Word: cuts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...still did not have much of a social life -- no one remembers a steady girlfriend -- and he did not join any fraternities because they blackballed people. He became a minor legend in college, setting up a dormitory barbershop to serve Nigerian students whose hair the local barbers refused to cut. It was a perfect Dukakis enterprise: high-minded and lucrative at the same time...
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...
...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...
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...