Military Cutbacks Likely to Hit Blacks the Hardest : Armed forces: Tens of thousands may lose their jobs. Yet minority lawmakers are leading the push for reductions.

Even relatively moderate cutbacks in the defense budget are likely to cost tens of thousands of black members of the armed forces their jobs at a time when their prospects for comparable civilian employment are bleak.

Yet the Congressional Black Caucus is among those leading the charge for such cutbacks.

The seeming paradox reflects the fact that, while national black leaders traditionally have sought to cut the Pentagon’s budget and divert finds to social welfare programs, the military has become a valued career opportunity for millions of blacks.

Since the mid-1970s, young black men and women have joined the armed forces in such numbers that they now make up 20% of those in uniform.

Now, by some estimates, more than 60,000 blacks in the military could find themselves out of work as a result of the relatively modest cutbacks already planned by the services. And the Congressional Black Caucus has proposed much bigger cuts, including a 10% reduction in U.S. forces in 1991 alone.

The Black Caucus proposes to transfer the resulting $7.8-billion savings to a variety of domestic programs, but the Bush Administration and many in Congress argue that any such “peace dividend” must be used to reduce the federal deficit, not increase spending.

“Black political leaders should be cautious about supporting precipitous personnel reductions,” warned Edwin Dorn, deputy director for research at the Washington-based Center for Joint Political and Economic Studies.

“There’s always been this dichotomy” between black Americans’ enthusiasm for military service and their opposition to increased defense spending, Dorn added. “There is a question as to whether we want to have it both ways or have faced that apparent contradiction.”

Even Gen. Colin L. Powell, the first black ever to chair the Joint Chiefs of Staff, fretted in a recent television interview that the military reductions will close off a promising route to upward mobility for many young blacks.

Blacks are most concentrated in the Army, which faces the deepest cuts of the three services. They also are concentrated in the military’s enlisted ranks and junior officer corps, which offer substantially less job security than the ranks of senior officers.

According to Dorn, black soldiers, sailors and airmen also are clustered in military fields that would be most expendable: support, supply and administration jobs. Not only can the military services plug cheaper, less well-trained personnel into those slots, but they also have little incentive to compete with the civilian market to keep such personnel.

“In the Black Caucus, there’s a lack of appreciation of the risk of the impact upon black Americans in the service,” said one congressional manpower specialist. “They’ve overlooked the risk factor.”

But to Rep. William H. Gray III (D-Pa.), House majority whip and a leading member of the House Black Caucus, the suggestion that military spending should be kept high so that blacks can keep good jobs has an anachronistic ring to it. He said that it sounds much like the suggestion that women should not be offered broader opportunities because fewer of them may get into secretarial pools.

“I don’t want black kids to go into the military because it’s the only place they can get good opportunities,” Gray said in a recent interview.

In addition, Gray said that the Black Caucus and House Democratic leaders have proposed to shift the savings from military manpower cuts to domestic programs such as highway repair and job retraining, which would create many new opportunities for blacks.

But Dorn and others warn that there are so many claims upon the “peace dividend” that it might not be shifted to domestic programs at all. Even if the savings go toward creating new job opportunities in the civilian sector, Dorn said, the funds probably would not get there quickly enough to help blacks hurt by military cutbacks.

That could be especially bad news for the legions of blacks who entered the military in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when civilian job opportunities for disadvantaged blacks were particularly scarce. After finding opportunities and establishing themselves in the military services’ enlisted ranks, those blacks now could be shown the door in large numbers.