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At the least, Carlucci's moves will set guidelines for his successors in dealing with the new lean era. Beyond that? Well, Michael Dukakis has praised Carlucci for beginning to face up to the hard choices that must be made. This has led to speculation that Carlucci, who has already served one Democratic President (as deputy director of the CIA under Jimmy Carter), might continue to head the Pentagon through a Dukakis Administration. Dukakis "could do a lot worse," says Senator Nunn. In a Bush Administration, Carlucci would be a natural holdover, as well as a candidate for Secretary of State.
Keeping Carlucci at the Pentagon might not exactly be doing him a favor. Over the next five years, he figures, the Pentagon will have to slash appropriations by $200 billion to $300 billion below the amounts it had planned to spend. A $300 billion cut is roughly equivalent to the current year's total military outlays, from missiles to mouthwash, battleships to boots. And that amount is the optimistic estimate. It assumes that Congress will heed Carlucci's request to increase the Pentagon's budget each year by a steady 2% above the rate of inflation. While George Bush supports this idea, Dukakis talks of holding defense appropriations even with the rate of price increases.
On Capitol Hill, a chorus of voices warns that the Pentagon will be lucky to get even that much. Many members of Congress, searching for ways to cut the overall budget deficit, are in no mood to give the military any increase. According to Les Aspin, the Wisconsin Democrat who heads the House Armed Services Committee, the slash in Pentagon budget authority over the next five years is likely to be "closer to $422 billion" than to Carlucci's figures.
Cuts on that scale cannot be carried out by any nickel-and-dime process. The U.S. will have to reassess its commitments around the world, rethinking basic military strategy and the weapons systems needed to carry it out. The $300 billion budget for fiscal 1989, now in Senate-House conference, gives only a mild taste of what is ahead. To get within those limits, Carlucci will, among other things, retire a Poseidon ballistic-missile submarine, two Air Force wings (total: 144 planes) and 620 Army helicopters, and scale back the proposed number of men and women in uniform by 46,000, leaving a total of 2,138,000. Some 20,000 projected civilian employees will also be dropped. Though Congress so far has bought these proposals, they represent the kind of compromise that pleases no one fully. Says former Defense Secretary Harold Brown: "What Carlucci cut is just tiny compared to what will have to be done."
To carry out the slashes required in the future, the Pentagon will have to steel itself to cancel some of the shiny new weapons systems that it is about to buy. Over the next decade, the services are due to spend $80 billion for 132 radar-invisible Stealth bombers; $37.5 billion for 750 Advanced Tactical Fighters, the new jet that is supposed to replace the Air Force F-15; and an additional $35 billion for a Navy version of a similar aircraft.