Rein In Navy or Risk Even More Dangerous Scenario

Already the Reagan Administration is saying that there are no parallels between the shooting down of the Iranian airplane in the Persian Gulf and the downing of the KAL 007 airplane by the Soviet Union in 1983. Unfortunately, there actually are a number of parallels, and there should be one more: corrective action against the service that is responsible.

The first similarity between the two incidents is that the airplanes involved were both behaving recklessly. The Korean plane not only was over Soviet territory but also apparently refused warnings to land. Whatever happened over the gulf, the Iranians at a minimum surely should have been taking greater care in a war zone.

The second similarity is that the Soviet and American military each had a previous incident that produced a dangerous set of instructions and mind-set. The Soviet air defense had let a civilian airliner stray deep into Soviet territory undetected in 1978, and the Air Defense Command had been severely punished. In 1983 the command was not about to make that mistake a second time. Similarly, the Iraqi attack on a U.S. ship, the Stark, put the Americans on hair-trigger alert.

The third similarity is that the Soviet Union and the United States, despite all their military surveillance equipment, were not taking sufficient care with civilian air traffic known to be regularly in the area. The American mistake, however, is more inexcusable because it should have learned from the foreign-policy disaster that the Soviet Union suffered from the KAL incident, because it had more sophisticated equipment and because it knew that an Iranian civilian airline was located next to a military one in one of the most dangerous places in the war zone. Iran may be morally culpable in this case, but it was American national interests that suffered the most.

Finally, the Soviet Union and the United States reacted foolishly to the disasters. The Americans did acknowledge the incident more quickly, but it was inexcusable for Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to completely exonerate the commander of the Vincennes at a time when he cannot have been certain about the facts.

The real question is what to do now. The Soviet Union under Yuri Andropov did not relieve the top command in the KAL incident but did punish lower officials. But when the Air Defense Forces let a small plane land in Red Square, Mikhail S. Gorbachev dismissed both the defense minister and the head of air defenses. A line army officer was put in charge of the air defense troops.

It would be utopian to hope that an army general will be appointed chief of staff of the Navy in the United States, but something nearly as dramatic needs to be done. For too long we have refused to court-martial officers responsible for major disasters, let alone to fire their civilian superiors. We need to learn from Gorbachev.

It is not clear what exactly is wrong with the Navy, but something fundamental is, even if we forget the current procurement scandal. The Navy has been spending huge sums of money on unnecessary construction of aircraft carriers and on unnecessary recommissioning of battleships. And yet we didn’t have mine sweepers when we went into escort service in the gulf, we went into Grenada with little planning beforehand, we couldn’t knock out Moammar Kadafi’s camp in Libya with two aircraft carriers offshore and the Stark was hit without even trying to defend itself. And now we didn’t take the simple steps to prevent a major foreign-policy disaster while fighting in the gulf.

The most worrisome thing is the plans that the Navy has for future war. Thanks to John Lehman, we have a suicidal war plan for fighting the Soviet Union in the North Atlantic. We are pushing a naval cruise-missile program when we are the country with the long, unprotected shoreline and should be advocating the abolition of this class of missiles. And rumors persist that the controls over nuclear weapons on submarines and other ships are perilously weak.

One of the causes of the problem is that the long American naval tradition has left the Navy insulated from effective political criticism. Even the arms-control community has focused attention on the Strategic Defense Initiative and on the big land-based missiles rather thanon the more expensive and dangerous situation at sea.

If the disaster in the downing of the Iranian airliner leads this country to move away from its obsession with symbolic nuclear-arms control and to concentrate on the problems of war-fighting, command-and-control of the military and limitations on conventional weapons (certainly including the fleet), then 290 people will not have died in vain. But if we simply pretend that everything was justified, this incident may look trivial in comparison with what eventually may happen.