Department Of Defense U S Budget

President Clinton, unveiling his first military spending plan Friday, sent Congress a $263.4-billion defense budget for fiscal 1994 that would reduce troop strength to a level not seen since the Korean War but would keep most major weapons systems intact.

Senior Pentagon management officials plan to recommend that the United States proceed with production of the B-2 Stealth bomber and the C-17 transport aircraft and continue work on two futuristic fighter-bomber aircraft, defense officials said Monday. At the same time, however, they are expected to offer Defense Secretary Dick Cheney options for trimming the B-2 and C-17 program in light of pressure to respond to changes in the East Bloc and new fiscal constraints.

The proposal to close the massive Marine Corps Air Station here triggered a wave of speculation among real estate experts Friday that was slowed only by the realization that major problems threaten to complicate any sale. The base is on prime property, centrally located in a rapidly developing county where flat, buildable land is becoming scarce. But closing the base won't simply be a matter of turning around and selling it to a developer.

What began for Col. Sandy Mangold as a prestigious Pentagon assignment to recommend cuts in the Air Force's $20-billion spacecraft and nuclear forces budget ended up a rancorous odyssey through an institution trying to come to grips with an austere future.

The federal commission created to review proposed military base closings Friday added another 36 installations, including the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, to the list of bases under consideration for phase-out or force reductions. The unexpected action by the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission significantly expands the initial pool of 43 military facilities that the Pentagon has recommended closing.

The Air Force, acknowledging for the first time that looming defense cuts will cause major layoffs within its ranks, said Friday that new personnel policies will force as many as 11,000 uniformed personnel out of the service during the next two years. Affected servicemen and women will begin receiving notice of their shortened tenure at the end of this month, Air Force officials said.

Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), an influential supporter of the B-2 Stealth bomber, warned President Bush on Friday there is a 50-50 chance that the Senate will follow the House and vote against further production of the radar-eluding plane. "I think it's got an uphill fight," said Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "There's a lot of work for the President to do on the Republican side," where opposition to the B-2 program is growing.

More than 3,000 Orange County-based military reservists and National Guard members, the bulk of them at the Armed Forces Reserve Center in Los Alamitos, would lose their positions in cuts proposed Thursday by the Pentagon. The cuts mean loss of part-time jobs and potential retirement income for the so-called "weekend warriors," civilians who perform military duties on a part-time basis, among them dentists, surgeons and air traffic controllers.

The Pentagon, which had hoped to focus its budget cuts on hardware, is now preparing a plan dubbed "Base Force II" that would accelerate troop reductions and virtually ensure the first personnel dismissals since the period following the Vietnam War. The plan, which would be implemented over the next three years, is a retreat from the "base force"--the troop level that Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney last year said represented the "absolute rock-bottom minimum" needed for national defense.

Successful congressional candidate Martin T. Meehan spent much of his time on the hustings this year calling for "massive" reductions in defense spending. "We need . . . to have the money it takes to make the economy more competitive," the Massachusetts Democrat said. Now, as a congressman-elect, Meehan is getting ready to take aim--and fire.