(FORTUNE Magazine) – We begin by fastening on three thoughts about the U.S. defense budget that have lately swum into focus. (1) Owing to an outbreak of sweetness and light in the world, the budget will be cut big. (2) Owing to unsound thinking back home, it will doubtless be cut the wrong way. (3) Owing to a massive collective attack of innumeracy, the American media have been unable to explain what's going on, and the off-the-record guidance they keep getting at the Pentagon seems only to make things worse. One of these days, the newspaper readers of America may find out what Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and his minions in the Pentagon have been trying to convey, but the day seems distant as we input these bitter bytes. The SecDef's ideas somehow involve cuts of $180 billion. It seems at least to be clear that this number is central to the story. When we inquired on December 3, Nexis cited 164 news stories since mid-November in which ''$180 billion'' had appeared within 30 words of ''defense.'' Since the whole defense budget has been in the $300 billion zone in recent years, it also seems clear that cuts of that magnitude are a major matter. Remaining persistently murky have been certain other critical details: the number of years over which the cuts would be spread, the baseline against which they should be measured, the percentage decline in total defense spending represented by the cuts. The murk was instantly on display in the New York Times, which exploded the story under a page one, three-column headline on November 18. The paper said the $180 billion of cuts would be implemented over three fiscal years -- 1992 through 1994 -- and ''would represent an average annual drop of about 5% in spending after inflation . . .'' Huh? 5%? The most recent Pentagon projections for spending in 1992-94 show aggregate outlays of $954 billion. Unless you plug in some fairly wild assumptions about the defense inflation rate -- you would have to get close to 15% -- there is no way to cut that amount by $180 billion over three years and end up with real reductions averaging only 5%. Nevertheless, the Times has not backed away from either the 5% figure or the three-year timetable in repeated follow-up stories; and, the Times being the Times, its arithmetic has been replicated all over the place. Nexis is pointing us to some Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, AP, and UPI stories also illogically linking those two numbers. Outdoing everybody in dopey arithmetic was Xinhua, the Chinese government news agency, whose correspondent reported soberly, or maybe not, that the $180 billion over three years worked out to annual cuts of 2%. To be sure, some of these publications have used different, dizzying combinations of figures in other stories. We can also point to stories in which the cuts are said to be spread over four, five, and six years. Possibly the most persuasive account we read appeared in the Post on December 3. It was a long, plausible analysis by former assistant secretary of defense Larry Korb, who seemed quite sure that the cuts would be spread over a five-year period. Even at five years, you need a high inflation rate to make the calculation work, but Korb indicated that there is a case for projecting defense inflation at 8%. The American media tend to be instinctively hostile to Pentagon brass, but in their confused reportage on the $180 billion of defense cuts, many journalists seem to have unknowingly aligned themselves with the service chiefs. They have done so in assuming that the cuts inevitably will, and should, come mainly out of large and complex weapons systems (the B-2 Stealth bomber being a prime candidate) rather than manpower and ''readiness.'' That is a strategic non sequitur. We were talking the other day to Fred Ikle, for whom we worked two years ago on the Commission on Integrated Long- Term Strategy. (He was a co-chairman of the commission, which included such other heavyweights as Albert Wohlstetter, Henry A. Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski.) It turns out that Ikle would be quite happy to take the cuts out of manpower these days: The near-term security environment is highly unthreatening, and the long-term security environment is utterly unknowable. Since manpower can be acquired and trained in far less time than weapons systems can be developed, all logic tells us to take the budget cuts out of people. To be sure, all logic remains underrepresented in Nexis.