Need for ‘Lighter and More Lethal’ Forces Pointed Out by Deployment : Military: Forces geared to thwart a Soviet invasion of Europe may be too cumbersome for a Mideast flare-up.

The U.S. troop deployment to Saudi Arabia has been a massive undertaking by any measure. Over the last five weeks, steady streams of cargo ships have unloaded hundreds of tanks and other equipment to bolster U.S. ground forces there.

But the sea lift has become so large that Navy transportation strategists have found they need more fast roll-on, roll-off cargo vessels to keep up the pace--and they are thinking seriously about chartering a large Soviet version of the ship, now docked in Cuba.

The incident may seem ironic--another example of the Cold War thaw--but it serves to illustrate a point:

Although the United States spent billions during the early 1980s bolstering its armed forces, the buildup was shaped primarily to deal with a Soviet nuclear attack or an invasion of Western Europe--not a flare-up in the Middle East.

While officials insist that American troops and equipment are generally well-suited for possible engagement with Iraqi forces, they concede that the United States is finding it still has some important needs--such as more sea- and airlift capacity, lighter tanks, more offense-oriented aircraft carriers and better protective gear against chemical weapons.

“We have designed a military force to fight in Europe,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) said shortly after returning from a tour of U.S. forces on the Arabian peninsula. “That force was a heavy force, heavy tanks, M-1 tanks.”

But as Nunn conceded ruefully, the effective but ponderous M-1s don’t lend themselves to the kind of rapid deployment that the United States needs in the Persian Gulf and are too big to be flown in swiftly.

“The first M-1 tanks were just arriving the day I was there,” he said--three weeks after the deployment began. “We have a lot of rethinking to do about our military strategy.”

The Persian Gulf crisis erupted right in the middle of a fledgling debate over what kind of troops and equipment the United States should have in the aftermath of the Cold War.

The Senate last month passed a military spending bill designed to begin the job of reshaping U.S. forces for new contingencies. And the House is expected to begin debate on its version as early as next week.

But while Congress probably will not make any major changes until fiscal 1992, when strategists know more about Soviet intentions and the emerging challenges in the Middle East, some programs seem likely to win a significant boost as a result of the gulf experience.

The House Armed Services Committee has launched a detailed study of the military’s post-Cold War needs, but Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), the panel’s chairman, and Nunn both have some ideas.

Among them are:

More rapid sea-lift cargo ships to make the deployment of equipment easier. The United States now has eight such vessels. “If we have twice as many fast roll-on, roll-off ships, we can move twice as many divisions in the same amount of time,” Aspin said.

Creation of a new tank-like vehicle that can be moved more easily than the M-1s that are now stationed in Europe. “What we’re looking at is some vehicle that can be moved a lot easier than what we’ve had in Europe. We can only put one M-1 in the C-5” cargo plane, Aspin said. “We’re moving against the tide of having to build another main battle tank.”

A new boost for the C-17, a giant cargo plane being built by McDonnell Douglas Corp. in Long Beach as a successor to the aging C-141--and designed to fly faster and land in much tighter spots with bigger payloads. President Bush requested procurement of six C-17s at a cost of $1.7 billion in fiscal 1991, which begins Oct. 1. Both the Senate-passed defense authorization bill and the House Armed Services Committee version defers procurement because of the plane’s development and testing delays.

A shift to “lighter, more lethal” U.S. forces to replace existing ground units, which are either too heavy and too slow to deploy or else lack sufficient firepower, endurance and ground mobility. “The Army and the Marine Corps need to go on a diet,” Nunn said in a recent floor speech. “We have the technological potential to permit the Army and the Marine Corps to get the weight of their combat forces back to 1980 levels by the year 2000, and with improved firepower and survivability.”

Revamping U.S. strategy for aircraft carriers to make them more offensive, rather than defensive. Nunn wants to add more fighter-bombers and reduce the number of planes assigned to defend them and surrounding ships from assault. “We ought to be considering taking some of our carriers and making them much more Third World-oriented,” he said.

Improved gear for use against chemical weapons, particularly in the face of the threat posed by Iraqi troops, who have used such weapons before. “We have had a better design of gear available for several years,” said Michael Brower, an analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The gear we have now has several layers of material that does not breathe outside air. It is a terrible burden for troops.”

Retired Navy Capt. James Bush, associate director of the liberal Center for Defense Information, asserts that “the military plans we have today are inadequate for the post-Cold War area.”

He called for scrapping provisions of the 1947 National Security Act, which he said have tied U.S. forces so rigidly to areas such as Europe, South Korea and Japan that U.S. commanders have been unable to shift troops from other regions, forcing the White House to call up the reserves instead.

“Why fall back on the guard and reserve forces when you have 2 million men and women in uniform?” Capt. Bush asked. “The reason is because of the rigidity of these plans.”

Joshua Epstein, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, said that “we have a lot of the right stuff” for deployments like the current one, but “we just have a lot of extra stuff.”

He contended that the United States “could have invested much more heavily in close air support, in sea lift and the sort of mundane necessities of conventional conflict rather than the very big, very high-technology-ticket items such as nuclear-powered aircraft carrier battle groups and follow-on attack forces. And of course in the strategic field we have five or six ways of penetrating Soviet airspace.”

The Persian Gulf crisis has highlighted other needs, said an aide to Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.), who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“We need research into preserving our electronic and tank weaponry from malfunctioning in the hot sun and blowing sand,” he said. “We need better air-cooling, better reinforcement of armor around wires in the air-defense system so that the sun doesn’t melt them.”

Considering that former President Jimmy Carter instituted a rapid deployment force to protect oil supplies from the Middle East in the aftermath of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, Pentagon and congressional planners have had several years to prepare for the kind of crisis with which they are now confronted. Could more have been done?

Aspin defends the thrust of defense budgets of the last decade.

“The point is the major threat has been the Soviet Union,” he said. “If you wanted to do something against Panama or Grenada or Iraq, you used what you’ve got. It’s not ideal, but it’s pretty adequate.”

Aspin said that, up to now, “our equipment was designed and structured to fight the Soviet Union. We design American tanks with Soviet tanks in mind, American planes with Soviet planes in mind, and tactics with the Soviets in mind.

“If we had known five years ago that the Soviet threat was going to recede, and in 1990 that we would be facing Iraq or Panama, we could have designed forces differently and they would be better,” he said. “But it would have taken an enormous amount of foresight.”

Meanwhile, advocates of new weapons programs that face immediate cuts or cancellation because of the fading Soviet threat are scurrying to propound new rationales tailored to meet the kind of “Third World threat” represented by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

Thus, the B-2 Stealth bomber, originally intended for deep penetration of Soviet airspace in a nuclear war, now is being touted for potential surprise attacks against the mass-destruction weapons plants and personal quarters of such dictators as Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi.

Similarly, the Strategic Defense Initiative, the space-based “Star Wars” program to intercept long-range Soviet missiles, is being promoted in ground-based form as a way to kill the missiles of Third World dictators and terrorists.

Whether these and other weapons can be rescued from the budget knife remains to be seen. But Aspin--and others on Capitol Hill--are convinced that the military needs to learn from its experience in the Persian Gulf this year.

“What we’ve got now is a kind of transition budget, keeping at least one eye on the Soviet Union but speculating about what we may be looking at in the future,” he said.

Times staff writer Sara Fritz contributed to this article.