Cheney has styled himself as something of a super hawk, but when it comes to opposing weapons, his advisers seem to be counting on no one looking closely at his record. In his four-year stint as defense secretary during the waning days of the Cold War, Cheney terminated more weapons than every Democrat combined over the previous four decades.

The depth and breadth of his cuts were so breathtaking that today the military is still struggling to cope with some of the consequences. And while the tenor of the times seemed to call for a drawdown in Cold War forces, subsequent developments have made some of his decisions look poorly conceived and wasteful.

In the case of the Air Force, Cheney recommended terminating both its top-of-the-line F-15 fighter and its lower-cost F-16 fighter. He cut the number of A-10 ground attack planes from 435 in 1990 to 159 in 1993, with the intention of phasing it out completely. He delayed development of the next-generation F/A-22 fighter while reducing both the annual production rate and the final production goal - steps that later led critics to claim the plane was unaffordable.

That's a lot of cutting for someone who often stressed the importance of air superiority - but he didn't stop there. After saying in congressional hearings that the military needed more air lift in the future, he recommended cutting the next-generation C-17 cargo plane from 210 to 120 airframes. And after proposing in 1990 a reduction in the B-2 bomber program from 132 planes to 75 - which he said was the minimum acceptable number - he proposed in 1992 to cease production at 20 planes.