RUST COMMENTARY: CURRENT U.S. MILITARY STRATEGY IS ONLY A GIANT BLUFF

IN THE TANK: Only half of our soldiers think the principal mission of the Army is to fight.

* Direct and indirect military expenditures on day care have tripled over the last decade.

* The Army just completed its worst recruiting year since 1979.

* What is wrong with the U.S. military?

HOLLOW TO THE CORPS: The president is relentlessly shrinking the armed forces while thinking of more and more things for them to do.

Within a few weeks of announcing that American soldiers would remain in Bosnia indefinitely, President Clinton set forth a plan to reinforce the U.S. presence overseas, increasing funding by 20 percent and personnel by even more. The problem for Secretary of Defense William Cohen? The windfall went not to our shrunken, strained and underfunded military, but to the Peace Corps.

Like many other institutions, the military is a trinitarian structure consisting of mind, body, and soul. Issues of the mind revolve around strategy and doctrine. The body is represented by personnel and materiel. The soul is concerned with those intangible issues of morale, esprit de corps, and culture that have proved so consequential in the history of warfare. As Patton remarked, "It is not the sharpness of the bayonet but the gleam in the attacker's eye that will break the enemy line."

Unfortunately, in today's military, the putative attackers have lost much of the gleam in their eye, and their bayonets aren't particularly sharp either. The military is beginning once again to take on the hollow feel it had in the 1970s. (Yet another instance of retro chic?) It is caught in a downward spiral continuously exacerbated by a national-security strategy that is at once an abstraction and a fabrication, a funding and readiness crisis that steadily eats away at the ability of our forces to carry out missions more challenging than peacekeeping, and a cultural imbroglio over issues of identity, institutional ethos and sexual integration. Small wonder that few have joined Newt Gingrich in proposing to shift some of the possible budget surplus to the military. Who wants to throw good money after bad?

The U.S. now offers the world a grand strategy that is, in essence, a gigantic bluff. With a force shrunk by some 40 percent over the past seven years, America promises to lead the defense of five separate regions of the world, be prepared to defeat both Iraq and North Korea handily at almost the same time, and take on most of the peacekeeping and humanitarian relief tasks that arise. The immediate result of the chirpy strategy of "doing more with less" is a 300 to 400 percent increase in the pace of operations. The Army, which conducted 10 "operational events" outside of normal training and alliance commitments in the period of 1960-91, has conducted 26 since 1991. The Marine Corps undertook 15 "contingency operations" between 1982-1989 and 62 since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Units of all the services meet themselves coming and going in a frenetic drive to carry out the many different tasks of U.S. strategy.

Nonetheless, a bluff is not a bluff until it is called -- the thought with which our strategists comfort themselves. And U.S. strategy rests on the fragile assumption that nothing too serious will happen anytime soon -- at least, not during this administration. Short-term tactical planning has reached cynical heights. The president's official national-security strategy of "engagement and enlargement" -- a therapeutic document described as "pabulum" by Johns Hopkins University Professor Eliot Cohen -- offers an insight into Clintonian thinking. "Diplomacy is our first line of defense against threats to national and international security," it reads. So much for deterrence. Thus, as in the recent stand-off with Iraq, Madeleine Albright and her black Stetson will be dispatched to bring peace in our time, and the military can be left to the important business of ethnic reconciliation in the Balkans. It is a strategy that assumes the triumph of good intentions whenever the U.S. encounters a potential adversary.

This approach belies some fundamental dicta that 4,000 years of strategic history have given us. First, the credibility of a policy of deterrence lies in the ability of the deterring force to visit powerful destruction upon a possible enemy. Second, as Lady Thatcher is always quick to point out, it behooves a great power to prepare for the worst. And third, no great power ever remained so by showing what Jonathan Clarke calls "an instinct for the capillaries." -- JOHN HILLEN, Olin Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a National Review contributing editor.

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KYOTO -- Clinton at his worst: What happened to the U.S. position at the United Nations Global Warming Conference in Kyoto, Japan, is an example of the Clinton administration's worst features. First, President Clinton, prior to the conference, had called for the U.S. to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 34 percent, to 1990 levels, between 2008 and 2012, and had exempted developing nations -- some of the worst offenders -- from such significant cutbacks. Second, the president said our reductions would not "weaken the economy but, in fact, will add to our strength in new businesses and new jobs." He made it sound as if the reductions would please everyone. They won't, of course, because Clinton's promises, as usual, are completely false.

The Heritage Foundation reported in November that independent economic studies found the Administration's proposal would mean a permanent loss in annual growth in GDP of between 1 percent and 4 percent, and a decrease in employment in all states averaging 1 percent, or 1.9 million jobs, by 2020. Furthermore, the George Marshall Institute pointed out that this would all be in vain because even "a 50 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. would be entirely canceled by increases in carbon dioxide emissions from China alone."

At the Kyoto conference, when environmentalists whined that our proposal was too feeble, the vice president sent as the Administration's white knight to tell the world that we would be "flexible" -- and, indeed, we were. We agreed to cut our emissions 7 percent below the original Clinton position. And the developing countries? They were asked only to set voluntary reduction targets-even major emitters such as China and India.

It seems inconceivable that a Republican Senate will ratify such an agreement, no matter how much Mr. Clinton exults in his latest "victory." -- Casper Weinberger.

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At the recent Kyoto conference, Al Gore refused to "exempt U.S. military training and overseas operations from fuel cutbacks," the result being that the U.S. will be in violation of the Global Climate Change Treaty unless the U.N. grants approval for any overseas military actions. Get ready for the fuel-economy replacement for the M-1 Abrams tank.

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President Clinton's new surgeon general, David Satcher, opposes a ban on partial-birth abortions and lobbied against a recent bill mandating that mothers of babies who test HIV positive be notified. Satcher is accordingly under fire from the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Center. Why not just abolish the office of surgeon general entirely? It has been vacant for three years with no noticeable effect-except that we've been spared lectures in favor of condoms and masturbation and against smoking.

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Health Spending Growth Lowest in Four Decades, Improving Quality of Care While Containing Costs Possible, Proven: The private sector health-care system is successfully keeping quality health care affordable, a new Health Care Financing Administration report shows.

* U.S. health care spending hit a 37-year low in 1996, rising just 4.4 percent, HCFA reported. In 1995, health spending rose 4.8 percent.

* This slowest rate of health spending growth, after adjustment for inflation, was only 1.9 percent.

* Since 1993, annual health spending has averaged 5 percent, with the growth rate dropping each successive year. Contrast this trend with the average yearly spending growth from 1966 to 1993: more than 11 percent a year.

By contrast, government health spending hasn't matched the private sector's success.

* From 1989 to 1996, government health spending rose each year 9.7 percent on average, compared with private sector spending growth at 5.8 percent over the same period.

* Federal employees will see their health premiums rise 8.5 percent on average in 1998, while large private sector firms will pay only 4 percent more this year.

* Medicare spending grew at 8.1 percent in 1996. While down from 1995's 10.6 percent rate, Medicare's spending rate still outpaced private sector health spending by 4.9 percent in 1996.

By emphasizing value and innovation throughout the 1990s, America's health care leaders have improved the quality of care while reducing the costs.

* Managed care has succeeded tremendously in making quality care more affordable.

-- Consumers' out-of-pocket health expenses rose only 2.7 percent in 1996, and their share of health insurance premiums rose only 3.8 percent that year, the HCFA report said.

-- The Lewin Group estimated that Americans will save $383 billion this decade because of the low premiums and reduced out-of pocket costs that health plans offer.

* New medical innovations are delivering on quality and value.

-- For instance, a new class of drugs is being developed that could prevent 7,000 to 10,000 heart attacks a year. It could well save both lives and millions of health care dollars.

-- A new procedure for gallbladder surgery enables America's 500,000 annual gallbladder patients to get out of the hospital in one day instead of eight, cutting more than 3 million hospital days a year.

"There has been a concerted effort to develop approaches, treatments and techniques that keep people healthier, that bring about quicker recoveries from injuries and illnesses, that result in more efficient and effective care," HLC president Pamela G. Bailey said. -- Healthcare Leadership Council.

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Dose of Reality: In a celebratory briefing on his new budget, President Clinton drew a huge zero on a chart to represent the elimination of the federal deficit next fiscal year. A disappearing deficit is a good thing, but the president might just have easily written up these numbers: $1,730,000,000,000 (federal spending in 1999), $5,500,000,000,000 (the projected federal debt in 2003). You'll note that the federal debt -- as opposed to the deficit -- continues to rise, even under Clinton's scenario of continued modest economic growth. Annual interest payments alone on that debt now run near $244 billion. Those "zeroes" really add up. -- Washington Update.

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St. Louis Blues: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is in dire need of an editorial cartoonist, or so the editors claim in an employment ad in Editor & Publisher. But at a time when moderates and conservatives are taking over the political scene, the flagship of the once-important Pulitzer media chain has announced that only liberals may apply.

"We are a liberal, progressive newspaper in search of a brilliant artist to contribute trenchant, witty and superbly drawn daily cartoons on a wide range of local, national and international subjects," said the ad from the paper famous for its front-page "Weatherbird" cartoon and past editorial cartoonists such as Bill Mauldin.

"We believe that a cartoonist's charge is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted while moving readers to laughter, tears, deep thought, fury and occasional Cheerio-spitting at the breakfast table," added the ad.

But if liberal subjects are off limits -- and presumably this would have to include President Clinton and his exploits -- what's left to make fun of? -- Washington Times.

~Gary Rust is president of Rust Communications, which owns the Southeast Missourian and other newspapers.