The Wall Street Journal, by Staff

By Greg Jaffe and Thomas E. Ricks

Wall Street Journal Staff Reporters

On the Roosevelt, It's All Job, No Adventure, Scrubbing Floors With Steel Wool
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'Just a Professional Janitor'

[First in a series on military spending]

IN THE ADRIATIC SEA -- It's lunchtime aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, and Petty Officer Keschina Storts is in charge of the pork-chop line. She's an aviation-electronics specialist by training, but her job at the moment is to count sailors lining up for rations. Three other sailors stand at the front of other lines doing the same thing. Their assignment: to find out how many of the 4,600 men and women aboard this aircraft carrier prefer pork chops to hamburgers, "so we know how much food to order," says galley supervisor Timothy Tuck.

Several hours into her 12-hour shift, Petty Officer Storts's little aluminum clicker is up to platter No. 615, about the same rate as the last time pork chops were offered. "I know there are better uses for my time," says Ms. Storts, a 23-year-old mother of two from Fontana, Calif., who is on a months-long rotation in the galley. "But this is where the Navy wants me right now."

So it goes for much of the crew. Throughout the 96,000-ton ship, from the signal bridge to the galleys three stories below the flight deck, sailors perform many of the same tasks their predecessors did 30 years ago. They stand watches that video cameras and remote sensors could handle. They chip and repaint heavily trafficked parts of the ship every three months, though commercial ships have found ways to make paint last as long as three years. And they scour floors with steel wool designed for dishes, not decks.

It's a paradox that bedevils all branches of the U.S. military today: undermanned and overstaffed, as the armed forces consistently fall short of recruitment and retention goals to fill jobs that often are of dubious necessity. While the military needs to attract technically skilled recruits like Ms. Storts to fight its high-tech "hot spot" wars, it hasn't modernized its personnel practices accordingly.

Pentagon officials "genuinely believe that people are our most important asset, but too often we treat them as though they were a free good," Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig says in an interview. "The world has changed, but the Navy hasn't changed with it."

Of course, the primary function of a Navy ship's work force isn't to perform chores such as cleaning and painting with maximum efficiency: It is to keep the ship running 24 hours a day, as well as to prepare for and fight wars. As a result, a certain measure of redundancy is built into the system.

Nonetheless, inefficient use of human resources is one of several reasons why, while the Soviet Union is a decade deceased, the "peace dividend" the U.S. was supposed to enjoy in the post-Cold War world has been underwhelming -- arguably, more chump change than jackpot. Though the sums are down from the peak years of the Reagan-era buildup, the U.S. still spends $275 billion a year to defend itself, and, increasingly, police the world. As the enforcer for the world's sole superpower, America's "peacetime" military is one of the busiest in the nation's history, carrying out major operations nearly continuously throughout the 1990s. During Bill Clinton's presidency alone, the U.S. has fired more than 900 cruise missiles in combat -- an average of one every three days.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

As Congress engages in its annual debate over how much to increase the Pentagon's budget -- an argument that for years has involved just a few billion dollars one way or the other -- there is little focus on the bigger picture: What exactly are we buying with all the money? Are we using those resources wisely? And do they provide us with the military we need as the global superpower?

This article initiates a series that examines these questions and explores how the Pentagon is struggling to adapt to a new world in which it is hindered by the persistence of some of its Cold War ways. Promising weapons programs are starved for funding in favor of big-ticket armaments designed for confronting Soviets on the high seas and the plains of Central Europe. Recruiters use antiquated methods to chase a shrinking pool of job seekers. Bureaucratic turf wars stall efforts to close unneeded facilities. Huge nuclear-armed submarines roam the oceans poised to fight a war that they won a decade ago without ever having fired a shot. Everyone agrees that if the U.S. military were rebuilt from scratch today, it would look very different -- but few agree on just what those differences should be.

Nowhere is the military's failure to adapt to the modern world more evident than in the way it treats its people. Paying for military and civilian employees is the Pentagon's biggest single cost -- roughly $120 billion annually. But many observers think that amount could be a lot less. For example, a 1998 study by Rand Corp., a nonprofit think tank, concluded that updating technology could allow substantial reductions in the number of personnel on aircraft carriers. The study found that if such personnel were reduced by 1,500 sailors -- a figure the Navy says is reasonable -- the Navy could run 15 carriers at the current cost of operating 10 to 12. Navy Secretary Danzig blames a "psychology of conscription" for much of the inefficiency in human resources, and he says he is committed to purging it.

A 24-hour period aboard the Roosevelt is all it takes to see the huge challenge he faces.

It's a little before 7 a.m., about a week after the end of the Kosovo air campaign, and the crew is settling back into its normal peacetime routine. A division of the ship's boatswain's mates gather beneath a huge portrait of President Theodore Roosevelt in the hangar bay.

Boatswain's mates are the ship's all-purpose sailors. "Our job is the same as when I joined the Navy," says Chief Petty Officer Christopher Comer, a 19-year veteran who supervises the 32-sailor division. "Paint needs to be chipped, and floors need to be stripped and waxed." The painting and chipping are constant. Some passageways are repainted once every two weeks to cover accumulated grime.

Shortly after the morning muster, Seaman Jerome Reed begins stripping and waxing one of the ship's passageways with scraps of steel wool and kitchen sponges. If he had a mechanical buffer, the six-hour job could be accomplished in two. But none of the buffers on board is assigned to his division. Besides, the bosses insist that the floors look shinier when swabbed by hand.

The Navy could buy more buffers or install newer types of flooring that don't need to be stripped, buffed and waxed weekly. Such flooring is already used in most commercial ships and a few naval ships. The barriers to replacing the decks, however, are more cultural than practical. Swabbing the decks is a job that is part of Navy custom and lore. It was conceived not just to ensure clean floors, but also to teach sailors to take pride in their ship. It's the kind of job that some Navy brass say they want to eliminate.

"If you force young, smart sailors to work this way, they will not stay with the Navy," says Rear Adm. William Cross, who is heading an effort to redesign all aspects of the Navy's carriers, from bridge to galleys. The first changes designed to reduce manpower will begin appearing on the carriers in 2008. The largest savings, however, won't be realized until 2018, at the earliest.

"Are we slow in doing this?" Adm. Cross asks. "Yes. But there was a tremendous concern that if we moved too quickly, we would do something inappropriate that would require a very expensive fix."

Others, like Secretary Danzig, say the military's slow response is itself the product of a culture that is just beginning to realize the costs associated with the poor use of personnel. He recalls how, after making a speech to the captain and crew of a Navy ship on using personnel more wisely, the captain told him how much he liked the speech, escorted him to his stateroom and ordered a sailor to stand watch next door in case Mr. Danzig woke during the night and needed anything.

"I don't think I have woken in the middle of the night and needed someone since I was 13," says Mr. Danzig. "If I did, I certainly could have called someone" on the phone in the room.

A RUSH JOB

Today's boatswain's mates are much different from those who joined the Navy 20 years ago. All of Chief Comer's sailors finished high school, seven spent some time at college, and one graduated. Overall, 97% of the Navy's sailors possess high-school or equivalency degrees, compared with 75% in 1979 and 89% of their civilian peers today, ages 18 to 24. The improvement in credentials reflects the success of policies intended to attract recruits equipped to fight in the era of high-tech warfare. But not all supervisors think education is the chief measure of a soldier. Chief Comer, whose sixth-grade education wouldn't get him into the Navy today, says that sailors may be better educated and more intelligent now, but that they also are "more selfish. They want to know what is in the job for them."

Scrubbing decks with scraps of steel wool isn't what 21-year-old Seaman Reed expected when he joined the Navy two years ago. He had been working as a hotel clerk in his South Dakota hometown of Deadwood (pop. 1,828). Hoping to become a paralegal apprentice, he says he scored in the top 10% on the military's entrance exam. That qualified him for the job, but it wasn't available. A recruiter convinced Seaman Reed that as a boatswain's mate, he would have time to try out other, more technical jobs.

"That's what the recruiters told all of us," says Seaman Derrick Cox, a skinny kid from Virginia's coalfields scrubbing away nearby.

"Boy, was that a lie," Seaman Reed sighs.

"I was thinking of waiting" for a job in the pharmacy, Seaman Cox says. "I am kicking myself in the a for not waiting until one opened."

He and his fellow boatswain's mates -- a tight-knit group of urban blacks and rural whites no older than 25 -- routinely work 16 hours a day, leaving no time for branching out. In the evenings, they have enough energy for little more than a game of hearts. Endless ribbing makes the day go faster. When one of the ship's heftier sailors, Larry Stevens, finishes swabbing a deck, he half-heartedly asks for a new assignment. "Why don't you run to the port side and work on the list," cracks Lead Petty Officer Harry Devernera. The sailors explode in laughter.

The most common epithet they fling at each other is "lifer" -- someone who will spend at least 20 years in the Navy. When the other mates call Seaman Reed one, he just shakes his head and smiles. "I am getting out," he assures them.

"I've made a lot of friends I never would have made in Deadwood," he says later. "But I am basically just a professional janitor. I scrub floors and paint."

Many sailors on the Roosevelt and other ships do, of course, perform technically challenging jobs, from repairing jets to running the ship's nuclear reactor. Nonetheless, poor use of personnel translates into poor retention. The Navy tries to get 38% of its first-term recruits, who sign commitments ranging from three to six years, to re-enlist, but only 29% do so, despite generous re-enlistment bonuses. Recruiting and retention shortfalls have left the Navy with a total of 18,000 fewer sailors than it says it needs -- a need based on the way the Navy currently chooses to operate its fleet.

Petty Officer Steven Spears, who works on the nuclear-powered ship's reactor, could have collected a tax-free bonus of as much as $45,000 if he had re-enlisted for six more years. Mr. Spears is married, as are the majority of Navy enlistees, unlike the draft-era military, in which almost two-thirds of all services' troops were single.

"I didn't even want to know how much I qualified for," Mr. Spears says. "In the last year, I have missed my wife's and my daughter's birthdays. I missed Christmas and our wedding anniversary. I'm tired of it." On Oct. 22, when his enlistment ends, he plans to return to his hometown of Cullman, Ala., and start looking for work.

It's an unhappy outcome that has become all too common. Earlier this year, in a General Accounting Office survey of about 1,000 people on active duty in "critical specialities," the Navy scored the worst, with 75% of enlisted sailors saying they intended to leave the military. Only 15% said they would stay. Overall, 52% of enlisted personnel from all services said they were dissatisfied with military life.

A big part of the problem is that the services are burdened with a personnel system designed in 1947 to correct shortcomings that became apparent during World War II. In order to be better able to mobilize for and fight big wars, the military engineered a top-heavy structure of officers who could take over new units as they were formed, with one general for about every 1,100 soldiers.

But America fights a different kind of war these days -- mostly finely tuned, nimble maneuvers of limited duration to quell isolated crises. With the old personnel structure still in place, the result is a kind of peacekeeping battle fatigue that only adds to discontent among the ranks. The Army's 10th Mountain Division, for example, went from providing relief for victims of Hurricane Andrew in Florida to peacekeeping in Somalia to occupying Haiti. Now, it has a brigade on rotation in Bosnia. Since 1992, the amount of time that Navy sailors spend at sea has risen more than 25% because of peacekeeping missions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti and the Persian Gulf. In the Persian Gulf, some Air Force pilots have done a full five deployments -- albeit shorter than the Army tours in Bosnia -- since the end of the Gulf War.

The Air Force probably has done the most to make its manpower management conform to the needs of the new world order. Concluding that "small wars" such as the conflicts in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo are likely to be characteristic of our time, the Air Force is reorganizing itself into 10 "Aerospace Expeditionary Forces" -- each with an array of more than 150 fighters, bombers and support aircraft and a total of more than 10,000 people -- to respond to crises. So, instead of grabbing forces almost willy-nilly, as in the past, the Air Force will always have two AEFs "on call" for deployment overseas. The system, which is to start taking effect Oct. 1, will give Air Force personnel more predictability in their lives: Each AEF is to be deployable for 90 days every 15 months. The change doesn't come a moment too soon: Air Force pilots are tiring of deploying overseas, especially on high-boredom, low-challenge missions like patrolling no-fly zones over Iraq. Lured by a hot economy and a hiring boom among commercial airlines, pilots are bailing out of the military at high rates, leading the Air Force to predict that it will be short by more than 1,200 pilots for the next three years.

While the Air Force looks to the future, the past is alive, if not well, on the Roosevelt. Seaman Reed is finishing scrubbing the floors, and sailors in the main enlisted galley are struggling to get out lunch in a kitchen that has changed little since World War II. Bread is baked from scratch, rather than from frozen loaves as on commercial ships. There are no microwave ovens and virtually no frozen vegetables or meats -- staples on any cruise ship. There is one can opener; when it breaks, the cooks use knives to open the containers until it gets fixed, usually days later.

"It's not that the Navy doesn't realize that its galleys need to be redesigned," says John Birkler, a Rand Corp. analyst who has studied carriers for the Navy. "But when it comes down to buying new galleys or new missiles, you have to buy the new missiles."

On a typical Navy ship, for every seven sailors, one is involved in preparing or serving food. At the moment, however, the Roosevelt doesn't have enough cooks; it's 39 short of its usual 122 complement, prompting the manager of the ship's six galleys to e-mail a desperate request to higher-ups in Norfolk, Va.

"My staff is regularly working 16-hour days, seven days a week," Senior Chief Petty Officer Herb Weaver writes. "They have no time for anything other than work and sleep."

Several days later, word comes back: There is no help available. Without reinforcements, the galley workers -- others on board call them "cellar dwellers" -- must spend even more of their time in the windowless spaces below the ship's flight deck. Some will go weeks without feeling the Mediterranean breeze or watching the sunset.

"This place is a hellhole right now, and I feel like it is my fault," says Petty Officer Tuck, who oversees the main galley's 15 cooks. "I am burnt."

Others on the Roosevelt are still smarting from the grueling months of the ship's last overhaul, in 1996. The carrier's stay in the Norfolk shipyard was supposed to last two years. But Navy brass ordered the job finished in half the time so the ship could return to sea. (The Navy today is struggling to patrol the globe with a fleet of 322 ships, down from 592 in 1989.)

Medics from the ship's infirmary spent hours laying flooring that was supposed to have been put in by shipyard workers. They did it wrong; much of it had to be re-installed. Ensign Mike Johnston, who supervises the ship's air-traffic controllers, recalls his days as a painter: "We were told the shop wasn't progressing quickly enough so that we needed to do the painting," he says. "Then the shipyard workers came in and redid it. It makes no sense. Our air-traffic controllers need to be practicing and working on their skills, not painting ships."

Capt. Charles Hattau, the Roosevelt's executive officer, argues that using the sailors for such jobs is a necessary evil, albeit a handy one. "You have them doing manual labor because they are free labor," he says. In the Roosevelt's print shop, meanwhile, the clock on the wall has stopped working. So have some of the shop's lithographers. They are trained in the craft of offset printing, a technology that the ship replaced in the early 1990s with the same copying, collating and binding machines found at Kinko's. The new machines require one-third as many people to operate them, but the print shop is staffed at the old levels. And the textbooks on printing that are kept on hand for reference cover equipment the Navy hasn't used in years.

"The books are a problem," says Chief Jose Obregon, who runs the shop. "But they have to study them if they want to get promoted."

By early afternoon, the four sailors on the day shift have finished their work and some of the night shift's. Two lithographers are searching the Internet for a copy of the movie "Pink Floyd: The Wall." Then they tap into a Web site that spoofs the movie "Titanic." Their two supervisors talk on the phone, read magazines and sweep the floor, which already gleams. Loafing once got so bad that Chief Obregon had to ban sailors from the back room because they were sneaking naps and playing video games.

"The new technology is putting us out of a job," says Penny Price, a supervisor in the office.

Is she worried about losing her job?

"The Navy has been talking about eliminating this for 15 years," she says. "So far, we've been fine."

One reason why the Navy continues to train lithographers it doesn't need can be explained by an oddity of military budgets. Supervisors get budgets for materials and equipment. If they come in under budget, they are rewarded. But within individual departments on the ship and on naval bases, there are no budgets for personnel and no rewards for supervisors who figure out how to complete their assignments using fewer people. Supervisors such as Chief Obregon are simply assigned a fixed number of people based on their area of specialty, whether they need them or not. By early evening, most enlisted sailors are finishing their workday. A few will check their e-mails for news from home or settle in to watch a movie on one of the ship's 900 television sets. Some play "Air Commando" in the ship's video arcade. Everybody is thinking about the next port call, in France. Seaman Reed wants to go skiing in the Alps. Other boatswain's mates are frantically trying to trade "watch days," when they are required to remain aboard the ship.

After an afternoon painting for a coming inspection, Seaman Reed heads to dinner, walking past Petty Officer Storts as she tallies the dinner rush. By 5:45 p.m., she has counted 814 sailors who favor chicken for dinner. But "there was a spill, and I had to clean it up, so I probably missed about 50 people," she says.

If the Navy installed an electronic card system, in which sailors swiped meal cards through a scanner that tallied them, Ms. Storts probably could be working on Navy jets instead of counting sailors. Such systems have been in most college cafeterias since the mid-1980s. The Navy, however, is just beginning to install them on ships.

When he finishes dinner, Seaman Reed watches a movie, then reports for midnight watch duty, which lasts until 4 a.m. He and two other sailors are assigned to a small, noisy pair of rooms in the back of the ship, by the rudder. One sailor takes a minute to jot down the readings from five temperature and pressure gauges every 30 minutes; he lies on the floor the rest of the time. Seamen Reed and Quentin Brown are supposed to switch the ship to an emergency steering system if the primary system goes awry.

On watch, the burden is boredom. To pass the time, Seaman Brown reads a copy of Vibe magazine, shoving it beneath his chair whenever supervisors drop by. "You're not supposed to be reading anything down here," he says. "But if I don't read something, I'll fall asleep, and then I'll be in even bigger trouble."

Adm. Cross says there is no reason why ships can't be designed so that the captain can switch to the emergency steering system from the bridge. Remote sensors could also replace the sailor who takes temperature readings. Those changes, however, are still more than a decade away on the Navy's aircraft carriers.

Seaman Reed sits on a small metal box, his arm propped on a fire hose. Yellow earplugs dull the engine noise. For the most part, he stares off into space. "The watches give you a lot of time to think about all the things you've done wrong in your life," he says.

THOUGHTS OF ELSEWHERE

But tonight, he's thinking about his wife. He met her in South Dakota, and they married shortly after boot camp. Before this six-month deployment, he dropped her off at a spartan apartment in Norfolk, where she knew no one. They talk once a month. "The last time we talked, I promised my wife I'd take her out for a nice dinner when we get back to Norfolk," he says. "You know -- something you really have to dress up for, and then after dinner we'll go sit on the beach, and I'll put my arm around her."

That day is three months away. With the Kosovo conflict over, the Roosevelt is going to the Persian Gulf, which is just another vast body of water to Seaman Reed. When his shift ends, he will get no more than three hours to sleep, an inconvenience he must endure whenever he draws a midnight watch, every couple of weeks. At 7 a.m., he will begin another day of scrubbing, painting and watches.

"Have you ever seen that movie 'Groundhog Day'?" he asks. "That's kind of what life is like."

Major Post-Cold War Military Operations

Since the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, U.S. military forces have participated in more than 90 operations. More than half involved substantial troop deployments for combat missions, peacekeeping assignments and humanitarian undertakings. Here's a look at the major ones and how much they cost the Pentagon (in inflation-adjusted 1999 dollars):

Panama
Dec. 20, 1989 -- Feb. 13, 1990
Operation Just Cause
U.S. troops overthrow General Noriega and arrest him on drug-trafficking charges.
Maximum U.S. troop strength . . . 27,000
U.S. casualties . . . . . . . . . 23 dead, 320 wounded
Cost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $182.1 million

Persian Gulf War
Aug. 7, 1990 -- Feb. 28, 1991
Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm
U.S. leads a U.N. effort to expel Iraq from Kuwait.
Maximum U.S. troop strength . . . 541,000
Reserves activated . . . . . . . 245,000
U.S. casualties . . . . . . . . . 383 dead, 458 wounded
U.S. combat sorties . . . . . . . 40,000
Total U.S. bombs . . . . . . . . 227,165
Cruise missiles . . . . . . . . . . 317
Cost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .$8.1 billion

Iraq
1991 -- present
Operations Desert Fox, Desert Strike, Northern Watch, Southern Watch, Provide Comfort and others.
U.S. forces are deployed to protect Kurds, enforce a cease-fire resolution, prevent military flights in the north and south, retaliate against a plot to assassinate former President Bush and stop the production of mass-destruction weapons.
Maximum U.S. troop strength . . . . 30,000+
U.S. casualties . . . . . . . . . . . 26 dead
U.S. combat sorties . . . . . . . . . 300+ (Dec. 1998)
Total U.S. bombs . . . . . . . . . . 1,000+ (Dec. 1998)
Cruise missiles . . . . . . . . . . . 499
Cost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .$7.8 billion

Somalia
Dec. 9, 1992 -- March 3, 1995
Operations Restore Hope, Continue Hope and others
U.S. troops lead a U.N.-backed famine-relief mission as warring factions fight for control.
Maximum U.S. troop strength . . . 25,800
U.S. casualties . . . . . . . . . 43 dead, 153 wounded
Cost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $1.7 billion

Bosnia and Macedonia
Feb. 28, 1993 -- present
Operations Deny Flight, Provide Promise, Deliberate Force,Decisive Edge, Joint Endeavor and others
U.S. troops lead NATO and U.N. efforts to halt Serbian aggression against Muslims and others in former Yugoslavia, to provide humanitarian assistance and to enforce peace agreements.
Maximum U.S. troop strength . . . . 32,000
Reserves activated . . . . . . . . 17,000
U.S. casualties . . . . . . . . . 4 dead, 5 wounded
Allied sorties . . . . . . . . . . 100,000+
Cruise missiles . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Cost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $9.7 billion

Haiti
Oct. 20, 1993 -- April 17, 1996
Operations Uphold Democracy, Support Democracy and others.
U.S. ships and combat troops lead U.N. efforts to restore and maintain democracy in Haiti.
Maximum U.S. troop strength . . . 22,000
U.S. casualties . . . . . . . . . 4 dead, 3 wounded
Cost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $1.1 billion

Rwanda
April 12 -- Sept. 30, 1994
Operations Distant Runner and Support Hope
U.S. combat troops evacuate U.S. citizens and others and provide humanitarian relief as ethnic unrest leads to widespread violence and a huge refugee flood.
Maximum U.S. troop strength . . . . 2,100
Cost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $147.8 million

Afghanistan and Sudan
Aug. 20, 1998
Operation Infinite Reach
U.S. bombs camps and facilities allegedly used by Osama bin Laden for terrorist attacks in retaliation for blowing up U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Cruise missiles . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Cost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $50 million+

Kosovo
March 24, 1999 -- present
Operations Allied Force, Noble Anvil,
Shining Hope and Falcon
U.S. and NATO forces wage an air war against Serbian-led government in Yugoslovia to halt repression of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. U.S. troops also participate in relief operations and peacekeeping mission.
Maximum U.S. troop strength . . . . . 38,601
Reserves activated . . . . . . . . . . 5,656
U.S. casualties . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 dead
Allied combat sorties . . . . . . . . 9,000+
Total allied bombs . . . . . . . . . 23,000
Cruise missiles . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
Cost . . . . . . . . . about $5 billion appropriated

Sources: The Department of Defense, the Congressional Research Service and the General Accounting Office, press accounts and three nonprofit groups: the Center for Defense Information, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Affairs and the Federation of American Scientists. Cost estimates came from figures supplied by the CDI, the CSBA and the GAO.

© 1999, Dow Jones & Company

By Greg Jaffe

Wall Street Journal Staff Writer

Quota-Haunted Sgt. Cady Anxiously Pursues Leads From a Shrinking Supply
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'Stay Away From Explosives'

[Second in a series on military spending]

SEATTLE -- After an excruciating slump, Daniel Cady is finally on the rebound. A recruiter for the Air Force, Staff Sgt. Cady already has signed up two of the four people he needs to meet his monthly quota. Looking crisp in his sky-blue uniform on a clear summer morning, he is game for a few hours of cold calls.

Then Kalif Harper calls him. Sgt. Cady had cajoled Mr. Harper for two years before signing him up in June. Now it's mid-July, and he's just weeks away from shipping off to boot camp.

"My mom offered me $500 if I try another year of community college," the 19-year-old says.

"She what?" Sgt. Cady sputters. "Get down here. We need to talk."

Sgt. Cady is on the front line of one of the most intractable problems facing the U.S. military today. Only a few years ago, the Pentagon was slimming down and had so many willing recruits that it raised its qualification standards. Now volunteers are in such short supply that the long-term viability of the United States' vaunted all-volunteer force is in question.

Recruiters are working harder than ever, often putting in 65-hour weeks. But they are chasing an ever-shrinking pool of high-school students willing even to consider a military career. The reasons are many: The economy is surging, so more attractive options abound. States have spent billions building up vast community-college systems, giving millions more high-school graduates access to post-secondary education. Many of today's parents never served or were alienated by the Vietnam War; thus their children have little or no emotional connection to the military. And as the Cold War and the Gulf War have given way to peacekeeping missions of uncertain duration in unattractive locales, a career in uniform has become a much harder sell.

For the first time since 1979, both the Air Force and the Army can't find enough people to fill the ranks. The Navy came up 7,000 recruits short of its target last year of about 55,000, so it decided to accept a larger number of recruits who didn't graduate from high school to meet this year's goals. Only the Marines, the smallest of the forces, is meeting its relatively modest goals without much trouble. Overall, the Department of Defense is 7% behind its recruitment goals this fiscal year -- the largest shortfall in years -- leaving it more than 9,000 recruits short and struggling to fulfill its missions with fewer and in some cases less-qualified troops.

There's very little support in Congress or the Pentagon or among the public for one obvious solution: re-instituting the draft for the first time since 1974. Enticements such as lucrative signing bonuses, pay increases and tuition benefits have proved not to be panaceas. Expensive advertising campaigns, including new Navy spots produced by Spike Lee, have so far had little impact. All told, the Defense Department now spends nearly $2 billion a year recruiting about 200,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen. The military spent 11% less in 1989, adjusted for inflation, while signing up 40% more enlistees.

A TASTE OF SUCCESS

Before signing up with the Air Force himself in 1991, Sgt. Cady spent several years drifting. He graduated from high school in Detroit and worked for a local beer distributor until he was laid off. He tried a brief stint as a car salesman, but really wanted to work with computers. Unable to land a job in the field, he finally tasted success in the Air Force. He finished at the top of his boot-camp class, learned to repair mainframe computers and made staff sergeant in 3 1/2 years, about half the time it takes a typical airman. Performance reviews described him as "ingenious," "outstanding," and among the "top 1% of all airmen."

Sgt. Cady says he grew bored repairing computers, and in 1996, he became a recruiter -- a job that he says seemed more exciting and challenging. Now, in July 1999, Sgt. Cady, 34 years old, makes about $40,000 a year in salary and benefits. He lives in an Air Force-subsidized apartment, with a swimming pool, tennis courts and a gymnasium, in Seattle's northern suburbs. "I really believe in the product I am selling," he says.

The past three years, however, have tested his resolve. Three recruiters in Sgt. Cady's six-recruiter group were relieved of recruiting duty because of stress. In January, after a stretch of 70-hour weeks, Sgt. Cady was so mentally exhausted that he couldn't sleep for three days. He sought out an Air Force doctor for professional help, and was advised to take stress-management classes.

The classes helped, but the pressure hasn't abated. Coming into the summer, he hadn't met his quota for three months, prompting his bosses to undertake an official "performance audit." Now he's fretting that he will never be promoted again.

It's a cool, rainy Tuesday, a few days after the call from Mr. Harper. Sgt. Cady pulls his new red Jeep Grand Cherokee into a parking space in front of his office's big plate-glass window and walks into one of his biggest impediments: the Air Force recruiting office itself. It's located in the back corner of a bedraggled strip mall that includes a Korean video store, the Seoul High Fashion Boutique and the Ye-Dang discount furniture outlet.

"You need an office that draws kids in and makes them feel good about the Air Force," Sgt. Cady complains. "If I was starting a business and this was the only site, I wouldn't even bother."

He tries to make the best of it. Sgt. Cady goes out of his way to let potential recruits know that the spotless Cherokee parked outside is his. In the bathroom, the broad-shouldered six-footer fluffs his reddish-brown flattop and snips loose threads from his uniform with a nail clipper. He doesn't want recruits to picture themselves in a dingy office. He wants them to picture themselves in the $28,000 car sporting a snappy Air Force uniform.

As usual, the out-of-the-way office generates no walk-in traffic, so Sgt. Cady hits the phones. To locate potential recruits, he makes calls from lists of thousands of high-school seniors, provided by the school system. In desperation, his call volume has soared; he made 931 calls the previous month, nearly three times last year's rate.

A PREFERENCE FOR COLLEGE

Like all recruiters, Sgt. Cady targets a dwindling pool of students who don't want to go to college immediately. Today, about 80% of high-school seniors plan to attend a four-year college, up from 50% in 1976, according to the University of Michigan's annual Monitoring the Future Study. Even the Pentagon's generous tuition plan -- up to $50,000 once recruits finish their initial four-year commitment -- has little impact. Three-quarters of all high-school seniors today say they have no interest in joining the military at all, up from about 55% in 1976.

"Today's high-school seniors . . . don't see the military as a way to attend college," says David R. Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland in College Park. "They see it as a detour from college."

Facing that reality, the Pentagon this year started targeting college campuses more aggressively, tapping recruiters who themselves had attended post-secondary schools and may be more adept at enticing students struggling with grades or finances. The Army also is considering allowing recruits to attend college on the government's dime before fulfilling their military commitment.

For now, however, most recruitment efforts are aimed at students who aren't immediately college-bound. The problem is that few of them can meet the military's standards. Sgt. Cady has essentially given up on recruiting students from Seattle's inner-city schools, figuring few students there can pass the Defense Department's qualifying test, which measures basic middle- and high-school skills.

At one urban school, Franklin High, only two of 12 students who took the test last year passed it. On a lark recently, Sgt. Cady randomly picked answers for each of the test's 99 multiple-choice questions. He got 20 right. Paging through his Franklin High folder, he laments, "Look at these scores -- 7, 11, 13."

So Sgt. Cady concentrates his efforts on students from middle-income families. Not surprisingly, most he contacts already are enrolled in college. In four hours of cold calls, he finds only a handful expressing any interest: a 19-year-old who admitted to regularly using hallucinogenic mushrooms, an 18-year-old once convicted of burglary and a recent graduate who was arrested for blowing up a billboard with dynamite. All are disqualified.

"If you know anyone interested in the Air Force, send them my way," Sgt. Cady tells that last young man. "And please, try to stay away from explosives."

TELEPHONE OVERKILL

Though most recruiting leads emerge from such telephone calls, the Pentagon has been slow to adopt modern telemarketing techniques. With relatively high-paid recruiters from each of the four services calling millions of students each month, some youths with no interest are contacted by as many as 15 recruiters, according to a 1996 study prepared by Lt. Col. James R. Thomas while at Rand Corp., a nonprofit think-tank studying the issue for the Army.

The study suggested hiring telemarketing firms to make cold calls, weeding out seniors with no interest and creating a central database of the rest for recruiters to work from. Mr. Thomas estimated that doing so could boost the Defense Department's recruiting efficiency -- measured in terms of the number of calls it takes to yield a good lead -- by up to 25% and save as much as $500 million a year. Earlier this year, the Army began testing the use of private call centers in eight markets and says it found them effective in generating leads on a large scale in a short amount of time.

Sgt. Cady's best hope for the day is a 6 p.m. appointment with Som Chanthamaly, 19, a community-college student he found while telephone prospecting last week. A few days earlier, Mr. Chanthamaly met with the Navy recruiters and took a practice version of the military's basic high-school skills test. He scored far too low to qualify for the Air Force.

Two years ago he wouldn't be worth Sgt. Cady's time. Now, he is. First, Sgt. Cady talks up the Air Force's educational opportunities and high-tech jobs. Then, he moves on to more leisurely pursuits.

"Som, tell me, what do you like to do?" Sgt. Cady asks.

"I like golfing and fishing," Mr. Chanthamaly says.

"Well, did you know every Air Force base in the U.S. has a golf course?" Sgt. Cady asks. "Have you ever tried to play golf on a Navy destroyer? It doesn't work so well."

Sgt. Cady finishes up with Mr. Chanthamaly around 8 p.m., capping a 13-hour day. "The Navy recruiters are going to push him even harder than I did," Sgt. Cady says after he leaves. "But my gut says we'll get him."

The next morning, Sgt. Cady's first meeting is a follow-up with Mr. Harper. Sgt. Cady has been courting him since he was a senior in high school. Tall and thin with a wisp of a mustache, Mr. Harper loves the movie "Top Gun." He was ready to join after their first conversation. His mother, however, wanted him to try a year of community college first. So Sgt. Cady waited.

The day after Mr. Harper's college classes ended for the summer, the sergeant called and arranged another meeting. Mr. Harper signed up on the spot, agreeing to ship off to boot camp Sept. 9, giving Sgt. Cady credit toward his June quota. Keeping Mr. Harper on track is critical for Sgt. Cady, because if he drops out now, the loss would count against the month's quota.

"You tried community college and it didn't work," Sgt. Cady implores him. "I know the Air Force is in your heart. You owe it to yourself to give it a try."

For the moment, Mr. Harper agrees. But then he leaves to talk with his mother about her new $500 stay-in-college bonus program.

If money were the only consideration, the military would win easily. To woo highly qualified recruits, the Defense Department this year started offering high-school graduates enlistment bonuses of as much as $12,000, up from $4,000 in 1994. As for salary, Congress is poised to approve a 4.8% pay raise for all military personnel, the largest in 20 years, adding $5.7 billion to the budget annually.

Even without the pay raise, an airman with roughly four years of experience made about $2,017 a month in salary and benefits in 1997 -- more than nearly 80% of all male high-school graduates between the ages of 22 and 26, according to Rand. But experts say inducements such as signing bonuses have little impact in a growing economy. "We are reaching the point of diminishing returns," says Bruce Orvis, an analyst at Rand. "I don't think we can buy our way out of this."

GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS

Though Sgt. Cady remains hopeful that he will land Mr. Harper, he suffers a major setback that same Wednesday. Kristina, a young woman who signed up last fall and also was supposed to ship off to basic training in September, shows up in his office. She has a note from her doctor.

She's pregnant.

Sgt. Cady has spent more than a year coaxing the 17-year-old. When she had a falling out with her mother last winter, Sgt. Cady wrote her a letter praising her independence and good judgment so she could use it at an emancipation hearing (to be declared an adult before turning 18). Kristina, wearing a white button-down shirt and black shorts, plops down in a chair in front of Sgt. Cady's desk and stares down at her blue and white Nikes.

"I wish I could give you a big hug because I consider you a friend," Sgt. Cady says after he reads the note.

He asks how her father is handling the news. She doesn't look up: "He's been OK." Has she told her mother? She shakes her head no, still downcast.

Sgt. Cady got credit for Kristina nine months ago, but now she counts against this month's quota. The loss means he needs three more recruits, not two, to meet his quota of four.

"We're going backwards," he says. He strides out of his office, passing through the building's back door. It still bears the imprint of his size 13 shoe, the residue of a bad day several weeks earlier when he kicked it. Sgt. Cady takes a few deep breaths.

He has one more meeting scheduled for Wednesday. When Neil Gauler shows up, Sgt. Cady smiles and booms, "Hello." Mr. Gauler, a recent high-school graduate who had contacted Mr. Cady, leans back in his chair and crosses his arms over his chest. He is wearing baggy jeans and a New York Yankees baseball cap.

"What do you see yourself doing for a career?" Sgt. Cady asks.

"I'd like to work in the hip-hop music industry," the teenager says.

Any hobbies?

"I like driving around and listening to hip-hop," Mr. Gauler replies.

Sgt. Cady pitches Mr. Gauler on Air Force training in electronics and computers: That could help a career in the music industry. He pulls out a list of courses he took as part of his Air Force training.

"You don't have to do homework in these classes?" Mr. Gauler asks. "If you assign me homework, I won't do it."

Desperate, Sgt. Cady asks if there is anything else that grabs his interest. Mr. Gauler leans back in his chair.

"The one thing I am interested in is making money," he says. "Making money easy."

One week later, Sgt. Cady's score for the month remains stuck at one, and he is out of good prospects. Mr. Gauler has decided to attend community college. Mr. Chanthamaly took the qualification test, but didn't score high enough to join the Air Force, so he went for the Navy, which has slightly lower standards. He will ship off to boot camp in less than a month, since the Navy also is speeding up the enlistment process to address shipboard shortages.

Of course, all the services could increase enlistment rates with such moves, but there is a serious drawback: The Navy's boot-camp attrition rate has jumped, since recruits without high-school degrees generally have a harder time assimilating and all new recruits have less time for second thoughts before arriving at boot camp.

Mr. Harper, meanwhile, is still a worry. Since Sgt. Cady's last meeting with him, the African-American youth has called a black recruiter in the office to ask him about racial discrimination in the Air Force and whether he had any regrets. The recruiter told him that he hadn't experienced racial discrimination in the military and that he had no regrets.

"He's having doubts," Sgt. Cady says. "His mother has been working on him."

When Sgt. Cady arrives at the office the following Wednesday, he has only nine days left to make his quota. There's a message on his answering machine. It's Joy Erickson, a new prospect who had looked up Sgt. Cady in the telephone book the night before. She quickly becomes his best hope for the month. He calls her immediately.

Ms. Erickson, 17, is from Saskatchewan, Canada. In May, her mother was hit by a truck and killed while delivering newspapers. After the accident, her friends and three siblings began treating her differently, she tells Sgt. Cady over the telephone.

"I kind of felt like the replacement mom," she says later, her voice cracking. "I couldn't handle it. I needed a new start."

So she moved to Seattle a couple of weeks ago to live with her older brother, who recently joined the Coast Guard. But Seattle hasn't helped. Ms. Erickson spends most of her day watching videos. The only night she ventured out for a walk, some men mistook her for a prostitute.

Ms. Erickson doesn't have a car, so Sgt. Cady agrees to drive to her house about 40 minutes away and pick her up. "We need to get her before she finds a boyfriend," he says on the way to her apartment.

On the drive back to his office, Sgt. Cady homes in on her loneliness. "You know, on an Air Force base you'll feel lonely for about 20 minutes," he tells her. "People treat you like a brother or a sister when they see you in that uniform. You're strangers, but you share an immediate bond."

Sgt. Cady pushes her to sign up immediately, but she balks. She's leaving for her brother's wedding in California in two days and will make a decision when she comes back in several weeks. And she wants to check out the Army. Sgt. Cady backs off and drives her home. She won't help him meet his goal this month.

By the last Monday of the month, Sgt. Cady has given up on making his quota. Tired of the phone, he decides to go out and look for people. He has doubled the amount of hours he spends driving around in his region hunting potential recruits.

"I don't know where to turn," he says.

In Seattle, other military recruiters with nowhere else to turn have begun cruising by bus stops and offering to drive students to school if they will listen to their pitch. Local principals complain that some recruiters also have shown up at students' homes uninvited.

The practice got so out of hand that in August 1998, the middle-class Shoreline School District placed restrictions on all military recruiters. That followed a rash of complaints from parents, and an incident in which an Army recruiter in Shoreline was alleged to have fondled a high-school girl in his car. The recruiter was court martialed and acquitted. Then this spring, after a different Army recruiter was accused of giving a 16-year-old girl a ride home from school and accompanying her inside without her parents' permission, the school system banned Army recruiters completely.

"The Army recruiters . . . didn't respect the rules set up to protect students," says Marjorie Ledell, a spokeswoman for the Shoreline School District.

Sgt. Cady says he doesn't engage in such practices. On this Monday, he stops at a small luncheonette and a T-shirt shop. Then he heads to a pier where a group of young men are fishing for salmon. He tries to start up a conversation, but gets nowhere.

"You're not going to knock us over the head and drag us off?" one of the fishermen asks.

"No," Sgt. Cady replies. "We don't usually do that until the last day of the month."

When the month's final day arrives, Sgt. Cady suffers one last blow: Devlin McGill, a community-college freshman who signed up in November 1998 for a September enlistment, tells the recruiter he's having grave doubts. He drops by the office for a meeting.

Mr. McGill's parents, both college graduates, have flooded him with literature questioning the safety of the anthrax vaccine administered to almost all enlistees. They have pushed him to give community college one more try. "For someone who is going to waste four years of their life, the Air Force is a great adventure," Mr. McGill explains before visiting Sgt. Cady. "As much as I don't like the way my parents do things, I am starting to think I might be better off in college."

Once inside the recruitment office, he tells Sgt. Cady he doesn't want to join the Air Force, citing concerns about the anthrax vaccine. "I can tell you that the secretary of defense had the anthrax shot," Sgt. Cady tells him. "The Air Force wouldn't require it if it weren't safe." The pitch goes nowhere. When Mr. McGill leaves, Sgt. Cady rubs his face.

"I am dying," he says.

That knocks Sgt. Cady down to zero recruits for the month. It is his worst month ever. When he calls his boss to tell him he has lost another recruit, Master Sgt. Patrick Brandell's response is curt. Sgt. Cady kept detailed notes on each of the dozens of conversations he had with Mr. McGill over the past six months. Sgt. Brandell tells him to fax them over immediately.

"They want to review my notes so they can say it is my g--damn fault we are losing him," Sgt. Cady says.

'WHEN THE STRESS STARTS'

A few hours later, Sgt. Brandell faxes Sgt. Cady his goal for the upcoming month: six recruits.

"This is one thing you can do to really p--- off recruiters who are having a bad month," he says. "I can't find four kids who want to join the Air Force, and now I've got to find six. No one knows how to fix the problem so they just raise the goals. That is when the stress starts."

Sgt. Cady's girlfriend calls. He tells her he doesn't have time. Before he can finish the sentence, she hangs up. He goes outside to get a breath of fresh air and then settles in for another round of cold calls. He also checks in with a prospect who had stood him up on three separate occasions. "I don't normally drive over to someone's house, but I am willing to drive over there to tell you about the Air Force," he tells the young man.

Then Sgt. Cady again calls Mr. Harper, the young man considering his mother's $500 anti-enlistment bonus. Now Mr. Harper is worried that he won't be able to handle the technical challenges of the Air Force. Sgt. Cady reminds him of the commitment he made to the military.

"I am confident you can do it," he tells him. "You're a very bright young man."

Shortly after 7 p.m., Sgt. Cady heads home to apologize to his girlfriend. After working six days a week, 12 hours a day for the entire month, he has netted zero recruits. Tomorrow is the first day of a new month, and he has no leads.

On Sept. 8, Mr. Harper ships off to San Antonio for Air Force boot camp.

The following day, Sgt. Cady begins a new job. Fed up, he had asked for a transfer. Now, he's training recruiters in Michigan.

"I feel like a new man," he says. "It's nice not having that quota hanging over your head every day. But I can't forget what it feels like, because I am going to be training guys under the same pressure. It is awful easy to forget how hard it is and to have unrealistic and unfair expectations."

© 1999, Dow Jones & Company

By Thomas E. Ricks and Anne Marie Squeo

Wall Street Journal Staff Writers

Resistance and Neglect Kept Drones From Soaring, Despite Their Advantages
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The 'Arsenal Ship' Torpedoed

Corrections & Amplifications
A page-one article Tuesday about Pentagon weapons procurement paraphrased comments by retired Gen. Kenneth Israel saying that the pilot-dominated Air Force hierarchy has always been biased against unmanned aerial vehicles. Gen. Israel did say there is a bias against UAVs in the Air Force, but he added that there also have been "pockets of support."

[Third in a series on military spending]

One night during the war in Kosovo, a band of Serb soldiers took control of a bridge, blocked the way with an armored vehicle, and began harassing would-be crossers. What they didn't know was that their undoing hovered overhead in the form of a giant mechanical bug.

The Predator, an unmanned U.S. aircraft, surveyed the scene from 20,000 feet and beamed an image of the Serb checkpoint and its precise coordinates back to NATO commanders in Italy. However, the Predator wasn't designed to finish the job; for that, an American fighter pilot was dispatched to bomb the checkpoint.

All told, the U.S. used roughly two dozen Predators and similar unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, to fly missions during the 78-day war in Kosovo. Nine were shot down. "Those UAVs were willing to die for their country," says Gen. Michael Ryan, the Air Force's chief of staff.

UAVs have been viable alternatives to piloted planes since shortly after Francis Gary Powers's U-2 was shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960. These drones can fly lower, longer and into more hazardous, missile-riddled airspace than any pilot would dare.

But the Defense Department has yet to fully exploit UAVs. Over the past 20 years, the Pentagon's spending on drones has totaled $2 billion -- roughly equal to what it pays for a single B-2 bomber and one-tenth of what it soon plans to spend every year on manned combat aircraft. With modest recent boosts, the Defense Department intends to spend $620 million on developing and buying UAVs next year, compared with the $3.1 billion the Air Force wanted for the controversial F-22 fighter. As a result, the UAV technology in current use remains far short of its potential, not yet capable of bombing runs and other more-advanced missions like those that claimed two manned fighter jets over Kosovo.

Ten years after the Cold War ended, the U.S. military's arsenal of weaponry remains dominated by big-ticket weapons such as tanks, aircraft carriers and fighter jets -- hardware that would have been especially useful if the standoff with the Soviets had ever turned hot. Today, this arsenal siphons spending from innovative equipment that many inside and outside the defense establishment say America must invest in to retain its military edge as the nature of modern warfare evolves. Among other types of equipment, experts point to UAVs and the so-called arsenal ship -- a mobile launch pad with a small crew and all manner of missiles -- as prime examples of equipment that is as high in potential as it is low in priority.

"The real problem with the Defense Department isn't fiscal, it's strategic," says Andrew Krepinevich of the nonprofit Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. "It's not that they don't have enough money; it is how they spend the money they have."

FAVORING THE STATUS QUO

Several forces conspire to stifle unconventional weapons proposals. Most obvious is the easy familiarity of the big guns, planes and ships that helped make this the American Century. Rivalries among the services and within each branch tend to favor the status quo, too, as does the defense establishment's innate conservatism, which manifests itself in risk-aversion, impatience and intolerance of failure. And beyond the Pentagon, entrenched business interests, old-fashioned congressional pork-barreling and political intrigue have proved to be powerful agents working against change.

The impact of these forces is evident in the history of UAVs, which have been the wave of the future for the past quarter of a century. Military strategists love the idea. Former Pentagon acquisition chief Paul Kaminski predicts that the next century could bring an end to manned combat aircraft altogether. Congress has repeatedly signaled its approval. Backers also have included some Air Force higher-ups, including Gen. Ryan, the chief of staff, and his father, who served as the service's top officer 30 years ago.

But consider what happened in 1993 when Congress, five years after unsuccessfully prodding the Air Force and the rest of the Pentagon to take UAVs more seriously, created the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office to oversee development of unmanned aircraft throughout the military. The office met continual resistance from Air Force officials who pushed for ever more-advanced manned fighters, to the point where the Pentagon now plans to spend $340 billion on 3,700 of them over 30 years -- even though the U.S. remains unchallenged in the air.

Gen. Kenneth Israel, who ran the new office, frequently found himself playing defense. Lobbying for funds on Capitol Hill, he would see his message muddied by military officials who wanted money for manned aircraft. Inside the Pentagon, the same crowd would question his data. At one meeting, he detailed how much money the Air Force could save by using UAVs for reconnaissance, instead of manned U-2s and SR-71s. A colleague stated flatly that he didn't believe the figures.

"In a typical work year, I had about 250 meetings, and most of them were just like this," says Gen. Israel, now retired and working with defense consultants Burdeshaw Associates Ltd. in Bethesda, Md. "It was a struggle every day to make people aware of what UAVs could do." The pilot-dominated Air Force hierarchy, he adds, has always been biased against UAVs. "Critics determined that the best way to slow down a bold and innovative idea was to load it down with cultural innuendoes and inaccurate comparisons between manned and unmanned aircraft," he says.

Air Force Gen. David Nagy, who oversees acquisitions of UAVs and other equipment, acknowledges that "there's been a lot of skepticism" in the service toward UAVs, but, he adds, "There's a recognition now that there's plenty of room for manned and unmanned."

Pilotless reconnaissance aircraft got their first big tryout a few years after Mr. Powers parachuted from his U-2 into an international incident. To cut pilot losses, the Pentagon deployed unmanned vehicles called Lightning Bugs over Southeast China and North Vietnam. Launched over the Gulf of Tonkin from a C-130 cargo plane and piloted by joystick by engineers from maker Ryan Aeronautical, the jet-powered drones flew 3,500 missions during the Vietnam War.

Some were used to spy. Others scattered leaflets from President Nixon, urging North Vietnamese combatants to "please quit this foolishness." An early U.S. drone snapped the first photo of a still top-secret version of a Soviet MiG fighter. Another drone had eyes and teeth painted on the front and was nicknamed the Tomcat. A few played chicken with enemy fighters.

But a political power-play helped deny the program wider support, industry executives and military historians say. Washington officials, tightly controlling the war from the Pentagon, insisted that they view the resulting black-and-white reconnaissance photos first, so they could relay orders back to Southeast Asia. That caused delays, which diminished UAVs' usefulness and made them a harder sell once the war was over and the U.S. slashed defense spending. Meanwhile, the Air Force and the Navy were increasingly -- and justifiably -- worried that they were being outdone by advances in Soviet fighter aircraft, so the services pushed hard for new fighters and bombers, especially those employing stealth capabilities.

"It wasn't difficult for someone wearing a white scarf to decide where they wanted to put their funding requirements. If the money was limited, they'd put it into manned aircraft," recalls Norm Sakamoto, a Ryan Aeronautical vice president involved in UAV work since the late 1950s.

Other times, geopolitical concerns came into play. While the war was still under way, Ryan Aeronautical engineers designed a radar-evading, highflying, long-range UAV to spy on the Chinese. By the early 1970s, the U.S. was almost ready to deploy 27 of these Compass Arrows. But according to military historians, President Nixon killed the program to help pave the way for normalized relations with the Chinese after his historic summit meeting with Mao Tse-tung.

After that, the Army and the Navy periodically dabbled in UAVs. With no U.S. alternative, the Navy in the mid-1980s bought an Israeli-designed UAV system, called the Pioneer. After the Navy bombed Fayluka Island just east of Kuwait City during the Gulf War, some Iraqis tried to surrender to a Pioneer flying overhead. Another drone used in the Persian Gulf, developed in less than a month by Northrop Grumman Corp., was made to look like U.S. fighter aircraft on Iraqi radar; in the early hours of the air war, these drones flushed out Iraqi antiaircraft defenses so that real F-16s could bomb them.

Unpopular new programs often fall victim to the Pentagon's longstanding aversion to the risk of failure. After winning a joint Army-Navy competition against McDonnell Douglas Corp. (since acquired by Boeing Co.) in the early 1990s, TRW Inc. set to work building the Hunter, a sophisticated drone that had to be able to survey a battlefield from 150 miles away. But three test-flights ended in crashes, and the product was delivered 10 months late. The Pentagon grew impatient and killed the project, though TRW, as required by its contract, eventually fixed the problem and delivered several usable Hunters. Some were later used to train personnel to fly UAVs, while others sat unused in an Arizona depot until commanders desperate for UAVs to fly reconnaissance missions in Kosovo dusted them off.

The Hunter's successor, the Outrider, succumbed to "goldplating," whereby multiple requirements are piled on a proposed weapon by various branches until it becomes untenable or is overtaken by technology. Alliant Techsystems Inc., based in Hopkins, Minn., won the contract to build the Outrider and worked on it for two years as the services kept asking for new gadgetry. The Army, seeking a cheap way to track enemy movements, wanted the Outrider to be small and simple, but the Navy wanted it to incorporate costly and somewhat bulkier new technology allowing it to take off and land vertically like a helicopter, industry executives say.

"It was a complete failure to assume the mission requirements of the Marine Corps or Navy would be the same as the Army," says Katrina Herrick, a defense consultant who has studied UAVs for more than a decade. "They ended up with a system that couldn't meet anyone's needs and was canceled" in June 1998. Pentagon officials privately concede that an accumulation of too many disparate requirements did in the program. (The Pentagon has since ditched the one-UAV-fits-all approach and is letting the individual services procure their own systems in the future.)

Another factor working against UAVs was directly related to their biggest benefit. Big-ticket projects such as fighter jets and aircraft carriers employ lots of people, and the defense industry sprinkles that work in key congressional districts to sustain political support. That wasn't the case with UAVs, which are cheaper and require fewer people to build them, industry executives say.

Eventually, however, the other services' interest in UAVs compelled Air Force officials to become more engaged in the effort. The Predator, the aircraft used in Kosovo, was a turning point. The Hunter and Outrider programs were all but dead, and the Army had little money to support a UAV program itself. Meanwhile, Gen. Israel's airborne reconnaissance office had begun developing the Predator and was looking for a branch to bring it to fruition. So the Army cut a deal with the Air Force in the mid-1990s: The Army would let the Air Force run the show as long as it took the program seriously and let the Army have unfettered battlefield access to Predators, Army and Air Force officials say.

Without a single drone in hand, the Air Force started training two new UAV squadrons. Built in six months by San Diego-based General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., the Predator was adapted from a classified program known as the Gnat, which it vaguely resembles. It has a 28-foot wingspan, two squat fins in the back near its propeller and a rounded nose that holds a camera and radar that can see through smoke and clouds. It is piloted remotely by operators sitting in a camouflaged Humvee equipped with two big satellite dishes and other gadgets that relay signals and images from the aircraft to battlefield commanders.

Even before testing was finished, the Predator was in heavy demand. U.S. officials working with the United Nations were desperate for UAVs to help monitor Iraqi weapons programs after the Gulf War, but the only test models already had been drafted for service in Bosnia. "There weren't enough Predators to go around, and that hurt" inspection efforts, says Scott Ritter, for eight years a top U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq.

Later, they proved indispensable for spying on targets in Kosovo and enforcing no-fly zones in Iraq, where together they have flown almost 1,000 missions totaling 8,500 hours. They also were used to make sure people had been evacuated in anticipation of an attack, to locate mass graves and, in the end, to verify that the Serbs were retreating as required by the peace accord. The Air Force now plans to deploy 12 Predator systems, each of which comes with four UAVs and costs $24 million, and General Atomics is at work on an upgraded version.

"The culture is changing," says Nick Yorio, director of UAV programs at TRW. "The one thing fighter pilots like less than UAVs is being shot down over enemy territory."

After the Kosovo war ended in June, Defense Secretary William Cohen signaled the shift: "We are at a crucial juncture in airborne reconnaissance," he wrote in a memo, comparing today's drones to manned aircraft 40 years ago. "We cannot overlook the value of the UAV industrial base."

The Air Force traces the about-face to recent advances that allow UAVs to pinpoint target locations, to transmit precise imagery quickly and to be built more cheaply. "It's where money came together with capability," says Gen. Ryan of the Air Force. The Pentagon was also prodded by recent incidents of pilots being shot down over Iraq and Bosnia.

Now, more sophisticated UAVs are on the horizon. The Global Hawk, currently being tested by Ryan Aeronautical (acquired this year by Northrop), is a white, Boeing 737-size, dolphin-shaped drone. It can fly halfway around the world, hover at an altitude of 12 miles for 38 hours, survey an area the size of Illinois, photograph something as small as a Stetson and release a decoy if it senses an antiaircraft threat. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is developing "micro UAVs" that are no longer than six inches and weigh less than three ounces. Lockheed Martin Corp. wants to make one that lets soldiers see over the next hill or around the next corner.

Next, the Pentagon will edge further into the fighter pilot's domain with bomb-dropping drones. Boeing this year won the $131 million Darpa contract to develop and test such weapons, which are expected to cost less than one-third the price of a roughly $35 million Joint Strike Fighter, the Pentagon's next ground-attack jet.

But most of these smart UAVs are years from deployment -- bomber drones won't be available until sometime around 2010 -- largely because the concept remains underfunded. "UAV technology could have evolved sooner with more money in the late 1970s," says Mr. Yorio of TRW. And even with the recent pro-UAV momentum, supporters worry that the Pentagon's latest commitment is just the usual fleeting boost that seems to follow every war. "We seem to be providing at best a lukewarm endorsement," says Gen. Israel.

While UAVs seem to be earning grudging acceptance in the defense establishment, the arsenal ship hasn't -- even though, among all the services, the Navy arguably got off to the fastest start in adjusting to the post-Cold War world. In 1992, it took three giant steps: It began aggressively closing unneeded bases; it retired the last of its battleships to cut costs; and, recognizing that it no longer needed to wrestle Soviets for control of the oceans, it released a study called "From the Sea" that concluded that the Navy needed to project power ashore.

"Our strategy has shifted from a focus on a global threat to a focus on regional challenges," the Navy concluded. "We must structure a fundamentally different Naval force."

To fulfill that promise, two rising three-star officers -- Vice Adm. William Owens and Marine Lt. Gen. Charles Krulak -- began backing an innovative vessel, the arsenal ship. The idea had been floating around the Navy for years, but hadn't received much high-level attention.

The double-hull monster would carry as much anti-ground-force firepower as an aircraft carrier, but with a crew just one-hundredth the size. Its grab-bag of missiles -- big and small, long- and short-range, dumb, smart and "brilliant" -- could reach deep inland and, for example, stop a tank column in its tracks. Its reach would exceed that of carrier-based fighter jets, while its flexibility would outdo U.S.-based B-2 bombers, which are limited to nighttime raids and can't react quickly to changing circumstances. It was hailed as only the second new warship idea since World War II, the first being the ballistic-missile submarine.

There would be only seven officers aboard and only two sailors operating the mess. All 50 crewmembers would clean their own rooms and do their own laundry. To counter takeover threats -- a major worry with such a small crew -- the ship's deck would bristle with antipersonnel mines wired to detonators elsewhere on the ship. Its mine-resistant double hull wouldn't have the usual "V" shape of a warship, but the sturdier "U" of a cargo ship. In combat zones, it would take on water and lower itself so that it just broke the surface, and water jets would shoot up the sides to further veil it from radar.

In 1994, Adm. Owens and Gen. Krulak took the idea to Adm. Jeremy "Mike" Boorda, the new chief of naval operations. Adm. Boorda himself was a departure from Navy tradition. As the first enlisted man to rise to the Navy's top slot, he was something of a maverick who tried to take the service in new directions and was greeted skeptically by much of the rest of the brass. "Mike had a vision of the Navy of the future," recalls John Douglass, then the Navy's top acquisition official. "He understood Washington, how to use innovative concepts not only to further technology, but to get more money for his budget."

As the Navy's former personnel chief, the admiral was quick to grasp one of the proposal's principal benefits: In an era of recruiting shortfalls, the Navy could operate with thousands fewer sailors. He also had an ulterior motive, according to current and former Pentagon officials. As he watched the limited progress being made with UAVs, he worried that a bomb-dropping drone might someday undercut the rationale for aircraft carriers, and he wanted to be ready with an alternative.

Not everyone was convinced, and opponents had some legitimate concerns. Congressional analysts worried that the arsenal ship concentrated too much firepower in a vulnerable place. With such a small crew and so many missiles, reloading would require either that the vessel chug back to the U.S. or that hundreds of missiles and countless supplies be transferred on the roiling ocean waters. And there were other assets in the military inventory, from submarines to bombers, that some analysts argued could also handle strikes deep in enemy territory.

But the ship's powerful backers at the Pentagon were convinced that such concerns could be addressed, and for a while in the mid-1990s, the project looked unstoppable, especially when two main proponents landed major promotions. Adm. Owens became vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Krulak became commandant of the Marine Corps. In March 1996, the Pentagon declared the arsenal ship to be "among the highest priority programs within the Navy."

In a bureaucracy, attempts to change course are subject to attack from inside and outside. In the Pentagon, competition among the four branches intensified as the defense budget shrank during the 1990s. Different factions within each service are sometimes pitted against each other, too.

Adm. Boorda's ability to repel attacks from other branches was limited, but he was seasoned enough to know that the project was even more vulnerable from within, so he moved the development program out of the Navy and into the high-tech precincts of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a separate organization that could insulate the project from the Navy bureaucracy.

"Mike Boorda didn't believe the Navy could do it on its own, because of the culture," says Larry Lynn, director of Darpa at the time.

Then the program suffered a setback from an entirely unexpected quarter. On May 16, 1996, Adm. Boorda walked into the garden behind his house in the Washington Navy Yard and shot himself in the heart. The admiral was replaced by a carrier pilot, Jay Johnson. For the next few years, the new man would have his hands full repairing the Navy after years of strife from the Tailhook sexual-abuse scandal and its leader's suicide.

In July 1996, the Navy picked five industry teams to compete for the contract to design the ship. The winner was to be picked in 1998 so the first of six ships could be launched in mid-2000. To encourage innovation, the Navy gave only the broadest guidance to its bidders: a ship with 50 sailors and 10 times as many missiles for no more than $500 million.

The result provided the ship with a new set of opponents. Each service has its favored suppliers who themselves can tap powerful forces to resist changes that jeopardize their interests. In the case of the arsenal ship, Northrop surprised everybody when it submitted the best initial proposal, Pentagon insiders say. Northrop was an alien force to many in the Navy -- an Air Force contractor best known for the B-2 bomber. And its radar-evading design, an unconventional system that remains largely secret, threatened to bring in new suppliers, excluding companies with long and lucrative Navy relationships. Moreover, Northrop's partner on the arsenal ship was San Diego-based National Steel & Shipbuilding Co., a company with little economic clout in California and little political clout in Washington that has since been acquired by General Dynamics Corp. Yards in Mississippi and Virginia, by contrast, are major employers that can usually count on home-state senators for support -- Majority Leader Trent Lott and the Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, respectively.

The arsenal ship "was a threat to the carrier, and that was a threat to Newport News Shipbuilding," the nation's sole aircraft-carrier builder, says Thomas Donnelly, a former House Armed Services Committee aide. "And that, in turn, was a threat to the Virginia delegation." A spokeswoman for Newport News Shipbuilding says the company never lobbied against the arsenal ship and notes that the company belonged to one of the bidding groups.

The final blow came from the opponents Adm. Boorda had feared most: The Navy's own began a subterranean campaign against the ship. Their motivation was largely parochial. Some design proposals had the ship's firepower controlled by ground forces -- a concept that spooked traditionalists, according to Pentagon insiders. Further troubling old-schoolers, another proposal called for the ship to stay in place for long periods, with relief crews flown in from afar, making it not much of a ship at all.

The ship also threatened powerful narrow constituencies in the Navy. "Mike Boorda saw this as ultimately replacing the carrier, and that was an unpopular view," says Mr. Lynn, the former Darpa chief. Finally, submariners were on the attack, for they wanted to see their own excess ballistic-missile submarines -- not a new arsenal ship -- used to launch conventional missiles.

The result was what a key congressional supporter of the proposal, Pennsylvania Democrat Paul McHale, calls "an inexcusable lobbying campaign" against it. "Subordinate Navy officers undercut the clear guidance of their leadership," says former Rep. McHale, a Marine veteran. "At the same time that the secretary of the Navy was asking me to support the ship, Navy officers were on the Hill making it clear that they wouldn't object if the arsenal ship were killed."

Rather than trying to kill it outright, Mr. McHale adds, the opponents employed bureaucratic stealth, quietly urging Congress to cut its budget just enough to force the Navy to do the deed itself. And sure enough, Congress signaled its puzzlement at the mixed signals and trimmed the arsenal ship's budget. In response, the Navy announced in October 1997 that it was "reluctantly" killing the project due to "insufficient funding."

Adm. Donald Pilling, vice chief of Naval operations, says now that while the arsenal ship had some allure, it ran into problems both within the Navy, where some groups, including submariners, had competing ideas, and on Capitol Hill, where "Congress wasn't really a full supporter." Ultimately, he says, "This was a matter of allocating shortfalls. That's what we do for a living."

Three months after the Navy ended the project, the National Defense Panel, in a major federal critique of the post-Cold War defense establishment, explicitly criticized that decision and other moves aimed at protecting existing weapons programs. The Pentagon largely ignored those comments, but now they may return with a vengeance: Some key National Defense Panel members are advising GOP presidential front-runner George W. Bush to advocate more innovation in the military.

"We need to pursue promising ideas," Gov. Bush said last month, "like the arsenal ship."

The idea of the arsenal ship isn't completely dead, but its proposed successor, the DD-21, probably will be half again as expensive, carry much less firepower and require twice as many sailors. And the first one won't be launched until around 2008.

As for two of the idea's original proponents, Adm. Owens and Gen. Krulak have both retired for careers outside the defense industry -- the admiral in satellite communications, the general in banking. Both still puzzle over why their old comrades doggedly resisted the idea.

"They aren't bad guys," says Mr. Owens. "They aren't trying to make bad decisions. Their thinking is kind of, `This is what we are all accustomed to, we know how it works, and to break the mold is dangerous.' . . . I think that not breaking the mold is dangerous."

© 1999, Dow Jones & Company

By Carla Anne Robbins

Wall Street Journal Staff Writer

Configured for Soviet Era, Missiles Aren't Aimed At New Types of Conflicts
---
A $20 Billion a Year Deterrent

[Fourth in a series on military spending]

ABOARD THE USS WYOMING -- The Cold War ended a decade ago, but here, a few hundred feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, it's as if the Wall never came down.

For six weeks, the Wyoming and its 157-man crew have silently roamed the Atlantic, the submarine's pipe joints cushioned with rubber washers to muffle telltale vibrations, its 24 nuclear-tipped Trident II missiles poised to launch. A missile fired from here, about 70 miles off the Florida coast, would need a little more than half an hour to reach Moscow.

Despite the decade's extraordinary political transformations, the Wyoming's captain says his responsibilities haven't changed much at all. "My job is to protect the missiles and be ready to launch them if I'm told to," says Cmdr. John Pasko. Missile Technician Sr. Chief Kevin Crandell says it would take a few extra key strokes now to program new coordinates into his missiles, since the U.S. and Russia officially stopped targeting their weapons at each other six years ago. "It's a small step," he explains. "It wouldn't slow us down."

In the twilight of the sonar room, Sonar Technician Israel Colon sits with headphones clasped to his ears, his eyes fixed on a glowing green monitor as he tracks sounds from an unknown vessel plying the waters above. Within minutes, the sonar team has it identified: a single four-blade propeller turning at 97 revolutions per minute. It's a merchant ship. The 24-year-old petty officer was trained by listening to tapes of Russian attack submarines, the Wyoming's natural predator, but in two years and four patrols, he has never heard the real thing.

"I've never heard anything I'd classify as a threat," he says. Nor is he likely to. The cash-strapped Russian submarine force rarely ventures far from home.

For many Americans, the idea of fighting a nuclear war has become unimaginable. But the Pentagon is still planning -- and paying -- for one. And this week's Senate vote rejecting a treaty that would have banned all nuclear testing shows that the Pentagon isn't alone in its commitment to a Cold War-style nuclear force.

Indeed, with arms control stalled, the U.S. arsenal still contains about 7,000 long-range nuclear weapons, more than half its Cold War peak. President Bush took American nuclear bombers off alert in 1991, but the other two legs of the U.S. military's nuclear "triad" -- 18 massive submarines such as the Wyoming and about 500 buried missile silos -- remain on much the same 24-hour-a-day, launch-within-minutes alert they maintained throughout the Cold War.

The cost of the Pentagon's nuclear arsenal has dropped more than 60% in real terms since the late 1980s, as the U.S. has given up building new multibillion-dollar weapons systems. Still, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. spent about $20 billion last year on supporting and maintaining its nuclear forces. (The Pentagon accounts for the spending somewhat differently and puts the total at several billion dollars less.)

Unless the U.S. is willing to do away with all of its nuclear weapons, further savings will be limited. The Energy Department alone is spending more than $4 billion annually to ensure that the U.S. arsenal will work without testing for decades more to come. And the enormous infrastructure that supports America's nuclear forces is such a large part of the budget that cutting back to 1,000 longrange weapons would save, at most, $2.5 billion a year, the CBO estimates.

And who is the target of this nuclear arsenal? In the post-Cold War world, the threats to American security range from Osama bin Laden to an erratic North Korea to an intransigent Iraq. But for the nation's nuclear planners, the primary threat remains Russia. "Russia's future is quite uncertain," says Edward Warner, assistant secretary of defense for strategy and threat reduction. "Russia itself maintains thousands of nuclear weapons. Russia's doctrine today is more reliant on nuclear weapons."

The Russians themselves feel far less confident of their power. With their missiles aging and little money to modernize or replace them, some Russian officials have quietly proposed in recent weeks cutting back each side's arsenal to fewer than 1,000 long-range weapons. The U.S. is insisting it won't go below 2,000 to 2,500 warheads, a level Moscow will inevitably feel forced to match.

Cold War suspicions of arms control in general and Russia in particular were behind Senate conservatives' decision to defy President Clinton and vote down the multilateral Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Like many in the Pentagon, they argued that new threats from China, North Korea and the like only bolster the case for a strong nuclear deterrent.

Wherever the threats originate, the question remains whether the nuclear deterrent the U.S. now pays for is worth the price -- both in dollar terms and in other opportunities forgone. For instance, some defense experts argue that the U.S. needs to be investing more in technologies to counter the growing threat of biological or chemical attack. Others say the U.S. should invest in a new generation of conventional weaponry to maintain its military dominance into the 21st century. Still others argue that the real threats from Russia are nuclear theft or accidental launch and that more money needs to be spent helping the Russians dismantle their weapons and secure their arsenals.

OF DOUBTFUL EFFECT

It also isn't certain that a huge nuclear arsenal, and particularly one that the U.S. reserves the right to test, will deter a new generation of potential nuclear rivals: India and Pakistan, rogue states such as Iraq, or terrorists seeking out weapons of mass destruction. Retired Air Force Gen. George Lee Butler, the former top commander of American strategic nuclear forces, says that if anything, the U.S. is feeding their nuclear appetites. "When [we] have no palpable threat and still declare nuclear weapons the cornerstone of our national security . . . is it any wonder the president's" calls on other nations to denuclearize "are going to be ignored?" Gen. Butler asks.

For now, the power, the price and the continuing vigilance of the American nuclear arsenal are all on display here on the Wyoming. The sheer scale of the sleek, black vessel is difficult to comprehend as it surfaces one morning to pick up a few visitors.

At 560 feet, it is as long as the Washington Monument is tall. It is also four stories high. Inside the sub, nearly every inch is crammed with electronics, weaponry and more than enough food and supplies to get the crew through a normal 11-week patrol without ever seeing port or, if necessary, surfacing. Even then, it is still large enough for someone to jog around the forest of missile tubes -- 24 laps for a mile -- though everyone aboard seems to prefer the treadmills and exercise bicycles tucked in among the missiles.

Its cost is just as monumental. Since the program began during the Nixon administration, the U.S. has spent $58.5 billion to design and build 18 Trident submarines and their missile systems. The Navy plans to spend an additional $5.25 billion over the next decade to put new, more-accurate missiles on four of the older Trident I subs-improving their "hard-target kill" capability against Russian missile silosand to refuel their nuclear reactors. The Navy estimates that it costs $92.5 million a year to maintain each of the Trident subs, their missiles, and the two full-time crews who trade off patrols to keep the sub in the water an average of 36 weeks a year.

CATASTROPHIC FORCE

The Trident II's value is in its stunning destructive power. Each of its 24 missiles can carry as many as eight nuclear warheads, for a total of 192 per sub. Each warhead, with its independent guidance system, is designed to hit its target within 500 feet.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, an arms-control and environmental advocacy group, estimates that an attack from a single Trident II sub on the Kozel'sk missile field 150 miles southwest of Moscow would leave 850,000 people dead from blast, fire and radiation.

Here on the Wyoming, the missiles are never far from view. Their orange metal tubes form the walls of the enlisted men's 9-by-12-foot bunk rooms. Most crewmembers seem unaffected by their proximity to Armageddon. "The way I've always looked at it is if we have to do a launch, we'd just do what we have to do," says Machinists Mate 1st Class Mike Knichel, who has spent 19 years on subs.

Every officer on board has access to the Wyoming's targeting plans, but only a few beyond the captain and the executive officer say they have actually chosen to look them up. Part of that reaction is training; part is the culture of this claustrophobic world where voices and emotions are always kept carefully in check.

"Our job is to deter wars. If we do our job right, we'll never have to use the missiles," says the sub's captain, Cmdr. Pasko. Nearly everyone on board the Wyoming refers to their voyages as a "deterrence patrol."

Like the general public, most members of the Wyoming's crew seem uncertain about who the enemy is these days.

In the wardroom over lunch, the submarine's officers struggle with the question. "I can't put a face on any one enemy," says damage-control assistant Lt. j.g. Theron Davis. "But I know that we're helping maintain world peace." Assistant weapons officer Ensign Sanford Kallal says that the problem isn't too few enemies, but too many. "A lot of countries have nuclear weapons or a way to get them," he says. Navigation officer Lt. Cmdr. Scott Fever tries to sum it all up. "Maybe our job these days is to deter someone from becoming an enemy," he says.

At the U.S. Strategic Command in Omaha, Neb., which oversees all American nuclear forces, analysts actually seem invigorated by such questions. In a small, plush conference room, the command's intelligence analysts present what they call "The Hydra" briefing on today's manifold strategic threat.

The first slide up includes a photo of Mr. bin Laden, the renegade Saudi terrorist. Most of the presentation is devoted to emerging dangers posed by China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and a host of "non-state" actors. Although Russia merits just one of the 13 slides, that slide also says that Russia poses the "only 'real threat' to U.S. survival."

The U.S. war plan, the ultra-secret Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, is still mainly directed against an estimated 2,000 targets in Russia. In recent years, the Strategic Command has added "options" for nuclear war with China and nuclear strikes against some rogue nations. The Clinton administration says it doesn't rule out using nuclear weapons to retaliate against all forms of weapons of mass destruction, including chemical or biological attacks.

While the dangers are real, many question whether a big nuclear arsenal is needed to deter enemies who count their weapons in the dozens, and moreover, whether traditional deterrence will even work against terrorists or rogue states that may be more interested in martyrdom.

For now, what Mr. Warner, the assistant secretary of defense, calls "the hedge" strategy remains American policy. Indeed, even if the U.S. and Russia can agree on deep cuts in long-range weapons, the Pentagon is committed to keeping thousands more warheads in storage for years to come, ready to be remounted on missiles should Russia become the enemy again.

SUBMARINES AS LYNCHPIN

Trident submarines such as the Wyoming remain central to those plans. The submarines' ability to hide makes them the most survivable leg of the triad. Under the START II arms-control treaty, ratified by the U.S. but not yet by Russia, half of America's strategic nuclear forces -- up to 1,750 warheads -- would be based on submarines. The Pentagon has decided to keep 14 Tridents to carry those warheads.

While the Pentagon argues that such an approach is strategically sound, it isn't the most cost-effective. In theory, to meet START II's warhead limit, the U.S. could cut the Trident force back to nine submarines from the current 18. Doing so would save about $38 million a year in operating costs for each sub cut. Further, reducing the force to nine submarines would save much of the $5.25 billion the Navy plans to spend over the next decade putting new Trident II missiles on four of the older Trident I subs and refueling their reactors.

At the Strategic Command, planners warn that cutting the fleet that deeply would mean a loss of important patrol and targeting flexibility. The head of the Strategic Command, Adm. Richard Mies, says that at any one time, only two-thirds of the force is actually in the wa ter and "survivable" in the event of a nuclear attack. "On a day-to-day, peacetime basis," he says, "a significant portion of that accountable force is not available."

Some critics suggest that the Navy still could save money with a 14-Trident fleet if it kept four of the older subs but didn't put new missiles on them. "You want to spend all that money to get 150 [meters] closer to your target?" asks Dale Bumpers, a former Arkansas Democratic senator who fought the Trident refit.

But in the end, a Pentagon report carried the day by arguing that going to an all Trident II missile force -- with only one set of repair equipment and replacement stocks -- would actually cost $3 billion less than keeping the current two-missile force. That projection, however, is based on the assumption that the Tridents and their missiles will be in the water until 2025.

Back on the Wyoming, the crew still has another five weeks left of its silent patrol. Their 18-hour days will be filled with constant drilling and testing and a small amount of free time for sleeping, reading, college courses and a favorite video game: 688I attack submarine. Chief of the Boat Joe Steadley, the senior enlisted man on the sub, says that a lot of the crew thinks that the attack subs, which go out looking for their enemies, "are a lot more exciting" than the Wyoming.

AN ISOLATED LIFE

Since the Wyoming's mission is to hide, no one will say where it is going from here. Cmdr. Pasko gets his orders from the Strategic Command on what portion of the Atlantic to patrol. But within that, he says, "we've got a lot of ocean to move around in." The sub is constantly on the move, searching for different water temperatures and different geography that "bends sound" to confound pursuers.

For the crew, the isolation is near-total. With its premium on silence, the sub only rarely sends messages. There is no e-mail, no phone calls, and for each crew member, only 10 short "family grams" from home in 11 weeks. No replies are permitted. The restrictions are so great that before leaving port, the entire crew fills out a "Potential Family Problem Form" letting the base and Cmdr. Pasko know whether they even want to be notified of family crises when they occur.

For Lt. j.g. Scott Eidem, that isolation is making him question how much longer he will stay in the Navy. He is proud of the job he's doing, but also tired of being away from his two-year-old son. "I'd like to hear an answer to that, too," jokes Cmdr. Pasko, who is clearly pushing the young man to stay in. While they may have doubts about their own future, though, few question that there will be Tridents for years to come. "There'll always be some enemy to deter," predicts Master Chief Steadley.

Nuclear Stockpiles

Five countries maintain substantial nuclear arsenals. While exact details are sketchy, three others are believed to have produced some nuclear warheads. One country, North Korea, is thought to have enough plutonium to make a small but unknown number of warheads. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it costs the United States upwards of $20 billion a year to maintain its nuclear arsenal.

Cost of Maintaining the U.S. Nuclear Arsenal

Long-range nuclear delivery systems -- $8 billion
For buying, operating and maintaining the bombers, missiles and submarines that would deliver nuclear warheads and bombs against strategic targets, such as Russia.

Treaty Verification and Miscellaneous -- $2 billion
For conducting the on-site inspection programs mandated by arms control treaties with Russia, and for operating and maintaining short range delivery systems such as some cruise missiles and fighter planes, and defensive aircraft.

Stockpile Stewardship -- $4.5 billion
For maintaining the actual nuclear warheads and bombs themselves, including short-range (or tactical) nuclear bombs. Essentially, the Department of Energy's weapons labs make sure that they would work well if detonated.

Command and Control and Intelligence -- $6 billion
For maintaining and running the sophisticated network that keeps the president and other military commanders in touch with the country's nuclear forces, including the submarines, and spying on other nuclear powers.

© 1999, Dow Jones & Company

By Kathy Chen

Wall Street Journal Staff Writer

[Fifth in a Series on Military Spending]

WASHINGTON -- When the Pentagon wants to buy Intel Corp. chips for its aircraft, it goes to Rochester Electronics Inc. The Massachusetts company sells discontinued Intel lines under the dubious motto "Leaders on the Trailing Edge of Technology."

That hardly serves to inspire confidence in the world's most high-tech military. But the Defense Department doesn't have much choice: Last December, Intel closed its military-development arm, which used to make customized chips for the Pentagon. "It was a very expensive business for us to run and the volumes were relatively small," says Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy.

Intel isn't alone. International Business Machines Corp., DuPont Co., General Electric Co. and numerous other technology-oriented companies also have sold or shut their defense research-and-development businesses in recent years. Even some traditional defense contractors are scaling back on R&D work. Stan Solaway, the Pentagon's head of acquisition reform, says three-quarters of the country's top 75 or so information-technology companies won't do research for the military.

A SHRINKING R&D SLICE

After dominating American R&D activities for decades, the Pentagon today is responsible for a shrinking share of the nation's R&D spending, and fewer companies are willing to put up with the red tape involved in competing for it. Moreover, the surging economy has created a voracious consumer appetite for high-tech gadgetry and driven companies that might otherwise be interested in military work to more marketable endeavors where there is no question who can profit from new innovations.

"What makes this really sobering is that much of what we're looking at in the future is a battlefield dominated by information technology," Mr. Solaway says. And there's no telling, he adds, what futuristic weapons of warfare might never exist as a result.

In the past, Pentagon-sponsored R&D made the U.S. the world's undisputed leader in smart bombs, stealth aircraft and the like, while spawning innovations that found their way into just about every household in the country, from the Internet to the microwave oven. But much of America's high-tech firepower was designed to fight the Soviet Union. Now that the Cold War is over, threats facing the U.S. are changing, making innovation all the more important.

And when it comes to innovation, these days the commercial sector is leading the way: In 1971, the U.S. Patent Office awarded 1,271 patents to the armed services, accounting for 1.6% of total patents issued. Last year, the figure dropped to 585, a paltry 0.4% of total patents issued. U.S. companies, by contrast, received 66,062 patents last year, 45% of the total and a 50% increase over 1971.

A FUTURE IN 'JEOPARDY'

"The Defense Department's future technological superiority is in jeopardy if it can't effectively leverage our commercial industry," says Jim Richardson, vice president for research at the Potomac Institute, a nonprofit think tank that studies such issues for the military.

Budget pressures have squeezed military R&D spending in recent years, and that spending is expected to total $38 billion in fiscal 2000, down 30% from its inflation-adjusted peak in 1989. Meanwhile, the private sector's share of total R&D expenditures in the U.S. is soaring. In 1960, private-sector R&D spending amounted to roughly one-third of the country's total. In 1999, it accounted for two-thirds (an estimated $166 billion). Over the same period, the military's share dropped to 16% from 53%.

Thus, the Pentagon just isn't the big R&D customer it used to be. Up until 1970, it accounted for all but a handful of all computer-chip sales. Today, private-sector customers snap up 98% of them. "We're looking at a marketplace that is exploding around us," says Mike Ellingson of IBM's Global Government Industry Division, explaining why IBM sold its defense-oriented aerospace arm to Loral Corp. in 1994.

Most companies gladly sell the military anything from their general lines. But specialized R&D projects tend to involve a bureaucratic morass. Just to keep up with the Pentagon's many financial checks, Eastman Kodak Co.'s government-systems division employs twice as many finance and accounting people as a commercial unit that rings up twice the sales, says contract manager Stanley Fry.

CONTRACTS AND LEGAL STAFF

Earlier this year, the Air Force asked Corning Inc. to develop a glass window that could withstand laser penetration. The contract was worth less than $100,000, a sliver of the $10 million in sales overseen by Bob Jones, Corning's product line manager for mirrors, so he figured he could shirttail the project to another production line with minimal effort. But then the Air Force sent him a 60-page contract.

Mr. Jones says Corning doesn't mind such requirements for major projects, but, in this case, "we had to bring three or four of our legal folk to see if we were in compliance -- almost to do [the Air Force] a favor," Mr. Jones says. It took three months just to finalize the agreement. Given all this, Mr. Jones says, he foresees manufacturing a number of windows for the military and then "we'll have to re-evaluate the profitability of this business."

The Defense Department has tried to address such complaints as part of a broader effort to streamline procurement while maintaining checks prompted by the 1980s' procurement scandals. The Pentagon issued regulations in 1991 that allow for more commercial-friendly R&D agreements. After the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa, the top military laboratory where the Internet was born, experimented with a "dual use" program that finances research projects with both military and commercial applications, the Defense Department extended similar programs to the services' budgets.

A GROWING PRACTICE

Darpa general counsel Richard Dunn brags that "much more than half" of his agency's projects now take advantage of such reforms. But he says the rest of the Pentagon is "hierarchical and bureaucratic. There are lots of layers of folks who need to be convinced." For example, he says that on a recent visit to the Navy's system's development and procurement headquarters, "they knew none of the details" of the programs. Gen. Richard Paul, commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, says, his service's "learning curve has really accelerated in the last three years or so after we stuck our toes in the water." Still, just 5% of the Air Force's $1.2 billion R&D budget went to dual-use projects.

"The [procurement] situation has gotten better -- just not in R&D," says Bob Spreng, executive director of a group of nine major, high-tech companies that are pushing for reforms to make dual-use work easier to undertake.

It's not just red tape that spooks potential Pentagon partners. There's also the high-stakes question of intellectual-property rights. Companies understandably want to own and profit from any patent developed through government research. But traditional defense contracts don't allow that, based on the rationale that the government shouldn't allow just one company to profit from an innovation financed by the taxpayers. "These are the biggest frustrations," says Henry Kohlbrand, Dow Chemical Co.'s director of external technology and intellectual-asset management, explaining why his company does little Pentagon work. "You have to educate them on trade secrets and patents and the importance of that in the outside world."

ACCESS TO DATA

Moreover, the military often demands access to sensitive data used by companies to develop its products, arguing that it needs such information for battlefield repairs. But in many cases, company executives say, the data are only tangentially related to the system in question. Contract negotiations between Kodak and the Air Force for an imagery-software development project recently bogged down over such issues. The Pentagon wanted Kodak to modify software that it hadn't yet put on the market. But the original contract would have given the Pentagon access to data used not just for the modifications but for the original software, too. After two months of negotiations, the Air Force deleted the problematic language.

"They fund a little incremental piece of work, but they want rights to all the data," says Kodak's Mr. Fry.

"We have the ability to do a lot more than what we're doing," says Mr. Solaway, the acquisition reform official. The brass encourages greater cooperation with the private sector, but in the rank and file, "a lot of people are afraid someone will come down on them with a hammer if it doesn't work," he adds. "What's really required are big cultural changes."

© 1999, Dow Jones & Company

By Chris Adams

Wall Street Journal Staff Writer

In the Mojave, Echo Range Costs $16 Million a Year For Only Occasional Use
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A Revealing Study of Studies

[Sixth in a Series on Military Spending]

CHINA LAKE, Calif. -- Scattered amid the creosote bushes of the Mojave Desert here stand more than a dozen giant contraptions bristling with some of the U.S. military's most sophisticated electronics. About 2,700 miles of fiber-optic strands connect the devices to computers that simulate almost any antiaircraft threat American fighter pilots could face anywhere in the world.

The Navy estimates that it spends $16 million a year to operate and maintain this 500,000-acre swath of wired, windblown wilderness. Nearly two hundred people work at Echo Range daily so planes can swoop overhead to see, for example, if the latest American onboard jamming technology can thwart the newest enemy radar.

But most of the time, there isn't a plane in sight. Some months, total aircraft testing time at the range averages less than two hours per weekday. For all of January 1996, total testing time was 20 hours. Why operate such an expensive site and use it so sparingly? It's hardly a question of need.

Repeated government studies have concluded that the Pentagon has more than enough electronic combat ranges -- Echo Range and two similar ones operated by the Air Force. One is just a few minutes away by jet at the Nellis Range Complex in Nevada; the other is at Florida's Eglin Air Force Base.

"Would the Navy build us again?" asks Ron Stepp, the Navy veteran in charge of running Echo Range. "I don't know. We're way expensive."

Indeed, four of the studies concluded that Echo Range is the least cost-effective to keep open. But bureaucratic turf wars, congressional pork-barreling and simple inertia have kept all three facilities up and, if not always running, taking leisurely strolls. At various times, senators and congressmen and the secretary of defense joined the fray to save one range or another. The issue has pitted the Air Force against the Navy and, at one point, one Air Force faction against another.

The long struggle over Echo Range helps explain a costly contradiction in the U.S. defense budget: Though troop totals have fallen in the past decade, the Pentagon is spending more than ever per troop.

For years, the debate over defense spending has focused on headline grabbing big-ticket items -- usually major weapons programs such as the F-22 fighter jet. But before the Pentagon buys a single rifle or pays a solitary grunt, it spends well over $100 billion a year on its support infrastructure -- all the things needed just to make things hum. By far the biggest component of this spending is the so-called operations-and-maintenance, or O&M, budget, yet it receives almost no public scrutiny. It pays for many things: spare parts, equipment overhauls, environmental programs, training, child care, health care, cutting grass and painting barracks. It also covers much of the cost of running Echo Range and its counterparts.

Since the Cold War ended in 1989, the number of active troops and the level at which they train -- Army tank miles, Air Force flying hours and the like -- have dropped by more than a third. At the same time, O&M expenses have fallen at less than half that rate. Today, the Pentagon spends roughly $70,000 a year per troop on O&M costs -- 30% more than it spent a decade ago, after adjusting for inflation.

There are some rational reasons: new environmental-cleanup directives, for instance, and growing medical expenses. And there's the obvious fact that constant peacekeeping and dictator-defeating operations have kept the downsized U.S. military extraordinarily active in the 1990s. But those factors aren't enough to explain the entire increase in per-troop O&M costs. Numerous government studies suggest that the O&M budget helps finance a system rife with inefficiencies: partly empty depots, underused testing facilities, commissaries that can't compete with neighboring Wal-Marts and warehouses crammed with tens of billions of dollars in inventory that may never be used.

The importance of the issue extends far beyond its fiscal impact. The O&M budget is the principal means by which readiness -- the speed at which military operations can be geared up -- is assured. And some military experts and congressional Republicans are becoming increasingly vocal in questioning the Pentagon's current state of readiness. Indeed, the Army has just concluded that two of its units are unprepared to go to war because they are too busy with peacekeeping efforts.

"The Department of Defense is burdened by a far-flung support infrastructure that is ponderous, bureaucratic and unaffordable," military experts on the National Defense Panel concluded in 1997. The General Accounting Office is even more blunt, finding in another 1997 report that "billions of dollars are wasted annually on inefficient and unneeded activities." In 1998, the Pentagon itself estimated excess base capacity at 23%, and said the figure for some functions -- including testing and evaluation centers and labs, a category that includes Echo Range -- was much higher.

Indeed, the problem is widespread, reaching far beyond this remote testing field. Consider:

• At a Navy storage facility in Norfolk, Va., a General Accounting Office investigator in 1995 found 27 circuit-card assemblies, used on various planes and helicopters and valued at $1,000, though only two were needed to satisfy war reserves or current operating requirements. And 10 more were on order, since the Navy computer automatically reorders some supplies without staff ever having to sign off. At other storage depots, the GAO found enough wiring harnesses for airborne radio communication systems to last 277 years and enough AP-1 central computers for the F-15 aircraft to last 109 years.
• At Edwards Air Force Base about an hour down the road from China Lake, the Electronic Warfare Directorate recently expanded its Benefield Anechoic Facility -- a hangar 80 feet high and sporting the "biggest single-piece door in the world," says Lt. Col. Randy Kelly, who oversaw the facility until several weeks ago. Covering the walls, the floors and the ceilings of the vast room are dark cones of blue foam, which keeps out all electromagnetic waves. By simulating conditions at 60,000 feet, the chamber allows for testing of electronic systems without the cost of running a fighter down an open-air range.

The problem, according to the GAO, is that the Benefield facility offers the same testing environment as a similar Navy chamber in Maryland. Both the Air Force and the Navy are expanding their chambers, spending a total of $512 million by the year 2002, some of it "to make the same electronic combat test upgrades," the GAO says. Lt. Col. Kelly says that for the past two years, the Air Force's Benefield chamber had no tests going on 40% of the time; the Navy, according to the GAO, insists it needs to expand its own chambers to handle future work.

-- Both the North Island Naval Aviation Depot in California and the Ogden Air Logistics Center in Utah can repair and maintain F/A-18 fighter planes. In the mid-1990s, the Ogden facility won a bid to repair some of the Navy's planes. But the Navy eventually canceled the contract, saying it wanted to keep repairs of the Navy plane within the Navy, even though the GAO concluded the Air Force could do the work for less money. One of the reasons Navy officials gave for canceling the contract was slow turnaround time by the Air Force repair center; the Air Force, however, responded that the Navy caused the delays, and pointed to more than 100 letters to Navy contracting officers complaining about them. Today, across all the armed services, maintenance depot facilities have excess capacity of between 25% and 50%, according to the GAO.

-- A 1997 Congressional Budget Office report found that the Pentagon's retail system -- comprising commissaries that resemble grocery stores and department stores -- is "not a cost-effective alternative to cash compensation" for active and retired military personnel. In other words, the U.S. would be better financially off if it were to boost wages for military personnel and let them buy their food, clothing and such at private-sector outlets, rather than continuing to run a vast, subsidized retail network of its own.

Pricing aside, the Pentagon's retail outlets are often far less convenient than private-sector shopping. The average commissary is open only 48 hours a week, is likely to be closed on Sundays, and can't carry the variety of goods that can be found at discount retailers like Wal-Mart.

The debate over downsizing and efficiency dominates the history of Echo Range in the 1990s. The facility opened in 1966 as an adjunct to an existing major Naval weapons-testing site. The California desert offered a nearly perfect environment for year-round testing, with rain a rarity (22 days a year) and visibility practically unlimited.

At its peak in the midst of the Cold War, base officials estimate, Echo Range employed more than 300 people. The range also was used to test other weapons systems, including the Tomahawk and HARM missiles, and the Navy's famed Top Gun pilots do some training here. Its most important achievement came in the 1980s, when its technicians simulated the antiaircraft systems of a Soviet ship, allowing the Navy to perfect the defense systems on their fighters.

Mr. Stepp, a civilian employee at the range for 16 years, waxes nostalgic about those days: The "Soviet ship in the desert" was "our number one claim to fame, marketing niche, operational strength," he says. Now that the Soviet naval threat has been neutered, much of the equipment is mothballed.

"So now what?" Mr. Stepp asks, wistfully.

Today, Echo Range continues to conduct the sort of tests that are essential for America's cutting-edge fighters. U.S. warplanes are fully integrated weapons systems, able to track and deceive threats, communicate with command headquarters and engage in battle -- all at the same time. To remain effective, they must be tested and refined continually. Pilots also need constantly to hone their flying and fighting skills.

The problem is, Echo Range's customers -- the Navy, the Air Force and a few foreign allies -- haven't had very much use for it lately. In the post-Cold War era, there aren't as many new threats to America's air superiority, and there are fewer new aircraft to test. So the facility is open only four days a week. And though Navy records show it's available to test aircraft for 1,560 hours a year, it was used for only 576 hours in fiscal 1996 and 820 hours in fiscal 1997. (The range declined to release more recent figures; other records show that it expects usage to remain stable in coming years.)

That leaves Echo Range's 187 employees with a lot of downtime. Some of that is used to maintain and repair equipment, line up and plan tests and study the resulting data. Mr. Stepp contends that the employees stay plenty busy, and he has argued for years against attempts to close his range in favor of the Air Force ranges in Nevada and Florida.

To bolster his case, Mr. Stepp provides a tour of the facility, restricted to nonclassified areas. He drives 25 miles from base headquarters to the range, passing a burro-crossing sign as he points out the spot that was once the set for another planet in a "Star Trek" movie.

Off in the distance, he passes what looks like a huge golf ball sitting on a ridge about 400 feet above the valley floor. It's called the "missile on a mountain." Inside the sphere and on the ground nearby, Mr. Stepp says, is just about everything needed to launch an antiaircraft missile: "If we had the missiles, we could launch at an airplane." When a plane zooms by, a seeker in the sphere fixes on the target and "we know what the missile is seeing," he says. The range's powerful computers collect hundreds of data points, from which the Navy can figure out what kind of decoys and jammers would work to evade the missile.

At his office, a nondescript building in a tiny complex of low-rise white buildings and trailers, Mr. Stepp takes a phone call to discuss an upcoming test -- proof, he says afterward, that the facility has plenty of work. He offers a slide show of the range's sophisticated equipment. The devices dotting the landscape, he says, house various "threat systems" with names like "spoon rest" and "bass tilt." If the Pentagon calls with word that a potential adversary has a new radar system, Echo Range technicians go to work.

The highlight of the tour are two 350-foot-tall wooden structures that look like teepee skeletons, built in the 1950s for various testing purposes. "At one time, when business was low, I was going to do some bungee-jumping," Mr. Stepp jokes.

One thing has kept some of the employees here busy for the past decade: a constant stream of studies that have required staffers to try to justify -- mostly successfully so far -- their existence. "You're putting dedicated man-hours of highly skilled people to work for months collecting and working the data," complains A.K. Rogers, Mr. Stepp's boss, in an interview.

The studies started back in 1990, as the Pentagon was first coming to grips with post-Cold War budget realities and looking for ways to scale back. Military planners quickly concluded that aircraft testing-and-evaluation, or T&E, sites such as Echo Range were a logical place to start. Such facilities illustrated the Pentagon's "greatest overlap in capabilities," one early report concluded.

Soon after, the Pentagon ordered up a study aimed at reducing duplication rampant throughout the Defense Department. The goal couldn't have been clearer: "an aggressive inter-service T&E consolidation effort." Instead, the study ended up focusing on avoiding additional duplication in the future, and the Defense Department told Congress it could be years before any consolidation savings were realized. The reason, according to a later report by the General Accounting Office: "service resistance to consolidating these existing test capabilities."

A few years later, a panel of officials from all the services looked at duplication at the testing facilities at Echo Range, the Nellis Range Complex in Nevada, which is managed by Edwards Air Force Base in California, and Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. In 1994, the panel decided that closing Echo Range would save taxpayers the most -- $95 million over five years, compared to $48 million if Eglin's facility were shut down. The Nellis range was considered too valuable an asset to close. The plan called for the consolidation to be complete no later than 1997. A year later, another study came to a similar conclusion.

The Navy fully participated in both studies. But it criticized their conclusions as "incomplete and flawed," according to the GAO, and it refused to consider closing its facility if the Air Force was going to retain both of its ranges.

Around this time, congressional interest in the issue intensified. Members from Western states criticized the antiEcho Range proposals from within the Pentagon and proposed consolidating such military testing facilities into a complex in the Southwest. That prompted protests from senators from Florida and other Eastern states, who told the Pentagon in a letter that they were "gravely concerned" by the proposal and praised the previous pro-Eglin studies.

Another Pentagon multibranch study ordered by Congress then concluded that electronic combat ranges had 30% excess capacity. The result, according to a later GAO report on the earlier studies, was a "gentleman's agreement" that spared Echo Range: the Navy and the Air Force would consolidate within their respective services, rather than among the services.

The Pentagon disputes that there was any gentleman's agreement. Nevertheless, the Air Force volunteered to relocate its testing equipment from Eglin to Nellisa move that previous studies had concluded was less cost-effective than closing the Navy's Echo Range and that would leave the military with no major East Coast testing facility.

That deal prompted a rearguard action from the Air Force's Special Operations Command, based right near Eglin's runway. "Over the years, we have grown accustomed to having this special facility in our own backyard," one Special Operations commander said in a memo. "Should the proposed realignment occur, it will not be business as unusual for AFSOC." The people behind the deal scoffed at such complaints. "Requirements in yesterday's fiscal environment are conveniences today," one Pentagon official responded in a letter.

But the Special Operations Command called on some friends in high places -- the Florida congressional delegation. Republican Sen. Connie Mack in the Senate expressed his "surprise and dismay" at the plan to close Eglin and, with Democratic Sen. Bob Graham and GOP Rep. Joe Scarborough, ordered the GAO to investigate.

Once the GAO started poking around, Echo Range's Mr. Stepp shifted into high gear. He argued strenuously that the previous studies were flawed at best and biased at worst. To no avail: The GAO blasted the decision to scale back Eglin and save Echo Range, noting that the Pentagon previously had "produced three studies with a conclusion that China Lake is less costeffective to keep."

Defense Secretary William Cohen also sided with the Florida lawmakers. "Let me assure you we share your concern," he told Sen. Mack in a May 1998 letter. "The Department has no intention of eliminating the electronic combat operational test and training capabilities needed to support the Air Force Special Operations Command," he wrote.

The Florida delegation also persuaded Congress to appropriate an extra $5 million so Eglin could "maintain and improve its [electronic combat] capability" -- money that even the Pentagon said it didn't need because, as the previous studies had proved, it already had too much testing capacity.

In the end, the Air Force decided to transfer some Eglin testing systems to Nellis in Nevada. Even that limited move toward consolidation was delayed at the request of the Special Operations Command, and some of the equipment slated to be shipped out West will stay at Eglin at least through July 2001 -- and may be allowed to stay indefinitely. The rest will remain at Eglin.

Ironically, military officials themselves concede that the inefficiency and overlap uncovered in countless studies often applies to the studies themselves -- especially given the outcome.

"If you look at the history of the studies, new studies often roll in before or right at the time others are completed," says Mitchell Cary, a midlevel Air Force official well versed in the issue's acronymheavy history. "There was the Board of Operating Directors study, and right at the end of that it was announced there would be a look at T&E with BRAC."

Maj. Marc Shaver, a colleague, chimes in: "At the same time, they were already doing the test consolidation master plan."

"And Vision 21 came right on the end of that," adds Mr. Cary. "Vision 21 was kind of cut short by the Quadrennial Defense Review, and then we went right into Section 912."

That last one came out this past summer. Its conclusion: The Pentagon's base-closing process was "specifically focused on reducing cross-service redundancies" but had resulted in "no significant actions." And, once again, the study recommended that the Pentagon consolidate its electronic testing ranges.

But even the Pentagon official who oversaw that study doesn't sound very hopeful. Stan Soloway, deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition reform, says he isn't familiar enough with the specifics of electronic combat ranges to explain why all three ranges remain open after so many years of study. Speaking generally, however, he says the Defense Department is so "overlayered with management and the board and committee structure that it inhibits" real reform.

"If you have . . . a convoluted enough structure, change becomes almost impossible," he says. "Can I sit here and suggest to you that this study has taken us several steps beyond those studies that were done earlier? Not really."

© 1999, Dow Jones & Company

By Thomas E. Ricks

Wall Street Journal Staff Writer

U.S. Choices: Terminator, Peacekeeping Globocop Or Combination of Roles
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Lessons of the Maginot Line

[Last in a Series on Military Spending]

What kind of war will the U.S. fight in the future?

Some defense experts argue that the threat will most likely come in the form of an epic confrontation with a powerful, state-of-the-art military. Say, for instance, Iran in 2025 smites its neighbors with chemical weapons and seizes Saudi Arabia's oil fields.

Others predict there won't be any more big wars -- just a plethora of enemy "ankle-biters" menacing U.S. troops with nettlesome firefights, as the Americans feed starving refugees on one block while separating warring factions on the next.

But there is growing agreement on the bottom line: Despite spending about $275 billion annually, the U.S. military isn't preparing for the battles of tomorrow. It can't attract enough recruits to meet its needs, yet it uses labor inefficiently, as if people were a free, conscripted good. Promising innovations such as unmanned aircraft are stifled by a continued focus on big-ticket armaments designed to confront the Soviet Union, including a huge nuclear arsenal of submarines, missiles and bombers.

Defense research-and-development spending is declining, and fewer high-tech companies find it financially rewarding to help the military create weapons for the information age. Meanwhile, the Pentagon oversees a vast overcapacity of bases and other installations that consume billions of dollars, thanks to bureaucratic turf wars and congressional parochialism.

"Every year we probably are wasting money," says retired Gen. Edward Meyer, a former Army chief of staff, because today's spending "isn't going to the force we necessarily will need in the future."

Yet even among those who have concluded that the armed forces are due for a major overhaul, a fierce debate is raging over exactly how to do it. The basic question is simple: If we were starting from scratch, unburdened by the baggage of past wars and threats, what sort of military would we build for the 21st century?

The answer depends on what role America wants to play in the world. Should it continue to shoulder responsibility for problems around the globe, or retreat to a strict defense of its own borders? Flowing from there are many secondary issues: Should the services be reorganized, perhaps with a separate Space Force? How quickly should the familiar weapons of the Cold War be abandoned in favor of new, information-age gear? Should the defense budget be smaller, or bigger?

In Pentagon offices, war-college classrooms and think-tank outposts, three major options have emerged. Each foresees certain kinds of conflicts, offers distinct advantages and carries unavoidable risks. Whatever course is taken, the growing consensus is that a different approach is needed -- and that the terms of the current congressional debate, focused largely on incremental changes in the size of the defense budget, have become largely irrelevant.

The Terminator

With his thick eyeglasses, owlish appearance and analytical skills, Michael Vickers strikes many as the prototypical academic. But his looks belie his previous career, as an Army Special Forces soldier and operative for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Now employed at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, a small but influential defense think-tank that advocates gradually but radically transforming the Pentagon, Mr. Vickers is considered one of the leading thinkers about the U.S. military of the future. What worries him most is the possibility of another huge war. To meet that threat, he argues for creating a formidable military to deal with big potential adversaries by deterring them and, if not, by showing no mercy in taking them on.

"I like a knife fight as much as the next guy," says Mr. Vickers, who during his military career learned to parachute behind enemy lines with a small nuclear bomb in his backpack, performed counterterrorist operations in Central America and helped equip and train the Afghan resistance for the CIA. "But the world is going in the direction of space, long-range precision strikes and maybe information operations" -- that is, attacks on adversaries' computers.

Many top military thinkers agree that numerous powerful adversaries await the U.S. in the not-so-distant future. To assume that no new adversary will emerge is to bet against history, says Maj. Gen. Claude Bolton Jr., who runs the Air Force's fighter and bomber acquisition programs. The U.S. was involved in wars during most of the decades of the 20th century, with two in the 1990s. "Somewhere between 2010 and 2020, this country will be spending a hell of a lot of money fighting another major war," he says.

Most who worry about a big challenge look to the East. The greatest military surprises in U.S. history, they note, have come from Asia: Pearl Harbor, China's intervention in Korea and the Tet Offensive. The most obvious threat is China, but some are wary of Japan, too. Even India, now just a fledgling nuclear power, could emerge as a major strategic concern, with many experts now quietly saying that within two decades it will loom larger in U.S. calculations than Russia. Throw in the East's next wave of nuclear powers, such as North Korea, Iran and Syria, and there are plenty of potential enemies capable of picking a nasty fight with the U.S.

"The price of global domination is about to go up, sharply," predicts Paul Bracken, a political scientist at Yale whose new book, "Fire in the East," argues that 400 years of Western military domination of Asia are coming to an end.

From Mr. Vickers's perspective, all this argues for a cutting-edge force of intimidating power. He contends that today's weapons -- heavy tanks, manned bombers, aircraft carriers and the like -- are "sunset systems," destined to go the way of the horse cavalry and the battleship. "By 2020, the era of tank primacy and mass armies will be over," predicts Mr. Vickers, who has been running a series of futuristic war games for the Pentagon. "I think we are in a period of revolutionary change in warfare."

Therefore, he thinks the U.S. should spend the next 20 years striving for the sorts of technological gains achieved between the world wars, when the nation's small but ingenious military first experimented with aircraft carriers, amphibious landings and tank warfare.

The core of the Terminator force likely would be a small but fast-moving and highly lethal Army that would cut through enemy forces such as tanks through horse cavalry. He and others argue that sheer mass, an advantage in industrial-era warfare, will become a vulnerability because it simply presents the enemy with a larger target. Faced with advances in battlefield sensors and precision-guided weaponry, this new Army's front-line units would have to be able to scoot around in armored vehicles or even armored uniforms, never presenting a stationary target for long.

Rather than toting all their own firepower, with the tons of logistical supplies that entails, they would be able to call in missiles and rockets from the air, sea and perhaps even from space-based "battlestars" hovering in lunar orbit. For transport, they might use armored tilt-rotor aircraft that take off like helicopters but then fly like propeller planes. Robots could lead their most dangerous patrols. Overall, ground forces might look more like today's small, elite Special Forces units than current infantry and tank divisions that require more than 10,000 people apiece.

Mr. Vickers estimates that the Army of the future would require about one-third fewer troops than the 470,000 it has today. Overall, his military would total about one million troops, compared to 1.4 million now.

The Terminator force's Navy also would look very different. Some experts advocate "mobile offshore bases," huge slow-moving ships with mile-long runways that would more resemble oil rigs than aircraft carriers. But Mr. Vickers says global satellite coverage would make surface ships too vulnerable. Instead, he foresees a force of submarines and semisubmersible vessels. These would include missile-toting "arsenal ships" that would carry warheads capable of dispensing dozens of "brilliant" flying munitions that individually zero in on the sound of enemy tank engines.

Mr. Vickers also would give the Air Force a complete makeover, cutting its fundamental tie to piloted planes. The new Air Force would feature a mix of manned and unmanned aircraft, almost all of which would rely heavily on radar-evading "stealth" technologies. Dozens of small, unmanned bombers armed with tiny but potent 50-pound precision-guided, superexplosive bombs would hang under the wings of huge airborne aircraft carriers. And Mr. Vickers probably would recognize the growing military importance of outer space by creating a new "Space Force" that could launch attacks against spots on earth or protect satellites and other key positions in orbit.

Yet there are two major risks to Mr. Vickers's force.

First, such a leap simply might not work. A tough, precision-guided military might prove to be the 21st-century equivalent of the Maginot Line, the powerful border fortresses built by France in the 1930s. Having a strong military doesn't ensure victory. It may instead simply drive adversaries to find new, as yet unknown "asymmetrical responses" -- indirectly through terrorism, or directly by finding and exploiting cracks in the American arsenal, just as the blitzkrieg enabled the Germans to bypass the Maginot Line and shatter the French army in World War II.

Also, in the 21st century, militaries will have to operate in a world blanketed by satellites, and there is no guarantee that the U.S. will be the one to figure out the best way to turn that globally transparent environment to its advantage.

Perhaps even more worrisome is the huge expense of creating, equipping, training and maintaining a Terminator force. It would take about a decade of intensive research to develop the new weaponry, and another decade of even heavier spending to procure it all, an effort akin to the 1980s Reagan buildup. The budget would also have to accommodate big increases for training.

Mr. Vickers argues for trimming the current military to pay for the Terminator force. But today's military leaders insist they already are overwhelmed and actually need more troops. They say that creating the Terminator force would require many more troops to conduct realistic experiments. So the defense budget likely would have to be boosted by as much as 20%, or about $60 billion a year -- far beyond the public's appetite.

Moreover, though Prof. Bracken and those in his camp may worry about military threats from Asia, his colleague at Yale, historian Paul Kennedy, warns in "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" that history has shown that allocating too much national wealth to the military can itself weaken a nation's power.

Globocop

Retired Marine Gen. Charles Krulak thinks Mr. Vickers's line of reasoning misses the point. "The days of armed conflict between nation-states are ending," he told Congress this year before stepping down as commandant of the Marine Corps. Instead, he argues that the military must prepare itself to police democracy's empire, fighting small skirmishes or solving humanitarian crises wherever they pop up.

His vision is a natural extension of his experience as the Marine-general son of a Marine general. The Marines always like to focus more on people and on training than on their weapons. Like many Marine officers of his generation, Gen. Krulak was molded by combat in Vietnam. What the military went through in 1969 and 1970, he once said in an interview, shaped its determination to create a highly trained, well-led, well-motivated force prepared for its missions. "If you can get through that, you carry in your heart and soul: 'Never again. Never again,' " he says. It also taught him that a determined low-tech foe can counter the conventional military might of U.S. forces.

To be ready for the future, this view holds, the U.S. should prepare its troops to deal with chaos itself. In part, that means giving troops new weaponry, such as better gear to deal with operating in a more urbanized world. But mostly it means finding good people and training them far better than they are now. It is a view widely popular in the military, which tends to focus on the next decade, during which no one is predicting the rise of a major adversary.

Gen. Krulak, who now works for MBNA Corp., a Wilmington, Del., banking and consumer-lending firm, envisions more of a "small war" military in the futuresomething akin to his beloved Marine Corps. The general foresees "the threeblock war," as in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1992 and 1993, where U.S. forces on one block fed starving refugees, on the next separated warring factions, and on the third engaged in a firefight.

To move seamlessly from one of those tasks to the next, the military would be light and generally low-tech, with more emphasis on simple boots-on-the-ground infantry than on snazzy new weapons and remote-control battlefields. Rather than spending tens of billions of dollars on research or big new weapons systems, it would put its money into recruiting, training and paying the professional force it would need for these brushfire operations. The Navy would support the missions mainly with cruise missiles and ground-attack aircraft. The Air Force would play the role the Navy did in the days of late-19th-century "gunboat diplomacy," striking from afar with a handful of fighters and bombers to enforce the will of Washington.

The Army would move away from relying on 70-ton main battle tanks or long-range artillery pieces. Instead, it would focus on long-term, open-ended peacekeeping missions in places such as Bosnia and Kosovo. Strategic nuclear forces might be slashed to the bare minimum-probably just missiles aboard submarines, negating the need for existing land-based missiles and the nuclear bomber fleet.

If such a police force is all that is needed, the U.S. military could be cut drastically and supported by a defense budget about one-third smaller, some defense experts say.

Yet this military strategy carries two downsides.

The first is that it is easier to get into these "small war" missions than to get out of them. The most striking characteristic of America's post-Cold War military operations is that they seem interminable. U.S. forces now have been fighting Saddam Hussein for twice as long as they fought Hitler. The Army may end up spending a full decade in Bosnia -- ten times the initial estimate offered by President Clinton on national television. Eventually, predicts Boston University's Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel and an expert on international relations, "Americans will awake to an unruly world in which the United States has assumed vast burdens not easily shed."

Even more worrisome, this sort of work erodes a military's ability to wage high-intensity war. If a big war did come along unexpectedly, the American armed forces probably would be dangerously unprepared. Recently, the U.S. Army declared that two of its 10 divisions are unready for combat because they are engaged in peacekeeping missions in Kosovo and Bosnia.

This was the shock that hit England in 1914 and still resonates there today. The British imperial force had been adept at fighting Queen Victoria's small wars in remote places such as Afghanistan and the Sudan, where just last year the U.S. showed its current might with cruise missiles. But when the British army suddenly had to wage a new sort of war on the European continent, it was devastated. Unimaginative and militarily uneducated officers proved unable to adapt to the vastly different circumstances of largescale industrialized warfare, and they led a generation of British youth to slaughter.

The less the U.S. looks able to fight a big war, the more likely it is that an adversary will try to take it on. So it is possible that pursuing a purely constabulary course today would condemn the U.S. to a big war a decade or two in the future.

The Insurance Force

Army Maj. Gen. James Dubik thinks the answer lies in a mix of Mr. Vickers's high-tech force and Gen. Krulak's low-tech boots on the ground. Gen. Dubik's vision attempts to hedge the security bet with a force that can reliably and efficiently execute police missions, but that also gets ready to confront powerful enemies in the 21st century.

Gen. Dubik has spent about half his military career as an infantryman and paratrooper, and the other half studying and teaching at military schools such as West Point and Fort Leavenworth School of Advanced Military Studies, and civilian universities including Harvard, Johns Hopkins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

On his most recent overseas assignment, as a commander of the 1st Cavalry Division on the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, he began writing an essay that considered what the U.S. military should look like after today's threats, such as North Korea and Iraq, have passed from the scene. As the Balkans winter settled in earlier this year, he spent his evenings at his Army-issue computer, tapping out his vision of the future of the U.S. military.

He prescribed a military with four main parts. First, it would have a big "prevention and war-fighting" component that would train for conventional high-intensity warfare -- and be used only for that. Second, it would have an "engagement force" for peacekeeping and other current overseas operations and for reinforcing the first force when needed for combat.

Third would be a small "experimental force" to keep the U.S. one step ahead in figuring out how to fight in the future. Finally, there would be a support force that would create the other three -- recruiting, training and managing everyone else. The existing services would remain in place, but their job now would be to supply people to each of the new functional forces.

"I wanted to start the debate," Gen. Dubik says of his essay.

He started one all right, and got himself promoted right into the middle of it. This week, Gen. Dubik took command of a new Army position as "commanding general for transformation" -- essentially, the first Army officer assigned to the 21st century. His mission at Fort Lewis, Wash., is to design the new "medium-weight" Army that is supposed to be as mobile as light infantry while packing the punch of a heavy tank unit.

The Pentagon bureaucracy is skeptical of Gen. Dubik's compromise force because it risks making the military a jack of all trades and master of none. By trying to do everything, the military could wind up doing nothing particularly well. Experimentation especially might suffer, because the Pentagon's tendency is to rob tomorrow to pay for today. So the concern here is that the U.S. could wind up with a force that is broken up for different missions yet isn't particularly adept at any of them. This isn't a small concern in an endeavor where the price of incompetence can be death.

Also, establishing the Dubik force would require a massive reorganization of the U.S. military, the biggest since 1947, when the bloody lessons of World War II and the first breezes of the Cold War forced change. Little such motivation exists today: Defense matters rank low in publicopinion polls, and no presidential candidate has made defense reform a key issue. Confronting entrenched interests would require large amounts of capital, both political and financial. And it likely would be difficult to garner popular support for what amounts to an unglamorous hedging of bets.

---

It's hardly clear which military will emerge from today's U.S. armed forces -- if any significant change occurs at all. Indeed, the U.S. may be able to muddle along for decades with a big but increasingly ineffective military. Or the nation might retreat into isolationism and decide that the core of its military should be a wall of missile defenses.

But the biggest worry among proponents of transformation is that it isn't easy for a successful military to remake itself. It was the defeated Germans, constrained by the Treaty of Versailles, who combined the tank, the machine gun and the radio to overwhelm the French and the British militaries in 1940. Army Maj. Donald Vandergriff and other military reformers argue that the U.S. military won't really change until it is forced to do so by some sort of disaster akin to Jimmy Carter's hostage-rescue debacle in the Iranian desert in April 1980, which presaged the Reagan buildup.

The first step toward genuine transformation, military reformers argue, will be to grasp just how profound the change must be, covering everything from how the U.S. armed services recruit new people to how those troops are trained, organized and equipped.

"The Cold War was a two-generation national emergency, and it has seeped into the marrow of our bones," says Chris Seiple, until recently a Marine Corps strategist. "We have all known nothing but the Cold War."

© 1999, Dow Jones & Company

By Thomas E. Ricks

Wall Street Journal Staff Writer

As Configured, Force Lacks Required Combination Of Swiftness and Strength
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'A Relic of the Industrial Age'

"The post-Cold War restructuring of the military has got to entail the ability to move forces rapidly anywhere in the world and, when they get there, to be able to decisively affect the battlefield equation."

WASHINGTON -- Suppose President Clinton decided today that sending in ground troops was the only way to win the war over Kosovo.

The U.S. Army could fly several thousand lightly armed infantrymen to Kosovo fast -- where they would be vulnerable and unable to take on Yugoslav tanks. Or it could ship a lot of monster 70-ton main battle tanks to Kosovo -- in a couple of months.

But the Army can't do what many say is needed right now: Get a strong armored fighting force to Kosovo quickly, in time to halt the Yugoslav military's bloody offensive against the province's ethnic Albanian population.

Today's Army isn't structured to give the president that option. In fact, as many in Congress in recent days have begun to call for ground troops -- especially as the air war has done nothing to halt Slobodan Milosevic's aggression and civilian casualties have mounted -- Clinton administration officials counter that such action isn't only unnecessary, but that the troops simply couldn't get there fast enough.

'FUNDAMENTAL RESTRUCTURING'

"There has got to be a fundamental restructuring of the Army," concludes Sen. John McCain, a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a Republican candidate for president. "The post-Cold War restructuring of the military has got to entail the ability to move forces rapidly anywhere in the world and, when they get there, to be able to decisively affect the battlefield equation."

As it happens, Army generals seriously considered reorganizing the service a few years ago so it would be faster, more agile, more flexible. The key change would have been to abandon the Army's basic structure of 10 combat divisions and instead shape it into about 25 "Mobile Combat Groups" of about 5,000 troops each.

Every combat group would be a complete package, some emphasizing artillery and armored vehicles, others attack helicopters. Each group would be light enough to travel fast, moving anywhere in the world in a week or two, yet strong enough to take on tanks once it arrived. What's more, the reorganization promised to halve the number of headquarters in the Army, producing savings that could be devoted to pay and training. At one meeting last year, a U.S. military briefer noted explicitly that this system would allow the Army to move 40,000 combat-ready troops into the Balkans in 28 days.

Instead, the Army right now is struggling to move 24 Apache helicopters, related artillery units, and a few thousand troops into Albania in two weeks.

Why?

A look at how the Army tiptoed up to radical reform and then shied away from it says a lot about the service's difficulties in adjusting to the post-Cold War world.

At the time the Army chose not to go down the path of reform in April 1997, its Gulf War victory, the Army's biggest success in more than 50 years, was still fresh in the minds of the service's leaders. And there were other reasons not to change: The Army's basic mandate is "to fight and win the nation's wars," and getting ready for small brush-fire wars could distract it from maintaining the sharp, tank-heavy force needed to win a land war in Korea or the Persian Gulf region -- both hot spots that loom as large as any in American strategic thinking. In fact, since the Gulf War, the Army has stepped up its efforts to "pre-position" thousands of tanks and other heavy equipment, both aboard ships and near likely hot spots, as a way of trying to be both heavy and fast at the same time.

A STRAINED SERVICE

Moreover, the Army of the 1990s has been continuously and unexpectedly busy -- first in the Gulf War, then in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia -- and that has made it harder to consider radical reform. Doing all that has strained the service, forcing it to do more with less as it shrank from 780,000 troops in 1987 to 492,000 a decade later. Many generals felt they and their troops had absorbed about as much change as they could take.

But now, in a situation where they can't move a lot of heavy troops quickly, some of those same generals are grappling with the question of how, if they are called upon to do it, they can get 40,000 troops and all their equipment to Kosovo. The most likely scenario would be to move 20,000 troops into Albania and about as many into Macedonia, and perhaps some to Hungary -- a process that would be slow, with clogged airports and ports posing endless difficulties.

The predicament has particular irony for Col. Douglas Macgregor, who is a top planner for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, running the alliance's Joint Operations Center as it grapples with the question of whether -- and how -- to send a ground combat force to Kosovo.

In late 1995, Mr. Macgregor, who as an armored cavalry officer played a major role in the key land battle of the Gulf War, took a big risk with his career and wrote a book recommending that the Army reorganize itself so it could move robust combat forces faster. (The book's title, "Breaking the Phalanx," alludes to the battles around 200 B.C. in which the more agile Roman legions smashed the once-invincible Greek phalanxes, helping establish Roman rule that would last for 500 years.)

Then a mere lieutenant colonel -- who in the Pentagon might be relegated to bringing coffee to the generals -- Mr. Macgregor argued that today's Army simply isn't configured to deal with today's world. The next time, he worried, the U.S. wouldn't be as lucky as it was in the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein delayed attacking American forces even as they spent six months massing in the desert.

Col. Macgregor's plan was to reorganize the Army into combat groups. Some would be "heavy," bristling with tanks and artillery. Others would be "light," relying more on helicopters. But all would be rapidly deployable. And while these groups would resemble the Marine Corps' "Marine Expeditionary Units," they would wield far more firepower. Most important, they would move by air transport, not by ship, as the Marines are designed to do.

Younger Army officers seized on the book, passing it around and discussing it in e-mails. Three Army officers studying at the Naval Post-Graduate School cited it as evidence that the Army as currently constituted is "a relic of the Industrial Age."

Soon, some senior officers became advocates of the book. The Army's top officer, Gen. Dennis Reimer, took interest in it and began mailing copies to other Army officers. He even made a point of reaching down several levels of command to have lunch with Mr. Macgregor, then posted to Fort Leavenworth.

Shortly after that meeting, in April 1997, Gen. Reimer effectively endorsed the book. "This is an interesting proposal, and worthy of a lot of deep thinking," he wrote in the regular, informal e-mail letter to his generals that he calls "Random Thoughts While Running." "I think most of us have recognized the need for strategic mobility."

Four weeks later, the Army's four-star generals -- its so-called board of directors -- gathered for their regular meeting at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. This time, most of the discussion focused on a possible redesign of the Army, Gen. Reimer recounted in a subsequent "Random Thoughts." Three possibilities were laid out. Should the Army adopt "Breaking the Phalanx" as its blueprint for the future? Should it stick with the division structure? Or should it choose an intermediate course that retained the big division but made the smaller brigade the Army's basic fighting unit?

Some of the half-dozen four-star generals at the meeting argued that the Army was simply too worn out from its recent campaigns to embark on a major reorganization. Others worried that Congress would grab the savings realized by the restructuring and prevent the Army from spending it on personnel and training; that, they thought, would result in an Army that was simply smaller and weaker.

Some said the division system had served the Army well for decades, and there was no reason to dump it now. A few simply dismissed Mr. Macgregor's ideas as typical of the armored cavalry way of thinking: overvaluing maneuverability while underestimating the importance of sheer firepower.

But when the meeting was over, it was clear that "Breaking the Phalanx" had been rejected -- for the time being. The consensus of the generals, according to insider accounts, was that the "Phalanx" Army was something that would come into being in a decade or two, as part of what the Army calls "The Army After Next." In the interim, the Army would stick with its division structure and make relatively minor adjustments.

As word leaked out of the rejection, disappointment among younger officers who had hoped that the Army was on the verge of a major cultural shift was "widespread," recalls recently retired Col. Richard Dunn. It became clear, he says, that "There was a definite generational gap here between senior and junior officers."

"What's the difference between `Jurassic Park' and the Army?" asked a colonel on the staff of the Joint Chiefs. The answer: "One is an amusement park dominated by dinosaurs. The other is just a movie."

Explaining the rejection to the rest of the Army, Gen. Reimer sounded almost apologetic. "There's a little caution in all of this," he told "Army Times," an independent newspaper. "The Army is a very conservative organization." Gen. Reimer declined to comment for this story.

Last fall, the Army announced plans to experiment with a "Phalanx"-like "strike force." But the plan has been met with skepticism by many in the Army, who say it is a pale imitation of Col. Macgregor's mobile combat groups. Among other things, it consists of only a headquarters, without troops. "It's a greatly crippled effort to address the issue," says Andrew Krepinevich Jr., an expert on military modernization issues for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent Washington think tank. Mr. Krepinevich worries that the Army, as currently structured, runs a high risk of becoming "strategically irrelevant."

As for Col. Macgregor, since writing his book he has been passed over three times in the selection for brigade command -- a virtual death warrant for his Army career, relegating him to staff jobs as a colonel for the remainder of his service.

Nonetheless, the colonel, who holds a Ph.D. in international relations, remains at the center of the debate over the future course of the Army.

Working as the top planner for Gen. Wesley Clark, military commander of NATO, Col. Macgregor helped devise NATO's attack on Yugoslavia. NATO insiders say the attack was restricted at first by the alliance's political leaders and only now is reaching the size intended from the start.

Meantime, the colonel continues to be a vigorous advocate of the ideas he espoused in "Breaking the Phalanx." But even if the Army had adopted his ideas in 1997, the Army's chief spokesman says, it still wouldn't be able to get forces quickly to Kosovo right now. "It would be impossible for the Army to adopt, reorganize, equip and train a structure proposed in the book `Breaking the Phalanx' in such a short period of time to make any difference for the current contingency," argues Maj. Gen. John G. Meyer.

© 1999, Dow Jones & Company

By Thomas E. Ricks

Wall Street Journal Staff Writer

Based in Missouri, They Fly Missions Over Yugoslavia, Return in Time for Pizza

KNOB NOSTER, Mo. -- A few days ago, the pilot of an Air Force B-2 "Stealth" bomber flew from here to Yugoslavia, where he risked missile fire and MiG-29 attacks to drop more than a dozen 2,000-pound "bunker busting" bombs. Then, without touching ground, he turned around and winged it back to his base here, 65 miles southeast of Kansas City.

When he got home, recalls this blond son of the Midwest, "my wife kissed me, and she said, `You need to mow the lawn. I'll go get the kids.' " After he did his chores, "we ordered out for Pizza Hut, because it was a special occasion" -- the completion of his first combat mission.

A LONG REACH

For the first time in history, the U.S. is carrying out a sustained bombing campaign partly from its own soil. More than 30 times in the past month, a B-2 bombera plane that, with its 172-foot wingspan, looks like a giant black boomerang-shaped spaceship -- has flown the 30-hour mission from Whiteman Air Force Base to Yugoslavia and back. That means the U.S. is demonstrating an unprecedented capability to reach out and touch its adversaries. With precision bombs and aerial refueling from military tanker aircraft, notes Brig. Gen. Leroy Barnidge Jr., the commander here, "there's not a target on the planet that we can't hit."

For the 45 B-2 pilots based here, it has meant something unique in American military life. Rather than flying from airfields in the Saudi Arabian desert in the Gulf War, or from Guam in the Vietnam War, or from the South Pacific, England and Italy in World War II, they are living at home while also acting as combatants in a war in a faraway land about which their neighbors know little.

Late last week, for the first time since the war against Yugoslavia began March 24, the Air Force allowed several of the pilots to be interviewed. It wouldn't allow their last names to be used, and the pilots went a step further, banning first names -- partly out of worry about being pumped for classified information about their high-tech planes if they are captured, and also out of concern about possible terrorist responses against their families. But they talked in some depth about the experience of bombing Belgrade one day and driving up Interstate 70 for a Kansas City Royals baseball game the next.

One black-haired major recalls being on alert as a backup pilot one afternoon: "I was running errands, picking up kids at the football practice, and thinking, 'Wow, I could be in combat tonight.' "

The blond captain who had to mow the lawn listens to this account and nods. "It's one of those surreal events," he says. That adjective, along with "weird," was used by several of the pilots to describe their experiences.

GET DRESSED, GO TO WORK

"The first mission was actually his birthday," says the wife of one B-2 pilot. "I packed him a lunch with some birthday cake in it. The next day was my son's soccer game, and he scored his first goal." Her husband, back home in time to witness the feat, was "proud as a peacock," she says. But she found the experience "very strange -- to drop bombs and then come home and watch my son's soccer game."

As a joke, she says, she greeted her husband with what she calls a "honey-do" list when he came home from one mission -- and actually got him to finally put the knobs back on her dresser.

"It is kind of weird to get dressed in your own bathroom and then go into combat," says a bald captain as he sits in the left-hand seat of a B-2 cockpit.

These pilots aren't the rowdy fighter pilots portrayed in "Top Gun" and "The Right Stuff" -- though many used to be, before they made the transition from F-15s and B-1s to the B-2. They tend to be more mature and are generally married and happily settled into family life in smalltown America.

Like them, the aircraft with which they are entrusted -- the most expensive in history, at $2.2 billion a copy -- is valued for its stability and unobtrusiveness. The B-2, which carries a two-person crew, was designed around the concept of being "low observable." Its shape and its surfaces are devised to deflect or absorb radar waves. Its engines are unusually quiet for a warplane and disperse their exhaust across the top of the plane, the better to avoid heat-seeking missiles from below. The cockpit, with its long sloping windshield and two high-backed seats (with room enough behind them for lying down), feels uncannily like the front seat of the minivans these pilots drive to soccer practices and to the Wal-Mart down Highway 50 in Warrensburg.

The B-2 remains based here, rather than at some overseas outpost closer to the action in Yugoslavia, partly because it has an elaborate support system here, but also because its advanced design and operation remain so secretive that the Air Force wants to keep it away from prying eyes. Indeed, pilots here park the plane in hangars specially designed so that everything from refueling to bomb-loading can be done inside, out of the view of spy satellites. Flying this way is expensive, though; each mission costs an estimated $441,270.

Pilots begin preparing for each mission when they are notified they are on the action schedule, about a week ahead of time. They begin to adjust their sleep patterns to maximize their alertness during the mission. To do this, they can move into quarters on base. Most have elected to stay at home.

On the day of the mission, they do a final review of mission plans, weather conditions and updated intelligence on air defenses and targets. Then they taxi the plane out past Hangar T-9, whose side is emblazoned in big brown letters with the slogan: "Global Power for America."

Much of the 15-hour flight to Yugoslavia is taken up with monitoring the plane's elaborate electronics. The bomber is refueled by an aerial tanker twice each way. Each of the two crew members follows a schedule and gets at least three hours of sleep per mission.

On breaks, many pilots chow down on the traditional "bomber dogs" -- hot dogs and chili -- warmed with the heater just behind the second pilots' seat. The blackhaired major carefully disciplines his food and fluid intake, sipping water constantly and drinking a cup of coffee about 20 minutes before entering hostile airspace. On his one mission, the blond captain took a less-regimented approach: "I went through two gallons of water, a liter of Mountain Dew, half a bag of nachos, some chocolate."

Some pilots here have flown multiple missions, some only one or none at all. They say very little about their actual bombing runs on Belgrade and other sites. But they insist that their sorties, while flown at high altitudes, are hardly antiseptic flyovers. "If you see missiles and things in the air, it definitely feels like combat," reports the black-haired major.

When they leave hostile airspace, an officer back at the base calls their wives. About 15 hours later, they touch down at Whiteman. After two hours of postmission "debriefs" -- on maintenance, weather, intelligence, and mission planning -- they are free to go home. It is then, says the bald pilot, that "the reality sets in."

One pilot says that when he went home after his first bombing mission, his wife was still at work. "I took a good shower, took a nap for two hours, and then cooked dinner for my wife -- spaghetti -- so it was ready when she got home from work."

The wife who packed birthday cake in her husband's lunch says she much prefers this arrangement to having him deployed to the remote Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, as he was when he flew 17 B-52 missions against Iraq in the Gulf War. Back then, she kept a list of questions for him on a bedside table to ask when he called for one minute about once a week, usually at 4 a.m. Having him fly from home, by comparison, "I feel pampered, almost guilty. He's here, I know where he's going, and they call when he gets out of danger."

She is now growing accustomed to this new way of war. "We know Dad's working all the time, and Dad sleeps a lot," she says, "so maybe I don't vacuum as much."

But there are still moments, she says, when she turns on CNN, remembers where he is at that moment, "and I'll get a little shaken up." Over the past month, she says, she has memorized Psalm 91: "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty." Her favorite verse, she says, is the 11th: "For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways."

© 1999, Dow Jones & Company