Cheney's past defense cuts questioned
WASHINGTON -- Vice President Dick Cheney, who has been charging that John F. Kerry would be a dangerous commander-in-chief because he opposed many key weapons that the military now relies on, himself presided over the biggest cutbacks in defense programs in modern history when he was secretary of defense under the first President Bush.
As Pentagon chief from 1989 to 1993, Cheney canceled or cut back many of the same weapons programs -- bombers, fighter planes, tanks -- that he says Kerry tried to deprive the armed forces of.
Many of the Cheney-era cuts were made at the end of the Cold War, when the administration of President George H.W. Bush was seeking to reduce the size of the military and secure a ''peace dividend." But some of these downsizing efforts would have affected the military of today.
Cheney proposed, for instance, disbanding part of the Army's Fourth Infantry Division, Congressional Quarterly reported in 1989. Troops from that division captured former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein last December.
The latest Bush-Cheney campaign ad depicts weapons such as the B-2 stealth bomber flying over a battlefield and then disappearing into thin air, attempting to convince voters that if Kerry prevailed back then, US military forces would be underequipped.
Yet Cheney canceled the B-2 bomber program after 20 planes, even though the Air Force saidit needed 132. He also canceled the Navy's A-12 bomber and scaled back the Seawolf submarine.
During his Pentagon stint, the size of the Army was reduced by more than 26 percent, the Air Force by 22 percent, the Navy by 14 percent, and the Marines by 10 percent, according to the Pentagon's official biography of Cheney.
But support for particular weapons ''is not a very useful way to judge strength or weakness," said a former congressional defense staffer who asked not to be named. Using such a yardstick, he added, President Jimmy Carter was the ''strongest" because his budgets resulted in the weapons that won the 1991 Gulf War.
Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.
