Air Force Seeking New Worldwide Role : Military: Shifting from emphasis on nuclear missions and Europe, the strategy will focus on possible 3rd World targets.

The Air Force, facing deep budget reductions and challenges to its mission, plans today to unveil a report that touts its ability to strike quickly at distant Third World targets, seen as a strong defense priority of the future.

The statement to be released by Air Force Secretary Donald B. Rice marks a decided shift from the Air Force’s longstanding emphasis on long-range nuclear missions and conventional warfare in Europe. The new tack stresses rapid operations that would “reach out and touch someone” anywhere at a moment’s notice, in the words of the service’s senior officer, Gen. Larry D. Welch.

The report, which promotes the service’s “unique characteristics” for futuristic warfare, offers a glimpse of the behind-the scenes competition between the Air Force and the Navy for a pre-eminent military role as the end of the Cold War sharply threatens defense budgets and the need for many traditional operations.

It offers a sweeping view of how the Air Force intends to redefine itself in the face of a scaling back that likely will trim its current force of 541,000 to as few as 460,000 by 1995. The service’s new emphasis on potential threats outside Europe attempts to counter a secretary of defense and Congress increasingly skeptical of the service’s costly programs, such as the B-2 bomber.

Among some outside critics, there have even been suggestions that the Air Force, the youngest of the four military services, could be abolished, with the Navy and the Army taking up the air-power slack.

The Navy, which has long promoted itself as the caretaker of the nation’s most effective arsenal for a Third World strike, has aggressively positioned itself as the premier service to handle brush-fire wars of the future. With at least two of its 14 carriers threatened by budget cuts, the Navy has cited its ability to strike distant targets quickly without access to foreign bases.

In its new report, the Air Force makes a bid for a full share of that mission. It also advertises some old missions, such as surveillance by satellite and aircraft, as prime ones for watching developing nations where threats could develop quickly.

Further, it notes that it can help the United States make new global friends and influence allies by transferring aircraft that are being retired because of budget reductions. The Air Force said that the recent shipment of older Air Force jets to Colombia, where they will be used in that country’s drug interdiction efforts, is an example of how the service can help Washington “influence events and protect national interests in areas where more visible means of intervention are not viable.”

Nowhere is the recasting more evident than in the evolving rationale for the $62-billion B-2 Stealth bomber. The B-2 was designed as an intercontinental bomber that would penetrate Soviet airspace. But the new Air Force report points out that in instances such as the 1986 raid on Libya, six B-2 bombers could do the work of the 119 aircraft and 20 ships that took part in that operation--and probably do it more cheaply.

Many lawmakers have jeered at the suggestion that the United States would use an $825 million-per-copy plane for such missions.

“There are obviously differences of opinion about the political salability of the conventional mission for the B-2,” Rice conceded in an interview Thursday with The Times.

“Would we have bought the B-2 just for that? Probably not,” Rice added. “But the plane will probably be more valuable in the future than it would have in the past. We’ll find as time unfolds many uses” for the aircraft.