VIEWPOINTS : Shootout at the HDTV Corral : As U.S. industry runs out of ammo in the global battle over television technology, the Pentagon is stepping in to try to beat back foreign competitors before it’s too late.

Charge! The cavalry rides again. And right in the nick of time. Just like on the old TV westerns, the U.S military is riding hard to stave off the bad guys. But with a new twist this time: Instead of Indians, the bad guys are the Japanese.

The Japanese, along with the South Koreans and the Taiwanese, already produce just about every TV product this side of the Hawaiian Islands. From the TV’s computer chips, to the picture tubes, to the VCRs. So, on the current TV battlefield, America already has lost. The only American company still left making TV sets is Zenith, and it controls but a fraction of the market.

And now the Japanese are taking aim at another target: the TV you’ll be buying tomorrow. Our Asian competitors are in a good position to control the blossoming market of a whole new generation of TV sets called high definition television. HDTV is the wave of the future, a system by which larger, clearer, more beautiful TV pictures can be made.

Go right up to your TV picture tube and take a look. Notice those little lines that run horizontally across the screen? On a small set, say under 21 inches, you might not notice the lines. But as with this year’s autos, the newer TV picture tubes are growing bigger. And flatter. Researchers are now able to make the tubes as big as your living room wall and hang them as flat as a painting.

When the picture tubes get really big, those lines on the screen stand out like a newly plowed field. Simply stated, HDTV fills in the spaces between the lines with more lines so you can hardly tell they’re even there. The picture looks smoother, more like a photograph. And images can be made wall-sized without sacrificing quality.

The only thing growing faster than the tube size are our competitors’ (including the Europeans’) research and development budgets, which aim to corner the market in HDTV technology needed to make the images. And if the winds of war don’t change, all the American companies really can do is watch and wait for a generation of new technology to pass them by. The HDTV market will be gobbled up by foreigners hook, line and transistor.

The situation is so bleak that last week, a group of America’s largest technology companies announced that they are looking into pooling their resources to develop HDTV. Considering the fiercely competitive nature of the TV business, this unprecedented move is mighty neighborly of them. It’s like San Francisco asking Los Angeles for help. But just how much information this consortium will share and how long it will take for an array of highly independent companies to unite their mental and monetary might remains to be seen.

That’s where the cavalry comes in. Because now the Department of Defense realizes that to be all that it can be, it will need to make use of HDTV technology. With theater-size images, a field commander can stand in a room miles from the front and direct the battle in living color without getting his feet wet. Or a pilot seated in a flight trainer can view a breathtaking image of the real estate he will attack and know in precise detail the color, shape and size of the terrain and target thousands of miles away.

With television’s potential to revolutionize warfare, the Pentagon can’t sit back and wait for a defunct American TV industry to develop the breakthroughs in TV technology to make this dream come true. The Japanese are years ahead of American HDTV. So the Defense Department has decided to invest in developing the technology itself. And the hope is that it will drag American industry along with it. The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is asking for proposals from manufacturers and research labs for the production of low-cost, high-resolution video displays.

One company DARPA is looking at is Zenith. Already a supplier of computers to the Defense Department, Zenith makes a magnificent flat screen color picture tube for its 14-inch computer monitors. With DARPA’s help, Zenith would like to scale up the picture tube with high resolution suitable for HDTV and military use.

There is more at stake than just fancy TV pictures. Practical, high-resolution screens mean breakthroughs in the development of computer chips to run them. By developing the kinds of chips that would find use both in military and commercial HDTVs, DARPA also hopes to bolster the nation’s computer chip industry. In essence, the military will be riding to rescue the American consumer electronics industry. As quoted in Broadcasting magazine, DARPA spokeswoman Jan Bodanyi said: “We are very interested in making sure that the domestic semiconductor industry is robust.”

So far, published reports put the Pentagon’s budget for HDTV research at about $30 million. Critics argue that that is hardly enough to overcome the multi-year lead the Japanese have. Add a zero or two to that figure, and we’re talking real commitment, they say.

This won’t be the first time that television gets a boost from the military. You can trace the roots of TV way back to the 1920s. But it wasn’t a pretty picture. It took the mother of invention, World War II, to speed the development of radar. And as any aging TV repairman will tell you, television is radar’s kissin’ cousin. (He ought to know. What do you think those radar technicians did after the war?)

This is a crucial time in the future of American television. Reopening an abandoned market is risky. No crystal ball, not even a high definition one, can forecast whether the cavalry will arrive with enough monetary might to save the day. As shooting wars wane, the battleground has become high technology.