Defense Chief Says Budget to Remain at Clinton Level

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told the top brass of the U.S. military Tuesday that President Bush has decided to stick with the Clinton administration’s planned Pentagon budget of $310 billion for the next fiscal year, military officials said.

The statement, in a closed-door meeting, came as a blow to military leaders who had hoped for a quick boost in funding, particularly because Bush campaigned on the theme that the Clinton administration had allowed military readiness to decline precipitously.

The planned budget represents a $14-billion increase from the current year’s defense spending of about $296 billion, but it is far less than many in the military expected. “That’s going to be a surprise to some folks here, yes,” one official said Tuesday.

Just last month, representatives of the armed services told members of Congress that they urgently needed billions in additional spending to shore up their readiness.

The top officers in the U.S. military--the Joint Chiefs of Staff, plus the four-star generals and admirals who are the regional commanders in chief--met with Rumsfeld at the National Defense University at Ft. McNair in Washington, then visited the White House on Tuesday night, an official said. Rumsfeld told the officers that before he will consider increasing their budgets, he wants to review the entire military, looking at the new administration’s national security goals and the personnel, weaponry and military structures required to meet them.

Rumsfeld also told the military leaders the review would take several months and that he expected them in the meantime to “stick to their knitting,” one officer said.

Mary Ellen Countryman, spokeswoman for the National Security Council, also said the White House does not plan to seek a supplemental defense appropriation this year.

However, one Republican defense group, the Project for a New American Century, issued a statement Tuesday calling on Bush to “increase defense spending, increase it substantially, and increase it now.”

The White House’s decision also could provoke a sense of betrayal in the military, experts said. “I think the senior military leadership will be upset,” said Richard Kohn, a University of North Carolina historian who is an expert in civil-military relations.

Even so, the move by the White House appears to achieve a political goal, noted Gordon Adams, a former specialist in defense affairs at the Office of Management and Budget who is now director of security studies at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. “I think the White House is issuing a signal about who is in charge”--that the president and Congress, not the Pentagon and the service chiefs, will set the budget, he said.