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

Our military forces are famous around the world for their ability to destroy targets. They do it with precision-guided missiles, or conventional weapons, or nuclear weapons. They're the best in the world; no question about that. Recently though they put more emphasis on their ability to construct things and questions have arisen as to whether construction is really the role for our military in the future. Our program is about that subject.

General CARL MUNDY, Jr., Commandant, US Marine Corps (before Senate Armed Services Committee, 19 May 1993):

"Our tempo of operations isn't slackening in the new world disorder. If anything, it's quickening."

General MERRILL McPEAK, Chief of Staff, US Air Force (before Defense Subcommittee of Senate Appropriations Committee, 28 April 1993):

"There's lots of business around for the Air Force to do. We're very busy."

NARRATOR: Today's top military officials report that they're busier than ever before. The once-feared Soviet military, with its hundreds of ships, tens of thousands of tanks, and millions of troops, which were once at the center of US military planning is now in total shambles. But the Pentagon's top brass says United States forces are still on the go.

General RONALD FOGLEMAN, Commander-in-Chief, US Transporta- tion Command (before Senate Armed Services Committee, 22 April 1993):

"Despite the end of the cold war, the men and women of the United States Transportation Command and our components -- the Military Traffic Management Command, the Military Sealift Command and the Air Mobility Command -- have continued operating at a very high tempo."

NARRATOR: And just what are US military forces doing?

In part, they're providing disaster assistance to foreign peoples in need of help. Over the past years, airmen have been busy delivering medical supplies, food and other items to the former Soviet Union.

In Bosnia, heroic pilots risk anti-aircraft fire to deliver food, clothing, blankets and other supplies.

In Somalia, US forces did everything from flying in urgently needed food and building bridges in remote villages to providing dental care to Somalis on the beaches of the Indian Ocean.

In Niger, US forces delivered seeds and dispensed medical treatment.

After a devastating cyclone struck Bangladesh, US military forces ferried food, clothing and other supplies to inaccessible victims, and provided medical help.

Over the past nine years, the Pentagon has delivered more than 10,000 tons of emergency relief supplies to more than 100 countries.

In addition to responding to natural and manmade disasters, the Pentagon has also been busy providing another kind of assistance to foreign countries. It's called "civic action," or sometimes "civic assistance," or "nation assistance."

Nation assistance is when the US military, in non-emergency situations, sends soldiers to build roads and bridges, schools and medical clinics, as well as other facilities. Sometimes soldiers give inoculations or provide other kinds of medical or veterinary care.

Between 1988 and 1992 over 75 countries received such assistance from the US military. From 1991 to 1993, over 63,000 active duty and reservists traveled just to Latin America to conduct civil assistance.

Pentagon officials like doing these activities because, they say, these missions provide valuable training opportunities for US soldiers.

General JOULWAN: "The reserve component gets excellent training. He trains to his mission-essential task list and he trains in an environment that is different than anything you can find in the United States."

NARRATOR: But how valuable is this training? According to a report presented to the US Congress by the General Accounting Office, or GAO, the training was of dubious value.

FRANK CONAHAN: In our current work, we found that all too often the value of the training being received by individual soldiers was questionable.

NARRATOR: Frank Conahan is the experienced director of GAO's National Security and International Affairs Division.

Mr. CONAHAN: We ran into a medic in one of the countries that we visited and said that he felt that he could get much better training in the emergency room of his local hospital back home than he got from dispensing shots to the villagers in the area where we visited with him.

NARRATOR: US military officials associated with these civic action programs reject the GAO's report.

Colonel JOHN COPE (Ret.): I am a little concerned about it. My concern is that it really doesn't strike me as being terribly well-informed.

NARRATOR: Colonel John Cope was the deputy chief of staff at Southern Command, the United States Headquarters for all American military forces which operate in Central and South America. Today, he's a knowledgeable senior fellow at the National Defense University. He is convinced that civic actions provide realistic training for US soldiers.

Colonel COPE: To physically have to leave your home station, leave everything behind that you can't just go back if you forgot, you've got to -- it's got to be very thorough. And so, you rarely get these kinds of training opportunities in these overseas deployments to provide that.

NARRATOR: Other observers are skeptical.

Colonel DUNLAP: Don't kid yourself in saying it's training. You can say anything is training. But don't kid yourself in saying that you are helping the military mission by doing that.

NARRATOR: Colonel Charles Dunlap is the thoughtful author of The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012 and The Last American Warrior: Non-Traditional Missions and the Decline of the US Armed Forces. Colonel Dunlap's views expressed on this program are his own and do not necessarily represent the policies of the Defense Department.

Colonel DUNLAP: Well, the missions do provide a type of training and they do have some training benefit. But when you look at training, you need to determine whether this is the most efficient and effective way of accomplishing that training. Do we really need to send a unit from Pennsylvania to South America to teach them how to pack up their equipment? I would suggest not.

NARRATOR: Senior military officials stress the benefits military units receive working as teams to achieve cohesion. Soldiers in videotapes produced by the military and provided to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" say they benefit from the training they get during civic actions.

From Department of Defense Video:

"The troops get really good training on these type of deployments because you use every type of skill that you have, plus some that some that you never knew that you had, using expedient methods to get things done."

NARRATOR: But are they getting the right kind of training? Colonel Dunlap thinks not. He believes that effective training requires the integration of support forces, like these construc-tion engineers, with the combat forces, the soldiers who actually do the fighting during wartime.

Colonel DUNLAP: In war and in combat, the hard task is not the medical people doing their discreet task -- in other words, giving the shot or the engineers building the road -- the hard task is to integrate those support functions with the actual combat unit that they're supposed to be supporting. When these units constantly train in isolation from the combat unit that they're supposed to be supporting, their overall effectiveness, in my mind, is undermined.

NARRATOR: In addition, the General Accounting Office found that the opportunity for soldiers to improve their occupational skills during civic action was limited. And that some soldiers were assigned tasks for which they had no experience at all.

Mr. CONAHAN: We talked with a sergeant who was supervising construction in one of the countries that we visited and he said flat out, he says, "I just don't know construction techniques," and he inferred that he shouldn't be called upon to do it.

NARRATOR: As a result, a number of construction projects were not carried out very successfully, according to the GAO.

Mr. CONAHAN: When you ask people do to things that they're not trained to do, they're likely not going to do them right, and we found cases where that was the case. For example, in Panama, a unit replaced a roof on a hospital clinic. They essentially slanted the roof in the wrong direction; they slanted it inward rather than outward. And the person in charge of that clinic was enraged when the person found that during the rainy season, the clinic got flooded. Rightfully so. Well, the people just simply weren't trained to do that the right way.

NARRATOR: Colonel Cope reminded us that one of the reasons the military does civic actions is to give US troops an opportu-nity to practice such things as construction techniques. Colonel Cope thinks the problems the GAO found are isolated instances and that GAO evaluators did not do a thorough investigation.

Colonel COPE: When you're taking from a very limited sample and making very broad general conclusions about just whether or not a program is very effective, I just don't think that you can reach the conclusion that they do from the size of the sample that they've got.

NARRATOR: Nevertheless, GAO evaluators found problems at every location they visited.

Do civic actions help developing countries economically and politically over the long term?

JOY OLSON: If a humanitarian aid program goes out and vaccinates children, it has a positive effect in terms of the children that are vaccinated. I'm not saying that that's not a good thing to happen; children need to be vaccinated.

NARRATOR: Joy Olson is the astute director of the Central American Working Group, a nonprofit group which coordinates the activities of 45 organizations focussing on Central American issues. She agrees that civic actions in Latin America may provide short term benefits, but doubts they are beneficial in the long run.

Ms. OLSON: For long term development, what you need to see are the civilian infrastructures developed to the point where not just this year's children get vaccinated, but next year's children, and the year after that. You continually have children who need to be vaccinated. So, you need to develop the civilian infrastructures that can respond on a continuing basis to the problems that exist.

NARRATOR: US military officials say their programs are specifically designed to teach the citizens of the host nation new skills.

General CARL STINER, Commander-in-chief, US Special Operations Command (before Senate Armed Services Committee, 21 April 1993):

"In Cameroon in FY-91, a small reserve civil affairs team of five doctors and four nurses conducted a medical training mission with the Cameroonian military... The skills given to the Cameroonians enabled them to inoculate an additional 170,000, military people after the SOF team left, and set up a system of record keeping that could be promulgated throughout that country."

NARRATOR: Some experts think the US military ought to concentrate on its mission of defending America from external dangers and allow civilian government agencies or private organi-zations which are specifically assigned to provide foreign assistance to do their job.

Colonel DUNLAP: We need to let those non-military agencies of government do their job. Let the State Department do their job. Let the Peace Corps do their job. Let the Agency for International Development do their job. And let the military do its job of being prepared to fight the wars should the occasion arise.

NARRATOR: Civic action supporters say there is enough work to go around and that their activities complement other non-military development efforts.

Colonel COPE: The DoD is not trying to compete with the Agency for International Development.

NARRATOR: Others emphasize that America's whole approach to foreign assistance should focus on helping developing countries initiate projects they can sustain and manage themselves.

JOHN SWENSON: I think US development assistance ought to encourage smaller scale development down at the community-based level.

NARRATOR: John Swenson is the thoughtful associate execu- tive director of Migration and Refugee Services, a department within the US Catholic Conference.

Mr. SWENSON: Local communities getting together to define and try to meet their own needs are given support and nurture through selective funding, but where they can establish coopera-tives, small enterprises, these sorts of things, which will assist them to take more control over their own lives than they're currently able to do.

INTERVIEWER: And the role of the US military?

Mr. SWENSON: I don't see a role for the US military in long term development.

NARRATOR: One problem of using military forces for nation assistance, Colonel Dunlap suggests, is that it sets a bad example by encouraging developing nations to look to their military for promoting economic and social growth.

Colonel DUNLAP: In many of these less developed and Third World countries, the military has been the source of oppression. And by bringing more military people in, we validate the concept that the military is the thing that gets things done. So, once again, the people are impressed or imprinted with the idea that the military is in charge and is the only way to get things done.

NARRATOR: Colonel Cope told us that in some countries, the military already plays a large role in building their nation's economy. And that US civic assistance provides American military personnel the opportunity to teach their foreign counterparts to respect human rights and the democratic process and civilian control.

Joy Olson believes US policy ought to use civilian means to encourage the growth of private businesses in developing countries.

Ms. OLSON: If you're talking about the long term stability of democracy and peace, you have to have civilian institutions that have the capacity to be able to build roads, maintain roads. You need the domestic infrastructure and something that isn't the military infrastructure. If the military is given -- it has all of these capabilities and is the only entity within the country that does, then you end up depending on the military to do things that I think within a democratic society should be carried out by the civilians.

NARRATOR: A number of development experts we spoke to wondered if using the military to provide foreign assistance was cost effective.

Mr. SWENSON: Military forces, and I think particularly the American military forces, travel with a very long logistical tail. I question whether it's really cost effective to provide humanitarian assistance directly using the armed forces, since it's so very expensive for the military to deploy.

NARRATOR: Others believe the costs are small, since the US must spend money on training anyway and that the only additional costs of providing civic assistance are the incidental costs of material, such as the wood used to build the schools and fuel consumed by road-building equipment.

Colonel COPE: This is not something that is going to generate a lot of new units or a lot of fancy equipment. We're using existing capabilities and low-tech items to perform these particular missions. It's a case of, I think, good husbandship of your resources in peacetime and getting the most out of something that is there, and there is a training benefit when you use your particular capabilities.

NARRATOR: According to the Defense Department, the Pentagon spent about $21 million on civic action between 1988 and 1992. Yet these figures don't tell the whole story, according to the General Accounting Office.

Mr. CONAHAN: The two principal costs, the personnel costs associated with the troops that actually carry out these projects are not included and the costs of deploying these troops to the overseas locations are not included. And when you think, for example, that some 50,000 troops were deployed just to Latin America since the 1980s, you can see that we're talking about massive numbers of troops and you're talking about pretty high costs.

NARRATOR: The GAO's first recommendation in their report was that "the Secretary of Defense develop a cost-effective method for providing Congress with a more reasonable estimate of the costs incurred in providing humanitarian assistance."

Some observers are concerned that these civic action activities will be used as an excuse to keep military forces America does not need for legitimate defense needs.

Colonel DUNLAP: I will predict to you, if it hasn't occurred already, that these non-traditional missions will be justified, will be used to justify the existence of these support organizations.

NARRATOR: General Stiner, the commander-in-chief of Special Operation Forces, or SOF, just this past year testified before Congress that operations and maintenance, or O and M, had to be provided so that his troops could continue to do civic actions.

General STINER (21 April 1993, before Senate Armed Services Committee):

"If SOF are going to continue to contribute to US national security, as it should, four things are essential. First, we need sufficient O and M funds to ensure training readiness."

NARRATOR: And that additional personnel had to added in order to keep up with all the activity.

General STINER (at same hearing):

"SOF must have an adequate force structure. Increasing demands for SOF may require small increases in SOF size if we're going to continue to provide the support required of us by the administration and the regional CINCs. The most important man-power shortage currently faced by SOF is being addressed by the formation of a second active civil affairs battalion."

NARRATOR: Colonel Cope points out that US ambassadors to developing countries frequently turn to the US military for help when they want to provide assistance to foreign governments.

Colonel COPE: The ambassador does have a range of capabili-ties that he can draw upon. The question is funding. The Agency for International Development has got to work long projections in advance. It very well may be that all of their funds are committed and they just can't take on a new project that a president has raised. You turn to the Defense Department to see if they can do something, and the Defense Department may be able to do it.

NARRATOR: Colonel Dunlap thinks that if development agencies were as well funded as the US military, US ambassadors would be able to turn to them instead of the Pentagon when they needed support.

Colonel DUNLAP: If the need is there and if the financing is there, then there are companies in this country that would be very happy to go somewhere and build a road, or conduct inocula-tions, or build a school, or whatever is needed in the Third World. I think that we ought to have a little bit more faith in our free enterprise system of coming up with responses if, indeed, the resources are there.

NARRATOR: What about when US ambassadors want to help countries during natural disasters, like the cyclone in Bangla-desh, or manmade disasters, like the civil war in the former Yugoslavia?

LARRY MINEAR: There's quite a debate raging right now, given the larger availability of military forces and personnel, about wherein they should make their major contribution.

NARRATOR: Larry Minear, co-director of the Washington-based Refugee Policy Group, is a renowned expert on humanitarian assis-tance in conflict situations. He's authored scores of articles and books, including, most recently, Humanitarian Action in the Former Yugoslavia: The U.N.'s Role.

Mr. MINEAR: It seems to me that in situations of natural disaster -- typhoons, floods, droughts, and so on -- there is a role for the military, primarily in the area of logistics, trans-porting things using military aircraft or other conveyances to areas where getting relief supplies -- food and medicine, or shelter -- in in a hurry after an earthquake is essential.

NARRATOR: Since 1990, over 37 countries have received disaster assistance from the US military. And, while these efforts are appreciated by most recipients, they exact a huge toll in the wear and tear on US equipment, especially on expen-sive military cargo planes.

Colonel Dunlap believes America ought to encourage international responsibility for rescue efforts, so that the world will not always look to the United States to pay for and carry out disaster relief.

Colonel DUNLAP: We ought to be moving towards developing an organization which will relieve the US military of performing that immediate emergency response to disaster relief, because right now we're basically the only people that can do it. And until that capability gets into place, the United States military is going to be continually obliged to respond to these sorts of emergencies.

NARRATOR: Many disaster relief organizations we spoke to appreciate US military support.

Mr. MINEAR: It's quite clear that whatever tasks the military takes on, it takes on with great thoroughness, with great consistency, and with great follow through.

NARRATOR: Yet there is a risk in relying too much on the military.

Mr. MINEAR: I think one of the dangers, therefore, that one has to think about is that when the military and the civilian humanitarians talk about a partnership, that partnership can easily be conceived of and implemented on terms of the larger partner, which is in fact the defense establishment.

If the result of that is that the spontaneity and the creativity and, if you will, the quick responsiveness of private relief groups is imperiled, this would be I think a lose-lose situation.

Colonel DUNLAP: I do think that there is a place for a standing United Nations civilian support organization -- in other words, planes and ships -- that can be used to support not only United Nations peacekeeping operations, but disaster relief and other emergencies that arise from time to time throughout the world.

Admiral LaROCQUE: Well, it's pretty obvious that there is a difference of opinion as to what the future role of the United States military ought to be, except that there is general agree-ment that the job of the military is, indeed, to fight and win wars for the United States. However, there seems to be consider-able pressure on the military to go about the world performing civic actions and handling disaster relief.

Now that is a decision which not only the United States is going to have to make, but the leaders of the other countries, as well. The United Nations, perhaps, ought to be increasingly involved in disaster relief and also in civic action. Clearly, there is a cost to the United States using its military forces in civic actions around the world; certainly a diminution in their military capability and training.

Until next time, for "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I'm Gene LaRocque.

[Over credits]

Colonel COPE: I think that the people that are involved in it, by and large, learn a great deal.

Colonel DUNLAP: I'm absolutely convinced that DoD involve- ment in these non-traditional missions will eventually erode combat capability.

Colonel COPE: DoD has got the ability to assist in the execution of US foreign policy even in peacetime. We have tremendous capabilities that are just waiting to be used and I think that we can find some very innovative ways to use these in peacetime.

Colonel DUNLAP: We need to eliminate the distractions. We need to focus and concentrate our remaining resources on doing the one thing that the military is supposed to do, and that's to fight and win wars.

Colonel COPE: In many instances, I'd say in most instances, you're not competing with the private sector at all. Remember, this whole thing begins with a country, the country's government. They are the ones that nominate the projects.

Colonel DUNLAP: Let the State Department do their job. Let the Peace Corps do their job. Let the Agency for International Development do their job. And let the military do its job of being prepared to fight the wars should the occasion arise.

[End of broadcast.]