*  Defense intellectuals have complained for years
*  that the Pentagon cannot determine priorities
*  because it has no strategy.
   Last April, the new defense secretary, Richard Cheney, acknowledged
   that, "given an ideal world,
   we'd have a nice, neat, orderly process.
   We'd do the strategy
   and then we'd come around
   and do the budget.
   This city doesn't work that way."
   With a five-year defense plan
   costing more than $1.6 trillion,
   it's about time we put together a defense strategy
   that works in Washington.
*  This won't happen
*  until strategists come down from their ivory tower
*  and learn to work in the real world of limited budgets and uncertain futures.
   As it is,
   we identify national goals and the threats to these goals,
   we shape a strategy
   to counter these threats,
   we determine the forces
   needed to execute the strategy,
   before finally forging the budgets
   needed to build and maintain the forces.
   These procedures consume millions of man-hours of labor
   and produce tons of paper,
   and each year, their end product
   -- the Five Year Defense Plan --
   promptly melts away.
   The graph on the left shows
   how this happens
   (see accompanying illustration
   -- WSJ Oct. 30, 1989).
   Compare the past eight five-year plans with actual appropriations.
   The Pentagon's strategists produce budgets
   that simply cannot be executed
   because they assume
   a defense strategy depends only on goals and threats.
   Strategy, however, is about possibilities, not hopes and dreams.
   By ignoring costs,
   U.S. strategists abdicate their responsibility for hard decisions.
   That puts the real strategic decisions in the hands of others:
   bean counters, budgeteers, and pork-barrelers.
   These people have different agendas.
   And as a result
   -- as the recent vote by the House
   to undo Mr. Cheney's program terminations
   suggests
   -- the preservation of jobs is becoming the real goal of defense "strategy."