Looking to Future of Defense

CRAWFORD, Texas — President Bush and his top defense officials meet here today to plot the next stage of their campaign to invest the military more in lighter, more mobile weaponry at the expense of traditional weapon systems.

The meeting at Bush’s ranch comes as the Pentagon continues to ready itself for the possibility of military action against Iraq, a fight that would rely greatly on the very types of heavy weaponry out of favor with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

But almost two years into Bush’s tenure, pressure is building on the president’s national security team to make significant progress on an endeavor critical to the military’s long-term health: shearing traditional programs to further the cutting-edge, highly technical systems that will be critical to fighting future wars.

Since coming into office, Bush and Rumsfeld have consistently pledged to pare down and modernize the sprawling military. But they have encountered formidable foes in a collection of regional, military and industry interests who have slowed their efforts. They have been criticized--first for failing to consult Congress or the uniformed military on their thinking, then for failing to propose the bold steps they had promised.

Now Bush appears to be seeking to give the transformation effort new life. Programs that could be on the cutting block this fall include the Air Force’s F-22 radar-evading fighter, the Marines’ V-22 tilt-rotor Osprey and the Army’s Comanche reconnaissance helicopter--all supremely expensive weapon systems that, Rumsfeld aides argue, slow down the movement to a lighter, more modern and more flexible military.

White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer and other White House officials took pains Tuesday to emphasize that the meeting was not called to plan a war against Iraq or even to consider what course to follow in the effort to remove Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power. He pointed out that Gen. Tommy Franks, who heads the U.S. Central Command based in Florida and who would thus be at the center of any such military planning, had not been invited.

Rather, Fleischer said, one of the goals was to take the lessons of the military campaign in Afghanistan and apply them to the battlefield of the future.

And one of those lessons, he said, is “the role that technology plays in helping America be ... lighter and more lethal.”

He said Bush had spoken often about the need to think about how wars should be fought in the new century.

“Wars against a shadowy enemy, for example, require a whole different type of approach, a different type of lethality, a different type of speed, a different type of footprint than your more traditional wars of the 20th century, which involve massive movements of troops and vehicles and involve flotillas of ships that would attack the United States,” he said. “That’s 20th century thinking, and the president wants to really push ahead to develop a Pentagon of the future.”

Fleischer said that, since Sept. 11, the Pentagon’s focus has been on the immediate needs of protecting the United States and that the meeting today will provide an opportunity to keep attention on that mission while also looking ahead.

To that end, Rumsfeld is bringing Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, director of the Missile Defense Agency, to help brief Bush on the future of the $8-billion-a-year missile defense program that is undergoing rapid change and expansion. Also attending the meeting will be Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The missile defense program’s primary focus at the moment is the construction of a test center in Alaska that the administration hopes to begin using as early as September 2004 to evaluate a range of new technologies. Officials also hope to be able to use the test facility by 2005 as the base for a rudimentary antimissile system in the event of an attack by North Korea.

In the absence of a Cold War-era treaty that limited antimissile systems, the Pentagon has begun experimenting with a variety of ways to shield U.S. troops and soil from missile attack.

The testing program will take years, and officials say the president will not need to make major decisions on the system’s architecture for some time.

“There are no decisions that I know of that are pending or imminent at all,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency.

Bush may be briefed on the status of a short-range antimissile system, the Patriot Advanced Capability 3, which is related to a system used in the Persian Gulf War and would probably be fielded to protect troops in the event of a new war with Iraq.

The system could be a key defensive weapon if Iraq sought to attack troops or other countries in the region with chemical or biological warheads, military officials say. Army officials have not been satisfied with the Patriot’s performance in recent tests, but the contractor and missile defense officials have insisted that it is greatly improved over its error-prone predecessor.

Rumsfeld may also raise his increasing concern over the threat to the United States from cruise missiles. These low-flying missiles have a shorter range than the ballistic missiles that have been the focus of the administration’s efforts. But they have been acquired by more than 70 countries, and Rumsfeld is concerned that they could be adapted by adversaries to carry chemical, germ or nuclear warheads.

Baker Spring, a defense analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy center in Washington, noted that if the government decides to do more to protect against a cruise missile attack, it could be forced to impose additional restrictions on private aircraft flights.

The administration’s focus on missile defense is part of an acceleration of the shift toward the high-tech gadgetry of warfare that the Pentagon has relied on since the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Such a shift from existing aircraft carriers, jet fighters and other traditional weapons to more futuristic systems that employ stealth, target with precision and strike from long range is seen by top administration officials as critical to maintaining America’s war fighting superiority. But it is exceedingly expensive.

Earlier this month, the Senate passed a $355.4-billion defense appropriation bill for 2003 that will deliver to the Pentagon the huge infusion of funds sought by President Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks. Funding for procurement, research, personnel and operations-and-maintenance programs each grow by at least 9% in the bill, which adds $34.4 billion to the U.S. defense budget.

But, despite handing the Pentagon its largest funding increase in two decades, the budget still does not include all the money the military needs for the array of programs it now has in various stages of deployment and development.

“The bottom line here is the bottom line,” said Chris Hellman, a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information, a Washington defense policy center.

“The policy people have pretty much beaten the Iraq thing to death; they know where they are,” Hellman said. “Their biggest issue now is making the case internationally and on Capitol Hill. But there really are other irons in the fire. They all concern Rumsfeld’s ideas about transformation, and they all boil down to money.”

The morning-long meeting is likely to take place in the president’s house on the 1,600-acre ranch. It is similar to a session he held a year ago, during his summer break in Central Texas, to look at long-range Pentagon matters.

The meeting, which is not expected to produce specific decisions, was largely driven by the budget calendar, Fleischer said. He said it would lead to the framing of budget proposals that Bush will present in January or February as part of the federal budget that takes effect the following October.

That budget planning, he said, “really kicks in in the fall.”

“So this is an early window to start looking at the framework for some of those bigger decisions that have yet to be made,” he said.

But Fleischer said it was unlikely that the group would deal with specific budget amounts for long-range projects.

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Times staff writer Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this report.