And the Bush administration is correct in reminding that the military still has a 23 percent surplus of bases, despite previous rounds of base closings. It’s not the Pentagon that defends the retention of these unneeded facilities. Bush will need to prevent Congress from torpedoing the new closings.

We recognize that when we support base closings, we risk feeling the bite here in Hawai‘i. But it’s the right thing to do.

Barbers Point Naval Air Station was a casualty of the last round of closings. In hindsight, however, the return of that facility to the community will have left us better off in the long run.

Strategic considerations — we’re closer to the next likely war than the Mainland is — will protect most of Hawai‘i’s bases from closing, but parts of facilities such as Bellows, Wheeler or Lualualei seem lightly used. We’ll see.

In sum, then, we support the improvements to military lifestyle, deplore Bush’s insistence on missile defense and remain hopeful that the coming spending trims will keep the Pentagon within budget without weakening our forces — a tall order.

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