DATE: Thursday, May 8, 1997                 TAG: 9705080001

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B12  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: BY HOWIE LIND 

                                            LENGTH:   85 lines

U.S. NEEDS FIVE MILITARY SERVICES

Why do we need five military services? Why not just combine all of the service secretaries into one, as proposed in a recent letter to the editor, thereby saving countless sums of money? As the argument goes, these savings could be used to balance the national budget and maintain the Social Security and Medicare programs. If life were only that simple. Two serious issues are raised here: (1) What effect on the armed forces would result from a total consolidation? (2) Can savings through defense cuts be used to correct other areas of government?

The first question demands a look at the service secretariats. They are each a bureaucracy that performs similar functions at the macro level, but they carry out very different actions at the detail levels. The Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard are as different as the environment in which they work - sea, air and ground.

What would we as a nation lose if all of the services were combined into one? Plainly, the U.S. would lose the ability to engage in armed conflict. Picture in your mind the metaphor of a perfectly choreographed stage play to describe an ideal military action. Everything occurs at the right moment with the exact result. Our Air Force and Navy planes would deliver ordnance at the precise time, hitting all intended targets, followed by the Navy launching missiles and sending the Marines ashore to arrive at the exact moment that the enemy is in retreat. These heroic actions are then followed by the safe landing of our heavy-lift airplanes to develop the Army's sustaining base for large-scale ground combat.

This, of course, all assumes zero American casualties.

The reality would be different. Technology and machines do not always work at 100 percent, despite being the best in the world. People make errors in judgment even though they have passed rigorous combat-training programs. The weather does not cooperate. Encompassing all of this is political decision-making that does not wait for the best environmental conditions before ordering an armed action.

In short, we need to back up our forces because there are too many variables to guarantee the safety of our young men and women. This spells redundancy in the above armed choreography, and, yes, this requires multiple air forces. Naval air power is required to initially silence the hostile forces near the shoreline. Marine aviation (mainly helicopters) is needed to rapidly deploy troops from the ships to the shoreline, as well as provide protection for the deployed troops. The Coast Guard would deploy ships and helicopters to ensure safe and navigable harbors. The Air Force would target the enemy's major centers of power and deploy the Army's ground troops. The Army's air force is used in a similar fashion as the Marine Corps', but far inland as the Army moves toward its objective.

Some people question our nation continuing to produce a war-making capability. This issue has often been rasied since the end of the Cold War and with an absence of overt threats. Fundamentally, how do we see ourselves compared to the rest of the world? The United States has evolved during this century to be the only nation on Earth that can respond quickly to a hostile foreign government, to a terrorist group or to natural disasters that threaten whole populations. Do we want to retain this ability?

I think we do. Historically, our engagement in major armed conflict occurs about once every 10 or 15 years, such as the Persian Gulf war and the Grenada operation. But the low-level military actions that occur every week are what we will encounter well into the upcoming century. Most of our actions involve evacuations of civilians, caused by internal political strife or as the third-party arbiter while attempting to restore peace to war-torn countries.

Regarding the dollar savings from defense cuts used to fix Social Security and Medicare: The numbers simply do not add up. The defense budget has been in decline since 1990. Social Security and Medicare together are over twice that of the military budget and are projected to keep rising. To tackle the budget-balancing act, we all need to look in the mirror and determine what we can do vs. what we would like to do. There are some sizable savings to be gained from the armed forces, but it is not from the combination of service secretaries. These savings could be achieved by reducing the huge inefficiencies caused by the military bases and production plants that DOD is forced to keep open in certain congressional districts.

Politicians are not to blame. The fault goes to those who pressure our elected officials to protect the jobs and cultures that we have grown up with.

What do we make of all this? I say, let those people who have been working hard to figure out the best arrangement for our military, keep at it. For now, we should keep our five armed services in the same design as we navigate through the unsure waters of the 21st century. Asking the hard question about what we are ``entitled'' to is paramount for us to truly balance the budget. MEMO: Howie Lind is a commander in the U.S. Navy. He has served aboard

five ships, worked in two headquarters staffs and received an M.S.

degree in Information Systems during his service of 17 years.

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