DATE: Saturday, April 12, 1997              TAG: 9704120295

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B2   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY BILL SIZEMORE, STAFF WRITER

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   46 lines

GEN. JOHN J. SHEEHAN: A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD

Marine Gen. John J. Sheehan demonstrated Friday the double-edged bluntness that has both gotten him noticed at the highest levels of the Clinton administration and ruffled the feathers of some of his fellow officers.

The Norfolk-based Sheehan, who heads the Atlantic Command of the U.S. military and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is said to be under consideration by President Clinton for the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation's top uniformed military job.

But his penchant for candid introspection, one of the qualities that has caught the president's notice, has also raised some eyebrows among his more buttoned-down peers.

At this weekend's symposium on the future of NATO, co-sponsored by the U.S.-European military alliance and Old Dominion University, Sheehan passed up the chance to tout NATO's proposed enlargement to include former Soviet-bloc nations, a cause that occupied many of Friday's speakers.

The expansion of NATO seems irreversible, he said, and there is no need to rehash it.

Instead, Sheehan urged the nation's leaders to scrutinize Cold War-era institutions like NATO to make sure they are addressing the needs of a changed world.

``We have to ask ourselves, are they still relevant to the world that we live in today?'' he said. ``Or is the economic vitality of a nation more important than the military dimension?''

To demonstrate the challenges of today's world, Sheehan offered an intellectual exercise: Imagine that you could shrink the population of the world into a village of 100 people. Then the following would be true:

Half of all wealth would be in the hands of six people, all Americans.

70 people would be unable to read.

50 would suffer from malnutrition.

80 would live in substandard housing.

Only one would have a college education.

``These factors and others have caused us to redefine security,'' Sheehan said. ``. . . Today's security challenges are economic, political, cultural and military in dimension.

``But unlike the last 50 years when the military dimension was dominant, today it has to figure out where it fits.'' ILLUSTRATION: Gen. John J. Sheehan

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