PERSPECTIVE ON DEFENSE : Clinton’s Stealth Weapon: the Federal Budget : The Administration is piling up new tasks without new funding; force readiness is : bound to suffer.

In the closing moments of the President’s stemwinder State of the Union address, he resolutely warned Congress that defense spending should not be cut below his budget proposal. But a close examination of the budget reality reveals factors that lead to a starkly opposite conclusion: It will be next to impossible to fulfill Clinton’s pledge that during his tenure the armed forces will remain as ready and capable as he inherited.

The $50-billion disagreement between Budget Director Leon E. Panetta and former Defense Secretary Les Aspin was merely the tip of the iceberg. If anything, the seeds of this budgetary conflict were sown within weeks after the Clinton inaugural, when Panetta proposed, and Aspin was forced to accept, a set of budgetary assumptions.

First, the White House proposed that there be no cost-of-living adjustment for military and civilian federal employees. When Congress predictably balked and approved an average 3% pay increase last fall, that action raised the national-security cost about $15 billion. Similarly, last year’s budget presentation assumed a virtually nonexistent inflation level over the next few years. While actual inflation has been low for some time, it hasn’t been in the decimal dust range Panetta provided for. Last year’s inflation figures are now in, and the impact is about $30 billion.

Both the pay and inflation consequences were predictable, but now serve to compound the problem. Taken separately, these adjustments should not require herculean efforts; after all, we’re talking about estimates that span just about the balance of this decade and, in aggregate, represent more than $1.5 trillion worth of programs. This ought to be chalked up as a reasonable management problem requiring year-to-year ingenuity and creativity as the successive budgets are developed. Indeed, the Clinton Administration will explain the problem as well within normal estimating error. In the parlance of bean counters, the financing will be considered a “negative funding wedge” that will be compensated by “economies and efficiencies.”

Similar budget tactics employed during the Reagan/Weinberger years were soundly rejected on Capitol Hill. Ironically, leading the charge was then-House Budget Committee Chairman Panetta. It will be interesting to see if Congress is any more receptive to an old approach reinvented by new advocates.

The consequences in the past were that specific programs needed to be cut to make up the difference. But today, there is a lot less to work with.

Beyond the mathematical food fight over how to resolve the known shortfalls, there are far more ominous time bombs lurking just below the budgetary surface.

Over the past year, the Administration’s frenzied agenda for change has piled on new responsibilities for defense, but with no new money included. The mightily trumpeted defense conversion initiative added upward of $10 billion of program commitments to find new ways to beat swords into plowshares. Defense budget planners have been invited to cover these costs without new funding. In the likely event that these government-subsidized conversion initiatives fail to be supported by market demand, there will be pressure to continue public funding.

Similarly, there has been no rush to the Treasury for the billions of dollars needed to pay for submarines, tanks and aircraft that, the Administration admits, the military doesn’t need but are in the budget to “preserve the industrial base.”

All these ideas to simultaneously encourage commercialization of the industry while also preserving it for defense production cost money. But until some lottery winner designates the Defense Department as the payee, other programs have to go to make room for these new expenses.

The Clinton Administration has also heaped on more financial responsibility for destroying former Soviet nuclear and chemical weapons, covering the cost of United Nations peacekeeping and humanitarian operations, and paying the tab for economic assistance to emerging democratic nations. Add to this the cost to extend deployments of troops overseas to be ready in the event the President decides to enter the fray in Bosnia, and the financial commitments begin to look less in the range of estimating error and more like a budgetary implosion.

Given the biases of this Administration, the budget strategy serves a larger purpose: military implosion. When the known and not-so-well known estimates are toted up, the defense budget is better than $100 billion in the hole. To cover this deficit, personnel will have to be released, operational readiness curtailed or vital programs eliminated. The Administration’s new defense secretary, William Perry, has inherited the management challenge equivalent of a 10-meter dive into a Dixie cup. Absent success in meeting this challenge, the President’s pledge that the armed forces will be as ready and capable as when he took office will become a cruel fiction.