U.S. Shifting Its Military Focus in Persian Gulf

U.S. military planners have been told to create a new policy for the Persian Gulf emphasizing defense of friendly Arab states instead of Iran’s vulnerability to a Soviet attack.

The threat of a Soviet thrust into Iran to seize oil fields and gulf ports long has dictated U.S. strategy and troop deployments in the region, but the Soviet Union’s preoccupation with internal economic problems and regional ethnic disputes has made a potential Iranian offensive far less likely, defense officials said Tuesday.

The policy shift is contained in the latest Defense Planning Guidance, a biennial classified policy document issued by the secretary of defense to help the military services as they draw up their budgets for the coming five years.

But aside from a significantly relaxed assessment of the Soviet and Warsaw Pact threat to Western Europe, the document offers few surprises and little specific guidance to help military officers carry out their long-range planning.

A senior Pentagon official involved in preparing the recently completed report says its guidance is likely to be rendered obsolete within months by international events and other studies now under way at the Pentagon. The official briefed a small group of reporters on the condition that he not be identified.

The document reflects the difficulty of strategic planning in an era of dizzying change. In years past, the report has been much longer than this year’s 28-page version and has offered highly specific advice to the services.

“A document that’s five or six minutes old is out of date these days,” a military officer familiar with the latest guidance said.

Senior defense officials are conducting extensive studies to determine appropriate U.S. military policy in the Far East, the Persian Gulf and Europe after an anticipated conventional force reduction agreement is completed.

Additional reviews are under way of technology and its effect on national security policy, on the “Star Wars” space defense system and on four costly aircraft development programs.

The results of those studies, due in the next few months, are likely to cause “major revisions” to the just-issued guidance, the official said.

For example, a senior Pentagon policy-maker said “Star Wars” is being fundamentally reassessed and “might be restructured” as a result of the current review.

The guidance notes that the United States is likely to lose some or all of its bases in the Philippines in coming years and orders the services to plan other ways to defend U.S. interests in the Pacific. It also says that Japan and Korea, although important U.S. allies, must bear a higher share of the cost of their defense.