Experts See Soviet Forces as Fractured and Demoralized : Military: American analysts expect no attacks abroad and feel that the generals have not regained influence in Moscow.

Two U.S. experts portrayed the Soviet military Wednesday as so fractured and demoralized that the Red Army might not attack abroad if ordered and might not defend Soviet territory if invaded.

John Hines of the RAND Corp. and Stephen Meyer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also disagreed with recent speculation that the Soviet military is regaining influence in Moscow, as reflected in the Kremlin’s harder lines on arms control and the Lithuanian crisis.

Both specialists, who testified before the House Armed Services Committee, said the Soviet Union’s more conservative positions in the strategic nuclear arms negotiations and in its dealings with the independence-minded Lithuanians do not necessarily signal a more powerful military institution.

“It’s in Gorbachev’s interest to take this line now,” Meyer said, referring to Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. “It is most likely a natural confluence of interests with the military,” he said, rather than a response to military demands.

If called on to attack foreign forces outside Soviet borders or defend the Soviet Union from external aggression, the Soviet military’s performance would depend greatly on the specific conditions of the conflict, the two experts said.

In response to questions from committee Chairman Les Aspin (D-Wis.), Hines said the Red Army would require at least two months of preparations before undertaking an offensive operation across its borders with conventional forces.

The deteriorating quality of the Soviet army suggests that “a senior Soviet commander would not want to take (those units) into battle,” Hines said.

Also, he said, it would be “fallacious to believe that the Soviet Union would unite if attacked,” particularly in light of growing resentment and ethnic dissention within a number of the Soviet Union’s non-Russian republics.

During World War II, the Ukraine welcomed Hitler, and if the Nazi leader had used the Ukrainians as allies, the war might have turned out differently, Hines asserted.

“In the Baltic states now,” he noted, “what would be seen from Moscow as an invasion would look from Lithuania as a rescue.”

The two specialists predicted that the situation faced by the Soviet military would “get worse before it got better,” and any improvement would not come for at least five to seven years and probably not before the turn of the century.

Meyer told the committee that the Soviet military is “fracturing under the strains of Gorbachev’s programs,” as well as pressure from social and political forces in the country. “The crisis for the Soviet military is unprecedented in the post-war period,” he said.

The splits, he said, are occurring along four major lines: rifts between civilians and military personnel, interservice rivalries, disputes between senior and junior officers and divisions between officers and their troops as well as within enlisted ranks, largely as a result of mounting ethnic and nationality issues.