NARRATOR: This is an Air Force F-16. This is a Navy F/A-18. This is a Marine Corps Harrier. And this is an Army Apache heli-copter. What do all these planes have in common? They are all part of America's four air forces.

Senator SAM NUNN (D-GA) (2 July '92, Senate Floor): "We're the only military in the world with four air forces."

NARRATOR: This week "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" asks "Do We Need Four Military Services?"

["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]

Admiral GENE LaROCQUE: Welcome once again to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR."

In all the years I spent in the Pentagon making war plans, some of the biggest battles were fought over which of the services was going to be directed and could assume the responsi-bility for performing certain military tasks. Because once you were assigned a certain military task, then you could assume that you would get the resources, the manpower, and the money to carry out those tasks. As a result, there was a lot of duplication and redundancy which was built-in to the Pentagon forces, each of the services trying to do all the jobs.

Today, there is some movement in the Congress and among military men to reduce that redundancy. Our program is about that today.

NARRATOR: Today's military is the result of over 40 years of massive growth fueled by inter-service rivalry and huge amounts of money. The United States spent over $12 trillion waging the cold war.

The Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines have operated as independent services. They've all sought to acquire as many missions as possible, believing that they were the most qualified to do the job. In the process, each service sought a larger and larger share of the budget.

Today's military is overburdened by massive duplica- tion. For instance, each service has its own fleet of aircraft. The Army and Marines have ground forces with duplicate missions. And each service has its own training and education centers and recruiting bureaucracy.

Senator NUNN (2 July '92, Senate Floor): "We're the only military in the world with four air forces. We have a Marine Corps and an Army with light infantry divisions..."

NARRATOR: Senator Sam Nunn, the respected chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, recently addressed the issue of waste and redundancy on the Senate floor.

Senator NUNN (same as above): "...Both the Navy and the Air Force design, build, and test, and field cruise missiles. Both the Navy and the Air Force build and operate satellites.

"Each of the military departments has its own huge infrastructure of schools, laboratories, industrial facilities, testing organizations and training ranges. We have at least, three and, in some instances, four separate chaplain corps, medical corps, dental corps, nursing corps and legal corps. The list goes on and on and on.

"Mr. President, this redundancy and duplication is costing billions of dollars every year."

NARRATOR: How many billions of dollars? Lots. In 1992 alone, the Army spent $1,700,000,000 on buying aircraft. The

Navy and Marines spent $6,900,000,000. And the Air Force spent $10,400,000,000. That's a total of $19 billion in 1992 alone. And each service is planning to spend a lot more in the future to buy new aircraft.

Senator NUNN (same as above): "The services now have planned over $350 billion worth of new combat aircraft that are on the drawing boards -- most of that in terms of starts begins in the budget this year -- with only limited efforts to achieve commonality among those systems.

"We must find ways to save billions of dollars with streamlining and eliminating the duplication in this area. Anyone looking at this area knows that it cannot be sustained in terms of cost."

NARRATOR: Duplication of effort is not limited only to buying aircraft. The Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force spend billions of dollars apiece on weapons research and development. And each service's medical corps is staffed with tens of thou-sands of personnel.

The services' quest for independence and bigness is reinforced by their own political lobbying machines. The Navy League, the Air Force Association, and other organizations constantly bombard Congress, seeking to increase funding for their service.

Everyone agrees that the Defense Department must change now that the cold war is over and the national debt keeps soaring. And the Pentagon has made some adjustments. Due to the prodding of Congress, the development of a few weapons is now a joint effort in which the services work together instead of developing their own weapons independently.

The production lines of a few weapons have been stopped. The planned purchase of a few new weapons has been put on hold. Some research and development laboratories have been consolidated. And personnel levels have been shrinking slightly.

Colonel Harry Summers, the insightful author of many books and articles, thinks the Pentagon is taking appropriate steps.

Colonel HARRY SUMMERS (USA, Ret.): I think they're moving in the right direction. I -- I think they're all trying to come to grips with the realities of the post-cold war world.

NARRATOR: Some others think the services' historical drive for a free hand and big budgets is a primary reason why the Pentagon has not realistically adapted to the post-cold war world.

Ted Galen Carpenter, the knowledgeable foreign policy expert at the CATO Institute and author of The Search for Enemies, thinks the Pentagon isn't moving fast enough.

TED GALEN CARPENTER: Actually, I think the military leader-ship is more interested in trying to protect as much as possible of its institutional prerogatives rather than trying to create an orderly strategy for downsizing.

NARRATOR: The major initiative to restructure the military under the Bush administration was called the base force concept. Under this plan, the Army was supposed to shrink from 20 active and eight National Guard and reserve divisions in 1990 to 12 active and six Guard and reserve divisions by 1997. The Navy is supposed to shrink from 515 ships to 418 ships. And the Air Force says it will go from 24 active and 13 reserve wings to 15 active and 11 in the reserves.

Natalie Goldring, an astute military analyst, thinks the Pentagon's changes are not farreaching enough.

NATALIE GOLDRING: In fact, what's happened is the Depart-ment of Defense has simply taken the cold war force and tried to shrink it in order to fit post-cold war missions. I don't think they've done that well. I don't think the task is over, by any means.

NARRATOR: Natalie Goldring thinks the Pentagon's revisions will only lead to a smaller version of today's military, which was designed for fighting the cold war.

Ms. GOLDRING: I think the military has started to take small steps toward restructuring, but by and large they've kept the framework they had before. They're talking about keeping the same kinds of division structures, keeping, by and large, the same carrier force; small reductions here and there, but not a restructuring. It's a shrinking, not a restructuring.

NARRATOR: In addition to the base force, each service claims it's changing and adapting. With the Soviet Union no longer its focus of attention, each service is looking at the Third World as the most likely place it will have to fight in the future.

NARRATOR: Each service is developing its own plans for so-called "regional contingencies." In plain English, that means fighting in the Third World. The Navy has a new strategy dubbed "From the Sea," which emphasizes using naval forces to attack targets on land and invade coastal areas. The Air Force has developed a strategy called "Global Reach, Global Power," which calls for transferring bombers, once assigned the mission of bombing the Soviet Union, to targeting Third World countries with conventional weapons.

The Navy and the Air Force both claim they will be the first on the scene when a crisis erupts. And both services will want money to compete with the other for this mission.

Some see this re-orienting toward the Third World as a step leading toward a reformed military.

TED GREENWOOD: I think the "Global Reach, Global Power" slogan of the Air Force is partly a recognition of its reorienta-tion towards regional conflict potential.

NARRATOR: Ted Greenwood was the innovative director of Columbia University's International Security Policy program and has been a consultant to the Defense Department. Today he's at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. We asked him if it was really necessary for the Air Force to assign more bombers to Third World missions.

Mr. GREENWOOD: I think there is absolutely that need. I mean, it's a unique capability which one can well-imagine would be very useful. I don't think it's a question of all or nothing. It's a question of, yes, you want it, and we can talk about how much.

Do we want to preserve all our existing interconti- nental bombers and transfer them to that mission? No, we don't. But do we want to keep some of them for that mission? I think we do. And then we can discuss what's the right number.

NARRATOR: Others think a shift toward Third World missions will cause the United States to become more involved in conflicts where we have no interests.

Mr. CARPENTER: "Global Reach, Global Power," combined with the regional contingency strategy, I think is an unfortunate combination. What it means is that the United States will be searching for conflicts in which it can become involved, even though those conflicts may have at most a tenuous connection to our own vital security interests. That is precisely the opposite way the United States ought to be going in a post-cold war world.

Mr. GREENWOOD: I don't think presidents act so much based on the forces that we have, but rather based on what the presi-dent and the administration think is appropriate to do.

Mr. CARPENTER: The absence of any kind of super power threat means that the United States can avoid most quarrels and conflicts in the world. Those conflicts might be extremely impor-tant to the parties concerned, but they're going to be, for the most part, parochial in nature and not relevant to the security interests of the United States.

Ms. GOLDRING: I think that when you have military forces on hand in a region, the tendency will be to use them.

NARRATOR: The United States already has more than enough military power to deal with any potential Third World conflicts, according to Natalie Goldring. She thinks reorienting the mili-tary to fight in the Third World is misguided.

Ms. GOLDRING: The US has more than enough military force to deal with Third World conflict. In fact, what we force people in the Pentagon to do is essentially try and create conflicts in order to justify the current force levels.

NARRATOR: What the United States decides to do about its self-assigned role as world policeman will help determine what duplication in the military should be eliminated. Only after this issue is resolved will we know what kind of military force we need.

Why has there been relatively little change at the Pentagon, despite the enormous changes in the world in recent years?

One reason is that the Pentagon views the United States as having vital interests in every region of the world. In March 1992, a draft of the newest Defense Planning Guidance was leaked to the press. This guidance spells out America's objectives.

Ted Carpenter thinks it defined America's interests in very expansive terms.

Mr. CARPENTER: That document outlined vital security inter-ests for the United States not only in Western Europe, and East Asia and the Middle East, which at least might have made sense in a cold war era setting, but it went beyond that to assert that the military would have to defend vital interests in Eastern Europe, in the republics of the former Soviet Union, in Latin America, in Subsaharan Africa, and in Oceania.

Now that means that if the military is to be believed, the United States has vital security interests that must be defended on every continent except Antarctica.

NARRATOR: Because the Bush administration sought to main-tain the United States as the world's policeman, Ted Carpenter thinks America's military could not make substantial reforms.

Mr. CARPENTER: If the United States adopts a security strategy based upon the defense of the vital security interests of this country and being the balancer of last resort in the international system, rather than trying to implement a global policing role, we can get by with military forces roughly half the size of those contemplated by the administration.

President-elect BILL CLINTON (3 Nov. '92, Election night speech, Little Rock AR):

"With high hopes and brave hearts, in massive numbers, the American people have voted to make a new beginning."

NARRATOR: With the election of Bill Clinton, what new opportunities for change exist? It may be too early to tell.

President-elect CLINTON (same as above): "This election is a clarion call for our country to face the challenges of the end of the cold war and the beginning of the next century."

NARRATOR: On the one hand, Clinton promised during the election to slightly reduce military spending by 4 percent below the Bush administration's projections over the next five years. On the other hand, he made many promises to buy new weapons and keep large numbers of military forces overseas.

But the meter is running. In 1993, we'll spend almost $300 billion on the military. That's almost $6 billion a week. This is almost as much as we spent during the cold war. There is lots of talk of change, but no one can agree on what to do next.

What can be done immediately? Do we really want just a smaller cold war military? Do we want the military to focus on the Third World? Do we want to continue keeping military forces overseas?

Mr. GREENWOOD: I think the United States should definitely keep some forces overseas, much less in Europe than we have in the past; indeed, in my view, considerably less in Europe than the Bush administration wants to keep. But in the Pacific, I wouldn't draw down forces in the Pacific. I think that the pres-ence of US forces in the Pacific is an important moderating element there.

All of our friends and allies in the Pacific want the United States to stay there. Everybody is fearful that if we leave, others in the region will increase their forces and that would be undesirable and destabilizing to the region. I think it's in our interest, as well as it's in the interest of all the local states, to try to prevent that from happening.

NARRATOR: With the cold war over, bringing all US forces back to the United States is one reform the Pentagon should start to make immediately, according to Ted Carpenter.

Mr. CARPENTER: I think the United States ought to withdraw most of its military forces from overseas commitments. Certainly, there is no need for a US troop presence in Europe. We do not need to keep Japan and South Korea as protectorates of the United States. We should maintain an active naval presence in the Pacific region certainly, but we don't need to have bases on the far shores of the Pacific to do that.

NARRATOR: Again, deciding if we want to continue keeping forces overseas will determine what overlapping military activi-ties we can eliminate.

During the huge military spending surge in the 1980s, each service spent billions of dollars researching and developing scores of new weapons: Weapons like this C-17 cargo plane, which could end up costing over $40 billion. The Advanced Tactical Fighter, which could cost over $96 billion. The Comanche heli-copter, which could end up costing $40 billion. And the Strategic Defense Initiative, better known as Star Wars, which could cost up to $100 billion.

What do all these weapons have in common? They were all designed for fighting the now-defunct Soviet Union.

The United States has to decide now whether to spend the money for these new weapons because many of them are ready to enter mass production. Does the United States still need them?

Colonel Harry Summers has focussed on maintaining advanced weapon technology.

Col. SUMMERS: One of our greatest assets has been our tech-nological edge and I think that we ought to maintain that as long as we can. Of course, there's a dollar limit how much we can do, but certainly the technological edge that we have serves us well on the battlefield. We saw that particularly in Iraq.

NARRATOR: Ted Carpenter questions the need for many new weapons.

Mr. CARPENTER: Every new weapons system has to be justified anew. Whether it would have had any utility in the cold war period is now profoundly irrelevant. We have to examine whether a weapons system makes sense in the kind of international system that we have today. If that system does not make sense, then it should not be funded, it should not be built. And we must get away from the unpleasant habit that we have acquired of regarding the military budget as kind of a giant federal jobs program.

NARRATOR: If the United States doesn't spend massive amounts of money on these new weapons, the money could be chan-nelled into rebuilding the domestic economy. For instance, for the cost of one C-17 cargo plane at $300 million apiece, the United States could buy 60 subway cars, 52 commuter rail locomotives and 123 buses.

Ms. GOLDRING: The weapons the United States was developing in the early and mid-1980s, and now into the 1990s, are weapons designed primarily to respond to a Soviet threat. That threat has gone away, so should most of those weapons.

We have the C-17 cargo plane. We don't need it. We don't need that sort of lift capability unless we're really plan-ning on intervening all over the world, something we shouldn't be doing. If we help provide the Department of Defense with the weapons necessary to take on tasks we think are inappropriate, they will take on those tasks. One way to stop them is by canceling some of these weapons systems.

NARRATOR: To begin eliminating duplication of activities in the military, we have to decide whether four separate services need to buy all the weapons on their wish list.

Another change that could be made immediately is relying more on the National Guard and reserves. According to one comprehensive Pentagon study, Army reserves can cost anywhere from 60 to 74 percent less than active component forces. In other words, if one active division costs $976 million a year to operate, a National Guard division costs $386 million. That's less than half the price. Yet the Pentagon wants to keep a large standing active military and rely less on the Guard and reserves.

DICK CHENEY, Secretary of Defense (26 March '92, Pentagon Press Briefing):

"And it is vital that as we take out and draw down the active force that we be allowed, as well, to take out the reserve and Guard component that no longer has a mission."

NARRATOR: Colonel Summers thinks America should depend more on its reserves.

Col. SUMMERS: The traditional way the United States has fought wars has been a rather small active military and a rather large reserve force. I mean, that's been the tradition. The aber-ration has been the cold war period, where we had an exception- ally large standing force in being.

I think now with the Gulf, we're back to the norm, back to the traditional way that the US has used armed forces.

NARRATOR: Ted Greenwood thinks the Guard and reserves should not be relied upon for combat missions. He thinks reser- vists should be used mostly to provide support, like driving trucks and flying transportation aircraft. He thinks the reserve forces should be cut just like the active forces.

Mr. GREENWOOD: We should definitely be cutting the size of the reserve elements, just the way we're cutting the size of the active duty forces.

NARRATOR: Others think the United States should rely on a Guard and reserves for a variety of missions, including combat.

Ms. GOLDRING: I think one of the ways the United States can still preserve a large fighting force while not spending as much money on its military is to move a large number of people from active duty personnel into the reserves.

NARRATOR: Bringing US soldiers home, cancelling weapons we don't need, and relying more on the National Guard and reserves, these are things that can be done immediately. The savings could begin today.

But what will it take to really change the Pentagon over the long haul, to eliminate redundancies, powerful inter-service rivalries, and make it adjust to the post-cold war world?

Ms. GOLDRING: What I think we need instead is a fundamental reassessment of the roles and missions of our military forces. I think we need the kind of gathering we haven't had in nearly 50 years, where the services are forced to sit down and talk with each other and figure out what the overall US defense posture should look like. They haven't been forced to do that. They won't be unless the president and the Congress jointly exercise leadership.

NARRATOR: Ted Greenwood thinks inter-service rivalry can be a good thing, as long as there is strong civilian control of the military.

Mr. GREENWOOD: You need inter-service rivalry, the same way as you have rivalry among baseball teams and football teams; it's not different. That's how organizations have to work if they're going to be successful. But other things have to matter, too. And if you want to keep this kind of rivalry under control so that it doesn't run amuck, which it can if it's not kept under control, you need civilian control. You need a president, you need a Office of Management and Budget, you need a Congress to moderate those forces and say, okay, that's good up to a point, but it can only go so far. And you have to be able to say no and you have to be able to say, well, you know, sometimes it's more important that you guys work together, and make them do it.

NARRATOR: While most people agree that strong civilian con-trol is needed, military officials also have to be less parochial and concerned about protecting their own turf, according to Natalie Goldring.

Ms. GOLDRING: What we pay our military to do is to help decide what's appropriate to the defense of this country. Their mission should be US national security, not the self-defense of the Pentagon, and I'm afraid the balance has fallen a little too far in the latter direction. I think there are people in the military who are sincerely committed to the process of change. I think they also recognize that their jobs are at stake, as well as those of their colleagues. So, there's a tendency to be too cautious, to try and create too many new missions, to preserve too much of the old force.

Mr. CARPENTER: To eliminate redundancy, the pressure has to come from the top, from civilian policymakers. We cannot expect the military leadership, with their own parochial service agendas, to make these kinds of changes. That pressure has to come from the outside.

NARRATOR: Everyone agrees strong leadership from the top will be required to determine the US role in the world and the kind of armed forces we really need. Once that has been accom-plished, the task of eliminating duplication in the military can begin.

Admiral LaROCQUE: Well, it does appear that, as the old comedian Jimmy Durante used to say, "Everyone wants to get into the act." Each of the services obviously has tremendous capabi-lity, but this built-in redundancy that was required during the cold war probably will have to be eliminated because of the stringency of the military budgets in the future.

Perhaps we're going to have to take a look at the roles and missions, going to have to decide just what it is we want our military forces to do in the future. Are they going to be the world's policeman? Are they going to focus on defending the United States? Just what is their role in the future? In this way, we probably can shape the precise size and composition and level of spending for our military forces. That's very important to the United States and our future.

I hope you found the program interesting and, until next time, for "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I'm Gene LaRocque.

[End of broadcast.]