COLUMN ONE : Forces Face Unkindest Cuts of All : The military is riding high after its stunning victory in the Gulf. But now the Pentagon is heading into a round of serious budget trimming, and personnel levels will be reduced markedly.

U.S. military commanders won more than just the war with their stunning success in the Persian Gulf: They have fully regained the hearts and minds of many of their fellow Americans that they lost during the Vietnam War. The public now has more confidence in the armed forces than in any other any major institution in the country.

But even as the military savors its highest prestige since World War II, the triumphant U.S. armed forces are returning to face what may be one of their most trying periods at home since the dark days of the Vietnam War. The Pentagon is about to begin a round of serious budget cuts, personnel levels will be reduced visibly, and the services may find it more difficult than ever to recruit reserves.

“As you start to build down at this rate, you can’t do it nice and neatly,” says retired Gen. Edward C. Meyer, the Army chief of staff from 1979 to 1983. “You screw the troops, and you make dumb mistakes getting rid of the wrong people when you do that kind of heavy chopping. And you’re not treating people very well who have just marched off proudly in defense of the nation.”

The constraints are serious:

Despite the success of Operation Desert Storm, the Bush Administration and Congress appear intent on proceeding with earlier plans to cut military spending sharply. The Pentagon budget for fiscal 1992, which begins next Oct. 1, will drop to $278.3 billion, down 3.3% after inflation from the current $273 billion. Similar reductions are scheduled for the five following years. That means major cutbacks in everything from new weapons systems to military bases.

The proposed cuts in military personnel could hit first--and hit hardest. Congress this week gave the Pentagon relief from earlier orders to trim 100,000 active-duty servicemen and women by Sept. 30. But unless the Defense Department and lawmakers agree to revise the White House-congressional budget accord that was struck last year, the services will face a staggering 13% cut in their personnel rolls in the next fiscal year--including a reduction of 62,000 men and women in the Army alone. For many Gulf vets, that could mean pink slips--”involuntary separations,” in Pentagon argot--as early as 1992, just months after many get home, Pentagon officials say.

The call-up of so many reservists for the Persian Gulf deployment may hurt recruitment and retention of reserves--by making prospective weekend warriors more aware that joining can mean risking a sudden mobilization that can yank unit members from their homes and jobs and put them far away--and in danger--for months at a time. Already, the number of new reservists appears to be dropping.

The Gulf conflict has raised other thorny issues, as well. Single parents and families with both parents in the military have had to leave young children behind for months. Blacks--some of whom have been drawn to the military because it offers a solid career that is relatively free of discrimination--were on the front lines in numbers disproportionate to their ranks in the general populace.

Opponents of the war cite still-broader concerns: Some fear that the euphoria of a quick and low-casualty Gulf conflict--at least, for America and its allies--could usher in an era of jingoism and intolerance of dissent. Others contend that the national catharsis could encourage future military adventures that would distract the electorate from urgent domestic problems.

“This nation is going to see a new flag-waving,” predicts Jinsoo Kim, coordinator of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights’ movement support network, which keeps tabs on scores of reports of harassment of anti-war protesters. “That creates a mood for intolerance.”

And Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.) cautions that the victory should be kept in perspective. “There is such pride in the performance of the military that significant changes in attitude have taken place, but we are still a long way from swinging over to the kind of confidence we had in our ability to deal with anything that we had in the days before Vietnam,” said Gore, who supported the Gulf War. “We need to have an armed forces with adequate capacity, but be cautious as a nation about using military power.”

To be sure, for the moment, the military is riding high. A USA Today survey found that about 78% of the American public now has confidence in the military--compared to 68% reported in a similar Gallup poll in 1989 and only 50% in a Gallup survey in 1981. And a recent National Public Radio-Harris Poll found that the public admires the armed forces more than any other major institution in America.

Military leaders such as Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of U.S. forces in the Gulf, have become national heroes virtually overnight. Schwarzkopf is already being touted as a possible Republican candidate to run against U.S. Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), while Powell is mentioned as potentially the first black vice presidential nominee on a future GOP ticket.

The latest public opinion polls reflect that success. Asked whether they would like to see various military leaders run for President some day, 42% of the respondents to USA Today answered affirmatively for Powell, and 38% did so for Schwarzkopf. “Both are enormously engaging leaders,” the Senate’s Gore acknowledged diplomatically. “They would be formidable in anything they chose to attempt.”

“John Wayne is back in the saddle again and wears the white hat,” exulted Max Cleland, who served as head of the Veterans Administration during the Jimmy Carter Administration and is currently Georgia’s secretary of state. “It’s fashionable again to have served your country, to have been in the military and to be associated with the military. What an incredible reversal from 20 years ago. I never thought I’d live to see it.”

In the short run, at least, the military’s new high-flying image is expected to prove a boon. One source of the burgeoning pride was the best-trained forces the United States has ever fielded. Most are high school graduates. Scores on standardized tests are way up. It is these people, in turn, who made the weapons work and the staggering Gulf logistics effort possible.

The 42-day-long war in the Gulf has already accelerated this upgrading. Recruitment of active-duty personnel--inspired by daily television coverage of troop exploits--has risen since the start of the Gulf War, both in numbers and in the quality of enlistees. Among those who signed up in recent months was a 33-year-old Los Angeles lawyer who left his practice to join the Army. He has begun training in military intelligence.

The Army Recruiting Command exceeded its January goals for new recruits by 14%. Since October, a record-breaking 96% of the new soldiers have had high school diplomas, and 73% scored in the top categories in the armed forces qualification test. Those who do well on the entrance exam tend to be more successful in their training, have fewer discipline problems, perform better and are more likely to complete their enlistments.

In the medium-term, with the proposed cuts in military spending, gaining entry into the armed forces will only become more competitive.

Meanwhile, Congress, which often has been skeptical about financing high-tech weapons systems, could prove more amenable to buying a few more replacements for those armaments that performed well in the Gulf, such as the Apache helicopter, whose production previously had been slowed. (Production of the F-117A Stealth fighter, another winner in the Gulf, already has hit its limits, and the Air Force and Navy--each of which is developing a new version of the plane--aren’t likely to want to buy more.)

But the continuing tight budget picture threatens to limit any serious congressional largess. Between 1991 and 1994, the Bush Administration’s plan would force the Pentagon to slice $243 billion from the budget blueprint it had drawn up in 1989--part of a broader plan outlined last year by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney to reduce military spending by at least 12% and the armed forces by 25% by 1996.

This means that if Congress does channel more money into some new weapons systems, the five-year budget-deficit-reduction accord that Congress passed last autumn ensures that the lawmakers will have to slash spending on other programs to make up the difference.

What is more, even with some extra procurement funds, the high-tech wish list is likely to prove too costly to maintain.

Although there are plenty of sophisticated weapons on the drawing boards, analysts point out that many of them are unrealistically expensive to deploy. For example, although the Bush Administration has downsized the Strategic Defense Initiative, known popularly as “Star Wars,” the new scaled-back version is expected to cost an estimated $41 billion to put into effect. And the controversial B-2 Stealth bombers cost about $870 million apiece--enough to cause sticker-shock for many lawmakers. The Stealth bomber program remains in jeopardy.

Indeed, there already is outrage in Congress over last week’s news that the costly B-1 bomber is unusable and will require $1 billion worth of repairs to get back into shape. And the Administration itself already has shelved the A-12 fighter aircraft. Cheney said it simply was too expensive.

If the cutbacks continue as planned, there will be some sizable personnel cuts as well. The Army, which faces the deepest cuts of any service, says it may have to issue walking papers to thousands of enlisted men and women, including noncommissioned officers--among them, many who had signed up hoping to make the military a career.

“I don’t think that’s fair at all, and it may be a reason for us to evaluate the proposed cuts in light of these peoples’ experience and the nation’s needs,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee’s manpower subcommittee and a former Vietnam prisoner of war.

Former Army chief of staff Meyer agrees. He says the Bush Administration should put on hold the plans it unveiled--coincidentally, on Aug. 2, the day Iraq invaded Kuwait--to shrink military personnel and Pentagon spending over the next five years.

“There needs to be at least a year’s moratorium while we consider the full impact of what we have learned from the Persian Gulf,” Meyer contended. “They should wait a year and redesign the forces for the future in a way that makes sense.”

The Pentagon already has begun moving to counter those trends. The Army, in particular, has rushed to devise a plan that would allow more gradual personnel cuts, officials say. Starting in 1992--a year later than the beginning of the planned reductions--the Army would cut 35,000 per year from its rolls, fewer than the 42,000 ordered by Cheney.

“We’ve got a plan, and it’s not to hand out pink slips to all these brave enlisted sergeants coming back,” said a senior Army official. “If you give us the extra year, we can smooth that out so people don’t come back out of the desert and onto the unemployment line.”

Maintaining the vitally important reserves, particularly physicians and other highly trained professionals, may prove challenging, as well.

The Gulf conflict marked the first time, since the draft was abandoned in 1973, that the interweaving of active duty and reserve units was tested. About 221,000 part-time warriors had their lives uprooted when they were called to active duty; some could yet spend as long as a year in the Middle East.

Many of those called up are suffering financial hardships. Others had to leave infants on short notice. And some are not coming home: In the most devastating incident of the war, a Scud attack on a U.S. barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killed 28 reservists.

“When the dust settles and the (reservists) start weighing the risks versus the benefits, the military is going to have a much tougher time recruiting and retaining people in the reserves,” said Martin Binkin, a military manpower expert at the Brookings Institution.

However, Binkin says that may not be a significant problem, since the military plans to reduce the reserve ranks, as well, from 1.2 million to 906,000 by 1995. Moreover, one way to cut the enlisted ranks is to move more full-time soldiers into the reserves.

Just which procurement programs and personnel cutbacks will make it and which won’t still is open to question. But it’s clear that lawmakers who want to boost military spending have a choice: They either can abandon entirely the budget-deficit-reduction accord that Congress and the Administration hammered out so painfully last autumn, or they can increase military outlays and offset that by slashing domestic spending further, which certainly would not sit well with the Democratic majority in both houses.

Whatever the challenges ahead, the military’s popularity is likely to last awhile. Military sociologist Charles Moskos said, “The halo effect from this has probably a decade . . . or until the next war we lose.”

Stanley L. Falk, a military historian, said that history suggests that the military’s stock soars when it is victorious in war but that it recedes at other times. In this vein, he recalls a verse from Rudyard Kipling’s celebrated poem about a British soldier:

“It’s Tommy this an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Chuck him out, the brute!’

“But it’s Saviour of ‘is country when the guns begin to shoot.”