Going From Cold War Firepower to Rough and Ready : Defense: The Gorbachev revolution has given America a golden and historic moment in which to rethink the nature of our forces and military institutions.

The positive evolution of a new relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union is occurring with the speed of light. The Cold War has entered its final phase. Now is the time for this nation to undertake an objective never achieved by any modern nation absent a military defeat--that is, the reform of its military force.

Military reform means simply this: Weapons don’t win wars, people do. The best people can succeed in battle only if they pursue proper strategies, tactics and doctrines. The best people pursuing the proper strategies, tactics and doctrines will determine the kinds and numbers of weapons needed.

In our mad preoccupation with ever-larger, more sophisticated, more expensive weapons, we’ve forgotten the most important thing to our nation’s defense--our soldiers, sailors and Marines. Our personnel policies are skewed and often destructive to true security. Instead of rewarding officers for bureaucratic and management skills, we should promote officers who demonstrate battlefield command and leadership. These are often quirky, iconoclastic individualists (like George Patton) but, unlike the play-it-safe, “ticket-punching” careerists and courtiers, they usually win battles, and wars.

Likewise, our enlisted personnel fight best when they know their buddies. This is called unit cohesion. The U.S. military system routinely destroys unit cohesion with one of the highest rotation rates of any modern military power in the world. Instead of shifting our soldiers and sailors from place to place several times a year, we should adopt some form of the British regimental system that would bond our military personnel to a cohesive unit throughout their military careers.

Properly led by real combat commanders, welded into strong units and given proper compensation--including housing, health care and training--American soldiers are the best on Earth.

But military goals and the means to attain them must be clear. Even the best fighters will lose if they use the wrong military doctrines to pursue the wrong strategies.

Since World War I, we’ve pursued a doctrine of firepower and attrition. We have traded bodies and equipment with our enemies, and won. For almost 50 years we’ve been prepared to fight this same style of warfare with a vastly superior potential foe, the Soviet Union. If we had come to blows, God forbid, we would have lost. That’s why we had nuclear weapons in Europe.

Happily, our NATO commander, Gen. John Galvin, has been recently quoted as saying that budget cuts will now force us to adopt a lighter, more mobile, maneuver theory of combat. We should have done it years ago even without the budget cuts. That’s the way the Israelis fight--quick, bold, mobile and outnumbered--and they usually win.

Besides, the Gorbachev revolution should have taught us by now that our most real and present danger in the 1990s and beyond will not be the Soviets, but rather terrorists, insurgencies and regional conflicts. This reality represents an even stronger argument for more flexible, counterinsurgency, counterterrorist special forces. Again the Israelis offer a model.

Finally, if we reform our personal policies and our strategies and doctrines, let’s also rethink the kinds of weapons we buy. Conventional weapons must be inexpensive enough to afford in numbers and simple enough to work in the mud and dust of combat. This is not an argument against technology. In fact, we should use our superior technology to produce these kinds of practical weapons. A $3.5-billion, 95,000-ton Nimitz class aircraft carrier has a service life of 40 years. Will we need that kind of ship--in very small numbers--in the year 2030? A $250-million B-1 bomber has now been made obsolete by Soviet radar. And a $500-million Stealth bomber has been made obsolete by new political realities.

America will make a big mistake if it permits the defense debate to become simply a quarrel over the size of budget cuts. That is only a collateral issue. We have a golden and historic moment in which to rethink fundamentally the nature of our defense forces and our military institutions.

The Gorbachev-led revolution is the most exciting and important movement in a half-century. It has changed, and will continue to change, our lives in countless ways. Not the least of these is that close to 100 million people are free today who were not six months ago. And we and our children are measurably safer and more secure than we were two years ago.

But it presents us, and our political leaders, with a huge challenge. Now we can seriously undertake an American perestroika .

We can restructure and rebuild the foundations of our own economy. In the 1990s, we must fundamentally shift our economy (and our morality) from consumption to production, we must bring new thinking and ideas to our foreign policy. We must create, with our allies, a Marshall Plan for Eastern Europe and harness the technology of the Northern Hemisphere for the needs of the Southern Hemisphere.

We can begin these reforms in the structures that have carried the Cold War burdens--our military institutions. But let’s also direct excess weapons-production capacity to meeting our country’s serious transportation, infrastructure, environment, housing and health needs.

This is the promise of this new age.