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Last year Congress ordered the Pentagon to trim 43,000 men from the military; Schlesinger intends to cut 58,000 by July. His budget for 1975 does add one new brigade to the Army but requires the 4,000-5,000 men to be drawn from existing noncombat ranks. Schlesinger also is considering more base cutbacks. Last spring then-Secretary of Defense Elliot Richardson announced that 274 military installations in the U.S. would be closed, reduced or consolidated to save $350 million a year. Schlesinger has ordered the services to recommend this spring enough other bases that could possibly be closed to save an additional $500 million a year.
Schlesinger must also devise a way to keep up the quality of the military's enlistees. In June 1973 the military draft ended, and the services began depending entirely on volunteers. Thanks to their more dramatic missions and weaponry, the Air Force and Navy have been able to meet their recruiting quotas. But the volunteer Army has not, and so far the quality of the volunteers leaves something to be desired. High school graduates now make up only 54% of the Army's ranks (and only 41% of the volunteers during the last three months of 1973), compared with 67% ten years ago. Blacks accounted for 27% of the new recruits in the last eleven months of 1973; in 1970 only 13% of all Army men were black.
Schlesinger says that the Pentagon "cannot guarantee the success of a volunteer Army" but will make every effort to make it work. As an inducement to volunteers, Congress has approved bonuses—$2,500 for a high school graduate enlisting for four years in a combat arm, $15,000 to a doctor who signs up—and has dramatically raised military pay. It now costs taxpayers $12,448 a year to maintain each person in uniform, compared with $3,443 in 1950. In all, the volunteer force has added $3.1 billion a year to the Pentagon budget. Manpower now accounts for 56% of defense costs, compared with 43% ten years ago. Still, even skeptics like Chairman John Stennis of the Senate Armed Services Committee agree that the volunteer Army should have three years to prove itself before a decision is made about whether to resume the draft.
Dwindling Reserves. Pentagon costs have also sharply escalated because of the energy crisis. In 1973 the military spent $1.6 billion for fuel; next year it estimates the cost at $3.1 billion, despite a drop of about 17% in usage. The savings were accomplished by such measures as cutting the time spent by ships at sea by as much as 20% and military flying time by 18%. Schlesinger says that there has been "some degradation of readiness," even though in the event of a war the military could commandeer fuel from civilians. Still, the cutoff of Middle East oil caused reserve stocks to dwindle to 15% of capacity (the actual figures are classified). The Pentagon expects the Arab oil embargo to end soon and military reserves to be back to normal by the end of June.
Schlesinger argues that big as the proposed $85.8 billion budget for 1975 sounds, it is really rather modest. Allowing for inflation, it is about $8.7 billion less than was spent in 1964, before the big Viet Nam buildup began. The proposed 1975 outlays would consume 5.9% of the U.S. gross national product —the same portion as last year but far less than the 8.3% of the G.N.P.