Priorities at Issue : Military as Drug Police: Double Duty

With the dexterity of a concert pianist and the intensity of a man with a mission, Petty Officer Paul Ramsey moved his fingers over the buttons on the radar console as the Navy P-3 Orion aircraft cruised slowly over the Caribbean Sea. His mission: searching the high seas for ships carrying illegal drugs.

It was a typical “Coast Guard Assist” mission--Navy jargon for a newly emphasized operation in which its sophisticated aircraft and vessels have been ordered to help the Coast Guard hunt for drug runners.

On this particular morning patrol over a key drug-trafficking choke point between Cuba and Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, a green dot--denoting an unidentified vessel--appeared on the plane’s radar screen. On closer examination, the Coast Guard found that the vessel was too high in the water to be carrying a load of marijuana and decided not to stop it.

Defense Risk Debated

Such military searches for drug boats among the tankers, freighters, fishing vessels and cruise ships that regularly ply the Caribbean bring into sharp focus a heated debate involving the Congress, the Reagan Administration and the Pentagon bureaucracy. The issue is the proper place of the nation’s 2.1 million soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in drug law enforcement.

In Congress, many maintain that only the Pentagon has the manpower and surveillance equipment, communications gear, ships and aircraft needed to halt the flow of drugs into the nation.

The Pentagon, however, has voiced two major concerns: First, it maintains, the time spent searching for drug runners in the skies and on the seas cannot be spent on the No. 1 defense priority: preparing for war.

Martial Rules Apply

Second, military personnel operate under “rules of engagement” that are far different from those of civilian law enforcement: They must presume guilt, not innocence. “We shoot people and take no prisoners,” one military officer said, drawing an exaggerated picture of the distinction.

Already, the Pentagon’s senior leadership has approved the search missions and supported the deployment of limited numbers of troops to Bolivia, to help that South American nation destroy cocaine-producing laboratories. And, at harvest time in the last few years, military ships and aircraft have been deployed across the Caribbean in efforts to keep drug shipments from reaching the United States.

Yet military leaders have roundly denounced a measure passed by the House that would vastly widen the use of the military in the Administration’s “war on drugs.” It directs the armed forces to block any unauthorized ships or aircraft from crossing the nation’s 16,935.8-mile border or entering any of its ports.

The proposal, sponsored by Rep. Duncan L. Hunter (R-Coronado), was approved in the House on a vote of 237 to 177. On Tuesday, the Senate passed a version of the legislation that does not call for such extensive use of the military. A House-Senate conference will resolve the differences, and Hunter’s staff is working on a compromise proposal.

The Senate’s drug bill, passed 97 to 2, leaves the use of military equipment and manpower to the discretion of Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger.

Hunter’s measure, if left intact, would order the President to deploy the armed services to such an extent that they would halt all narcotics traffic within 45 days, by using troops and equipment to locate, pursue and seize ships and aircraft--and to arrest their crews.

‘It’s Pretty Absurd’

“On the face of it, it’s pretty absurd, to be perfectly frank about it,” Weinberger said recently.

Hunter, whose district is heavily populated with active-duty and retired Navy personnel, is undeterred: “It’s the one thing that will stop the flow of narcotics into this country in the near term,” he said in an interview.

Pentagon officials and military officers, meanwhile, are torn over the extent to which they should take part in a campaign that has become a focus of attention in both the White House and Congress. They are asking themselves whether they can afford to appear reluctant to lend a hand, given the political ramifications.

“Hell, the President and First Lady are out there leading the charge. Of course you can’t,” said one senior Defense Department official who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.

Moreover, reluctance to take part in the drug law enforcement campaign could further damage already-waning support for the Reagan Administration’s military buildup.

Fighters Vs. Smugglers

The billions of dollars pumped into the Pentagon have purchased airplanes, ships, radar and communications systems that are designed for fighting the foreign enemies of tomorrow--but, in many instances, they could be used against the drug smugglers of today.

Defense officials say, however, that using the latest military equipment in the anti-drug effort would amount to a tremendous waste of its highly specialized capabilities.

“The military is trained and equipped . . . to intercept high-performance, sophisticated military aircraft. So, to use F-16 squadrons to intercept low-flying, slow, propeller-driven aircraft will be a difficult task, but we could do it. It just would be very inefficient,” said Chapman Cox, assistant secretary of defense for force management.

Indeed, in a variation of that scenario last week, the Navy, Coast Guard and others combined forces and apparently foiled one smuggling effort:

A helicopter from a guided-missile cruiser in the Gulf of Mexico spotted a single-engine plane 85 miles south of Mobile, Ala. Coast Guard ships, the U.S. Customs Service and the police in Biloxi, Miss.--where the plane appeared to be headed--were alerted, the Navy said.

Load of Pot Dropped

As the airplane reached land, however, the pilot dumped the load of marijuana and headed back out to sea. The Coast Guard eventually recovered 13 of the 50-pound bales of marijuana--but, despite the surveillance and evidence, no suspect could be found.

Such dramatic encounters are rare in the military involvement. Crew members of the $28.2-million P-3 Orion patrolling over the Caribbean, for example, estimate that no more than 10% of their time is spent on such missions.

Lt. Rich Heldreth said that a crew’s time in the air is carefully balanced between the anti-drug operations and searching for Soviet submarines--its primary military role. For every six to eight hours spent on a typical patrol for smugglers, an equal amount of time is subtracted from airborne training for the anti-sub operations.

“If they put a tremendous burden on us for Coast Guard-assist, unless they increase our flying time, it would funnel from our anti-submarine warfare allotment,” he said.

“The Navy is stretched pretty thin in a number of places. Everybody does want to help, but there’s a practical problem: constrained resources,” a senior Pentagon official said.

Military Concerns Cited

“With things happening in Central America, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and concern about the Pacific, there are strong demands on the resources.”

Rep. Hunter discounts the argument that increased military involvement would drain crucial combat resources. He says the Pentagon has overreacted to his proposal.

“The job will not require the huge deployment that some of the people who are dragging their feet have claimed,” he said. He added that, as a member of the House Armed Services Committee, he is “very concerned about readiness.”

To this, Weinberger answers: “You have to stop all aircraft and naval vessels. That is about 290,000 registered and 4,000 unregistered general aviation aircraft, plus a great many commercial aircraft.

“We would have to intercept anything that we didn’t have adequate intelligence on. We would have to have a continuous, 4,000-mile naval blockade of the coastline. We’d have to be able to intercept 160,000 documented, registered vessels . . . .”

Pentagon officials point out that the military’s contribution to the anti-smuggling effort already has been far from negligible and that, with or without the Hunter proposal, the military will have a still larger role.

Budget Plan Told

“We can provide equipment, and we can provide the intelligence. We can provide surveillance. We can provide communication networks,” Cox, the assistant defense secretary, told a recent news conference.

The monetary value of the Pentagon’s contribution has been increased, from about $5 million in 1982 to about $40 million in operational resources--not counting the value of equipment lent to other agencies. Cox said that for the fiscal year that begins today, the Administration wants to buy $250-million worth of equipment to be lent to other agencies for anti-drug operations.

These items would include five “aerostats,” radar units deployed in balloons at the ends of 12,000-foot tethers along the Southwest border; helicopters; C-130 transports that could be deployed on intelligence missions, and four E-2Cs for use along the Southern border.

“We will definitely continue to support law enforcement in this area,” Cox said. But, he added, such support will be increased “only to the extent that it does not impair our readiness to perform our primary mission, which is (to) defend the United States against foreign military force.”

As the issue is debated at the highest levels of government, those among the ranks recognize the difficulties and are sympathetic to those trying to reconcile the conflict.

“We’d prefer to do ASW (anti-submarine warfare),” said Lt. Cmdr. Jim Jackson, the mission commander and tactical coordinator aboard the P-3. “But, as a family man with two children--the drug situation in the schools scares me. If you look at it from that point of view,” he said, the drug patrol mission is “just as important.”