One, two, many wars.

• Position: Defense spending - Editorial

We ought to be grateful, perhaps, that Bill Clinton finally found a campaign promise he could keep without evasion or equivocation. The trouble is that it's a promise he shouldn't have made in the first place.

When he was running for President last year in depressed eastern Connecticut, Clinton pledged that he would give the area an economic boost by ordering more Seawolf nuclear submarines, which are built in Groton by the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics Corporation. The campaign promise was a surprise because the Navy said it didn't need or want any more Seawolf subs; in fact, it planned to get rid of almost half of the eighty-one attack submarines already in the fleet.

But when, after many months of intense study, Defense Secretary Les Aspin announced the Administration's military spending plans early in September, a third Seawolf submarine stood high on the list. The price tag, not counting the inevitable cost overruns: $2.4 billion. None of the reporters who covered the press conference at which Aspin released his recommendations cared to ask - and no one in the Administration offered to tell - what $2.4 billion invested in schools, homes, mass transit, and health-care facilities might have done for the economy of eastern Connecticut.

Along with the unneeded Seawolf submarine, the Navy is slated to receive a- new nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, to be built by Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia at a cost of $3.6 billion. The military rationale for this leviathan, according to The New York Times, is "to help the Navy maintain a constant maritime presence around the world." Neither The Times nor the Pentagon explained why such a presence is either necessary or desirable.

In all, the Administration's five-year plan calls for military spending in excess of $1.2 trillion dollars. There's little comfort in the fact that it reflects - again quoting The New York Times - "the same strategy that Defense Secretary Dick Cheney endorsed as part of the Bush Administration's military strategy before he left office."

Two basic considerations, both of them thoroughly misguided, are the apparent fundamentals of that strategy:

[paragraph] Military spending is the preferred way - in fact, the only way - to sustain the U.S. economy. To cancel, withdraw, or even phase out Pentagon contracts would eliminate many thousands of jobs, and wipe out the manufacturing corporations.

To address genuine domestic needs by allocating Federal funds now...