(FORTUNE Magazine) – Having won the peace, will U.S. policymakers now overreact and slash defense spending too deeply? Short answer: no. True, the five-year budget plan favored by Les Aspin, Bill Clinton's choice for Defense Secretary, would pare America's arsenal and active-duty troops well below current levels, as the table opposite indicates. But George Bush envisioned cuts that were only slightly less deep. Bush would have kept 1.6 million uniformed personnel by 1997, vs. Aspin's 1.4 million. Over the next five years, Aspin proposes spending just 6% less on the military than the departing Administration. What's the case for spending more? Almost nonexistent, given the nature of the threats the U.S. is likely to face in the 1990s. All come from a list of countries whose hostility toward America is mostly a Cold War hangover. Listed by size of their respective militaries, they are Syria, North Korea, Iraq, Libya, Iran, and Cuba.

None of these countries are close to matching Saddam Hussein's armed forces before their 1991 brush with the U.S.-led coalition, when the Iraqi military numbered one million troops with 5,300 main battle tanks and 430 advanced jet fighters. Although Saddam continues to taunt the U.S. and its allies, his military has been trimmed to 382,500 troops, 2,300 tanks, and 180 planes. An analysis last year by Aspin's staff estimated that the Syrian and North Korean ground forces are each about 60% the size of Iraq's pre-Desert Storm army. Does that mean it might be safe to spend even less on defense than Aspin imagines? Quite plausibly. William Kaufmann, a respected military analyst at the Brookings Institution, believes the military budget by 1997 could drop as low as $182 billion in today's dollars. His plan is the ''more radical'' one in the table. Kaufmann would save by spending more on some things. To ensure a flexible force he would retain more Marine divisions (18,000 troops each) than Aspin, since they can be rapidly deployed. But he would trim more ruthlessly the number of heavily equipped Army divisions (12,000 troops each), which can't be so easily moved. To strengthen America's capacity to engage an enemy quickly, he and Aspin both propose to build more military transport planes and ships. Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute and author of several Clinton defense speeches, agrees: ''Unlike the Persian Gulf, the next time we may not have the luxury of taking half a year to build up our forces.'' Kaufmann would cut harder than Aspin into aircraft carrier battle groups. They sail with 19 ships, and each costs $2 billion a year to operate. Their missions, Kaufmann argues, can be achieved more nimbly and cheaply by cruisers and frigates armed with cruise missiles and by land-based fighters and bombers. What if situations arise where bases for those planes aren't available? Another of Kaufmann's key assumptions is that the U.S. will retain a global string of allies who will help when needed. That's reasonable. The January raids on Iraq's missile sites included British and French planes, and used bases in the Persian Gulf. If the U.S. has to take action without such partners, it should question whether it is a good idea to go in at all. To pave the way for smaller Pentagon budgets, the U.S. would also need a deeper reduction in nuclear arms than those made in the recent Start talks, which cut America's and Russia's long-range nuclear weapons by 66%. Kaufmann argues that this could allow the U.S. to reduce its strategic forces to the 18 invulnerable Trident missile submarines that will be on patrol by 1997 -- and cut the $30 billion a year it would spend on nuclear weapons by more than half. Likewise, the U.S. will have to keep working with Britain, France, China, and other nuclear powers to keep crazies like Saddam Hussein from developing a bomb. None of this rules out the chance of a major new threat emerging -- a nuclear Russia led by an expansionist nationalist, say, or a China that in ten years could appear much more menacing. But presumably the U.S. and its allies will have years of warning to launch a buildup of their own. More important than the merits of Kaufmann's specific proposals is his way of approaching defense questions. In a dangerous world, it's always easy to make the case that when it comes to security, more is more. But at a time when the direct threats to American power are weaker than they've been in 40 years -- and when social needs are large and pressing -- that seems dangerously wrongheaded, rather like buying a gold-plated alarm system for a house whose roof is falling in.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: NO CREDIT CAPTION: THE FORCE WE HAVE NOW THE ASPIN PLAN A MORE RADICAL PLAN