Gop ‘Compromise’ Would Add Billions To Clinton Defense Budget Spending Would Increase For More Weapons The Military Already Has

Given the choice of buying more of the weapons the military already has or developing new tools of war, the Republicans reached a compromise: Go for both.

The defense budget proposed Friday by the Senate Armed Services Committee closely follows the plan laid out earlier in the week by the House National Security Committee. It would add generously to President Clinton’s research and development budget and even more to the weapons spending plan.

Overall, each bill would add about $13 billion to Clinton’s $254.4 billion defense budget request for 1997.

Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., the committee chairman, said the bill achieves “a balance of funding for readiness, modernization and quality-of-life programs.”

More than half the increase that would be added by the Republican-controlled Senate committee would go to weapons purchases, some of them older weapons on the verge of being phased out. Other procurement dollars would go to states and districts represented by prominent Armed Services Committee members.

The plan drew an initial thumbs-down from one Democrat.

“You can portray President Clinton as weak on defense,” Sen. Dale Bumpers, D-Ark., said to Republicans. “The question ought to be, Weak against whom? Who is the enemy that we’re going to spend $270 billion next year defending against? The Russians are a basket case.”

Army Kiowa and Apache-Longbow helicopters, Air Force F-16 fighters and Army Multiple-Launch Rocket Systems are among the weapons ordered in quantity by the congressional committees, though Clinton asked for few or none.

The Senate defense plan would add $7.7 billion for weapons procurement, slightly more than the House version. That represents a 20 percent increase. The Senate bill would add $3.7 billion, or 11 percent, to the president’s request for military research.

“There’s a general feeling that we’ve been letting equipment go for a while,” said Elizabeth Heeter, associate at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. But simply adding money to older systems, she said, “is kind of a Band-Aid solution.”

Built by Lockheed Martin in Fort Worth, Texas, the F-16 was a fighter program close to being shut down entirely a few years ago. In last year’s budget plan and now this year’s, the Republican-controlled defense committees reversed that direction.