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Then come the Navy's new SSN-21 attack submarine ($2.9 billion for just the first one ordered); the Army's proposed Forward Area Air Defense system, a complex of sensors, guns and missiles to provide air cover on the battlefront ($60 billion); and the bills for two more nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, approved by Congress last year ($20 billion with escort ships and airplanes). The Administration is also asking for upwards of $5 billion a year for the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Most critics agree with Gordon Adams, director of the Washington-based Defense Budget Project, that these weapons probably can be bought "only at the price of a drastic cut in the size of the U.S. armed forces or a debilitating slash in spending for readiness" (training, ammunition, spare parts). The whole contretemps raises a harrowing but unavoidable question: Can the U.S. afford to pay for the defense it needs -- and just how much does it need anyway? In his best-selling book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Historian Paul Kennedy points out that such dominant nations as Spain in the 16th century and Britain around 1900 began to fade in part because they were burdened by military commitments greater than their slipping shares of the world's economic activity could support.
Carlucci indignantly rejects any thought that this pattern is applicable to the U.S. today. It is "ridiculous," he says, "to say that our country cannot afford 5.9%" of gross national product, approximately the current rate for national defense. Yet Congress is reflecting a judgment that gargantuan deficits ($147 billion this year) will eventually cripple the economy. They cannot be significantly reduced without a whack at planned military spending, which constitutes 27% of the entire budget.
The fiscal bind is one that the Pentagon should have foreseen. Carlucci, who spent two years there in the early 1980s as the No. 2 man, has long grumbled, as have others, about the historic "sawtooth" pattern of defense appropriations -- way up for a few years, way down for the next few. In the early Reagan years, reversing a series of deep cuts in the mid-'70s, Congress voted military-spending increases as much as 13% above the rate of inflation; from 1980 to the peak in fiscal year 1985, Pentagon budget authority zoomed from $144 billion to $295 billion. The Pentagon's appetite for deluxe weaponry swallowed up so much of those titanic sums that the buildup failed to achieve some major goals. Overall, it did bring a much needed improvement in U.S. combat strength. But Ronald Reagan's dream of an Army of 18 full-strength divisions, a 40-wing Air Force and a 600-ship Navy remains unfulfilled. The budget for fiscal 1989 funds 18 trimmed-down divisions, 35 wings and 580 fighting ships.