INSIDE TALK / THE PENTAGON : As Tensions Ease, Analysts Ask: ‘What Do We Do Now?’

When Lutz Unterseher, a West German military analyst, visited Washington recently, one of his first and most insistent questions was whether any U.S. defense planners had committed suicide yet.

The answer, so far, appears to be no. But for analysts of military affairs inside and outside the Pentagon, the virtual dissolution of the “big war” scenario in Central Europe has caused personal and professional uncertainty and more than a little depression.

For the U.S. and European military establishments, the East-West military face-off has been the central fixture of all military analysis since the onset of the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact’s designs upon Western Europe, it seemed, would endure forever.

All that changed after democratic revolutions swept through Eastern Europe late in 1989. Even so great a skeptic as Defense Secretary Dick Cheney concluded recently that the prospect is “extremely remote” that the Soviets and their allies would join forces to attack Western Europe.

Since then, the scholars and service personnel who have spent their careers analyzing history’s most dangerous potential armed confrontation have seen their work in ruins, their scholarly tomes overtaken by world events and their professional futures in doubt.

“It’s like graduation,” said one Army analyst, evoking the bittersweet tones of a high school valedictory address. “We’re asking ourselves, ‘What do we do now?’ ”

“It’s going to be very difficult for this building to make the transition,” one Pentagon official said recently. “If you give up the Soviet threat, you’re looking into an abyss.”

In the military services, where legions of officers spent their days analyzing the European balance of forces, prospects for promotions and post-retirement jobs suddenly look clouded. At research firms that have grown rich analyzing the face-off between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, future Pentagon contracts are expected to dwindle.

And in universities and independent research institutions across the country, student interest and foundation support for research appear to be drying up or shifting to other fields.

The situation is especially ironic for those outside analysts who have argued for years that the Pentagon has been inflating the military threat to Western Europe to boost U.S. defense budgets. The virtual dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviets’ admission that their military needs a major overhaul appear to have vindicated these analysts’ longstanding claims that the Soviets had neither the reliable allies nor the quality weapons and organization to win a war in Europe.

“Just when a new breed of independent analysts had become really sophisticated in the way we approach national security problems and dissect military requirements, the canonical problem has gone away,” lamented Paul Stares, a military analyst at the Washington-based Brookings Institution who is writing a book on NATO’s military and political command structure. “There’s a sense of wondering how much of what you’ve done is still relevant. . . . “

At the Pentagon, the significance of the changes has been somewhat blunted by day-to-day events--at least temporarily.

“The changes are so mind-boggling and the Pentagon is so bureaucratized, analysts are kept from coming to grips with the changes by the press of day-to-day events,” said Ralph Hallenbeck, a recently retired Army colonel who has become a consultant at a Washington-based research firm.

Faced with the new uncertainty and with the prospects of shrinking military manpower rolls, many soldiers/military analysts are putting the brightest face they can on the situation.

“I’ve got years of my life invested in that border that just opened up,” one Army officer said. “But there’s no sense of loss; there’s a tremendous sense of accomplishment.

“In fact, I feel so good, I’m ready to go seek employment elsewhere.”