Seapower/Congress/Defense

By L. EDGAR PRINA, Editor Emeritus

Congress and the White House tangled repeatedly in 1999 over a variety of national security issues, including Chinese military espionage, lax export controls that allowed Beijing to purchase some of America's most advanced technology, the Comprehensive (Nuclear) Test Ban Treaty, the Pentagon budget, and, very late in the session, a potentially disastrous decision by President Clinton drastically limiting the use of Vieques Island, Puerto Rico, for live-fire combined-arms training.

Before the first session of the 106th Congress became history and members returned to the hustings until early January 2000 the nation's lawmakers and President Clinton agreed on a defense appropriations bill of $268 billion for the new fiscal year, which began on 1 October. The final total was $4.5 billion more than the president had requested. The measure, only reluctantly signed by Clinton, provides substantial funds for quality-of-life improvements, including a 4.8 percent across-the-board pay raise for the 1,386,000 men and women on active duty.

There also was money in the budget for a more generous retirement pay plan, additional family housing units and barracks, and all sorts of bonuses for skilled personnel and/or those agreeing to stay on active duty for longer periods. All of these enticements indicate the difficulty that the armed services--the Marines excepted--are experiencing with recruitment and retention. Two examples: The Air Force currently is 1,200 pilots short and heading toward 1,500; and the Navy has a deficit on any given day of more than 12,000 Sailors at sea.

The president had threatened to veto the defense spending bill, reportedly at the urging of Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.), the House minority leader. The theory was that a defense veto could force the Republican majority to give ground on a number of other appropriations bills and provide additional funds for programs favored by the administration. But a number of Democrats balked at that approach, making it unlikely that a veto could be sustained. The House had approved the measure by a whopping 372 to 55.

When he signed the legislation, the president said he did not think "it was fair, frankly, to put Democrats in the position of being attacked by the Republicans for being against the defense budget."

The Pentagon's fiscal year 2000 budget provides funding for only six new battleforce ships, a rate that would not capitalize an active fleet of even 300 ships, as Adm. Jay L. Johnson, chief of naval operations, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in October. But the Navy is getting one new ship it did not request. Through the persuasive powers of Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), the majority leader, Congress appropriated $375 million for a start on construction of LHD-8, a huge amphibious helicopter carrier that will be built at the Litton Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen had urged Congress not to appropriate the additional funds.

Controversy and Compromise

One of the most controversial items in the budget involved the Air Force's F-22 stealth fighter program. At a projected cost of at least $125 million per plane (the most expensive fighter in history) the question was whether the Pentagon and the nation could afford it, along with two other new aircraft programs, the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) in development for the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force, and the here-and-now F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet for the Navy.

In mid-1999, the House--following the recommendation of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and its chairman, Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.)--decided not to fund initial procurement of the F-22. The possibility that a major Pentagon program nearly ready for the production/procurement phase might be cancelled shook up the Air Force, the F-22 contractors, and Cohen, and led to one of the most intense lobbying efforts for a military program in recent memory.

Cohen himself wrote an impassioned plea to Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and an F-22 backer, asserting that a failure to fund initial procurement would have "devastating" consequences, and add as much as $6 billion to the cost of the program (339 aircraft at a total cost of $70 billion). A compromise was finally reached by Stevens and Lewis: No money can be spent for F-22 production in FY 2000, but $1.2 billion is added for continued research and development and $1.3 billion for other F-22 accounts.

The Air Force apparently feels so strongly about the F-22 (nicknamed "Raptor") that it would be willing to drop out of the Joint Strike Fighter program. This is what a senior Air Force official, who understandably did not wish to be identified, told the New York Times. Neither the Navy nor the Marine Corps would appreciate such an Air Force move--nor, presumably, would Cohen, because it would quite possibly kill the JSF by making it too expensive.

Bipartisan Accusations Against China

Earlier in the year, a major scandal involving Chinese military espionage against the United States was investigated by a bipartisan House Select Committee. The committee, chaired by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), found that security at one of America's most important nuclear laboratories was extraordinarily lax and that the Chinese took advantage of the situation to steal the designs of several U.S. warheads, including the most advanced one--for the D-5 Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile.

Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), a member of the Select Committee, said that "China stole classified thermonuclear weapons information, stole electromagnetic weapons technology that it can use to attack U.S. satellites and missiles, and stole classified research that can be used to detect and threaten our previously invulnerable nuclear submarines."

China also was able to persuade the Clinton administration to relax export restrictions on a number of advanced technologies; sometime earlier, and without explanation, national security agencies had been removed from the approval process. The result, Weldon commented, was that "China, which until 1996 had no high-performance computers to help design nuclear weapons, had more than 600 in 1998, all originating in the United States."

Test Ban Treaty Rejected

On another major issue, the Republican-controlled Senate and the president engaged in a titanic struggle over ratification of the Test Ban Treaty.

In the end, the Senate declined to ratify by a resounding 51 to 48 vote, handing the president what even administration officials conceded was a humiliating foreign policy defeat for Clinton. It takes a two-thirds vote (67 senators) to approve a treaty. It was the first time the Senate had rejected a major treaty since 1920, when it declined to ratify the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I and created the League of Nations.

Clinton denounced the Senate's action, accused the Republicans of a "new isolationism," and suggested that their ultimate goal was to kill all arms-control treaties. The Republicans denied all of these charges and accused the president of "playing politics" with national defense. Lott said the treaty was rejected because it was "flawed." Just one week before, he noted, the CIA had said that the United States could not verify whether Russia and China might even today be engaged in low-level nuclear weapons testing.

"Just a couple of days ago," Lott said, "there was an article in the paper indicating that Russia and China had refused to allow us to have sites for monitoring so that we could detect if, in fact, there might be testing.

"The message to our negotiators, to this administration, and to the rest of the world ... [is that] the Senate is a co-equal party to treaties. We should be involved in advice and consent. Our advice was not asked and we did not give our consent. We did our job. We did the right thing for our country, and I am very proud of it."

The fact that six former secretaries of Defense urged the Senate leadership to reject ratification was undoubtedly a factor in the final outcome. James R. Schlesinger, Richard B. Cheney, Frank C. Carlucci, Caspar W. Weinberger, Donald H. Rumsfeld, and Melvin R. Laird argued, in a letter to Lott and Sen. Thomas Daschle (D-S.D.), the minority leader, that if all nuclear tests, even of the lowest yields, were permanently prohibited, the reliability of America's own nuclear arsenal would inevitably decline--as would, of course, the overall U.S. deterrent credibility.

In the view of some observers, there is another important reason for rejecting the treaty as now written, and the former defense chiefs zeroed in on it.

"Finally, it is impossible to verify a ban that extends to very low yields," they said. "The likelihood of cheating is high. 'Trust but verify' should remain our guide. Tests with yields below one kiloton can both go undetected and be militarily useful to the testing state.

"Furthermore, a significantly larger explosion can go undetected or be mistaken for a conventional explosion used for mining or an earthquake--if the test is 'decoupled.' Decoupling involves conducting the test in a large underground cavity and has been shown to dampen an explosion's seismic signature by a factor of up to 70. The United States demonstrated this capability in 1966 in two tests conducted in salt domes at Chilton, Miss."

Neither Russia nor China has ratified the treaty. Nor has Israel or Iran. India, Pakistan, and North Korea have not even signed the pact.

The Vieques Conflict

Another major defense issue fraught with political implications was of immediate practical importance to the Navy and Marine Corps--and possibly to President Clinton as well. Ever since World War II, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps have carried out their live-fire training at a small Puerto Rican island named Vieques. The governor of Puerto Rico and other members of his party said last year that they want the Navy to pack up and leave because of danger to the inhabitants and the alleged ecological damage caused by the bombing. The Navy controls two-thirds of the 50-square-mile island.

The so-called "Vieques problem" is not new. Previous attempts to stop the live-fire training have failed, largely because the politically loaded charges fired off against the Navy have been totally, and demonstrably, false. A few examples of the spurious (and usually very well-publicized) charges that have been made: the Navy "is violating human rights" on Vieques; the Navy "stole the land"; the Navy "has been using napalm in its training operations," has "contaminated the land" and "polluted the water," and "is bombing daily and without notice." This time around, though, there was one provable "incident"--the 19 April 1999 accidental death of a Navy civilian security guard killed when two bombs released by a Marine pilot went astray. He was the first civilian to die on the Vieques range in the 58 years that the Navy and Marine Corps have been using the range. His tragic death, though, was all the pretext that was needed for a new round of protests.

As the protests from Puerto Rico increased in both volume and stridency, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on the matter. Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig and CNO Johnson testified on the critical need for retaining the range. In a review of the naval activities on Vieques ordered by Danzig, high-level Navy and Marine Corps commanders said: "This unique facility is the only location in the Atlantic where realistic multidimensional combat training can be conducted in a combined and coordinated manner. It is the only range which offers a live-fire land target complex with day-and-night capability, an immediately adjacent large area of low-traffic airspace, and deep-water seaspace.

"Co-located are underwater and electronic warfare ranges, amphibious landing beaches and maneuver areas, a full-service naval base and air station, and interconnected range-support facilities. It is the premier U.S. naval training facility, reflecting more than 50 years of investment and development, and the only place available to East Coast-based forces for training in several warfare competencies which are essential for combat readiness--most importantly live-ordnance combined-arms training."

The Senate Armed Forces Committee, chaired by John Warner (R-Va.), a former secretary of the Navy, is sympathetic to the Navy's case, but President Clinton has directed the Navy to seek a "compromise" of some sort that would both satisfy the desires of Puerto Rico's political leaders and meet the need of the sea services for live-fire training.

Seeking to forestall any compromise that would cause permanent damage to the combat readiness of the two sea services, Warner and several of his Senate colleagues introduced a "sense of the Senate" resolution that, it was hoped, would persuade the president not to order any actions that would limit the "rigorous" and "realistic" training that Clinton himself has acknowledged "is essential for success in combat and for protecting our national security."

It may be several months--or years--before the issue is finally resolved. In early December the president approved a theoretically interim plan that would put an immediate halt to live-fire training, cut in half the number of training days annually available for training and, after five years, terminate all training on Vieques (unless the island's inhabitants say otherwise, which now seems unlikely).

It is possible that Congress will be able to reverse the president's decision, but it would be difficult. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking and the end result could be another major setback for the Navy and Marine Corps--and, therefore, for U.S. combat readiness in general.