WHY THE PENTAGON GETS A FREE RIDE

It was as if the Berlin Wall had never come down. Last week the House National Security Committee force-fed the Pentagon $553 million to start building more B-2 bombers, whose original mission was to wage nuclear war against the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the Senate endorsed a budget blueprint, including a $1.5 billion payment on the Navy's third Seawolf attack submarine, which was created to track and destroy the Soviet navy, and is now rusting at pier side. And the Army's first rah-66 Comanche helicopter-designed to defeat Moscow's Hokum helicopter-rolled out of a Connecticut factory attended by bunting, a military band and a real, befeathered Comanche chief.

As anxious advocates for the poor and elderly fight to stave off budget cuts, the Pentagon seems immune. 0ne would never know it, however, from the rhetoric wielded on behalf of Pentagon spending. "You couldn't fight Desert Storm today," House Speaker Newt Gingrich told TIME, despite Pentagon assertions that the U.S. military is now primed to fight two such wars at once. "We're going to get people killed if we downsize much more."

In fact, defense spending today is lapping close to its level during the cold war. The Pentagon proposes to spend 92¢ for every cold war dollar, once adjusted for inflation. The House committee last week recommended a $267 billion defense budget for next year, $9.5 billion more than Clinton is seeking. The Senate approved a budget resolution that mirrored Clinton's defense request, and the final figure will probably split the difference and provide around $270 billion. But even Clinton's sum is more, after adjusting for inflation, than the U.S. military spent annually in the mid-'50s and mid-'70s.

Even on its post-cold war diet, the U.S. military costs nearly as much as the rest of the world's armies put together. "There's no other country that has the requirements we're confronted with," says Defense Secretary William Perry. "Unless we're willing to back off those requirements and go into an isolationist stance, we will have a uniquely high military budget."

But this high? Pulling back the curtain on the Pentagon's battle plan discloses a patchwork of arbitrary decisions and inflated threats. In 1993 the Administration concluded that the U.S. military needed enough forces to win two "major regional contingencies," each akin to the Persian Gulf War, at the same time. But there is growing sentiment in defense circles that the nation's two-war strategy is wrong, at least in light of expected funding levels. "The two-war strategy is just a marketing device to justify a high budget," says Pentagon cost analyst Franklin Spinney. A study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, concludes that projected spending is "incapable of meeting" the two-war requirement.