Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.wpost From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: For the Record Date: Thu, 5 Nov 92 05:01:45 EST Message-ID: <9.1992Nov5.050145@AmeriCast.com> For the Record From comments by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney during a confer- ence at the Mayflower Hotel Nov. 3: We are closing over 800 bases and installations worldwide. Between 1989 and 1995, I will have eliminated one million posi- tions out of the Department of Defense: half a million active- duty military, a quarter of a million reservists and a quarter of a million civilians. By the end of calendar year '92, according to one estimate, if you add up all the jobs in the Department of Defense - military and civilian - and all the private sector jobs - civilians work- ing for defense contractors - that will have been eliminated, it comes to 1.6 million people by the end of this calendar year alone that we've already reduced our total level of effort by. That's not prospective; that's already been done. I've canceled 120 different weapons systems since I've become secretary of de- fense and cut over $300 billion out of our long-range defense budget since the spring of 1989. Now, that's history. That's in the can. That has already been done. We'll complete that reduc- tion by the middle of the decade just three years hence, in 1995-96 time frame. But now we hear this cry from so many people: Dick, that's not enough. You've got to take it down farther, take it down faster. We want our peace dividend, and we want it now. We've got other uses for the taxpayer dollar than spending it on defense. But the point for us to remember ... is the fact that every time we've gone through one of these cycles in the past as a nation, we've blown it. We have always overdone it. We have always been so quick and so eager to take down the force in one of these periods after a fairly significant success, after a major con- flict, that we have always set ourselves up for trouble a few years down the road. 02:07 11-05C9999----- Copyright 1992, The Washington Post. This story is from the Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar- chived or redistributed. For more information, send-email to American Cybercasting Cor- poration (usa@AmeriCast.COM)