Television Reviews : David Hartman Finds His Heroes in ‘Early Warning’

David Hartman’s news report on the state oS. military capability, “Early Warning,” care of Fox Broadcasting (tonight at 9 on Channels 11 and 6), will be of most pleasure to those who view today’s war-fighting arsenal in the nostalgic glow of World War II triumphs.

Hartman himself seems to have ambitions as an ‘80s Ernie Pyle, the American war correspondent who reported from the foot soldier’s vantage point. Hartman trudges with sailors across the deck of a Trident submarine. He communes with Army border guards at the snowbound Iron Curtain. He hunkers down with Capt. Dane White in the cockpit of an F-16 (White: “She flies like a dream, David.” Hartman: “Boy, that’s incredible.”) David Hartman, Hellcat of the Fox network.

The crux of “Early Warning” is that the people in the armed forces aren’t to blame for all of the Pentagon’s current problems of botched operations, procurement scandals or unclear global strategy. The blame, rather, is with “Washington.” The last folks who want war, we’re told ad nauseum , are military people. If only “Washington” would let our troops do their job, everything would be fine.

Like any good TV show, Hartman’s needs a hero: the soldier as working stiff. “For most,” says Hartman, “it’s more than a living. They believe what they do helps protect our freedom, our safety, our choices in life.”

In Hartman’s military romance, there is little room for such nasty business as the Marine guards at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow bedding with Soviet spies, or journalist Seymour Hersch’s blistering revelations of the inept, near-disastrous Grenada invasion.

Images throughout “Early Warning” raise deeper, unexplored issues. The men who operate the USS New Jersey’s gigantic 16-inch guns talk excitedly of their assignment, and camera angles of the firing guns try to seduce us to share the sailors’ feelings. Nothing, however, is made of the fact that these were the same guns that futilely shelled Beirut in 1983-84. The point isn’t the guns; the point is what the guns are used for.

In a parade of sound bites with dozens of officials (most of whom, ironically, are from “Washington,” and all of whom are hawkish), lip service is given to congressional pork barrels, inter-service rivalries and the Pentagon’s taste for spending too much instead of “spending smart.” But the fundamental matter of judging the effectiveness and wisdom of the Reagan-era military build-up is beyond Hartman’s grasp. Riding around on tanks in the German countryside (“Here, they can tear the place up without worrying about somebody’s garden”) is more his metier . This is Rambo reporting.