Questions and Reforms

By Evan Thomas.

When the Sixth Fleet struck at Libyan air-defense batteries and patrol boats a fortnight ago without suffering a single casualty, America's top military brass celebrated more than just a victory over Muammar Gaddafi. The Pentagon offered the Navy's demonstration of high-tech firepower as a telling retort to an increasingly restive band of congressional critics who accuse the military of building "gold-plated" weapons that will turn out to be duds in combat. Like Libya's radar transmitters, the Pentagon's detractors were silenced, but only for the moment.

Early action reports from the Gulf of Sidra claimed that half a dozen of Libya's Soviet-made SA-5 missiles had fallen harmlessly into the sea, while the Navy's harm missiles had knocked out a radar station on land. Yet the Libyans were able to replace their radar within a few hours, and there remained some uncertainty whether all four harm (cost: $283,000 each) had actually struck home.

More serious doubts surrounded the Harpoon missiles launched by the Navy cruiser Yorktown in a night action. At first the Navy claimed that a Libyan patrol boat 38 miles away had been hit. But officials later backed off, admitting that the cruiser may have been shooting at a "mirage." If the gunboat was for real, ask critics, did the Harpoons (cost: $944,000 each) miss? And if the Yorktown was shooting at a mirage, what does that say about the $1 billion cruiser's complex, highly sensitive Aegis radar defense system?

Though final action reports will not be available for some months, Pentagon officials last week continued to defend the performance of the Navy's high- tech weapons. With so-called smart weapons like the harm, which homes in on radar signals to find its way to the target, "you get a higher probability of kill," says Donald Hicks, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. "But you have to recognize that nothing is perfect." Such smart weapons are designed to cripple a radar dish, not destroy an entire missile site.

To pre-empt a growing congressional clamor for reform of the Pentagon, President Reagan last week endorsed a significant reorganization of the Pentagon's high command. The package he accepted was proposed by a blue-ribbon panel led by former Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard, which was set up in the wake of scandals over military procurement. The most important recommendations: to strengthen the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the ten worldwide theater commanders. By enhancing their authority, the Packard panel hoped to overcome the interservice rivalry that has impeded military planning by the Joint Chiefs and execution by commanders in the field. The President also backed the creation of a "procurement czar," an Under Secretary of Defense to oversee the purchase of new weapons systems for all service branches and ride herd on a Pentagon bureaucracy that has produced $640 toilet covers and $7,600 coffee pots. In another report to be released this week, the Packard commission charges that "all too many of our weapons systems cost too much, take to long to develop and by the time they are fielded, incorporate obsolete technology."

Even within the Pentagon, some officials questioned whether the measures backed by the President amounted to anything more than rearranging squares on an organization chart. In a book published this month, America Can Win, Colorado's Democratic Senator Gary Hart, founder of the military reform movement in Congress, insists that mere organizational changes are not enough. Unless the military "culture" is transformed, he insists, the U.S. risks losing its next real war. According to Hart, the military promotion < system rewards "organization men," skillful Pentagon bureaucrats, while passing over "warriors" with a true understanding of the "art of war."

Hart aims his harshest criticism at the Navy, which he claims is building history's "most expensive naval museum," one designed to fight the last World War rather than any future one. The U.S., for example, has been funding aircraft carriers as the most effective way to project power. Hart dismisses the flattop as the ship that won the Battle of Midway (1942) and points out that the Soviet Union has been launching the capital ship of the next war--the submarine. The U.S. has 100 attack subs, the Soviets three times as many. American submarines are quieter, an important advantage in undersea warfare, but the Soviets' are faster and can dive deeper.

Navy brass point out that the $75 billion array of carrier groups looked pretty intimidating to Gaddafi, who dared not send his 535-plane air force aloft to challenge the Sixth Fleet. But questions about both the cost and effectiveness of the operation are sure to be part of the continuing debate over how to allocate military resources and structure the Pentagon bureaucracy for the defense the U.S. will need in the decade to come.

With reporting by Bruce van Voorst/ Washington