WASHINGTON -- The nation's long-standing bipartisan approach to national security is in danger of breaking down as the ascendant Republicans target the Clinton administration's defense policy for withering attack and lay out their own military priorities.
A cacophony of Republican criticism of the Clinton record, from Pentagon spending to peacekeeping operations, is sounding from Capitol Hill, which will be under Republican control next year.
"The Republicans have some very different ideas about how the money should be spent and what kind of mission the U.S. forces should be prepared to execute," said Andrew Krepinevich, director of the Defense Budget Project, a Washington think tank.
At the heart of the furor is the issue of whether U.S. forces are becoming "hollow" -- the code word for the sort of under-funded, under-trained, under-equipped, demoralized force that many critics think was allowed to develop during the last Democratic administration, that of Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s.
At its extremes, the Republican criticism questions President Clinton's fitness to be commander-in chief and condemns the subservience of U.S. policy to international institutions, particularly the United Nations.
"Multilateralism run amok," said Jack F. Kemp, the former conservative congressman who is now a director of Empower America, a conservative activist group that last week published a critique of the Clinton security policy entitled "Security and Insecurity," which criticized the administration policy as weak.
The Republicans' "Contract with America" contains this pledge: "No U.S. troops under U.N. command, and restoration of the essential parts of our national security funding to strengthen our national defense and maintain our credibility around the world."
Mr. Clinton's commitment Thursday of U.S. troops to a possible NATO force to evacuate U.N. peacekeepers from Bosnia will be acceptable to Republican leaders only if there is no U.N. control of the operation. On Friday, Secretary of Defense William J. Perry sought to reassure the Republicans, ruling out U.N. control. He said the evacuation, if ordered, would be under NATO command.
With the stage set for confrontation over a range of national security issues, there is, nonetheless, bipartisan agreement on which basic priorities should drive Pentagon policy: military readiness, troops' quality of life, or modernization of the machinery of war.
The administration asserts that it has focused on all three. The Republicans assert that it has woefully neglected them. With the Republicans in control of Congress and the major oversight committees, they will be in a position to set the agenda on Capitol Hill, push through their own proposals, and may be able to block Clinton initiatives.
Rep. Newt Gingrich, who is gearing up to be the most powerful House speaker in recent years, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" last week: "I think we can overhaul the Defense Department and get dramatically better procurement per dollar. . . .And I think we can also shrink the middle-level bureaucracy of the Defense Department by maybe as much as 40 percent."
The Republicans accuse Mr. Clinton of failing to fund his own strategy of being able to fight two major regional wars almost simultaneously, overcommitting U.S. forces to overseas peacekeeping operations, shortchanging weapons development, and spending too much of the Pentagon's budget on nondefense projects, like medical research.
To pre-empt the Republican call for increased funding, Mr. Clinton announced his own plan this month to boost defense spending by $27 billion over the next six years, a sum many Republicans view as too little, too late. Despite the increase, defense spending is still slated to fall for the next two years.
Even as the final details of Pentagon spending in fiscal 1996 were being worked out last week, Mr. Clinton received a letter from Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia and Sen. John McCain of Arizona, two Republican "hawks" on the Senate Armed Services Committee, expressing concern that the new defense budget would not fund protection of "our vital national interests, protect our allies, and deter and repel aggression in the post-Cold War world."
The two senators proposed cutting programs worth more than $7 billion and reallocating the money to priority areas. If the programs -- which included the B-2 bomber, M-1 tank upgrades, and outlays on defense conversion and technology reinvestment were ended, it would free $30 billion over future years, they estimated.
The ink was hardly dry on the senators' letter before Mr. Perry announced the administration's own plan Friday to cut $7.7 billion in weapons programs and redirect the savings to readiness and benefits.
Sen. Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina Republican who will be the next chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, dismissed the Pentagon announcement as "merely first aid for the ailing defense budget."
Administration officials assert that they have designed a post-Cold War defense posture that is adequately financed and strikes a balance between readiness and modernization within spending limits.
They deny that there is a deficit of more than $100 billion in spending plans over the next six years, as estimated by the Republicans, and suggest that any funding shortfalls for training this year have been due to Congress' failure to approve full and timely funding for the cost of various overseas operations, such as Rwanda, Kuwait and Haiti.
To avoid a repetition of the problem next year, Mr. Clinton is now seeking early payment of a $2 billion supplement for crisis costs.
Inside the Pentagon there is not the unalloyed joy one might expect, even among the uniformed branch, over the election victory of the pro-defense Republicans.
Said one senior officer, familiar with the thinking of the top brass: "I personally don't think it's going to make one whit of difference in terms of how we approach the whole idea of [troop] requirements or [weapons] acquisition at all.
"The change in control of Congress is certainly not going to have an effect on the number of trouble spots there are in the world."
The notion that more money might be coming the Pentagon's way from a Republican-controlled Congress elicited this reaction from Ken Bacon, the Pentagon spokesman: "If Congress wants to consider giving us more money, we will obviously look at ways to spend that money, but I think that Congress has to sort out itself what its own priorities are going to be."
He was referring to the Republican commitment to reduce the deficit and cut taxes and also increase defense spending. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's administration increased defense spending and cut taxes -- but at the cost of increasing the deficit.
"If you are a Republican, you can certainly talk the talk, but to walk the walk you have to reprogram money from other areas," said the Defense Budget Project's Andrew Krepinevich. "They are not going to have a lot of wriggle room on defense.
"It offers the prospect of being a debate with a lot of heat, but not very much change in budget projections."